Far Eastern Post, Dec. 2008

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TAIWAN

Dear friends:  I am resurrecting this old blog site to report on my two-week family visit to Taiwan and the mainland over the holidays.  I haven't been to Taiwan since 1999, when we brought my father's ashes over, or to the PRC since 1997, so this trip is overdue.  I'm here with my mom, my brother and my sister, and her husband and oldest son. We are gathering at my aunt's (my Ahee) house, in the Da An district on the east side, near Ren Ai Rd.  When my grandparents first built a house here in the 1950s it was on the outskirts of the city and there were rice paddies nearby but it's long been built up. Here is the house Ahee built on that site in the 1980s. Ahee is on floors 7-8 (8th floor is a tatami room) and Dajo-ma (my late uncle's wife) is on 5-6.   (The neighbors in the adjacent buildings don't like the angles--bad feng shui--so they hang mirrors on their balconies to bounce back the bad vibes. Ahee thinks this is funny.)  

We are doing some serious eating--breakfast takeouts-shaobing youtiao, danbing and doujiang; Old Wang's beef noodle soup; the obligatory visit to the dumpling temple, Din Tai Fung. We also had an awesome giant Pacific oyster (size of a mango) at the Three Oxen restaurant in the neighborhood; and a big family lunch at Dian Shui Lou ("cuisine Shanghai authentique", very fancy) hosted by my Dajoma with all of us and her daughter and family, who came up from Tainan.  



Food shopping is done at the traditional market (above, buying vegetables, and the noodle lady) as well as in fancy supermarkets in the lower level of Sogo, the Japanese department store, and Taipei 101 (they feel like Whole Foods). We also went to the flower market (above) and the jade market. 

We visited the cemetery, north of the city on the mountainside, where my grandparents, my two uncles, and my father are buried. The norfolk pine that was planted as a baby twenty years ago now towers over the site.   

Here we are with Biduan, who has worked for the family for many years. She is giving the Buddhist sign.

On Sunday after lunch we went to Taipei 101 (below left), the world's tallest building, completed 2007 (soon to be overtaken by a new construction in Dubai, but that's what always happens in the world's-tallest-building game).  It's in Xinyi,  the new finance/luxe district.  Designed by Taiwan's hot architect Li Zuyuan, who happens to be married to one of my cousins.  (for more click on link, above left)

Indeed Taipei is much cleaner and modern than when I was last here. Photo below right of Ren Ai Rd, near the Jade Market. The subway, which had just built its first line in 1999, now has several lines and is still expanding. There are still a lot of cars and scooters but traffic is not as crazy as it used to be.  

We are reading the International Herald Tribune and the local papers. What do Taiwan, the PRC and the US have in common these days? Economic recession and corruption! The news headlines during our travels were all about Taiwan's former president, charged with embezzling millions from the government (released without bail); the milk scandal in China (execs indicted); and Blago of  Illinois.

John went back to California on Monday morning and the rest of us went to Hualian, on the eastern coast. A pleasant two-hour train trip. We spent the day in the Toroko national park, hiking along the gorges in the marble mountains.

SHANGHAI

On Tuesday Ma and I left for Shanghai (Jen and family went to Hawaii). It's all "wow"--starting with the high-speed magnetic train (clocked 302 km/hour) in from the airport. We got in late and caught the last train of the night. (If you know Chinese you will get this clever pair of chinglish neologisms:  in Shanghai they refer to the 'last car' as the "lah-say cah".  Accordingly, they call the next-to-last car the "lah-san cah.")

We stayed in a hotel in the Hongkou area (old Japanese concession) which is now an upscale residential district. My mother's cousin Ah Gun, a retired marine biologist who developed fresh and salt water fish hatcheries, lives a few blocks away in a new condo complex with his family (3 generations). We went for dinner and to visit Ah Gun's wife, who has been ill. Their son Jinfu and his wife work for China Eastern Airlines (he in cost-control in food catering, she in sales and marketing) and their son is a first-year college student, majoring in Spanish language.  Jinfu took us around for a day to the old city and a walk along the Waitan (Bund). The old European buildings are now all banks and hotels. The riverfront (especially the Pudong side) is like Times Square on steroids. 

(above) Looking east from the Bund, across the Huangpo River, to Pudong.  The building that looks like a bottle opener is the Shanghai finance center. (below) Me on the Bund; most buildings were erected in the 1920s--the Customs House (building with clock tower, right rear) and the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank (HSBC) (domed building, now Shanghai Municipal Building). The customs house was first built and run by the British after the Opium War.  After 1949 my father's brother, Paul was a PRC customs officer here.  When the Bank of China built on the Bund in the 1920s the British made them build it one meter shorter than the European buildings. (click on link, above left, for more on historical Bund)

(above) Old Shanghai (Cheng Wang Miao) in front of the city temple and (below) inside Yu Yuan, the Ming-scholar villa.  Alas we did not have the xiaolungbao (dumplings) outside the Yu Yuan (reputedly the best)  because there was a two hour wait for a table.

(below) Xintiandi, an old residential area now swank boutiques and restaurants, in shadow of new hotels and department stores. I quashed an urge to buy a $100 tee-shirt at Shanghai Tang.

Below, the Shanghai museum. We looked at the porcelain and jade exhibits.

Ma and I took a night-time river cruise on the Huangpo. 



Ma also went to visit her best friend from medical school (Dr. Wang) who stays in Zhongshan hospital in the old French concession (second photo below is view from her hospital room). She was very nice and upon learning that I was a historian she asked me if I had read Churchill's History of the English-speaking World.  She is a retired high-ranking official at a research institute so she is in the wing for the people of high rank. The hospital room is free and the family pays  for a full time caregiver, a woman from Anhui province.  The migrants from the countryside are like the immigrants in U.S. cities,  they do all the menial jobs--caregivers, waitresses, etc. But they don't qualify for city residency cards so they don't have access to services.  It's similar to being an undocumented immigrant in the U.S.

On Christmas day we took a day trip to Suzhou to see the Ming gardens.  It's a quick two hours on the Shanghai-Nanjing (Huling) highway.  Outside of Suzhou is an enormous industrial zone built as a joint project with Singapore capital. Miles and miles and miles of factories and apartment buildings. It was not possible to tell whether the factories were operating but we do know that the worldwide recession has meant severe layoffs in China's export-manufacturing areas (4.8 million, according to the NY Times).

We visited two Ming scholar-gardens, Au Yuan (a small one) and Liu Yuan (big).  It is said that the scholars liked to plant pomegranate trees (many seeds = many sons) but not plum trees (flowers blowing over the villa wall = concubines running away) or mulberry trees (homophone for mulberry is injury).  Although it is winter (hence no flowers in bloom) the gardens are lovely in a quiet way. Inside the villas, the sitting rooms are sex segregated; rooms for men  face the gardens and have ornate furnihings; the rooms for women are behind them and are sparingly decorated (hmmph).

In Suzhou we also toured a silk factory (bought a silk comforter), a Buddhist temple, and a park with a pagoda built by the Emperor Wu 2500 years ago (below). When we got back to Shanghai we had dinner across from the hotel at Lao Ma's Huoguo (Mom's hot pot). This was a spicy version (very spicy) that I had not had before. They also like a kind of tofu that's been frozen and then thawed, which gives it a different texture.

Our Suzhou tour guide, Xiao (Little) Dong, gets the prize for the best Chinglish, for her handbag that says "Bani Rabbit / friends forever."  I really coveted this bag but could not figure out how to get it from her. (The photo does not show her pink and black Ugg boots with pink pompoms, apparently a popular look--I saw it on quite a few young women.)  Other Chinglish gems spotted on this trip:  "off bus cash-tick pay" (Taipei bus);  "specialty munchies" (snack bar at Hualian); "poison-free Japanese salad" (menu at Hualian restaurant); "your health rests with your civilized behavior" (sign in Liu garden, Suzhou. There is a lot of morals/hygienic admonishing on the tourist routes. Some of it is good, eg "Don't sneeze in the direction of others." In general I'd say that public behavior has improved--there is far less spitting and pushing than in the past.)

BEIJING

We meet up with Ahee in Bejing. She has come a day earlier to see her old friends from junior-high days, when they met in school in Sichuan during the Sino-Japanese war.  We are here for just two days, mainly for a quick architectural tour with Ahee.  We are staying at the Xixi Youyi (West Friendship) hotel in the Wangfujing, near the city center.  The hotel occupies the top stories of a large shopping mall so there is a huge advertisement for wedding gowns on the outside of the building.  The hotel seems to cater mostly to Chinese, including Taiwan businessmen who have factories in China (just  a few westerners spotted, including one American woman with her new adopted baby...)  We had a really excellent hot pot lunch (beef and lamb and that thawed tofu again) with H., who was my research assistant in Chicago and was home in Beijing for the holidays.  

That night we went to a concert at the National Center for the Performing Arts, locally known as the "boiled egg". The building is by Paul Andreau (Paris airport) -- a stunning eye-popper, right on Changanjie (the main boulevard) amidst all the traditional sites (Forbidden Palace etc).  At night its colors change from white to blue to purple. There is some local criticism that it should have been built in the traditional style, but I think not--it would have seemed too obviously imitative. The "egg" intends to be part of the natural landscape (notwithstanding its supersize). It houses an opera house (seats 2500) and two smaller theaters (each seat 2000). Tickets are expensive--Lincoln Center prices--and clearly for the elite class.  We heard a concert by the "Five Browns," an American brother-sister team playing five grand pianos. Among other things they arrange symphonic pieces for five pianos (e.g. Beethoven's 9th). Very percussive.

The next day Ahee hired a driver for the day so we could look at Beijing's latest architectural projects.  We drove around like mad all day, gawking at the humungous buildings that are the city's new banks, businesses, hotels, and government ministries. (An office building is a xiezilong--a "writing words" building).  There must be hundreds of millions of square feet of office space, it boggles the mind.  But these are not our destinations.  Rather, we were interested in several mixed-use projects and the Olympic zone.  First stop is a redevelopment project in Sanlitun, near the embassy zone (second ring).  Smaller in scale than financial and official Beijing.  Notice the Apple store.

The black and white complex below was out on the fourth ring. Several residential towers and a shopping mall. (architect unknown). We had bibimbop for lunch there.

Our favorite site in Beijing (which took two days to find!)--Stephen Holl's "linked hybrid," a complex of eight towers (residences and one hotel) linked at the 20th floor with bridges that serve as common spaces (shops, restaurants etc). Ground level has theater and a montessori school.  Notably all its energy (heating and cooling) is from 100-meter-deep geothermal wells. Construction is complete but it is not yet occupied (though all sold).

Below is the new CCTV building, not yet completed (from side and front), very much in the aggressive, overscaled style of architecture here.  The local people call the building "da ku cha", or the big pants crotch. One gets the sense that there is not a lot of love for official aggrandizement.

Looking through the Fairmont hotel, toward one of the many new apartment complexes (another pants crotch?)

OLYMPICS ARCHITECTURE

Olympic construction consumed the world's entire steel production for about five years, causing the price of steel to skyrocket. (It has since plummeted).

Most famously, the National Stadium, or bird's nest.  Built by the Swiss firm of Herzog and deMeuron in collaboration with Ai Weiwei, Beijing's badboy avant-garde artist (he criticized the Olympics as China's "pretend smile of bad taste," notwithstanding his design input). (Click on links, above left, for Ai Weiwei's "concept" of China ("fake editorial") and his statement on the Olympics and democracy.) (btw we share the same surname)

The Water Cube (swimming pool building), which sparkles with little lights

The Olympic village (where the athletes stayed), all units were pre-sold before construction for post-games occupancy, reportedly $1 million apartments.

Pangu plaza, adjacent to the Olympics site, designed by Li Zuyuan (of Taipei 101).  The five buildings form a dragon. The buildings are adorned with digital screens (perhaps the advertising helps pay for the development). Everyone in Beijing tells the story that Bill Gates rented the entire top floor of dragon-head tower for $15 million for the Olympics but this may have been a rumor aimed at inflating the prices. A Beijing real estate site lists apartments at Pangu at 50,000 rmb per square meter, about $2,300/sf -- more than Manhattan!  These photos were taken around 4:00 pm; it was hazy like this all day. I think it is a normal pollution day in Beijing. Because air quality was poor I've added another photo that I found on the web,which also shows the water cube and the bird's nest, though I think the image is computer manufactured.

My cousin Ming (son of another of my mother's first cousins) who lives in Beijing took us to Quanjude, the best roast duck palace in Beijing (photos on wall of Chou Enlai and Kissinger). Ming works for China's National Science Foundation. His wife Xiao Du is 55 and just retired from her hospital job (55 is the mandatory retirement age for women; for men it is 60... can you imagine? Pensions range from 20% to 90% of one's salary, depending on 'rank.'  The low end is probably comparable to our social security.)  The duck is amazing--roasted in brick ovens over wood from fruit trees.  Duck parts make up other dishes.  There was for example a dish of duck webs served with very hot mustard (very good).  The webs are perfectly boneless, and not cut or torn--they are deboned by hand by some poor souls in a workshop somewhere (likely migrant workers). There is also duck tongue which we did not order but I've had it before on another trip. Then there were the cute duckie pastries, filled with duck meat. 

Our last day in Beijing was very cold but bright and clear--the wind came through and blew out the pollution.  Ma and I  both leave with a sore throat (undoubtedly caused by poor air quality) but we are happy, having seen old friends and family, and the dazzle of today's China. Not representative of all of China, to be sure, but a dazzle nonetheless.