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May 15th, 2010 By Jonathan Chandler
The Wild East Magazine
 Magpies… What was it? One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, hundreds of the frockers, a glut. A glut of magpies – building their intricate stick houses the size of an ayatollah’s turban, or a B52 beehive on the just-budding tees. Xi-que, (or in Taiwan ping-yin: Hsi-chui) – Latin: pica pica sericea.
The Thieving Magpie, a traditional bird of ill omen, is the only bird in town, or the deadzone, as we “locals” refer to it. How apt.
Spring doesn’t come to QD. It goes from Winter to Summer with one night of lashing rain and violent wind. Next day, all the construction workers are tops off and the cherry and magnolia blossoms are yesterday’s wedding confetti,
I will be only a little sad to leave this seaside town, with its massive public works, gigantic museums, conference centers, five stadia, Party HQ’s of various looming ugliness: all part of the trillions of renminbi in the government-slotted domestic stimulus package. And all empty.
A silent, lifeless showcase for Modern China – the global colossus that taste forgot.
But I won’t be sad to leave the educational institution upon which I wasted a little of my time. With its fake Eton ducktails and pinstripes, its portraits of the Duke of Wellington on the walls, its dormitories with matron whose only qualification was to be related to the boss, and mostly its complete absence of a business license with which to employ foreign experts.
The place is run by some over-“guang-chi”-ed Big Brothers — the “investment group”, with marketing as the main methodology, and big money, the goal.
The missing element, in fact, the missing elephant in the living room, is education, learning; the teaching of the little souls of the some of the richest kids in China.
Hey, just because they’re rich doesn’t mean they don’t deserve a decent education.
The whole enterprise is a tottering edifice which combines the worst evils of modern China with the flashiest of fifties spiv-ery: all done and dusted on the Mount overlooking the Baohai Sea.
Having got that dirty water off the chest there is the other problem with QD; the sea appears to be as dead as a barrel of salted cats, though a Geiger counter might disagree in staccato indignation. Better not tempt fate by dipping in a toe though!
My first morning in town on the eve of last August, full of good intentions after eighteen months in dirty ole Shanghai I rose at five, trotted down to the beach ten minutes away and immersed myself in a sticky gloop of opaque brown. I smelt sewage and slithered out as quickly as I could to run home and shower furiously. That’s the last time I went for a swim in QD.
But the Lutheran Church, bare and white on the hill overlooking the old port unadorned after being done over by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution – that lovable misnomer – is a place of infinite grieving silence. While the Granite Mansion, built on the pine-clad rocks of Beach Number Two, where Chiang Kai-shek, Noel Coward and George Bernard Shaw partied with Emily Hahn and her coked-up gibbon lover, “Mr. Mills”, (dressed in tweed three-piece suit), still echoes with hysterical laughter and the ghost of an occasional gunshot.
 so-so-famous! The beer, how could one not mention the beer? Went to a local lean-to under a blooming cherry tree on my last weekend where they just deliver the aluminum barrels onto the rough-cleared ground and tap them straight into pint mugs for 1.5 renminbi, that’s 8 cents US, or into 3-litre plastic bags for takeaway. The toilet is an unlit hardboard niche wall with two footpads in the concrete floor, a sort of GPS for your drunken willy. Ladies; just turn ‘round, crouch and let gush. No such thing as a sink but the barbecued meat, and mountains of clams were the best I tasted in the ten months I was in QD.
The locals are tough, uncompromising, but deal with that and they are great fun. Shandong is the ancient core of the Middle Kingdom and they are quite different, another race altogether, it seems, from the average Mainlander, Taiwan-born or otherwise.
It’s a strange place, full of empty, brand-new boulevards fronted by empty, brand-new buildings. All two-wheeled vehicles are prohibited and there are more new cars than you’d ever see on the streets of London, Milan or New York City.
So, cheers to Qingdao, I’ll be back if only for the craic, the crooked dazzling smiles of the young people and the sunset over Mount Fu.
Jonathan Chandler is a British novelist currently based in Qingdao, China.
March 11th, 2010  Photo: Caleb Cole Lantern Festival marks the end of Chinese New Year or Spring Festival as it is officially known here and the 3rd Plenary Session of the 11th National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China is in its annual nod-off.
Though glimpses of spring are in the air, right now Qingdao is blanketed in snow and a blizzard rages. With the big show happening in Beijing, there is also a lot of official activity here in Qingdao which is the apparatchiks’ favorite watering hole. Just 342 miles from Beijing and 41 minutes from wheels-up to down, they flock by the private planeload between meetings to conduct their more intimate gatherings and rumored rendezvous, or even, one might dare say, interludes of a romantic nature.
Consequently, there are extra security personnel everywhere, uniformed and plainclothes, standing with menace by flashing lit vehicles or in gaggles of corner boys and lurkers.
At times like these, the Internet is very slow and the roads are empty apart from racing black cars with tinted windows, and long, low and sleek or high and rugged 4 x 4’s… but always black. The streets are cleared of folk and the only beggar visibly condoned (indeed he is unique, Congress sitting or not) is the famous mendicant known to all ex-pats and tourists who ply the small foreign bar scene.
This gent has perfected the look: he is lined, wizened, walnuty and wears a grubby, torn ex-People’s Liberation Army green coat with stuffing spilling out of rips, tied around with rice twine. His ragged, stained black kung fu pants hang like the sail of a ghost ship over traditional rope-soled slippers. He has a long silver beard in the manner of a Tang Dynasty poet (or Good Old Uncle Ho Chi Minh if any readers remember the Vietnam War). His matted grey hair is bundled up inside a decrepit and filthy Mongolian snow-hat, ear-flaps dangling, crusty and foul. Rumors from old QD hands are that he has accumulated great wealth in his years of professional beggarism and has a Porsche Cayenne (a black one) parked around the corner. I often encounter this chap outside Old Jack’s Bar in the middle of town. Recently we became, for a moment, quite intimate.
It was a Sunday noon and I had set out for a walk along the beach before hitting Western Union for an overseas cash remittance.
All W.U. business is conducted in U.S. green, but currency exchange rates at the banks in China are bad and a hassle and not available on Sundays. This being China, however, there is always a white car parked outside the main branch of Bank of China right opposite the Western Union office. The system works like this: you are foreign, you approach the white car and within moments someone will materialize from around the corner of the bank. If no one comes, the security guard in his cubicle will come out and find the man for you. When the man appears he asks how much, opens the trunk of the white car and conducts the exchange in full view of passers-by (One time he wasn’t there and the Security Guard changed money for me himself, inside his cubicle).
I changed my reds for green and was about to cross the road to W.U. when from nowhere appeared the famous outstretched palm. Uncle Ho certainly knew where to position himself in the daytime before the bars opened. I apologized and explained in Mandarin that I only had US dollars. “Mei-jing, mei-yo wenti” (US dollar, no problem).
“Imagine it wouldn’t be” I quipped over my shoulder as I dodged the black cars.
That evening we were scheduled for the traditional annual opening of the business year company bash.
It was a long night of “gan-bei”-ing and we ended up in Corner Jazz Bar, a place of ill repute where locals and foreigners like to hunt and fight. Our table (four tables end to end) had two hundred bottles of Qingdao’s famous local beer in lines five deep and forty long. At three in the morning I found myself helping the 76th descendant of Confucious into a black 2010 Cadillac SRX 4×4, tipping his driver.
Then, tired and emotional, I staggered, slipped on the dirty snow and fell in an inebriated tangle onto the street. I reached out to gain purchase on the spinning world when I saw a familiar hand swoop down to help me up. In my palm was some of the money I’d pulled out to tip the driver. As I focused through bleary eyes, I saw that there was a nice fat red 100 Renminbi note (the biggest denomination on the Mainland) laced around my fingers.
The famous hand froze. I looked up, the beggar’s startled eyes met mine and as time skidded to a slow crawl, in one fluid movement I was tugged to my feet, the note disappeared and I was left swaying, cursing my luck. Of Good Old Uncle Ho, no sign but the flurry of snow in the purple night.
February 16th, 2010 Jonathan Chandler
The Wild East
The snow which fell a week or so back has yet to melt completely and the winds are still bitter in Qingdao.
 Algae bloom during the 2008 Olympics, in Qingdao. Photo: The Guardian This ultra-wealthy city where two-wheels are banned and all the cars are brand new is a Party town.
Not that kind of party unfortunately.
Thus, the new Year of the Metal or White or Golden Tiger came in with but a few muted fireworks.
The changes that have been wrought on this formerly quiet German concession seaside town are pole-axing.
 In less than 20 years its population has grown from under a million to nearly nine million. It’s rich and gleaming. There aren’t any beggars and it seems everyone has a brand new building to live in. Yet there’s no one about. You rarely see more than a handful of people at a bus stop and down by the freezing ocean but a few retired high officials stroll in pairs doing their exercises along the empty shore.
What you see mostly are big black shiny cars, brand-new 4X4 Cadillacs, Porsches and Lexi.
For this seaside town, legendary for pre-revolutionary decadence, where Noel Coward would snort off hangovers with Chiang Kai-shek and the Soong girls at the Granite Mansion overlooking the pines and rocks of Beach Number 2, is rumored to be the playground of the highest of the high. The ocean resort where “xiao tai-tai”, ( “little wives” – a euphemism for take a guess), are kept pampered and secreted away in former German villas under avenues of cherry blossom.
Qingdao is discreet. Sometimes it feels a little too discreet. There is a strange absence of life. It becomes apparent after six months that nothing here is actually very real. It is a display city, silently controlled and full of deserted mammoth civic and residential construction projects: arenas, stadia, museums, academies, high rises.
Yet where are the multitudes, the “ren shan ren hai” – people mountain people sea?
The answer given is they come in the Summer.
But the contrast is too abrupt between jammed July and silent winter.
A possible explanation lies in its meteoric rise from smallish city (by Chinese standards) to metropolis with a skyline to match Shanghai’s Pudong-side.
The city was the site of the Olympic sailing events and was massively overbuilt and over-roaded in order to showcase the de luxe achievements of the Chinese capitalist revolution.
It appears that the Olympics rolled into the spanking new town and then after a mere three weeks moved on. The infrastructure investment worked and the citizens who thronged in on social engineering orders have all been housed in pleasant high-rise condos. But the international element has gone, the restaurants along the concrete ocean walkway and the Olympic marina are boarded up; the hotels are mostly empty and discarded plastic bags blow in the silent wind.
For that’s another odd thing about the city. Brave the biting wind and stand on the magnificent marina breakwater where Hooters and other bars seem on the wintry day as quiet as graves and breathe in the ocean air. It is odorless.
Where’s the briny, where are the seagulls’ cries and fishing boats?
The Yellow Sea around here is dead. Dead as the ultra-modern city skyline behind you.
Only distant gargantuan container vessels inch across the ocean horizon.
With the dawning of the New Year of the Tiger the feeling of ancient Chinese connectivity, so vibrant in Taiwan and the other mighty overseas Chinese diaspora cities, is absent.
The golf course on low hills between this desk and the ocean is empty and the snow lies around the forlorn fluttering flags. The wedge of sea visible beyond is grey and shrouded despite the winds.
Perhaps everyone left to return to their ancestral homes. No doubt the small towns of provincial China are rocking this Tiger dawn.
Yes, there is something very peaceful in this metropolis bereft of folk.
Besides, come summer, the place will be crawling with the richest members of the new China – for this is a Party town.
January 28th, 2010 Jonathan Chandler
The Wild East
It snowed dream-like and blew bone-flaying gusts of Artic wind last week. The sky was bleeding lead with pure white snowflakes floating along and then for two days a purplish sea-fog rolled in and tied Qingdao into a manky, ice-cold blindfold.
 Kate McGarrigle Sombre enough for the news that broke of the death of Kate McGarrigle, the great Canadian folk singer, at age of 62 from a heart attack. Kate with her twin Anna, were singers of mesmerizing purity and in the spirit of those wild and free times, told it like it was in gems of short songs about love, heartache, fun, radiance, cruelty and grief. Kate was also the partner of Loudon Wainwright and the mother of the current Wainwright musical clan.
If none of these names mean a thing to you, no matter. Just suffice it to say an old ‘un remembers his first broken heart like it was now…
I was living in a garret in South Ken in the early Seventies (they still had them in those days — 25 quid a week – probably worth a few million at the height of the gluttony) and working as a waiter at Joe Allen’s. My North London Jewish Princess had dumped me and I would retreat to the attic flat and wallow in the McGarrigle Twins and Gram Parsons.
Do yourself a great favor and seek out their early albums- sublime, angelic and other-worldly.
 Which brings up the worldwide cultural phenomenon – Avatar.
I saw it in 2D with some Chinese teenagers while the snow fell at the beginning of the year. It was a ravishingly beautiful visual experience, akin to eating fresh mushrooms up on Eshaness – Europe’s highest cliffs — during the perpetual Autumn sunset/rise of North Shetland.
Then following the spat with Google, the rigid face of the Middle Kingdom’s supreme rulers decided, with the wisdom bestowed by the Mantle of Heaven, to allow the movie to be shown in 3D theaters only.
Since there are only a relative handful of such facilities available around the vast hinterland, this effectively censors the movies and prevents the masses from seeing Avatar. But why? Is it saber-rattling to unnerve the young guns at Google and Yahoo? Is it just some form of trade protectionist retaliation for recent U.S. and EU moves to curtail Chinese imports?
Or is it something a tad more sinister: do the leaders wonder if the dystopian images of a ravaged planet earth are too disturbing for the teeming members of the Harmonious Society… or perhaps too familiar?
Is the dream-like beauty of the idealized planet of the Na’vi too provocative for the eyes of the toiling class in their toxic wasteland of quarries, mines and dead rivers…. ?
That one I will leave for the political pundits and the economists to puzzle out.
Meanwhile it seems a particularly 21st century kind of sad affair that such a thing of beauty should be kept hidden from innocent eyes.
Nearly as sad as the extinguishing of the light from the lady who sang like an angel all those years ago, “Hearts have a way of calling when they’ve been true.”
January 16th, 2010 ‘Lowdown’ Goes to the Philippines for Christmas
By Jonathan Chandler
for The Wild East
 Squatter community in Manila I made a last-minute decision to get out of sub-zero, Siberian wind-tunnel Qingdao for the Christmas holiday. The prospect of a week’s solitary sopping at Old Jack’s Bar, waiting for the unlikely phone call from my daughters was simply too grim to bear. I needed distracting and I knew where to get it.
So I paid over-the-top holiday price-jacks for cramped seats on planes to Beijing, Hsiamen and thence to Manila. The three-hour crow flight took about 14 hours door-to-door.
But Manila is worth it.
The shabby old, varicosed hellcat in her holey, faded fishnets and flaking mascara is still standing, or rather listing, with her elbow on a counter flush with ice-cold stubby glass-bottled San Miguel Pilsens and song, laughter and merry-making galore.
Manila may be old and crumbling, overloaded and mostly without infrastucture of any workable kind for the “informal settlers” — the new Phil euphemism for squatter — but within the madness and crush of humanity, it is a young and irrepressibly cheerful city.
The heat and hustle, the smiling faces, the cleanliness and smartness of apparel amid the dehumanizing poverty lapping up against the bastions of luxury and indefensible wealth: Manila can teach the world a lot of things, but what hits you is the dignified resilience and the charming demeanor of the vast majority whose wretched lives are confined to the sidewalk or the rotting banks of the fetid Pasig River. Never mind the nearly constant natural disasters (two ferry boats were sunk in the six days I was there, or the thirty-odd typhoons which struck last year); nor the massacres: 72 beheadings of women, children and journalists in Manguindanao discovered on the morning of November 23rd.
The citizens of this cruelly unequal country maintain their self-respect and behave with a very special blend of gravitas and unbounded joy.
What’s more, the Pinoys never complain, unlike the citizens of far wealthier countries like UK. For an overwhelmingly religious society, you don’t come across that bitter fist-shaking at the heavens or bemoaning gloom of the average Brit dole artist.
I was talking to a young woman who casually mentioned that Typhoon Ondoy had washed away her and her family’s shanty and with it the sum total possessions of their lives. She’d managed to save just one thing apart from her son — her precious mobile phone. It was the cheapest Nokia you can buy and a random act of human kindness was my guilt-laden response. No matter if I was conned, it was Christmas Day.
At midnight the Christians flock to midnight masses and then begins the gunfire and fireworks — legacy of the Chinese traders from centuries of intermingling. You don’t venture out on these nights (New Year’s Eve also), or you might well be found among the numerous corpses the following morning — utterly innocent victims of ricocheting bullets.
The night is deafening with gunfire, the smoky sky lit by thunderflashes as you peer out of the window as though in the middle of the siege of Stalingrad.
The next day I was in a shopping mall — wonderful social tools these — they provide an air-conditioned and massive space for the aimless throngs to spend the day. A calm and musical interlude from the infernal city — that is, until you hear a strange and growing cacophony. You peer ahead with that sinking feeling of doomed clairvoyance and despair for the planet’s future — yep — an unruly rabble of Mainland Chinese tourists have just entered the Mall with a roar of jabbering. smoking, phlegm-hawking, gesticulating and grab-handling of produce.
See the future, folks. It’s a world overrun by billions of rich Chinese tourists. Not a pretty sight but definitely one to warm the economists’ chill-blains.
November 10th, 2009  Statue at China's new sex-themed park The remnants of a typhoon piddled on Qingdao last night, whetting the thirsts of the flowers, trees and citizens, tantalizingly dewy but nowhere near wet enough to slake the dry.
So as the sere winds blow in off the Bao Hai Sea, the collective consciousness begins to fret and fray around the edges like the snapping of caged pit-bulls or the whinnying of frenzied wild horses sensing an approaching thunderstorm. Small spats break out, groups of people argue in the streets over some minor traffic accident and there appears a general malaise among the service personnel that is manifest in a snarled reply to the customer’s mildest request.
The citizenry, in general, thus, are displaying a callous lack of sympathy for the People’s Republic of China’s slogan of “Harmonious people, Harmonious world.” And all this barely since the last trumpet fanfare of the 60th Anniversary of the P.R.C. has faded.
Yet, apparently there is plenty of another kind of harmony going on in certain venerable places and drought, it would seem, is not the only thing on the minds of folk.
The oldest human mischief is out and about, and the song of the turtle can be heard in the land (“Turtle-head” being the favorite euphemism for the male member).  Chinese character for love: 'ai' Love is in the air and it’s not necessarily the monogamous romantic love leading to marriage which is rigidly on the agenda of most young Modern Chinese. In fact, there are reports that sex has been discovered by 21st Century Chinese. (China’s ancient traditions of sexuality are rich and culturally crucial.)
But not all is rosy in the Garden of Earthly Delights. Reports of outrage among the netizenry were broadcast after photos of discarded condoms on Shanghai Jiao-tong University’s campus were circulated. The moral masses complain that sex service adverts cover pages and pages of big city newspapers. Phone movies of students snogging in the park get distributed to angry effect.
More disturbingly, there are reports of the devastation wrought by prostitution and mass migrant labor on families rent asunder by economic survival.
The new generation’s sexual mores are truly revolutionary compared to those of their parents. Before the opening-up, PRC society appeared asexual. The drab blue unisex Mao suits of the bicycle nation seemed purposely designed to dampen down the libido.
One-child families and the absolute equality of women in the workplace with marriage consent to be approved by local party committees hardly added up to a decadent, licentious Gomorrah.
But with the arrival of Modern China not only financial and business rules were loosened up. Society’s strict morality was undone like the zipper on a delineatingly tight pair of designer jeans worn by a Shanghai office girl.
Adding to the internal sense of freedom was the influence of hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese businessmen and the massive influx of foreigners of all hues. The mighty lootocrat cities of Wenzhou, Kunshan, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and the Yangtse and Pearl River Deltas were built by Taiwanese and other Hua Chao (Overseas Chinese) immigrants whose motto was “Married in Taiwan, Single in China”.
It all adds up to free love, modern China style: adultery in a post Confucian world. And the authorities appear at a loss as to how to address the situation, which is embarrassing to most Chinese. However, you have to trust the Chinese to take up someone else’s problem and re-toggle it to make money. One smart business has found just such a way. Chinese-made mobile phones now have background ambient noise programs specifically designed for spousal unfaithfulness – adultery or just plain old cheating.
The phone’s program lists as background noise the following voice camouflages : Subways (coming into station/waiting at station with announcements/leaving station), Traffic jams, Rainstorms/ Thunderstorms/Typhoons; Airport Departure/Arrival Lounge; Taxi driver’s comments; Supermarket and Department store sales promos; School classrooms; Train Stations; Open-air parks; Musical concerts – classical, opera, pop; Movie theater soundtracks…..enough to provide just about any excuse to cover one’s actual situation.
“Hello darling, just waiting for the rain to stop, looks like the floods’ll keep me here overnight….” Fiendishly cunning as would be expected. In fact, when you think about it, acting in this way to spare someone’s feelings, loss of face, misplaced trust or broken heart, is a dignified and possibly Confucian solution to the age old problem of betrayal, treachery, infidelity or just plain fooling around.
© jagchandler.com (20/10/09)
October 12th, 2009  Golden week came and went in high Indian summer up here in Qingdao. Temperatures in the thirties in the second week of October. Hasn’t rained for months. Big fat flies laze around, eating filth, landing with heavy little legs and a total lack of grace on your skin, billions of them, breeding like flies. Sounds familiar.
The huge day came with much fanfare; the 60th Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China. (Heard that phrase a thousand times a day for the last few months.)
Patriotism is a dying instinct in most parts of the world (besides certain crimson-collared swathes of the U.S.), but not here.
Red flags have been flying from every conceivable spot, banners promoting the Motherland hang from every hoarding and fresh flowers in pots (for later removal) have been arranged to carpet the city, sidewalks, shop windows, around the base of trees and light-posts.
“Ai-guo” – Love of Country — is the key word. It isn’t subtly applied either.
News bulletins from the state TV station begin with one of three phrases: the name of the president, the name of the premier or the words: The People’s Republic of China. Not much in the way of world news.
When you live in a resort on China’s Bao-hai Sea Riviera, you might be forgiven for thinking that the rest of the world just slid off the planet into oblivion. This place is after all – what they call it again – China – the Middle Kingdom.
Strangely, nobody seemed to be watching the big screen erected down near the May 4th square and all I saw were commercials for new cars.
But not to cavil. The birthday celebrations covered much more than the military parade itself. There were the 56 (or is it more) ethnic peoples who live under the Han banner on display with folk dances and musical arts and the day-to-night was a spectacle as spectacular as one has come to expect of the Chinese and their favored director, Zhang Yi-mou.
That night at Qingdao, overlooking the moonlit beach, the Chinese do what they do best: fireworks! Multi-colored sea anemones and jelly fish undulating in the night sky with a craggy, silvery mountain backdrop. Psychedelic rainbow bursts and sparkling cascades of color make the heavens man’s palette. And later, the people themselves, out in their always vast numbers, light red paper lanterns, release them to rise majestically into the starry night, floating ethereally out over the ocean to fade away as distant smudges of blush on the cheeks of the firmament.
Lingering on are those inerasable images from the Military parade. No apologies from here, but it was fascinating, indeed, strangely enticing, to watch spellbound at the moment of salute, the screamed commands, the echoing blasted war-cries and the boots smacked down in staccato goosestep. Especially alluring were the pulchritudinous female contingents; some made up of ex-models and starlets especially selected and in training for half a year for the grand moment.
The Beijing Women’s Militia were particularly fetching in pink hats, short skirts, white stockings and white sixties knee boots. The gloved arms swinging, the crisp stamping feet and the deafening banshee wail made for a mighty testosterone-adrenalin rush.
The party lasted for days — swiftly followed by the Mid-Autumn festival. There were forty thousand weddings registered in Shanghai on the PRC’s 60th birthday and they all came up to Qingdao for the holiday to have their wedding album photos taken on the beach. Exotic sight that: eight in the morning with the grandmother of all hangovers taking a stroll by the seaside and spotting a thousand brides in their white (hired) finery, clambering over the seaweed-strewn rocks, while the peasant cockle-pickers and scavengers in their coolie( ku-li = bitter work) hats squatted and poked into the mud. Eye-blinking, headshaking stuff.
From all reports up here in Qingdao — China’s Rio — most people apparently couldn’t give a fig (or chestnut as they are in season) for the birthday celebrations. But the Mid-Autumn was a bigger show, with mobbed families out and about looking for a clear spot on the beach to watch the moon. But there were hardly any barbecues — not like dear old Taiwan.
The traditions of China were obliterated during the decimating upheavals of the Great Leap Forward and the murderous Cultural Revolution. Only now are they making a comeback.
It’s a straggly comeback and done in a strictly Middle Kingdom-ish way. No barbeque, no pomelos, no bonfires. There was an encounter with a single, measly mooncake full of mashed sesame and musky flour – inedible.
Being a Taiwanite there was a solemn duty to fill the New Chinese in on the delights of salted-duck-egg-ice cream mooncakes from the lovely old rock.
Happy DTs!
—
Jonathan Chandler is a British novelist currently based in Qingdao, China, and writes this column exclusively for The Wild East. If you’d like to reach him or inquire about syndication of his work in your publication, email jonathan at jagchandler dot com.
September 23rd, 2009 By Jonathan Chandler
Exclusive to The Wild East
 Certain practices and “superstitions” were frowned upon, violently so, during the Cultural Revolution — a recent hiatus in China’s rich and ancient weave. But with the revival of Confucianism, along with the “opening-up,” a deep thirst for the old ways and the ancient knowledge has re-emerged.
Although the return of arcania began with a diffident, hesitant tread, the fashion for all things “mystic and magick” has exploded in recent years.
Fortune-telling and the rambunctious rabble of fellow cash withdrawers are back in; and how! Without discussing social issues or, Mantle- of-Heaven forbid, anything polemic, prognosticators, sages and charlatans – mining some of the richest strands of China’s ancient tapestry – are making a huge comeback in both the more and less affluent places of the Middle Kingdom.
Once part of the ritual of daily life throughout the centuries of dynastic culture, a visit to the fortuneteller was as commonplace as a visit to the temple. More often than not, it took place in the same spot.
Now practitioners -“suan ming” – are to be seen on sidewalks, in shopping malls or outside temples, using methods as various and exotic as pulse-taking, face-reading ( the ancient art of “kan xiang”), palm-reading, phrenology, eyeball examination and consultation of the Book of Changes (the world’s oldest book, I Ching –also spelled Yi Jing). Newspapers and the Internet have daily Western astrological and Chinese zodiac horoscopes. Feng shui geomancers are in demand and for astronomical (nay astrological) costs. In Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and any Hua chao outpost – (Overseas Chinese – the diaspora) – the population is practically governed at the direction of the geomancers. Indeed in Shanghai, the lootocrats jealously guard their favored “Fong Xui” man, only passing on his secret and arcane methods of contact via an intimate circle of select friends.
Among the white-collar set, this fashion for external guidance fills a spiritual hole in this religion-free society.
Yet at all levels of society, it appears there is a universal groundswell of interest in things extra-material. Temples, churches and folk religions are flourishing all over the Middle Kingdom because the rush to Mammon has left behind too many struggling in its wake.
For these people, society offers little in the way of mental succor, and thus an entire gamut of New Age entrepreneurs has emerged to supply this demand. In Shanghai, and rich play-cities like Qingdao, you can even find Tarot readings given for a pretty penny by dubious types in flowery print dresses and birkenstock sandals who claim to have visited France and studied with the Witch of Aix.
Even the highest of highs have gotten in on the act. The precise timing of the Olympics Opening Ceremony was based on an ancient calendar of auspicious moments: 8 minutes and eight seconds past the hour of eight in the evening of the 8th of August, 2008. In other words, lucky numbered, 8.08.008.08.08.08. Eight in Mandarin is “ba.” Linguistically, “Ba” which is actually Guangdongese is the same as “Fa” in Mandarin which means “bring success, money,” and so on. That’s the “fa” we all use in “Gung Shi FA Cai!” – “work hard, make a lot of money,” the universal greeting at Chinese New Year to wish for success and money in the year ahead.
And lest one gets carried away with wonder regarding the dawning of the Age of Aquarius or whatever, just be clear that money is more often than not, as is usual in this vast land, the object of the exercise.
So, to any aspiring sages, oracles, shamans, clairvoyants and seers out there, pack your trinkets and black cat bones and float over to China – there’s gold in them thar superstitions!
– Jonathan Chandler is a British novelist, currently based in Qingdao. For syndication and reproduction permissions, contact him at jonathan at jagchandler dot com.
September 3rd, 2009 By Jonathan Chandler
Exclusive to The Wild East
Photo: BusinessWeek
September is here, and with it the teeming masses have left the beach — drunk down all the Tsingtao beer during the two-week Beer Festival — and returned to the provinces to take their dearly beloved one child per family back to the daily school grind of getting good grades in tests. The sky is blue, the sea is glittering and the mountains are crisply defined as we sail down empty afternoon roads.
At this pivotal moment on the global market balance sheet, China is positioned perfectly to define and exploit its role as one of the great superpowers of the world economy. Indeed, if you had been in Qingdao in August you would have been amazed by the sheer numbers of new, ultra-expensive luxury car imports, and the vast crowds of very well-off citizens spending their Summer hols cavorting in swimwear all over the place. This is all with a most un-Confucian lack of modesty and newly-acquired concept of “leisure” that was previously unknown in the Middle Kingdom and definitely frowned upon by traditional Confucianist dogma.
Not being of that persuasion I can report with sincerity that it was a very fine thing to behold the Shandong xiao-jie’s – the Little Misses – in their designer logo-branded bikinis. And then there was the Beer Festival.
The Chinese have a saying for be-mobbed crowds – “ren shan ren hai” – People Mountain, People Sea. And while driving – or attempting to drive – in the vicinity of the Beer Festival grounds in the last two weeks of August, you would have discovered just how appropriate this saying was, thereby once again illustrating how rich and perfectly apt are the descriptive phrases of the ancient and glorious Chinese language. But as I sat in the taxi for ninety minutes to pass through one intersection on the opening day, I was struck by the thought that there might be a serious hitch in the government plans for domestic stimulus.
Cars: too many of them already and an infinity more to come。
Apparently in the year to date, China has bought more cars than America. In fact, the government has actively been encouraging this car-buying spree with its mainline shooting up of multi-trillion Renminbi intravenous speedballs into the country’s economic veins.
As I sat there, sweat cascading down my face and back in the sauna-room taxi, going nowhere at no speed, I was thinking about modern European and the developed world’s cities with their anti-car policies.
When we finally reached the actual curb corner to take us out of the jam, I saw a single traffic cop, his hat perched on the back of his head like Elvis in G.I. Blues, his red face drenched, his green uniform stained and darkened all over, his hair a tangle of tufts as manic as the gridlock all around him.
He caught my eye and I saluted and winked. His eyes stayed on mine for a few suspended moments, then he smiled wryly, shrugged his shoulders and held out his palms as if to say, “Zhe-ma ban? What can one poor cop do?”
So here’s the problem: if China continues down the path of domestic stimulus with the encouraging of private vehicle acquisition, the future will be one hellzapoppin’ car-jam, which is bad for the environment, a waste of energy and above all, a farcical waste of time and thus money.
I’ve experienced plenty of Shanghai lockdown and that ninety minutes a couple of Saturday early evenings ago, stranded on a Qingdao beach road, made me think that China might consider some other way to get people to spend their way out of the recession, because private cars are inevitably a doomed species, a thing of the past.
The whole world wants China to go on marching forward into a bright and shining future… not sitting in traffic stasis being an object of futility, productive of one thing only: gallons of sweat!
Jonathan Chandler is a British novelist and writer currently based in Qingdao, China.
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