People's Republic of Pajamas

In present day China, whether or not to become a Party member can be a trying decision.  Do you join the Communist Party? Or the Pajama Party?

When I first encountered "street pajamas" in Shanghai, I assumed they were a stubborn holdover from the dreary Mao-era uniforms that unseated fashion here for 30 years. But a little research indicates otherwise.

Seems this peculiar practice of stepping out in sleepwear started after the "opening up" around 1980, when Western style pjs began to be sold in China without proper instructions for use. To the isolated Chinese eye, these novel suits of silk and flannel seemed far too fine to be relegated to one's bedroom. PJs were misinterpreted as  a symbol of wealth and sophistication, something to be shown off with a whiff of flair. 

At the same time, most of China's urban dwellers lived crammed into tiny communal style houses with public bathrooms and kitchens. It didn't make sense to change out of one's perfectly nice pajamas to walk to the toilet or across the road to the fruit market. Eventually, people began to venture further afield in their sleepwear: to the shopping mall or subway. Accessories like high heels and man bags were added. Voila! The Pajama Nation. 

Before the 2010 World Expo, Shanghai officials got squeamish about what effect pajama people might have on their city's burgeoning cosmopolitan image. A campaign was launched to snuff out what they now regarded as the fashion faux pas. Signs were posted stating, "Pajamas Don't Go Out the Door!" And volunteer Pajama police patrolled neighborhoods telling offenders to go home and change. 

                                                                                                                                                               Fortunately,  some residents cling defiantly to their loungewear rights, like this darling couple in front of the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on a Sunday stroll wearing matching his and her outfits. 

Lo and behold,  whimsically minded Western fashion designers are taking notice.  In London, Rachel Roy hit the red carpet in a pair of pajamas she bought in the Hamptons - channeling the Celine 2012 Resort collection (left). 

And Sofia Coppola just wore these Louis Vuitton stunners in Vogue! 

How clever! And comfy too!

iHongKong

Hong Kong's new pride and joy.

Just a few hours before the untimely death of Steve Jobs half a world away, Asia’s obsession with all things Apple was on parade during last week’s “Autumn Festival” in Hong Kong. After braving the holiday mob at the brand new Apple store in the International Financial Center (a real Apple store, not a fake!), we later happened upon a futuristic sight at the luxe Philippe Starck designed Felix restaurant in Kowloon’s historic Penninsula Hotel. 

We’d popped up to the bar for a bird’s eye view of Victoria Harbor’s Symphony of Lights.... 

View of Victoria Harbor from bar at Felix

but the real intrigue was downstairs on the main dining floor where a table of eight western businessmen ordered their dinner on individual interactive iPADS. Apparently the guests could digitally sample each menu item in photographic detail along with tasting notes on both food and extensive wine list. An amuse buoche to do James Bond proud – and an elegant tribute to Jobs' legacy. 

Felix dining room, where the menus are iPads.

Be Water My Friend

Hong Kong street meme


Spotted this wall art near Kowloon's cool Kubrick Cafe and Bookstore. I love the chiseled Chinese features and serious clothes juxtaposed with the fluid hipster-Tao mantra. Banker meets Bruce Lee meets Grasshopper.

Mandarin Meter Maids

"But officer....I just stopped for some Chunghuas!"

Parking tickets may be a global scourge. But in Shanghai they're just another way the government sticks it to the growing load of car owners. In an attempt to control escalating pollution and traffic nightmares caused by China's surging love affair with the automobile, the city has imposed strict limits on the number of licenses it will issue. To register a vehicle in the first place, one must bid for a basic plate in a monthly auction. The city offers only several thousand plates each time and with some 25,000 residents bidding, prices have skyrocketed. Winners pay up to 50,000 yuan ($7700) for their tags. That's the cost of a compact sedan. How to say, "That's crazy talk" in Chinese?

Photos by Federico Darwish.

Creepy, crawly, crickety things

Forget PETCO!
Shanghai's Xizang Lu Market is a Pet Store Like No Other

Perusing the cricket department

I first heard about the Shanghai pet market from Bumble Bee, an Uno-playing third grade boy who is the gentle owner of a spider he named Butter. Butter was a birthday present from Bumble Bee’s father, who paid 100RMB ($15) for him, plus another 100RMB for accessories and feeding bugs. In Miss Jo mode, I express excessively peppy enthusiasm about this information, in part to compensate for pathetic Mandarin.  Bumble Bee responds by bringing Butter to school so I can meet him -– transported on the back of his mom’s bicycle!

Bumble Bee shows some Butter love
Bumble Bee can’t tell me Butter’s species in English, but the furry black arachno-thing is the size of a ping-pong ball and looks suspiciously like a tarantula. He travels in a clear plastic carrying case similar to the kind art students use for hauling paints. He has a bed of dried grass, a few stones and a piece of Styrofoam to hide under. “It’s his home,” Bumble Bee says affectionately. I muster admiration as the boy describes his pet’s diet of smaller insects and water.

"It's his home!"
Butter’s provenance, I'm told, is the Xizang Lu Flower and Bird Market, a ramshackle open-air bazaar where children of Shanghai have been buying their pets for decades. Located in the Old City, south of the ritzy Bund, this warren of sensory chaos is a throwback to simpler times, before the Pudong skyscrapers towered in the distance, before the BMWs blew past the groaning rickshaws.

Antique cages for your brand new tweeter.

Visitors to the Pet Market meet a crazy cacophony of birds and chirping crickets, a spectrum of smells and a heavy dose of dust. Next to enervated bunnies and a few frail dogs and cats, you'll find sparrows and parakeets in rickety unkempt cages, ferrets, mice, dark rooms of aquarium fish and some medium sized rays of questionable legality.  Scores of turtles in glass bowls appear healthier than their mammal counterparts.

Turtles, turtles everywhere.

Turns out a favorite student, Vivian, found her green turtle, Maria, here. Her classmate, Steven, got his Tom here as well. Their friend Cinderella’s pet turtle, Lisa, came from a river in the wild. Poor Lisa met her maker just last Friday. She simply stopped eating and died.

Ni hao!

Over in the bird section, an exotic parrot is blase. Why not? He's got a fabulous fake Burberry satchel. 

Dodgy denizens of the animal underworld
The market's real raison d'etre, it seems, is the cricket business –– which may account for some of the unsavory dudes hanging about.

Tickle me (Elmo) cricket
Before actually laying eyes on the crickets, you hear the racket. Hundreds of them singing (or screeching) by rubbing their wings together reach the decibel level of a jackhammer. During my first week in China I encountered a cab driver who kept two kinds of crickets on his dashboard. I thought the noise was the receipt machine stuck on print. The cricket men at the market spend hours tickling their wares with rabbit whiskers or synthetic ticklers to improve their voices. Seems the better singers are also the better fighters.

Bamboo cricket cages

The bamboo cages strung up in clusters on poles have tiny dishes of water and food for the insects. Traditionally, their Chinese minders provided the crickets little clay beds to sleep on. 

Lettuce eat! Dinner time for crickets.

Some dealers house their crickets in neat, multiple rows of small white boxes. These seem to be the fighters, as they are carefully tended and painstakingly fed individual bits of lettuce for dinner. Prices range from 30RMB to 100RMB here at the market. But offsite, where the dealers secretly keep their prize fighters, a champion can fetch many times that amount. Seems high-stakes cricket matches are swanky (and big-time illegal) events, often held in posh hotels, with wealthy Chinese executives betting on pots that can reach 2 million RMB. Talk about a racket!

Picking a winner

Thanks to Federico Darwish, photographer extraordinaire.

All that Glitters

Ultra-girly Asian girls love their sparkly hair bobs, displaying maximum pop-value in thick, dark hair.   Western women would likely reserve such glitz for evening wear. In China, it's strictly carpe diem. When the smog lends its gray drabness overhead, who can't use a little twinkle? Shine on sisters! 

Magical

MAGICAL
 (She hates this picture)

At lunchtime during "English Corner" older students visit me on benches under a vine covered pergola for an ad hoc half hour of conversational English. The kids are surprisingly clever, especially a whip smart fifth grader named Magical, a tall tomboy with an impish smile and wise eyes. 

A word about Chinese kids' English names. Some are assigned by foreign teachers but most are chosen by the students themselves. There's Cinderella, Barbie, Tiger, Yoyo, Shiney, Happy and Ice Cream. There are a number of Cherries, Apples and Sunnies. There's a heavy set trouble maker named Tank. Every class has a Bingo. One tiny first grade girl with pink glasses calls herself Bob. Then there are Emaily and, my favorite, Oven.

On the first day of English Corner, I ask about a typical Saturday or Sunday. Most say they study, practice musical instruments, play badminton with a parent or grandparent. One or two play computer games. But then I meet Magical, and she very securely announces that on Sundays she works on her book. "I'm writing a book about (what else?) magic," she says. I ask if she's read Harry Potter. She says, yes, she's read all the Harry Potter books but her book is different. I tell her I'm writing a book too and her eyes light up. After the group disbands, I am walking back to my office, Magical appears at my side and gives me a small pink notebook covered in fabric and bound with twine tied in a small bow. "This is for you," she says. Still reeling in bewilderment at China and faking the whole teacher thing, I'm uncertain how to respond. "Are you sure?" I ask.  "Yes, I bought it with my own money," she says. "I like to buy presents for my friends."

Each week, I continue to be amazed by Magical's sophistication. 

She's precociously chatty and describes things being delicious (her mother's blueberry tea) and discusses IMAX theaters in Shanghai.  She bought a "money box" which she describes in detail. I explain it is a bank and she finds that fascinating. "Like the Bank of China!" she says with a triumph of understanding. She plays Cat's Cradle.

On the day after the class picnic Magical describes in great detail a "science" movie she's seen (I'm pretty sure she means science fiction) about grass and trees that eat people. It sounds scary, I say. "No it was very interesting," she corrects.
After Qingming holiday, I nearly fall over. She's gone to New Star Korean Bath House for the saunas. Ironically in this huge metropolis of Shanghai, it's the one spa I've been to - just a week earlier. We proceed to compare notes on the pools, treatments and the restaurant, which I had thought of trying for bibimbap but didn't have time. "It's not very delicious," she warns.

There are a ton of kids here who inspire and amuse.
Then there's Magical.

Gardens, Temples and Gussied Up Girls

Tuesday was Qingming Festival, which is also called Tomb Sweeping Day in China. It's a national holiday to honor the dead when relatives visit the graves of their ancestors with food, flowers and, traditionally, brooms. The April 5 holiday fell on Tuesday, so to justify a three-day weekend, everyone worked on Saturday and then took Monday and Tuesday off.

With three other teachers, Kym, Evan and Jade, I headed for Suzhou, a charming enclave of only 2 million (!)  southwest of Shanghai. The bullet train was sleek and – most importantly – warm,  whisking us there at speeds of 350 km/hour. The ride went too quickly; I barely got to crack my Peter Hessler book. At the station we were met by an epic taxi line worthy of a sci fi movie. Think Disney World on steroids. Or an ant hill. Somehow through a crazy bout of charades with a local policeman we sorted out a bus to take us to our hotel, the Mingtown Hostel on a canal in the historic Pingjian district. Very sweet. Until we were told they had canceled our reservation and given our beds away. As we were about to despair, some kindly Koreans asked if we wanted their rooms, because they needed to switch hotels. Huh? Another blur of confusion and then we made an exchange that kept us off the streets. Ah, China.

Mingtown Youth Hostel

Suzhou Canal

Suzhou is dubbed the Venice of Asia thanks to its pretty canals and stone bridges. About 200 remain of the 6000 that greeted Marco Polo in the 13th century. Spring was in the air, cherry trees and other blossoms popping in the gorgeous Humble Administrator's Garden, one of four top tier classical gardens in the country. Loved the very literal names of spaces within the garden:  the Looking at the Moon Pavilion, the Hall of Distant Fragrances, the With Whom Will I Sit? Pavilion, etc. Unfortunately the crowds soon had us yearning for the Get Me Out of Here Now exit.

Shuang Ta

The rare double pagodas of Shuang Ta (Song Dynasty) were especially exotic and evoked India, where they are more commonly seen.

And the Beisi Ta offered some superb Buddhas.

Beisi Ta 

FORGET THE ANCESTORS!  Many of Suzhou's young beauties seemed to have skipped the tomb sweeping and were out in force, all done up for model-like portraiture with their grooms, fiances and, in one case, Winnie the Pooh. The Chinese love these fantasy photo shoots, spending days at a time on the hair, makeup and elaborate wardrobes. Costs run from $450 to $15,000.

The production process is lavish, with multiple

 clothing changes and photographers, assistants, hair and make-up artists hovering.

With giant mirrors shining in their faces to reflect light

 and crowds of tourists looking on, note the relaxed and natural poses of the bridal couples.

Photography studios pass out leaflets to young women asking, "Do you want to look like the cover of Vogue?" The images from these sessions are blown up into posters, emblazoned on mugs and made into screen savers.

No man? No problem. Winnie will do.