The Mid-Autumn Festival... it came and went. And I was busy and did not have time to jot down a entry detailing my date with the moon. This will be a bit of a personal post. Political manifestos and sensual photos will return at a later date.
On Friday, Oct. 2, L. and I took off on a mission to the Shangri-La hotel in order to obtain a box of mooncakes she had been given from a friend. We were going to take the subway but the cars were so overcrowded that we ended up getting off after only two stops and walking a ways. She stopped to make a deposit at a "Cash Recycling Machine" (in China, it is common to use separate ATMs for deposits and withdrawals). While she was in the bank, I perused a collection of counterfeit books that a vendor was selling on a cart outside. A couple caught my eye, both by Will Durant. I ended up choosing The Story of Philosophy over The History of Philosophy.
My personal dates of philosophical inquiry can be divided approximately into three phases: high school, college and graduate school. With the graduation from my M.A. now more than eight years past, I was overdue for a refresher course on the great books, and Durant's summaries seemed like a good segue. The vendor offered the book for 30RMB (about $4.25) and I didn't attempt to bargain it down further. The printing was of good quality, but had a strong smell of fresh wood, like it had just been ripped out of a 2x4.
We walked into a large Sichuan chain restaurant and I lapped up the book's contents greedily. One passage stood out: "Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt--particularly to doubt one's cherished beliefs, one's dogmas and one's axioms. Who knows how these cherished beliefs became certainties with us, and whether some secret wish did not furtively beget them, clothing desire in the dress of thought. There is no real philosophy until the mind turns around and examines itself."
The first chapter provided a rather cursory summary of Plato, kind of like seeing the Arctic Circle from an airplane. You may have glimpsed it, but you've hardly explored it. But it was good to get a taste.
One thing I have to bring up. Some of the phraseology in Durant's summary quite frankly scared me- particularly those passages where he seems overly tolerant of Plato's disdain for democracy, rattling off words like "what could have been more ridiculous than this mob-led, passion-ridden democracy, this government by a debating society," attributing the disarray in Athens to its rotating rule at the hands of "simple farmers and tradesman." They may have made a mess of things, but I've also read about more than a few so-called philosophers who managed political affairs ineptly, and nowhere have I seen this perfect education that would (in of itself) prepare a person for leadership. Real experience, broad communication, travel, simple integrity and compassion, even occasional heartbreak seem too inextricably intertwined. The idea of these abstract thinkers with no personal interest in the state they're overseeing scares the shit out of me. For me, the model of a great leader is Abraham Lincoln. I don't think any Lincolns are likely to come out of a segregated, dogmatic education of three or four decades...
The restaurant where I was scanning these passages was Xing Xiang Hui, a large place cast in a modernist diner-type decor, rich in black and gray colors. The menu was not merely a menu, it was also part magazine, part shopping catalog, part shall we say experience. Entitled "Lifestyle Plus," it contained(for example) a page dedicated to the art of Andy Warhol- with products for sale that bore little resemblance to his pop art, which included a pair of black and red boots that looked like galoshes and a shirt with a cartoon reptile on it.
Looking over the food section, L. immediately eyed the chicken claws. She passed the menu to me and I passed over a page with a plate full of duck heads before settling on a dish of duck necks. "Why do you want duck necks?" L. asked incredulously. "Why do you want chicken claws?" I asked defensively. In the end, we left out the duck heads, but instead ordered a dish of pork and green peppers, some chicken wings, and "disanxian" ("Three Flavors of the Earth," meaning potatoes, eggplant and peppers"). Our four dishes, along with some watermelon juice, came to 97RMB. The food was reasonable but far from spectactular, missing the chilis and peppercorn zing that is customary in Sichuan cuisine.
Leaving the restaurant, it was time to continue our odyssey to exchange the coupon for the mooncakes. We hopped in a cab and took it over to the Kerry Centre. A sign stood in the lobby directing mooncake seekers to the third floor. Exchanging her coupon, L. got a long box that looked like it should hold a pool cue but instead held six small mooncakes, about the size of White Castle burgers. They came in yolk, green tea, black sesame, sugar-free pumpkin, sugar free white lotus and date-and-walnut flavors. They had a consistency close to a scone. I rather liked them, but L. insisted they were "freaky mooncakes."
We had some time to kill before heading to the Shanghai Dance Festival, so we headed down to the Starbucks on the first floor (yes, I know, I hate Starbucks and I also drink coffee there a lot... such are the complexities of life). The Moon Festival is a convenient time for businesses to ignore all laws of economics. Thus, little cakes that ordinarily sell for around 50 cents each now are sold in six-pack boxes costing $30, $50 or even more. The cakes at Starbucks, which I'm told taste good, were on sale in boxes piled high to the ceiling at a cost of 218RMB ($32) per set. Haagen-Dazs is another unlikely mooncake entrepeneur. I settled for a medium coffee and perused a copy of Shanghai Daily. A feature article inside the newspaper lamented how the Mid-Autumn Festival had been reduced to another family dinner by the television event, one associated mainly with mooncakes and thought less fun by young people than Valentine's Day or Christmas. It talked of times in the distant past, when people would gather outside in the night and watch the moon and drink wine and recite poetry.
For the following evening, L. and I went to a visit a friend from her hometown in the south of China. Along the way, we stopped at City Shop and L. picked up curry to make shrimp and I picked up a bottle of Chilean wine. Her friend lived in one of the dwindling old neighborhoods in central Shanghai, a kind of ramshackle boarding house-type dwelling that nevertheless had a homeliness that is lacking in the apartments that have now become the norm. Her friend had recently had surgery, and the woman's mother had arrived to oversee affairs, preparing (with a bit of L.'s assistance) a 10-dish dinner, featuring such local specialties as boiled frog and periwinkles. Of me, the mother had two questions: "Do you eat intestines?" And "Why don't you shave your beard?" I explained to her that I once bought an electric razor at Carrefour and it promptly jammed inside my beard, leading me to return it. Since then, I have just let the beard go its own way.
[An aside: just try returning an item to Carrefour or Wal-Mart in Nanjing, China. I had a coffeemaker from Wal-Mart that broke after two weeks. When I returned it, they insisted that they wouldn't take it back, but instead would arrange for a repairman to fix it. A week or two later, they said I could pick the machine up. I biked for an hour to Wal-Mart to go get it. When I took the machine home, it wouldn't even turn on. So much for the repair. I took it back to Wal-Mart once again and rather angrily insisted that this time they give me my money back. As for Carrefour, I got a glimpse at how their return desk worked when I returned the electric razor- not much better. First off, the people working at the return desk were not authorized to take returns. So they had to call a manager out, which took about a 15 minute wait. When the manager came, she turned the razor on and insisted that it worked because it made a hum. Yes, the machine turns on, I explained, but it doesn't cut hair. To demonstrate, I poked beard trim side of the razor into my beard, where it promptly gagged. Horrified, the manager agreed that it did not seem to be working. Next, she took it apart, holding it up against the light, apparently checking to make sure it did not have any hairs that would indicate I had secretly been using it for the last few days. Finally, I got my money back from a cash register that barely had a 100 kuai in it--apparently, paying money back on returns is not a common practice at discount conglomerates in China.]
Getting back to the meal. Liam, a friend of L.'s, was there, and he asked if I had seen the National Day parade. I said I had and he asked if it was like parades in America. I said there were some aspects in it that were similar, but that in America heavy weaponry is usually not put on display for a ceremonial parade... Our hostess' mother asked if we needed more dishes and everyone hurried to say there was enough on the table (the 10 initial dishes were later followed by desserts of fruit and mooncakes)... The TV played in the background. Brazil was announced as the winning Olympic bidder. What surprised me about that was how shocked the American press had treated the announcement that Rio was selected over Chicago, Tokyo and other destinations. C'mon. South America has never hosted an Olympics. This is a world event. And Rio will obviously hold a great party if they can keep crime under control. I thought the Olympic Committee made the right decision (though I was also a bit saddened to see Barack Obama's Chicago effort passed up). Next came news of the David Letterman affair- I had never previously known him to be a personality in China, but apparently now he was. This was followed by coverage of some pop concerts related to the National Day celebrations. I wondered what that must be like... your some 20-year-old pop star on stage shaking your hips, and you look out to the front row of the audience to see, not some teenage girls, but a row of crusty middle-aged military dudes in olive green uniforms. If the singer felt absurd there on stage, he didn't let on.
Somewhere in the meal, some of the guests found out that Liam had once been the singer of a now rising Chinese rock group. They asked him if he regretted passing up his chance to become famous. He said he was more interested in finding a girlfriend and writing poems. He added that he writes poems in a Beat style, mentioning Allen Ginsberg and The Dharma Bums. Leaving the dinner, I was off to a photo shoot. We invited Liam to go with us, but he said he was going to a poetry jam and would have to join us another time.
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