in the past couple week scores of people have been coming through shanghai. our apartment has basically turned into a hostel. we have all the amenities of transitional living: shower, food, couch, blankets, pillows and a mysterious mattress.
yesterday began with dimsum and ended with me coughing and snuffling my way back home after yet another night suffused with cigarette smoke, probably a contributing factor to why i feel so shitty today. and the gallon of green tea i drank at enoteca is probably why i am awake at eight feeling infirm after falling asleep around four last night. sunday mornings are usually the worst.
tami, bry, tina, jodie, joyce, jen, her friend ray, and i ate dinner at bellagio (yippee taiwanese food!) before moving the party to enoteca next door. this enoteca's even nicer than the original on anfu road. it was great since tami and i were able to ponder the wonders of hanging out in shanghai after having not seen each other in four or five years, joyce and i got all hot and bothered discussing the literary merits of south asian female writers, and bryan and i were able to exchange some final words before he leaves this morning. it was also a brilliant display of my brain mass decay as i butchered both the english language and numerical representation with my ramblings.
"we are the cream de la creme!"
"my friend, he's making like, 85 grand a year, if he gets a bonus that's three figures! three!"
but what would the night be without the strangeness that occasions nearly all shanghai activities? joyce's friend nick shows up at enoteca. i have no idea who this guy is besides the fact that he sang opera at the carnegie hall as an eight-year-old and he starts out by asking me the standard
"what do you do here?"
"i'm here doing research."
the good thing is he guesses fulbright so all i have to do is nod. then follows it with
"what's your topic?"
"chinese characters..."
"oh you're the simplified characters person. that's not a real topic."
i'll be the first to admit there are far more socially redeeming topics than an academic, obscurely specialized focus on chinese orthography. but what the fuck, since i started my shit, everyone seems to know more about chinese characters than me.
nick brought a man with him, someone referred to as his "fairy godfather", a porty, balding middle-aged white man who is writing a book and does music reviews for the ft. hey andy! he's seen your byline! how about that! anyway, guess what homeboy's book is about? the making of amy motherfucking tan's bonesetter's daughter into an OPERA. yes, an OPERA. like the world doesnt have enough of her mysterious oriental oh-mai-gah-i-so-tortured-because-i-is-chinese bullcrap floating around in litspace. i do think amy tan is a great writer - she is an excellent manipulator of words, she is supremely observant and creative. but this power can be used for good or evil right and she picked evil. lady found a bankable gimmick and milked it for every royalty it's worth, which is why the asian american literary genre today is saturated with whiny crap from monkey king to snow flowahh and the secret fan (lisa see, i hate you. i truly. fucking. hate. you. you are the epitome of everything that is wrong with literature today. you are the paradigm of scholastic evil. if i didnt believe that book-burning is an unforgivable sin your bedamned pieces of shit would be the first in the bonfire). thanks a lot, amy tan, for fueling the fetishistic appetites of sinophiles the world over and creating a market for weepy female writers to exploit their ethnic background. AN OPERA OF THE BONESETTER'S DAUGHTER. seriously? SERIOUSLY?
but more fun did come out of the night. fairy godfather's wife is apparently very invested in the arts, and eventually arrived at enoteca with a small chinese man in tow.
"everyone! this is wu tong!" there was something about wong kar-wai, but i didnt catch it.
tina, however, got very excited and was jabbering on to the small chinese man about yo yo ma and such. i asked nick who the small chinese man was. "oh, he's played the sheng on yo yo ma's silk road tour."
wah! i've totally seen this guy perform! the sheng is this funky chinese wood instrument that produces this wild, reedy sound when played.
it was my turn to get excited and i told mr. wu tong that i saw him play when the silk road tour came to taiwan. well he's going to be in the operatic form of amy tan's novel bonesetter's daughter coming to you this september! but since he was so nice i decided to forgive him of that. as he was leaving he even gave me a hug!
anyway, the moral of the story is, which you are not feeling too hot, it's not a good idea to hang out in a smoke-infested room for four hours.
now where is my damn airborne...
