The End

The Broad is no longer Abroad, but at home in Minnesota, lounging on her parents' living room sofa. I haven't decided what to do with this web domain, yet. Maybe I'll save it for next I travel somewhere far away and exotic. Or rent it out to other broads. Though unsure whether I'll keep up this whole "blog" schtick, I maintain registry of maureenbiology.blogspot.com as well as yellowsubmaureen.blogspot.com (the latter of which has mildly racist undertones -- which I sort of dig). I'm so tickled with the titles, I just might have to throw every rational feeling about my blog-abilities away, and keep doing it. Can't let an un-PC pun on my first name go to waste...

In the immediate future, you catch me in the following places:

IvyGate for my guest editor stint, August 12 - 25
Mudan Boutique Blog

SH-->MNL, MNL-->TPE, TPE-->SFO

This dispatch reaches you in your far corners of the world from the China Airlines lounge of Taipei International (or is there just one? cue Mr. Whitworth). There's a typhoon on -- it started in Manila and then followed me here to Taiwan. However, I'm told the typhoon's nothing compared to the might of Taiwan's very own national airline. Paper, rock, scissors, rain, 747. 747 beats rain; scissors beat 747 'cuz duh, pointy objects are verboten in the world of air travel. My split-end scissors are safely stowed in checked luggage.

The first thing you see when disembarking in Taipei, in glowing bold-face type is DRUG TRAFFICKING PUNISHABLE BY DEATH IN THE ROC. Flashback to Brokedown Palace and Claire Danes and Kate Beckinsale, back before she was anybody, both sporting choppy prison haircuts that were actually angled and kinda chic, screaming obscenities through hoarse voices and pleading for their lives in prison (yeah yeah, that actually took place in Thailand, which is very clearly a different country than Taiwan, but it's kinda same concept, right? BEWARE, FOREIGNERS, YOU'RE IN ASIA NOW AND WE'RE STRICT HERE). I wended my way through the perpetually deserted, architecturally perplexing terminals to the strangely luxe, two-story lounge featuring a full-service noodle bar and, like, fifty different types of baozi and dumpling. I conclude that the entire airport population is here, because everything else is eery and empty. In 15 hours I'll be in San Francisco.

On my last day in Shanghai I hit up the last tourist location on my list, Chenxiang Ge nunnery, home to a handful of Buddhist nuns, right in the heart of Old Shanghai. Chenxiang Ge's centerpiece is a large statue of Guanyin, the gender-bending female bodhisattva of mercy who started life as a male, but sometime around 1100AD Guanyin imagery switches to female representation, and there it now remains.

The scent of incense hung in Chengxiang Ge's air, mixed with lotus blossoms and the stacked oranges that worshippers laid in front of the myriad gold Buddha statues for luck, offerings, etc. In every nook and cranny of the place, coins and red slips of paper were tucked away, offerings from visitors. The picture above shows two coins wedged into an urn's decor, with two visitors lighting candles in the background. The woman was quite pregnant, but nonetheless managed to kowtow (a ritual of kneeling, bending at the waist, and tapping one's forehead and hands on the ground) several times in front of every single Buddha in the temple. The nuns wore their heads shaved, just like Buddhist monks, but these nuns wore grey-blue robes instead of the traditional gold. They prayed with beaded strands that reminded me of the rosary.

Like every other Buddhist temple I've visited, Chengxiang Ge is riddled with images of the many aspects of Buddha, which apparently include the following:

Buddha eating french fries (other possibilities include tootling a harmonica and smoking a bowl -- no wonder he was so tranquil, right? STAY OUT OF TAIWAN, BUDDHA, DRUGS ARE REALLY SUPER ILLEGAL HERE!):

Buddha as Eve in the Garden of Eden (note serpent and apple):

Buddha as a character in the Simpsons (blue hair, yellow skin) (note tiny kowtowing child sporting braided queue -- and yeah, that's a DVD in his hand -- no word on whether it was an offering, or just a bootleg from his personal collection):

Picture-taking was only allowed in a few areas of the nunnery, to preserve sanctity and/or the privacy of the nuns. And maybe to prevent people like me from comparing Buddha to cartoon characters from the Fox network.

After Chengxiang Ge I ate pulled noodles in a hole-in-the-wall shop, and then visited the wholesale fleamarket where Dan, my ex-editor, new cyber-boss, and proprietor of Mudan Boutique supplies all his jade needs. It is a massive 5-story warehouse, organized by ware. Ceramics on one floor, mahogany and jade on another. The best part was tucked in the back of the fifth floor (read: least foot traffic, ergo least profitable section) labeled "sundries" which was essentially a garage sale, but in China, and old. Photo albums of PLA soldiers circa 1972, anatomy charts with labels to guide acupuncturists, bizarre wind-up toys, kites, chipped porcelain, ancient silk dresses, dusty Peking opera costumes, anything and everything decorated with Chairman Mao's visage... The funniest is when you see the tourist-seeking vendors on the street, who beseech you first with the usual PRADA! GUCCI! ROLEX! and, when you fail to express interest, will add CHAIRMAN MAO! COMMUNIST MANIFESTO! bcs they sell those, too.

I spy with my two little eyes... a disembodied foot.

Other neat-o thing witnessed in Old Shanghai: Cricket fighting. Actually, cricket fighting is really boring. Though the crickets here are less like insects, and more like miniature dinosaurs with the shrillest, most deafening scream imaginable ("chirp" does not apply to these suckers; Jiminy they're not), their "fights" are more like slow motion dances, with each cricket owner prodding his thumb-sized prizefighter incessantly with a wire until finally one cricket gives the other a lazy hippity-hop and sort of mounts the loser, and then it's over. I was hoping for insectivorism or disembodied with legs played like the fiddle (didn't Jiminy have a fiddle? and isn't a cricket's "fiddle" actually supposed to be his thighs? ergo, Jiminy was playing a pair of thighs?).

Excuse me, I have some very tasty noodles beckoning me from Mr. Noodle Bar of Joy.

Wo ai China Airlines.

In case you crave me,

and my current level of theBroadAbroad does not suffice (I plead exhaustion, and way much work to finish up before I leave the country), read these:

China rejects Jackie Chan's Rush Hour 3
Tonight: Popcorn party at Zapata's (seriously)
Spiderman-wannabe scales Jinmao, gets arrested
Frag-fest on corrupt bureaucrats (this one got a mention on BoingBoing!)

And, this post gave me the giggles, though I cannot say I wrote it. In yet another attempt to diminish the Dalai Lama's power and take control of Buddhism (ergo, in the PRC's mind, Tibet), the Chinese government is now requiring that all people capable of reincarnation -- i.e., Living Buddhas -- must register with them and seek approval, first. So, if you plan on being reborn anywhere in China, please get your paperwork in order first.

Luckily, the Dalai Lama is already planning on reincarnating outside their border. And PRC's Panchen Lama is so not making it to nirvana, that rube!

Ooohhmmmmmm

In the process of attempting to provide links for the above (pretty sure the interview I had in mind is on His Holiness' personal website, dalailama.com, somewhere), I discovered that the Great Firewall of China blocks all things Lama and Tibet, and redirects you to state-run pages regarding the bureaucracy's take on how the nature of enlightenment (hint: It includes following the law and not watching "Seven Years in Tibet." Brad Pitt is a rube!). I mean, duh. You'd think I'd foresee these things more often.

Note to Minne-readers

I read about this today and it's terrifying. Please write and tell me that you are all okay...

Puppies!!!

Today I came THIS close to buying a puppy in an alley in Xujiahui. Walking back from the subway I saw a guy standing on a corner, holding two microscopically teensy puppies in hands, ticking off a loud salesman schpiel in Chinese (which could have been "eat this for dinner" for all I know -- but for now, let's just say it was "super cute fun happy puppy love wheee!")

(Just kidding, y'all. While I have seen bull penis, camel thigh, and chicken feet on menus, I've yet to see or even hear of someone eating any part of a dog. I think it's like Mormons and polygamy -- a source of embarrassment, buried deep in the past, practiced by a few splinter groups, more frequently ridiculed than experienced -- and really, who can't think of a thousand practices in any culture that would fit that description?)

But back to the matters at hand. PUPPIES FOR LOVING, NOT EATING.

Puppies!!!

Next to the schpiel-ing vendor was his business partner and two cardboard boxes full of adorable. Naturally, I emitted a high-pitched squeal of delight and proceeded to pick up every single baby pooch, likely picking up fleas and ringworm, too, because seriously -- street vendor puppies? Maybe not trustworthy. Let's just say I washed my hands pretty thoroughly afterwards (though I must admit, it wasn't until, like, puppy no. 19 that the thought even crossed my mind, so entranced was I by the streaming golden rays of CUTE being emanated from each tiny little doggie). Prospective buyers would scoop the docile puppies up, look into their eyes, lift their eyelids, pull up their lips, look at their teeth and gums, lift their tails to look at the butts, and for some reason would kind of roll the puppies back and forth in the palms in their hands, like they were making play-doh snakes, except puppies. I don't know what the rolling was supposed to do, but the more robust of the pack would sort of squirm, shake their tushes, and wave their legs, while the runty ones would flop around like ragdolls and look generally bored with the whole ordeal. The vendors had two adult dogs on leashes, but they said they weren't the parents of this litter, just "examples" of their fine wares.

Sadly, I did not have Uncle Enrique's camera on me, and the cell-camera didn't faring too well. That overexposed blotch / psychedelic sunspot on the right is a Pekingese puppy, and the guy in the background is the non-schpiel-ing vendor.Anyway, I ultimately kept my RMBs in my wallet, because I'm pretty sure I'd be quarantined and permanently no-fly-listed if I attempted to bring Chinese street puppies back with me to the States.

addendum Jason and Maureen converse in cyber-space, part II:

M: omg today they were selling PUPPIES on the street!
J : aww
J : were they bootleg puppies?

It's that time of the week...

...for shameless self-promotion! I've totally fallen of the BroadAbroad wagon. Luckily, those who crave more-more-maur-Maureen (bonus points to anyone who can quote the Kylie song I'm invoking) can get their fix with these clix:

Coming Soon: Wontons from Outerspace
Foreign Blood Wanted!
Hot Enough For Ya?
Sperm donation (whoops looks like I never got around to making up a jazzier title)
Death by Sweaty Computer
Early Buzz (and trailer) for Ang Lee's Lust, Caution

I'm leaving Shanghai in 9 short days! I DON'T WANT TO GO HOME. I'm not done here, yet. I still have my post on Chinese manners/honesty/taboos coming up, and have barely begun construction on my token Beijing Olympics post -- a must-write for all blogoific visitors to China in the next, like, decade or two.

And wasn't I supposed to write a significant portion of my thesis before coming home? Um, whoops...

Going Underground...

After my less-than-satisfactory bout with a red taxi last week, I finally got my act together and started riding the Shanghai Metro. Why, you ask, did it take me over a month to start riding a mass transit system that serves 1.8 million people a day and is the most rapidly-growing urban rail system on the planet? The answer's right there. It's really frickin' big. And, uh, scary.

Like most pedestrians here, I frequent underground tunnels for street-crossing purposes and sometimes for entering buildings from the basement (mostly when it's raining). But I sort of hate doing it. the tunnels are pure anarchy-- a sweaty crush of hundreds of people walking at top speed, throwing the occasional elbow to the gut of confused slow-boat walkers like me who can't read the signs and don't quite know where we're going. The lines for ticket-acquisition are fast and aggressive, English is minimal, and most tunnels lack air conditioners which really not conducive to the swelling masses of sweating, grunting people racing through at all hours of the day (how this city avoids massive heat stroke epidemic, I will never know).

The station closest to my apartment is the Xujiahui station-- though "station" really doesn't suffice. Xujiahui has 14 street exits, connects to the basements of six major shopping centers and eight office towers, and spans several city blocks. It has three sit-down restaurants, a sushi bar, a bookstore, a manicurist, a Bank of China outlet, a teahouse, an art dealer, and dozens of retail stores. It's main concourse is half a mile long. The only longer concourse is in the People's Square station, which happens to be the one closest to where I work. i.e., My commute requires the two scariest stops in the system.

I first peeked beneath ground on my first day alone in Shanghai, right after my mom flew back to the Manila. Curious about the throngs of commuters pouring down staircases into a beige-tiled underworld, I toed closer and closer, squinting to look in and gauge the size/distance, until I found myself swept with the masses down a 3-flight staircase and into a humid, orange-lit tunnel. To my horror, I realized that the huge, bustling city above ground whose magnitude I had just barely begun to grasp-- was replicated in its entirety below ground, too! This city is so populous that not only is it shooting up into the sky with hundred-story towers growing like steel-and-glass weeds-- people are moving downwards, too-- shallow roots shooting out laterally such that every square inch of surface area of Shanghai has dual potential-- the two sides of a coin-- both above and below can be developed, urbanized, inhabited, used.

The Metro is only one small piece of the underground city, but its platforms at the heart of every sprawling tunnel network-- which makes it all the more confusing to locate and use, buried under so many layers of concourses and retail opportunities. Transit signs are all pretty clear, with big arrows and such, and it's amazing how many zillions of people file in and out of the tiny little platforms every minute! The trains are packed, quite literally, like sardines. As in, there is literally no way to fall over in the Shanghai metro because even if you lost your footing, your body would seriously be suspended mid-air, pinched between the strangers' bodies with which you have suddenly becoming intimately familiar, in a few minutes' time. I now know more about the exact shape and texture of the human body than I ever did before. Even at off-peak hours on Line 1, you are guaranteed full body contact with all people adjacent to you (translation: pickpocket heaven). People regularly get shoved out, knocked around my sliding doors, ejected, refused... Nary a week ago an even unluckier guy was killed by closing doors on a crowded car.

To under the phenomena, watch the follow video, where sliding doors smack the backsides of several commuters a few times, until a team of uniformed subway officials succeed in manually shoving the people into the car, snatching their white-gloved-hands quickly back from the doors' gnashing plexiglass teeth as the train glides away:

(note: the guy who died happened to have ingested a massive quantity of mind-altering drugs shortly before his death, which may have impaired his reaction time-- and hopefully impaired his sensitivity to pain)

Crowds, perils, and all, the world of the Shanghai underground is now mine, twice a day. Tickets are scanned at entrance and exit so that your payment reflects the distance you travel. My trip from Xujiahui to People's Square costs 3 RMB: 35-cents by American standards. By taxi, the trip is 20 RMB, or $2.50. Unless, of course, I take a red taxi. In which case the cost would be an arm, a leg, and my first-born child.

Shanghaiist Round-Up

For your reading pleasure.

Bad Boundaries: Illegal Maps Draw Fines
'Death Note' website shuts down; creepy Chinese youth seek new ways to be morbid
Fake fake buns maybe not fake after all?

That last one has drawn some serious netizen ire, including one San Francisco reader (yes, it's anonymous, but IP addresses aren't, suckaaaazzz) who calls for my immediate dismissal from Shanghaiist... and then goes on to make a bursting-ear-drum joke! A reference to my otitis media of yester-months? At first I thought I had a stalker, but my editor thinks it's just a rando hater, bcs every time we publish a cardboard baozi article, the cyber-rabble freaks out. Also, I'd like to think that nobody who has an actual relationship with me (stalking or otherwise) would misspell "inquiring" (see guest comment #4).

Red Taxi TERROR; or, why I now take the subway

I've become a negligent poster. Not the kind that hangs on the wall (though sometimes I do that, too) but the kind that is so ridiculously exhausted she can't keep up her blog. :-( , indeed.

But here's a good story:

Last week my Uncle Enrique was in town for business, and I was to meet him for dinner at a Pudong restaurant, which means going across the Huangpu river, which is the bane of every cabbie and commuter's life, especially at rush hour, because it's reeeeeeally slow getting across the bridges. And if you have to go deep into Pudong territory (as I did)? Perish the thought.

4 taxi-rejections (I tell them my destination, and they immediately point me to the door, shouting the one word they know in English-- NO!) and 45 minutes later (cab-competition is fierce at rush hour) I'm at my wits' ends. It's over 90F, humid, and I'm hungry, dehydrated, and my mascara is melting. I find the one cab willing to take me to said location but...

It's a red cab.

Unlike green, white, and blue cabs, which belong to organized taxi companies, red cabs are privately owned. Which means the drivers aren't regulated, pocket their profits directly, don't have to use meters, etc. Consequently, the conventional wisdom is "Never take a red cab. YOU WILL BE ROBBED BLIND."

But the driver was so friendly! And his car so well air-conditioned! Truth be told, I was running so late I barely even noticed the color of the cab until I was already in it, the cabbie bulldozing his way onto the highway on ramp, and he turns around and says to me, "100 RMB."

"What?!" I cry in horror. That's well over double the usual price!
"You want get out now?" he asks. We are by now on the highway. I'm pretty sure if I get out of the car I will die.

"Umm... 40 RMB?" I counter-offer. He stops the car. A cacophony of horns and screeching tires as angry drivers swerve around us.

"50 RMB!" I cry shakily-- and then-- burst into real crying. As in, all the stress and worry that had been building for days, but I'd brushed off and bottled in, suddenly poured out in the form of big fat tears rolling down my face and dripping off my chin. Alas, it did nothing to affect his cold, hard red-taxi-driving heart.

"100 RMB," he repeats, pointing at the door, which is mere centimeters from honking drivers flying by at full speed, shaking their fists at us with rage. From behind strangled sobs I nod, yes, yes, and wave for him to continue driving. He passes me a kleenex and we are back on our way.

Even at the time I knew I was overreacting. He cheated me out of the equivalent of, like, $7, and given the urgency of the ride, that's really not such a bad amount of money to give up for the convenience and, yes, air conditioning. Mr. Red Taxi explained to me that his car is very expensive, and he saved up for many years to afford it, so he has to charge extra. Honestly, I actually feel bad that he had to deal with a wet rumpled mess of stressed-out girl, like that. It was a purely emotional response to, um, being trapped in a car with a stranger threatening to dump me in the middle of a Chinese highway if I didn't give him exactly what he wanted!

Suffice to say, the next day, I finally got a subway pass and am learning how to negotiate the Shanghai underground... And holy shit, is that a tale in and of itself. Stay tuned.