I arrived in Shenzhen to study computer animation. I’d just left a job I liked very much at a major animation studio in LA after several seasons working as an animation coordinator. I loved working with the artists, but I didn’t see myself moving up the management ladder. So, off to China. Of course.
I’d been studying Mandarin for a while at that point, Pimsleur and tutors who were friends and friends of friends. I’d also been reading a lot of Lawrence Lessig, a then Stanford Law professor who was writing books about the Internet and our broken intellectual property system and the opportunity and threats posed by new technology if the traditional media monopolies were allowed to extend their models of control into the fabric of this new medium. This was not long after the height of the filesharing wars, the RIAA and MPAA were suing kids for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and Steve Jobs had just come out with the iPod.
So off to China I went with an entire rolling suitcase entirely filled with books. It turns out this is not a great idea, particularly when you have to take multiple flights, stairs, subway, boat, and cab to your final destination. Anyway, I finally got to the school and it wasn’t long before I realized that studying a highly technical thing in a language I didn’t really know wasn’t gonna work out. But I’d come all that way, with all those books, so I got an apartment ($225/m for a two-bedroom, furnished) and set about answering the question: what is Real?
Spoiler alert, I didn’t figure it out. You try reading Jean Baudrillard (you know, the guy from The Matrix) and see where it gets you. But I was invested. And it was the right place at the right time to be thinking about this question. A side note, perhaps relevant: I’d gotten the apartment via an agent, which was the way there, with the help of a Chinese friend I’d made early on. The agent took us around to units in the area. The first one she showed me, and I don’t exaggerate at all, was bare concrete, grafittied, strewn with garbage, and still apparently sheltering its stringy, teenage former tenants. It looked like the abandoned sewer pipe skater punk hideaway of a past I didn’t have. It was a shock, to say the least. The agent cursed, animatedly and at length the teenage runaways, apologized profusely to me, and quickly took me away to show me better places. I’m now convinced that it was the ultimate lowering of standards, a balloon pop, to soften me up for the places that followed. Even now it seems cartoonish, but that’s how it happened.
So I’ve got this apartment now, I’m trying to read Baudrillard and finding JG Ballard easier and more rewarding. I live in a neighborhood with, as far as I ever saw, no foreigners. In fact I live in an apartment block (an entire, large city block of four-story, identical apartments) all otherwise filled with mid-level government employees — teachers, cops, doctors and the like. And me. The nearest corner is a major intersection with no traffic lights, though there is a crosswalk, and a crosswalk indicator, but after one narrow miss I realized that there was no point to it. The best you could do when crossing on foot, just like the drivers who barrel into the intersection, is to screw up your courage, look the drivers straight in the eyes, and go pell-mell for the other side. It should be noted that China has an insanely high annual death toll on the roads. I mentioned this later to Y, adding, but there are a lot of Chinese. To which she, thinking that I was saying, but, no big deal, there are plenty more where you come from, got quite upset. Translation is hard, particularly when freighted with historical baggage.
On that same corner, and just about every corner, at least in my neighborhood, were people selling pirated DVDs. And aside form the hilaribad camming that some were — someone holding a video camera in a theater somewhere in Asia, as evidenced by the subtitles, silhouettes in the way, and audience laughter surprising you at times that made no sense — they were fascinating for their selection. It would seem, on every corner the same, pirated DVD merchants would have the latest art-house films. Not all of them, in fact pretty arbitrary, but an interesting selection. More than most theater chains in most cities in the US. What in the world possessed this network of Chinese pirates to pick these movies? I had no idea. I wanted to infiltrate that network and document it. But I figured that a) my appearance might give me away from the get-go, and b) it probably would end, having made it all the way to the top, with my murder by Triads.
There were also shoe stores on my block. Shoe stores that sold knock-offs. Knock-offs which, as my friend told me, came from the same factory that was making the legit shoes for Nike or whoever. One batch going to Nike, one batch going to the street.
So were they fake?
The best I could figure that Baudrillard had to offer was that Nothing is now Real. But the secret is that it never was. The map of the territory, recreated at full scale, perfectly, overlaying the territory itself, is all there ever was. And it’s fraying.
Thanks, B.
A buddy back home consented to buy me one of the new iPods and sent it to me. It didn’t arrive. Many things didn’t arrive. Many things just seemed not to work. And much of this was down to my not understanding anything of a system that is really quite different than the one I’d grown up with. But thanks to the ridiculous generosity of many Chinese, we usually got there in the end. This time it transpired that my (notionally my) iPod was being held at customs where a duty, equal to the item’s value, needed to be paid. I really hadn’t budgeted for that. So somehow I wound up at Shenzhen’s central customs office, unaccompanied, to plead my case. Mind you Shenzhen was already one the biggest export ports in China (interestingly, with the bulk of those ships going to Los Angeles. I daydreamed about hitching a ride home on a container ship). iPods were made in Shenzhen, as was much of Walmart’s inventory, so these customs people probably had bigger fish to fry. Nevertheless, after much nervous waiting, alone but for a receptionist, in a palatial if bare waiting room on one of those solid wood couches that Chinese find elegant yet are terribly uncomfortable, I was admitted to see the head of Shenzhen (and I believe all of Guangdong) customs. His office was similarly huge and similarly furnished. He smiled and greeted me warmly and we chain-smoked and talked in English. This went on for a while. At some point the conversation wound down and he informed me that the import duty had been waved and the iPod would be forwarded on to me. And that was that.
Except that I must have given him my cell phone number because he would call from time to time, randomly, to chat in English. Eventually I came to suspect he wanted to work on his English skills. Many realizations came to me like this in China. Lots and lots of not understanding the meaning of things, the mechanisms causing actions. Only much later for gears to turn in my own mental machinery and some insight to drop.
The iPod would prove a boon and perhaps a curse. I rarely went anywhere after that without The Velvet Underground, or Radiohead, or Cat Power, or Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy in my ears. And it was a great comfort to have a bit of my own world with me as I attempted to navigate, often failingly, this strange and fascinating world (I couldn’t read signs, though my innate sense of direction (as well as charades ability) was never better). But my iPod was also a pacifier, a security blanket which removed me from some of the immediacy of my experiences, and perhaps offered me an unreality to enjoy instead.
I’d read a story by JG Ballard while I was there (it wasn’t among my books, which I probably didn’t crack a single one of, so I pirated it), in which a couple lives in a beautiful walled garden where time-crystals grow. They’ve plucked nearly all of them, and are down to the smallest ones now. And the hordes on the distant horizon are getting less distant, and these smaller and smaller crystals are pushing the masses back less and less far. Until finally they’re overrun.
After a long time in Southern China, with a fair amount of inland travel under my belt, some new good friends, and the sense that I had learned nothing about that for which I’d come, time, and something of the The Real World, was crashing in on me. I returned home.