ThesisBlog

  I have absolutely nothing to do, and it’s fantastic. I’m sitting here on a fine Saturday afternoon watching UCLA get their dentures ground into dust by the fighting Mormons of BYU, and I just can’t help but smile. THIS is the reason for living, right here. There’s no homework to do, no pressure mounting, no nagging weight, just pure unadulterated carelessness. Almost a week ago, I finished 26 years of schooling in a single whirlwind afternoon that left me completely unable to put the feat of completion into context. It’s not until about now that it is all beginning to sink in. Guiltless nothingness!

  Man, Thesis was a monster. It’s a system that has been abandoned by almost every architecture program in the United States for reasons ranging from early job-market entry to lack of resources to feelings of irrelevance. I, however, see it as not only important but essential to a quality education, if you take as a given that a quality education tries to send each student out into the world with a set of marketable and worthwhile skills. Thesis is the final culmination of each student’s method, which at a place like SCI-Arc can be as individual as tea strainers on your shoes. I mean snowflakes. Without that final push to develop a single well-thought-out, fully-developed and carefully-executed last project, everything taught over the previous three years becomes moot. ( bit of an overstatement)

  If SCI-Arc’s reputation is one of innovation and individualism, it is currently failing to live up to that standard. So much emphasis is placed on high-gloss shiny renderings, overly-elaborate white on black line drawings, and untouched, unmodified 3D prints, that most of the projects hanging on the hallowed concrete walls of our ¼-mile-long former railroad depot during Thesis week are indistinguishable. I wish I could go back in time and see what SCI-Arc Thesis projects were like 25 years ago. The mystery I want to solve is whether computers have ushered in an age of “Thesis” projects concerned monotonously with taking an arbitrary inspiration for design and executing it, or if those types of projects have been around through the ages. To me a Thesis project needs to find a question within the discourse of architecture and attempt to at least find out if the question is answerable. In this way, the project gives something back to our field, advances it in some small way. If you get 125 students each year trying to millimeter forward the line of what architecture is and can achieve, great strides can be made. But if 70% of those can’t manage to figure out even what asking a question entails, well then there’s not a lot of progress happening. 

  That being said, my project last week had a lot of people scratching their heads. Not least of which were the heads (pun) of the Graduate program and Thesis program at SCI-Arc. These are two of the most powerful and, in my own personal opinion, un SCI-Arc-y people in the school. I’ve never met two people more out of touch with what they purport to propagate. They are, in many ways, my archenemies. The fact that they barely know I exist only played into my hands last week. As fellow These-ers rushed around in white gloves with their $1000 boards making sure their $2000 3D prints were being manufactured in a timely manner, I was inexplicably laying down industrial linoleum and putting up shelves stocked with food. It was inexplicable to them, not to me. I actually knew exactly what I was doing, believe it or not. I say this not as twisted show of superiority, but to illustrate just how cavernous was the divide between our respective ballparks. Theirs was a glittering, spotlit, fleet of robotically-controlled HD cameras, 90,000 plus Monday Night Football event watched by millions in their living rooms and local bars in primetime. Mine was an afternoon High School Field pickup cricket game with a couple of wives and a crew of scoffing local ruffians in attendance. Those were our respective ballparks. That about sums it up, and brings a merciful close to the sports references. 

  To say the supermarket that had popped up in the Northwest corner of the Main Space overnight was garnering buzz is an understatement. Most of it was just plain curiosity, some of it was overwhelming joy (really, some people laughed so hard they cried...ok, it might not have been joy), and the rest was open derision. In fact, I found out on Sunday before my presentation that on Friday night aforementioned heads of programs held a meeting in front of my shelves determining whether it was feasible to require me to dismantle my project and not present. I kid you not. They eventually cowed to the sheer mass of my food and gave up on their quest to rid the school of everything not 3D printed. Perfect. I’d at least achieved the most basic tenet of my personal Thesis mantra: Do something different. Beyond that, however, I knew that I would really have to execute an eloquent and direct explanation in my upcoming Sunday presentation, because the premise of my project (which actually has very little to do with supermarkets, exactly) would not be immediately tangible. 

  This, then, is a good time to talk about my Thesis and its presentation. There are interesting milestones that can be achieved when working on a project in the way we do. One of the things you hope might happen is that you stumble upon an element of your idea so worthwhile that you might even be able to continue working on aspects of it beyond graduation. When I was in China studying this summer, I had such an event occur. I developed a technique of spatializing everyday surfaces with film and projection, specifically using projection as material, material as space. It’s a bit complicated, but it involves filming and re-projecting carefully from a single vantage point. Great. Now what? The rest of my time was spent developing a worthwhile substrate for this tool, and I eventually settled on and developed a supermarket. It’s an unusual choice for a thesis program, because it doesn’t generally lend itself to innovation. And that’s exactly what I intended to prove was possible. 

  I did a killer video in China that illustrated my concept beautifully. I shot it and projected it back (while filming a second time the reaction to the projection) in a busy tiny square in the village of Cao Chang Di outside of Beijing. It was a rousing success, to the point that my thesis advisors set up a pseudo-art opening for me in our studio space and many of the artists from the nearby Beijing art scene showed up to see it. I may very well have influenced the media art scene in China for decades. HA. That was a joke, people. But it was at least an indication that I had stumbled upon something worthwhile. And you can’t ask for anything more than that. 

  Knowing that my Times Square video (the little square where I filmed we called Times Square) would be the killer moment of my presentation, I put together a series of multimedia vignettes and tied it all together to show the jurors. As I sat waiting for my friend Eileen, the person presenting just before me, to finish describing her project, I began to have a nagging dreadful stomach twist. I’d practiced the routine, set up all the projectors and dvd players, stocked the shelves, designed, printed, and mounted my boards, and frosted the mirrors. Something else was bothering me...something..missing. What was it? I got up quietly and ran through the video presentation I had queued up and ready to begin in 20 minutes time...Wait...what’s going on...? I...I seem to have... Oh. Crap. I FORGOT TO INCLUDE MY TIMES SQUARE VIDEO! I was so concerned with polishing off all the other stuff I was working on, which included almost a dozen other videos, that the main event, already compiled and ready to go was so easy that I kept putting it off. I kept saying I’d be able to throw it in at the last minute until I forgot to do so entirely. Until 20 minutes before I was to present. My bowels emptied. Discouraged, devastated, and disgusted, I had no choice but to go on with my presentation. I had already set up a physical example of the technique used in that film, and it was running dutifully in my pseudomarket setup there, so I just had to use that as an illustration of my concept, without getting the ‘wow’ factor that the other film would bring.

  When I stood up in front of everyone, I was quite nervous, but my vast experience performing in front of people and my seasoned skill at being publicly eviscerated by those more knowledgeable in the field of architecture prepared me well for this terrifying afternoon. After a brief early stutter, I fell easily into my spiel, and was off to the races. The jurors gave fair and balanced criticism, with some defending my approach and some saying I had not gone far enough. I was expecting some sort of ‘is this even architecture’ debate, but they delved less into the controversy of my project and more into the meat of what it was attempting to propose, which made me happy. 

  After it was over Michael Rotondi, one of my juroros, pulled me aside and told me that I had developed something remarkable, and that if I spent the next 20 years pursuing the implications of it, my career would be an exciting one. WIN. 

  So though I screwed up tremendously, no one noticed, and in the end something remarkable came out of it. I walked up to the podium to grab my (misprinted) diploma from the steel gray hands of miss automaton Graduate Director to the raucous applause of my friends in attendance. I returned her scowl with a nice toothy grin, gave her talons a firm grip, and said, “Thank you very much!” before I turned on my heel and walked out of SCI-Arc with my head held high. This school may have won many battles, but I won the war.

-c

ChinaBlog Day 1543802

It has been a while, so I'll give a little update. I'm approximately 6287 miles East of my last post. It is sad, clear, hot, stressful, and nerve wracking to be in Los Angeles after such a fulfilling adventure in the ancient world of China. Now that I have returned triumphantly to my school with stories of delicious scorpions, taxi battles, man-made rain, and a society of rebirth, the culture shock of returning to my homeland is palpable. We just take up so much SPACE here. But I will say that being able to drink the water and see the sun is making my life a lot more pleasant. Other than that, however, I return to the US and A undeniably changed. I think the most important such alteration to my perspecitve is one caused by lowered expectations of comfort and convenience. The Chinese seem to be just fine in their, from Western eyes, unbearably cramped and haphazard living quarters. In fact, Gallup recently went around the globe to countries of higher world economic standing and polled the inhabitants to gauge their level of happiness. Obviously, they don't simply come out and ask, "How happy are you?" Using a series of roundabout queries the poll showed that Chinese people have one of the highest rates of satisfaction with their current and perceived future existence. The economy there is exploding. The number of people living in abject poverty has dropped to rock bottom levels. Their average per capita income is still at high third world levels, but compared to the mass extinction level it was at not three decades ago, people are pretty ok with the trends. And that contentment is reflected in the way the majority of the people I met in China responded to my interest in their lives.
--But this positive change has come at quite a price. Chinese culture does not dote upon physical manifestations of the past the way our Western one does, so there is less of a sense of monumental loss when they bulldoze a thousand year old Hutong to create a single luxury apartment block (where people can play tennis upon the exact location that a single family held residence for generations). But all this promise of progress and betterment will fade eventually, and some will begin (and already have begun) lamenting what can never be recovered. China will be left with few copies of what life used to be like, and in the process of building toward a certain Western ideal will find that they have erased their very identity.
--I come back here and understand the Chinese drive to assimilate Western culture. It's clean, well-made, spacious, private, and individualized. All things that China has only recently become aware of, and then obsessed with. But these traits are surface treatments on top of a land lacking identity and culture. We grow up in our technological cities surrounded by advancement and diversity, completely disconnected from any sense of purpose or generational continuity. Each person is his or her own being, capable of creating or destroying themselves independent of anyone else, but unable and, eventually, desperately looking to find their grand place. The Chinese have culture in spades, it effuses from their very speech, and yet they covet (and I'm making an argument here) our independence and heritage-crushing individuality. It may seem to simply stem from the Western World's firm foundation atop Mazlow's Heirarchy, where we have little to fear in the way of starvation and basic physical comforts, and thus may now turn our attention to more esoteric ideals relating to comfort of mind. But I believe the conflicted intentions of our two hemispheres stem instead from a fundamental we-come-from-half-a-world-away difference of opinion, very simply. The Chinese economy is unstoppable in a way that ours has not been for almost a decade, the Chinese people are overwhelmingly happy with the direction of their lives and promises of the future, so it does not stand to reason that they are looking UP to us, striving to attain what we have and they 'do not'. We are just on different paths looking for different things dealing with the tremendous consequences of our relentless pursuits. That we may have what they want, and they may have what we want, is only reflected in our two cultures' inextricably intertwined fates. Wherever we two end up, we will probably end up there together.
--Goodbye China. I hope I may return someday.
-c

ChinaBlog Day 62

I have to invent a new word for last night. Awesorrible. It is something so wonderful and so awful that it ends up feeling just average. Similar to Dragonball Z, if you've ever watched it. No? Well, anyway, last night my old choir, the Los Angeles Children's Chorus (LACC) participated in a performance of Carmina Burana at the brand new Beijing National Performing Arts Center near Tienanmen Square in the center of the city. And I wanted to attend. No big deal, right? Take a shower, catch a cab, buy a ticket, come home. Like riding a bike.
--On an interesting side note, Beijing has recorded more rain this summer than in the past 20. Most of it has been man-made, and begins at precisely 7pm every Friday night. Man-made, you ask? Of course. The Chinese government, in readying for the Olympics, has been directly seeding the clouds with silver iodide delivered via rusty old Communist-era jalopy rockets. You can hear them flying overhead shortly before a downpour shouting "Thars gold in them thar hills!" or whatever jalopys say. Anyway it's a good way to get rid of some old ordinance and help green-up Beijing's 1.3 million new Olympic trees at the same time. My only problem is with the timing. Why Friday night??
--The performance started at 7:30 on the button. The flier said it was a two-part affair, with Carmina Burana joining an interpretive performance by one of China's premier transsexual ballet dancers. And by transsexual I mean man becoming woman, not man wearing tutu. She's quite famous here.
--In order to make the 7:30 show with enough time to purchase tickets beforehand, I planned to arrive at 7, and thus leave my apartment/catch a cab at 6. My driver was a young, personable guy, and he took great pains to show me all the most well-blocked and agonizingly slow shortcuts he knew through the city. By 7 we had barely made it out of my neighborhood. At 7:30 we were stuck on the expressway inching along carlength by carlength. I hoped beyond hope that the flier said 7:30 because the performance actually started at 8. By this time I was rather frantic and ready to scream at my young, personable cab driver, who at that moment was having a young, personable chat on his cell phone with some other young, personable Chinese person. I can still see the imprints of my nails on my palm. At 7:55 we finally turned onto the street that the Performing Arts Center is on, and zoomed up to a staggeringly halted mass of tiny vehicles six lanes across. No one was moving. Even worse, people were getting out of their cars to see what was the matter. Even worse than that, the old rusty rockets had successfully delivered their payloads, and it was beginning to bucket down in golf-ball sized drops. Pretty soon we could barely see the front of the car, let alone what the holdup was, because there was more water in the air than air. The streets began to flood. The clock ticked over to 8. I threw up in my mouth. And finally, FINALLY the cars hinted toward evaporating from in front of us.
--The cab driver dropped me off with a young, personable wave amidst the densest torrent I'd seen that night. My umbrella creaked and buckled under the weight of water not simply falling, but being shot out of the sky at a 45 degree angle. I set my tiny, cheap little shelter against the worst of it and sloshed 50 or so yards to a set of large glass doors. The building is the shape of a single droplet of water sitting on a flat surface. A big round blob. Locals call it 'the butt' because it has a crack of windows going up the front side. But that's beside the point. By the time I made it to the bank of doors I might as well have been walking through a swimming pool from the knees down. My waterproof shoes were doing an admirable job of containing all the liquid pouring into them from around my ankles.
--A series of guards stood resolutely between me and the safety of 'butt's' warm interior. "NO" they said to me with their hands and faces and uniforms as I huddled toward the opening. "WHY NOT?" I said with my sopping hand gestures. "GO AROUND TO THE FRONT" their official miming told me. "FINE. JUST SEE IF I WILL THEN!" I gestured through the torrent. The walk around crackside took its toll. By the time I made it down to the identical bank of glass doors outfitted with identical guards, my umbrella was beginning to come apart at the seams, several of its ribs were bent and rusting, and my pants had slid to my knees under the weight of excess water. Despite my appearance I approached the new set of guards with aplomb. It was approximately 8:30. My watch wasn't working anymore, so I had to use the sun and stars to suss that bit out. A big sign behind the glass said BOX OFFICE enticingly. With my gaze affixed 20 yards past the doors, I ran smack into the be-medaled hat of a very perplexed uniformed teenager. I had forgotten about, and probably dismissed as irrelevant, the uniforms on this side of the building, because I knew it was the correct side, and assumed that I had full permission to enter. Not so. They roundly refused my entry. "TOO LATE!" they forcefully gestured. "GO AWAY!" Unfortunately for them, they did not know how arduous had been my journey from Wang Jing. I picked up a nearby feral ferret (of which there are many in the city) and threw it at them. In the screaming confusion I slipped past unnoticed, and sprinted toward the safety of BOX OFFICE.
--Behind the counter I witnessed a heart-wrenching scene. Three women were putting jackets on over their uniforms while hastily gathering Things into purses. Oh no. They're closed. I reached out a sopping hand and tapped the most English-speakingy one on her shoulderpad. "PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEZE?" Long pauses, whispered discussions, angry reprovals, encouraging glances, and, finally, "OK. One last ticket. Ok. That will be 380 Yuan. Cash." I jumped my fist into the air. It was sort of like how 80's tv shows always end, but without the freeze frame. I hastily plunged my hand into the pool of water in my pocket around my knees and salvaged my wallet. Pulling it open, I found to my indescribable horror exactly (and not a Jiao more) 340 Yuan. Oh. Crap. I couldn't believe it. At all. What. Do. I. Do. Now.
--There are some abilities that you have to be born with. If you aren't, you can practice, take lessons, read about it, and generally become somewhat decent. But you can never be truly great without the natural gift. The ability to draw is one example. Perhaps cooking is another. My gift is looking staggeringly pathetic. Heart-stoppingly, bone-chillingly, gasp-inducingly downtrodden. Standing there dripping like an icicle in the desert, clutching my crumpled and useless umbrella, shoes flooded with water, pants around my ankles, I have to say I might have been in the greatest form of my life. Like the saddest sap in Miserableville I slowly slopped my Yuan onto the counter and began to cry. The woman was helpless in my grasp. She gave me the most pitying look anyone can give, reached into her purse, and pulled out her own 40 Yuan to add to mine. Then she slid a ticket over to me like Mother Theresa kissing a leper, and I silently shuffled my way into the performance hall just in time for the end of intermission.
--I still didn't quite know which part of the program I had missed, but to my utter delight when the curtain rose for the second half there stood the 200 requisite men women and children ready to belt out one of the most powerful classical pieces ever created. Seeing the singers on stage, full orchestra and 20 or so spectacularly-costumed dancers before them was such an overwhelming relief after hours and hours of worry and misery and anguish and uncertainty and patheticness that I began to weep. I made it. The orchestra punched their first notes, the choir 'O FORTUNA'ed loudly, and I sank into my chair, bathing in contentment for the first time in a long, horrible evening.
--It was a grand performance. The confusing woman dancer choreographed acrobatic, truly breathtaking movements to fit perfectly the mood of each piece. LACC rocked, as usual, and the choir and orchestra, from Stanford University, did an adequate job as well. It was certainly the most interesting performance of Carmina Burana that I have or probably ever will see.
--At 9:30 the curtain finally descended in front of the performers after three bowing sessions for a standing ovation that seemed to go on forever. I knew I was broke, and I also knew I needed to grab a cab home, so my first order of business was a trip to some unspecified ATM hopefully somewhat near the performance hall. A quick scan of the street told me that I was in the dreaded business/government district. The blocks here are horrific, mostly completely devoid of storefronts for miles on end. It's a little like being at the airport with a craving for Chicken Tikki Masala. You might be able to find it, but it'll take a lot of walking and no one will be able to direct you. Eventually, however, I found a welcoming white and red '24' lit up over the typical glass cube that signals an all night ATM. With great enthusiasm I wrenched open the door to find a single old Chinese man with a trowel kneeling on the floor and staring at me like I just walked in on him grooming his dog. 'What's this guy doing here?' we both said with our faces. There was no ATM, not even a bank here, just the prospect of such an establishment sometime in the near future. Crap. Another 20 minutes and three blocks later I finally found a real one and withdrew my moneys.
--At this point I was pretty confident. Dangerously confident, in fact, that I would be home in time to catch an episode of my favorite show on TV and be in bed at a reasonable time. After all, it was only 10:00. All I had left to do was catch a cab. No sweat. I ran straight out into the river and threw my arm from under my sad umbrella at the curb. Count to ten...aaaand...cab! CAB! Hey. What's this here. Um, guys, I'm ready now. Cab please. Choo Zoo Chuh! That's how you pronounce 'taxi' in Mandarin. I yelled it. Cab after cab after cab zoomed by. Almost all were full of passengers. Occasionally, an empty one would pass at breakneck speed. Most splashed tsunamis onto my pants, which were back down around my knees. I couldn't figure out what the problem was. Why weren't they stopping for me? I finally determined that I was standing downstream from some unspecified and momentarily invisible taxi pickup point. I walked up the street, but couldn't see the place. Taxis continued their speedy processional mocking. Occasional couples huddled under umbrellas with halfhearted attempts at snagging a passing coach, grateful for the excuse to spend more time in the same physical space. I reached a busy intersection and stood on the corner, catching two simultaneous directions of traffic with my outstretched hand. Nothing. I moved on. By the time 11:00 rolled around I could feel the rainwater sloshing around in my eyeballs. And I was hopelessly lost. I couldn't have returned to the performance hall if I'd wanted to, and I was smack in the middle of the endless, lifeless forbidden forest of after-hours office towers. A new tack was in order.
--Hotels will sometimes help non-customers, especially if the place is big and fancy and you are extremely nice and can do a decent 'I'm so pathetic and helpless' routine. Heh. They don't know who they're dealing with. I searched several blocks and finally found the brightly lit revolving door I was looking for. Doorman, plush carpets, fancy marble, perfect. I gave the uniform a confident smile and pushed into the lobby, where another uniform begged my pardon. 'Choo Zoo Chuh,' I answered. He squished his face up in confusion. I mimed talking on a telephone, and repeated 'Choo Zoo Chuh.'
'Sir, is there anything I can help you with?' !!! English! What luck!
I asked him if it would be possible to have the hotel call me a cab. He called over the prettiest woman on staff, their head of customer relations, and she told me that they would be overwhelmed with happiness to accommodate me. She led me to an arrangement of plush, opulent, air conditioned furniture (though it was raining, it was still 90 degrees outside), and told me to wait while they hailed a cab. No one takes tips in China, but this kind of service is actually quite common. It's just the Chinese way, I guess. I sat, relieved, and for the first time in an hour and a half, forgot about cabs entirely. I checked my email on my phone, read the program I still clutched, and chatted a bit with a Japanese businessman next to me. 20 mintues rolled by without my noticing. The lady returned. 'Sir, I am very sorry to say that we are unable to get a taxi to come to the hotel. We are open only one week, sir, and I am very sorry to say that they do not know our hotel yet, and I am very sorry to say that we cannot get one to stop at our door at this time. Please accept my sincere apologies.' what? Are you KIDDING me!? That's...well, that's just astounding! I can't believe it!
'No, no, of course, that's no problem. Thank you so much for trying to help me. I'll just go try my luck outside. Some more. Maybe I can find my way home on the subway or something. Thank you. Bye.'
'Sorry, sir, but the subway is closed one hour ago. Sorry.' Sigh.
As I approached the curb outside I found the first doorman drenched and defeated looking, still out in the night downpour attempting to hail me a cab. I thanked him profusely and watched as he ambled dejectedly to his post. If a freaking hotel doorman can't hail a cab out here, what hope have I??
--The next forty five minutes were a series of drenching splashes and cunning entrapments. I decided that there were a high enough volume of empty cabs that if I hid behind a light pole at a busy intersection, I could run out into traffic during the red lights and find one to just jump into right there in the middle of the street. After three such encounters, I came to the disheartening conclusion that this was not a good idea. I'm glad I don't speak Chinese, because the stuff those cab drivers screamed at me when I splatted onto their pristine interiors was probably the most hideous stuff one person can say to another. I hoped that they would take pity on my MeyGoaRen-ness (Americanicity) and just take me where I wanted to go. No such luck. One guy actually got out of the car and yanked my door open, and I jumped out before he could throw me onto the street.
--By midnight my umbrella was in tatters and I slopped along the gutter, lost and sobbing. The nice thing about such a rain, no one can see you cry. I kicked at floating trash and halfheartedly held my hand out while I looked for a hole to crawl into for the night. I wondered if they had homeless shelters in China. For the 105628500 time, a car drove by and dumped a man-sized wave upon my head. I felt myself begin to melt a little. I focused all my frustrations and anger on that car. I stared at it with enough force to light it on fire, even in this weather. And it stopped. It stopped? What's this? Would I actually get to yell at someone for this small injustice? No one exited the vehicle. I approached the passenger side with fervor and wrenched open the door. There was a taxi driver behind the wheel. He looked at me expectantly. His nonchalance was confusing. I backed away. This man was playing a game I didn't understand. What did he want with me?
--With a horrifyingly gentle smile he beckoned me inside. 'Where to?' he intoned in Chinese. No. Way. After more than two hours, three fights, the heights of riches and the depths of depravity, a cab just pulled up and stopped. For me.
--The relief of seeing my apartment building cannot be overstated. It was there. Shining, wet, and comforting. When the taxi driver pulled to a stop at the curb, I wept in his arms and promised to send him some gifts from Los Angeles when I returned home. He was a saint, a miracle-worker, an humanitarian of Nobel proportions. I stood in the street and watched his saintly taillights disappear into the mist, never to return again. Then I reached into my pocket to call my roommate to let me in from the continuing downpour, and discovered that I had left my cell phone in the cab. DAMN THAT $%*&@^!!
-c

ChinaBlog Day 60

I've never considered myself much of a fashion hound. More like a fashion muskrat, or maybe even just a fashion cricket. So when I walk into the Silk Street Pearl Market near Americatown here in Beijing, world headquarters for fake (jiade) Chinese knockoffs and their be-kiosked professional quarterbacks, I get understandably sweaty. The place is so intimidating that they have their own psychiactric ward for maladies ranging from breakdowns due to fear, breakdowns due to regret, and breakdowns due to extreme shopoholistic euphoria. At some point(s), every customer in the five story market must make the spectacularly rediculous choice between pride and an object that, 20 minutes earlier, they never knew existed. That's mostly because the goods in this place are a tantalizing mix of 'ooh!' and 'wow!' The ooh is for the thing you didn't know you wanted, and the wow is for the price you might be able to get it for.

--This, of course, depends on two things. First, one's skill with the art of negotiation, which in turn requires an almost inexhaustable knowledge of 'things' and their seasonal alterations and accordant prices, as well as a deft mind that can convert last year's model prices into fake knockoff dollars, and then into Renminbi. The second, and perhaps more important, is a qualified bodyguard (some enterprising individual now rents them out at the front door, much to the chagrin of the marketsellers). The bodyguard is necessary not to watch your purse or purchased items, but to wade unhindered into the kiosk and extract you bodily should you ever make the reckless decision not to buy the thing you just asked the price of.

--Thinking of the Pearl Market as a discreet collection of Polo shirt/Coach bag-selling kiosks is a monumental misunderstanding. It is much more akin to an army base in which the soldiers get paid by the kill. Customers walk in there wearing the enemy's uniform: naievete and an idiotic surprised grin. There are no Chinese customers at the Pearl. (Ok, not to peel away the fourth wall, but that statement was made for dramatic effect, and is entirely untrue. I just wanted to point out that it's mostly foreign people who are the whales to the slaughter, that's all.) If you make it out of the place without something you don't need, then you haven't purchased anything, and you should treat yourself to a steak dinner. If you make it out of there feeling like you've gotten away with theft, I have a bridge to sell you.
--If you aren't getting the picture (I know, you probably are), here's a typical purchasing scenario: It begins with your eyes glued resolutely to the tips of your swinging shoes as you attempt to shove your way down the kiosk-lined corridor. If you do not raise your head one inch, you will only have small Chinese women grabbing at your arm or screaming in your face, which, they have all noticed with a sense of irony, is pointed right at them because of your (meaning my) enormous height. This forces you to lift your eyes from their faces as you attempt to circumvent their hysterics. At that moment, you will inevitably lock eyes, even for just a split second, with some sort of garment, 'antique' trinket, accessory, or electronic device. This causes a frenzy of activity, as three different women dive into their junk-laden caves to grab a handful of the exact same object you momentarily gazed upon and immediately disregarded. Now they come at you armed with things. All this can be forcibly ignored with a resolute enough will. However, eventually you will lock eyes with something ever-so-mildly interesting. In your mind, for the briefest instant, you think, "Gee, it'd be nice to have that. Too bad I'm poor. Oh well...Actually, maybe it's really cheap here. I wonder if I can get them to settle on a price I find reasonable." In that briefest instant, you may as well have taken off your pants and run screaming through the hallway, that's how conspicuous you are. Pounce. Out of nowhere, ten tiny hands grip your person and yank you into the kiosk. This is in no uncertain terms the unexaggerated truth. They actually grab you and pull you bodily into the shop, like a puppy at the vet. The bodyguard stands back warily, ready for any indication you are about to drown. Before you realize what has happened, you are face-to-face with 10 variations of whatever item initially caught your eye and a Chinese woman so fierce and animated that you instinctively cover your eyes. With one hand pulling down on your wrist and one hand holding ten shirts/shoes/watches/bags

/trinkets/games/jackets and one hand furiously gesturing at this or that feature, the 'conversation' about price begins. The first step, over which you have entirely no control, is to say two of the most frightening words in the Chinese language: "how much?"
--She smiles like a frog in a fly factory. "Oh, well, this not cheap knockoff like other there. This real leather, not so cheap. Normal pwice..." (steel yourself) "...is..." (typing on calculator) "...105628500.00 Yuan. No no no! Come back here! We friends, I not make you pay this! This normal pwice! Not friend pwice! For you, friend, I give big discount! Look here! Ok, for you, I give..." (typing) "...105628000.00 Yuan! Is good pwice! Come back! We friends now!"
--You are inevitably pulling your way to the threshold of her kiosk, and she's throwing a tantrum. The initial price is so outrageous that you require no acting skills to let her know that this is way more than you wanted to spend. What it does is make you think twice about your own initial offer. If you're tough, you stick with your gut. And then take another 90% off that. If you're not tough, you end up changing your initial asking price based on her first offer. By the way, the accent I've written into this exchange is only there to show you how good their English is. It is not to make fun of the way they talk. For one thing, they speak English 105628500 times better than I will ever speak Chinese. I just thought I should clear that up. So, then it's your turn to reply.
"That's WAY too much. I don't even want it. Bye."
"Wait! You not happy?! We friends, you tell me, what you want to pay?" She hands over the calculator. This is the moment of truth. Where will this all begin?
You type in "10 Yuan."
She looks up like you just punched her daughter in the face. And she's frighteningly quiet now. "Listen. We friends. I thought you like me. Why you give me pwice for sock? How much you pay for sock? This jacket (let's just say for the sake of the exercise). No sock. Seriously. How much you pay for sock?" She reaches down with a fourth hand and grabs at your sock. At this point you are utterly confused. Why is she suddenly talking about socks? You have to move on.
"No, we're too far apart. I have to go now." Pull unconvincingly.
"Wait wait. Ok. Fine, I give you good pwice for jacket. Not sock. Ok, here: 105624000 Yuan. This best pwice. Ok?"
"What? That's barely different!"
"Ok, what you pay for nice jacket? Give me you best pwice!" She shoves the calc over to you.
"Well, I guess I could go to...25 Yuan."
"Whatwhatwhat?" I'll simplify the exchange from here on out. There are some subtleties, like when she tells you that if she takes your price she'll actually be getting less than she paid for it, and you tell her that you might be able to squeeze out an extra 10 Yuan if you borrow cab fare from your friends, but it basically goes something like this (with several pretend walkings-away resulting in large-scale multi-person riots):
"105620000"
"50"
"105600000"
"60"
"105000000"
"65"
"5000000" BIG protestations.
"75"
"100000" Tantrum.
"100"
"5000" Wow. What just happened?
"150" She's peeing with glee.
"1000"
"175" Got you right where she wants you.
"500"
"200" You can't stop. You just can't.
"400"
"250"
"350"
"280"
"Ok, you want 280, I want 350, let's split. 310! Best pwice! You happy, me happy."
"300"
"You make me poor! Come on, 310, best pwice!"
Go ahead and try to walk away at this moment. I have friends who attempted it. The woman will scream out in Chinese and all the other women from nearby kiosks will come running over to form a barricade. It's impossible to break away once you've gotten to the end of the negotiation, even with your bodyguard pushing and shoving his way through the reef of little women. He's really only there to get you out after the first back and forth. Beyond that you're on your own.
--That's when you realize that you've just promised this woman 300 Yuan for a jacket you didn't even want, which is precisely 5 times what she bought it for, and 3 times more than you initially wanted to pay. It's an utterly humiliating moment. But no matter how much you thrash and scream, eventually you will get out of there with a new jacket, 300 fewer Quai (she budges at the last second, to make you feel better about your purchase), and a feeling of having been part of something ancient and mystical. You are but one in a long line of foreign suckers.
--Congratulations. Now go take your jacket home and watch as its seams split upon first wearing.
-c

ChinaBlog Day 48

--I’m in Los Angeles right now. I may not have mentioned that I was returning home so soon, but that’s only because I’m just here for a thesis review and in a few days I’ll be back in Beijing. My last day in China is July 7. But it’s really nice to be home for a bit, see everyone, marvel at the strangeness of my home life. After living amongst families who all rotate their sleep schedule to share one bed, it’s pretty strange to show up here where everyone lives in their own house and has their own yard and takes up so much space that it makes me wonder how we can possibly sustain it all. I guess that’s the question of the century. I feel more culture shock coming home than I ever did upon my arrival in China. And the air in LA is so clear. Jeez.
--There’s an interesting thing happening at BASE right now. About three weeks ago, a large group of us, mostly the guys, all ate the same thing at the same place and ended up with some sort of exotic sickness. It’s not the end of the world, and shut your ears if you are easily embarrassed. A lot of us are mysteriously not ‘regular’. In fact, we are more like ‘disturbingly often’ and ‘freakishly sudden’. It is not uncommon for the tranquil atmosphere of studio to be rent by the sound of a wooden chair being flung backward as some poor soul bursts from his desk to sprint at full speed on careful tiptoes to the bathroom, where all manner of pungent sounds emanate for just a couple of minutes. Then the door will push open, and out will come said person, haggard and relieved, to return to his desk for another couple of hours of peaceful work until the process is repeated again. What is this madness? It makes you start to worry about all sorts of things that are not perfectly right. For instance, I sneeze a lot in the morning. I thought it was my down bedding, but maybe it’s another symptom of the ravaging effects of this strange Eastern parasite. And my knee has been bothering me a lot, which I originally chalked up to a grueling all-day hike across the Great Wall, but perhaps it’s the bug eating away at cartilage between my bones. Also, one of my taste buds is falling out. No kidding. It’s about 3 millimeters longer than the rest of them, and it’s right in the center of my tongue, swishing about in my mouth like a sea anemone tentacle whenever I drink something. I think I’d better see a doctor. Maybe the taste bud is the key to everything that’s wrong with me. What if that’s the Chinese Parasite Headquarters for Section Chris. Is it possible to have one taste bud surgically removed? I can almost pull it out myself, but I think that would be quite messy. Best to leave the skilled work to the professionals. Bu I can feew ip fwopping awoun im my mouf aw va ime an ip’s fweaping ammoying. Aaa. Unh. Bammip! Sigh. Can’t get it. Anyway, my thesis review is tomorrow at 2. If any of you want to come see it, it’s at Sciarc, so stop by if you’ve got a minute. I’ll let you know how it went in the next post.
-c

ChinaBlog Day 43

I have been to The Great Wall and must now submit to the most ancient of Chinese rituals. There is an old saying here: One who rides back of stone snake must return home to blog. It is so long-standing and pervasive that there is even evidence of it influencing the Japanese in this recently-uncovered primitive haiku:
Foreign monsters throng
The green mountains divided
Now go home and blog
I find myself part of a tradition few get to experience. And yet it's immediate familiarity makes me question the very nature of this post. Am I going to just write another blog about how amazing the Great Wall of China is? Really?
--Yes. Yes I am very much. Why? Because it's amazing. Really REALLY amazing. So amazing, in fact, that it has its own cell phone towers just so visitors can call home and say, "Hey, whatcha doin? Oh, laundry? That's nice, but I'M ON THE FREAKING GREAT WALL OF CHINA RIGHT NOW. Seeya." *click* I didn't do that, however I did call my dad and wish him a happy Father's Day. It was Father's Day for me, but it isn't Father's Day for him until right now. Confused? Well, just to be safe, I'll say 'Happy Father's Day dad'! There. That should cover all my bases. So, back to the wall.
--Since this post will be entirely about the Great Wall of China from here on out, and it takes me about three minutes to write 'the Great Wall of China', I'm going to hereby shorten it to UJDWC, which stems from a nickname I gave it at the time (Utterly Jaw-Dropping Wall of China). The UJDWC is so impressive that there were at least three times when I literally gasped audibly. The first was when a swarm of bees flew into our cable car enclosure. The second was when I saw the wall for the first time. And the third was when I realized that there were four near-vertical wall sections between me and the car. It turned out that the bees were more like hornets, and a good frantic screaming scramble to wedge ourselves underneath the benches seemed to ward them off. This slow, creaky, slow cable car system is designed to circumvent the 40 minute road hike up to the entrance. UJDWC is built along mountain ridges, for obvious defensive reasons, so just arriving at the gate doesn't get you even within sighting distance of the one man-made thing that can be seen from space in daylight. We opted for the slow, creaky, slow, dizzyingly high and vulnerable-to-aerial-attack contraption that is half ski-lift and half death-trap to quicken our pace to UJDWC. I think it still took 40 minutes. What's nice is it lets you off at one of the towers, so you go through a 500 year old castle-like structure before the UJDWC is revealed to you in it's treacherous splendor all at once as you emerge from the darkened stone cavern.
--What a day to do this hike. It's 4 miles long, and takes 4 hours. It's a set route along the wall that enables you to hit every major ticket stop before getting to the end. Our driver dropped us off, wrote a note in Chinese, waved, and left. There was some feeling that he would probably be there at the other end when we arrived, but it wasn't completely obvious at that point. We figured that our rockin cell signal would eventually save us.
--UJDWC is in various states of disrepair and newness, and was obviously built by whomever happened upon the site over its lengthy period of construction. Its width, height, slope, lean, stairs, ramps, cobblestones, and towers vary so violently from one patch to another that just keeping yourself from toppling over is a heavy task. And several places are so steep that you crawl up the steps. Also, there are essentially two general types of stairs; ferret-sized and rhino-sized. Why they couldn't just assume that it would be mostly people who used the wall, I don't know. I guess they were just covering all their bases. But it means that any human visitor must use the full capacities of their frontal cortex to correctly place bottom-of-foot onto tread-of-stair, as it is either 3 or 16 inches above or below its previous resting place. We (Matt, Jessica, Mark, and I) must be brilliant, because we managed to get through the four hour hike without more than a single ruptured knee and a slightly broken nose.
--The views of UJDWC from UJDWC are astonishing. I took a million pictures of essentially the same thing in different configurations during the hike, and they can now be seen on flickr in case you're a glutton for punishment. No, seriously, they're awesome.
--What was not awesome was the agonizing brutality of the hike. We were constantly drenched in sweat and locals trying to sell us Cokawaterpostcardtshirt like it was gold nuggets at a clearance sale. One woman actually stood in front of us and watched us eat our packed lunch ready to pounce when it appeared any of us was getting to the bottom of our water. 'Cold Cokawater! Cold Cokawater! Postcardshirt!' 'NO. I have NO MONEY. The UJDWC ticket kiosks TOOK IT ALL. YOU'RE WASTING YOUR TIME.' Etc. to no avail. I ended up giving her my bag of curry-flavored candied peanuts (these, as you might imagine, were not exactly what I thought I was buying when I got them at the store) which she promptly transferred into a ziplock and tried to sell to Mark. We eventually figured out that when we had gathered a sufficient following of Cokawaters we could just stop and wait for an inevitable 20 person German tour group to flow by, and they would fall into the bigger mass like moons to a gas giant so that we could be left relatively at peace for a half hour or so. In all it was a quiet, pleasant, utterly draining day.
--So now I'm home after climbing the Great Wall of China, blogging about the Great Wall of China, and I feel at peace with the experience. All is one, the cycle has been completed. I highly recommend you take a trip out this way to see this place. It's one of those few landmarks that's actually better than you expect it to be in person. Like Yosemite, Paris, and In-N-Out.
--My time in China is beginning to come to a close. There's so much left to see and do, so I might just return in the not-too-distant future. We'll see.
-c

ChinaBlog Day 36

If you will forgive me for a moment, I need to jot something down so I don't ever forget it. (You don't have to read these next couple sentences if you don't want to, but it might serve you well one day. I'm just saying...) Ok, here goes. Note to self: Landlords are nowhere near as frightening as Landlord's wives. End of note.
--There. That will do. I need to remember that for all time. My schedule for Sunday was thus:
8am: Wake up.
9am: Arrive at school (hereafter known by its proper name, B.A.S.E., or BASE for short.)
9am-5pm: Futz around making the BASE website/kill time.
5pm-7pm: Fret nervously about my upcoming meeting/film showing/film approval with Landlord.
7pm-8pm: Wait outside corner market for store owner to finish dinner so he can take me to see Landlord.
8pm: Find that Landlord's wife is home instead of Landlord.
8:00:01pm: Crap pants.
8:00:01-8:07pm: Listen to Store Owner, Guy Who Works at School (via phone), and Landlord's Wife have violent three-directional argument.
8:07pm-8:08pm: Catch phone hurled at head by Landlord's Wife. Hear GWWaS tell me that she does not approve. Does not approve at all. Wonder where my life went so wrong. Beg. Plead. Clutch at skirt hem of Landlord's Wife.
8:08pm-8:10pm: Jump out of way of Landlord returning home. Listen to another angry argument between Landlord, Landlord's Wife, and Store Owner.
8:10pm-8:20pm: Show film to the three from laptop. Try to figure out whether their utter confusion is good or bad. Suddenly get thrown out of house by Landlord and Landlord's Wife.
8:25pm: Have Store Owner point expectedly at the balcony.
8:25pm-10pm: Have GWWaS translate Store Owner's gestures. Project approved by Landlord and Landlord's Wife. Run back to BASE. Gather truckload of equipment and carry it back to balcony on bicycle. Set up rig with help from Store Owner. Frantically press play (on computer), then record (on camera). Watch as people marvel over the spectacle. Wonder where it all went right. Don't ask questions.
--Yep. Hectic day. The townspeople loved the project because it was weird and funny-looking and they recognized people in the film, and recognized where the film was made, and enjoyed looking down on everyone's morning rituals in the square. The Landlords loved it because they could stand down on the ground telling everyone who would listen that it was their building, and thus their project, and thus their idea, and be the centers of attention for a full hour (Parades were thrown in their honor. We'll get to that later). My professors loved it because the event makes all kinds of statements about the nature of time and space, and can cure cancer and make whales more plentiful. And I loved it because it's finished.
--So that's one completely interesting facet of Chinese culture I ran into this week, the other took place just this night. I wasn't kidding about the parade. Today was a Chinese holiday. It's the first time this holiday has ever been celebrated. If you're wondering how they can just invent holidays, I would like to tell you a secret. I personally saw the head of Hallmark leaving out the back door of the Forbidden City just a week ago. Coincidence? Anyway, I was leaving BASE to find a cab, and happened upon a large throng of people cramming their way down the tiny alley that leads to Place to Pick Up Cab. I followed slowly, listening to the amazing horns and watching everyone talk and laugh and follow what I thought was a paper dragon, but turned out to be a life-sized paper horse-drawn carriage. We all stopped at the intersection and I began filming the spectacle: horns, dancing, laughing, horse. When suddenly, to my astonishment, horse burst into flames, and in seconds horse and carriage were engulfed, collapsed, and turned to large burning embers in the sky. Right there on the street. And I got it all on tape! Cool. I'll upload the file to flickr soon. That's all for now. I'm exhausted. Also, go Lakers. Sigh.
-c