Grey weekend in the Goat City

The night

GZ

This weekend I went back to China, the second trip there in a month. A friend was transitting through Guangzhou for the night, so I hopped on the train for the two-hour trip to China’s Southern metropolis. Its a city of oddly orderly skyscrapers in Tianhe, a forest of angular glass towers like a Chinese Atlanta, smooth monotonous subway rides and the swagger and hustle of Xiaobei’s “Chocolate City.” It was my third time in the city but I felt that I had yet to get a handle on it. And as it turns out, I left feeling little the wiser.

I missed a few things that I had wanted to do this time:  I didn’t get to see the Guangzhou Circle (ie Guangzhou Plastics Exchange) despite a special trip to the cavernous and intimidating Southern Train Station, from where I had heard it was visible (but no such luck)

And I didn’t go to the PAPA gay party, which has sadly ceased operations.

But I did spend the night in my favourite little street in Xiaobei, eating delicious Central Asian flat bread and juicy lamb at a Uighur restaurant, with the transglobal nomads passing through the city, drawn by China’s bright lights and cheap textiles. I stayed down the road in a hotel for African import-exporters, next to a street of shops selling lighting fixtures to Angolans and “advertising machines” (I think they were laminators) to Nigerians.  I saw women carrying boxes on their heads and heard the muezzins call and waited by the hotel lobby clocks showing the time in Brazzaville, Bamako, Beijing. Walking at night I got offered ice, hookers, a dialysis machine. I spotted a hip hop club called Fifty Cent staffed by men in Sikh turbans, and bought melons for breakfast at a twenty four hour Arab grocery and pretty good coffee in an all-black coffee shop. I battled with the perpetually pissed off hotel staff, dealing with perpetually pushy traders.

I also discovered a whole new nearby area of shiny malls, Starbucks flat whites (not bad) and a gay bar serving complicated cocktails – slowly – to a terrace weirdly full of women.

One (chilly) night and two half-days in Guangzhou.

Amazing 3-D art

Qi Xinghua’s previous installation at Guangzhou’s Baiyun Wanda Plaza.

Xiazhou

Xiaozhou – to go or not to go

Whereas Xiaobei was an old favourite of mine, Xiaozhou was a new discovery. About fifty minutes into the suburbs, it consists of a web of streets and old houses around some canals, and was said to have been adopted as something of an artist colony. I had read about the urban village online and was intrigued by the huge fluctuations in how it was perceived – some people called it “off the beaten track” and made it sound utterly undiscovered while others decried it as “commercialised”. The wikitravel entry was so starkly dichotomous that I reproduce it here in full:

Xiaozhou Village (小洲村): The village is a short taxi ride from University City. Some travelers describe this district as full of historical buildings, fruit orchards and canals and relate that, in recent years, this has become artists’ haven. Others report that recent development has obliterated all traces of the village and that the district is a typical industrial suburb adjoining a huge field used as an outdoor latrine.

Charming village or industrial latrine? Hidden gem or tourist trap? Ruined or improved? There was only way to find out.

The village was easily accessible by bus (the 252 or the 45) from downtown and I got dropped me off – early on a rainy Sunday morning – at a very local street market, where a woman sold turtles from a tub and slit chickens’ throats to order. So far, so good. Just beyond this, lay the village itself . Old stone buildings sat slumbering by sludgy grey canals under dripping trees, interspersed with newer tiled apartment blocks. The shops were shut but through their windows I could see signs advertising free wifi and cutesy dessert menus – definitely aimed at the tourist trade – but the only people around at this moment looked staunchly local, a man cooking up tofu fa on his riverboat, an old woman, shopkeepers selling boiled eggs and oranges in bags. Colourful street art covered many of the village’s grey brick walls.

As I wandered around through narrow, maze-like streets – the village is quite big – I saw signposts in English, clean public toilets and some evidence of the recent construction – footpaths and gateways constructed newly but in old style. It was, I thought, quite well-done.

The main attraction, the “oyster houses” which were traditionally coated in oyster shells for insulation, were only mildly diverting, but the atmosphere as a whole was a pleasant one and there was a surprising amount to see – several old clan houses, a vibrantly-coloured old barber shop, lots of little stores along winding, narrow lanes.

My take on Xiaozhou then was a sympathetic one – I enjoyed my hour or so of poking around there. Its no undiscovered gem, but at least when I was there, it wasn’t overly touristed either. And the guy who called it an industrial suburb next to a latrine was definitely in the wrong place.

Recommended.

The wall

A Summer of … Love?

As the heat descends on East Asia for a long, hot summer, tempers are already boiling in Korea. The anger is over a decision to ban the city’s gay pride festival. Planned for June, the march had been threatened with pickets from rightwing Christian groups. The police solution? In the interests of “equity” and maintaining public order, they have banned both the march and the counter-demonstration. Of course though, since the whole aim of the counter-demonstration was to stop the march, in effect the police have sided with the anti-gay protesters.

Hearteningly, Korean gay activists have not taken the defeat and are petitioning back with the support of Japanese gay groups under the faith-in-humanity-restoring banner of Tokyo X Seoul Solidarity Under the Rainbow.

Keep fighting the good fight!

Whatever happens with the street parade, the city’s gay clubs will stage I:M, a pride dance party, featuring the gleaming torsos of the transcontinental pecorati, regardless.

Elsewhere around the region, Bangkok is hosting its (first?) gay film festival, sponsored by Attitude magazine, the bears hit the beach in Taiwan for the 6X party and Guangzhou’s Papa Party will celebrating its second anniversary.

Meanwhile in Guangzou…

The Papa party featuring Benson Chen and Howard Chang as gogo-stars.

Meanwhile in Guangzhou …

No more weird buildings: China

For the last ten years China has acted as the world’s architectural laboratory. As the skylines of Beijing and Shanghai boomed, the world’s top architects clambered for lavishly-funded prestige projects. Second-tier cities then joined the race to outdo each other in an attempt to appear equally wealthy and sophisticated. Every city had to have its own easily-brandable instant icon. In this age of China’s heady ascent, anything goes. The results have been wild, a stylistic free-for-all: the Birds Next stadium for the 2008 Olympics! The pulsating water cube! The CCTV building! The Beijing Opera house! Shanghai’s Mori Tower! The Zaha Hadid-designed Guangzhou Opera House! The Guangzhou Plastic Exchange (pictured above), the world’s largest building (in Chengdu) and the Sheraton hotel below in Huzhou.

 

But now Premier Xi, in a break from overseeing the stifling of democratic protests in Hong Kong, has signalled a tightening of the reins with a single sentence: “No more weird buildings.”

Tianzi hotel, Hebei

With that utterance, a chill has descended on plans for, for example,  the world’s tallest building, a kilometre-tall hot pink pyramid in Wuhan. It seems the age of the gigantic, weird building is over. I’m not sure how to feel about this. Undoubtedly many of these projects were wasteful white elephants better suited to generating construction kickbacks than anything more tangibly useful. Some of them were ugly, and yes they were bizarre. But at least they were trying! I think somehow I will miss their daring and imagination.

Teapot building, Wuxi

Domestic weekend in China

I went to Guangzhou this weekend to see my friends Antje, Joerg (and Arik) at their home on a pretty, village-like university campus in a suburb of the city. It was a weird feeling to be on a train, gliding to (effectively) another country after work on a Friday night. I had been before (full report here) and I mainly wanted to spend time with friends so it was a restful weekend of light wandering around the city, good food, sleeping in (a lot), fireflies flickering on the university campus at night and stocking up on knock-off Game of Thrones and Spartacus DVDs.

Thanks Joerg and Antje!

GZ EATZ

 

The main thing to do in Guangzhou, of course, is to eat. As I am not a huge fan of Cantonese cooking (too many same-y textures and not enough spice) we visited instead a palatial Chinese vegetarian restaurant, complete with fake lotuses and lotus-shaped lamps, those artfully displayed pieces of driftwood you find in China and a clientele of wealthy locals with silent children prodding at iPads and rich housewives in juicy coutoure and tennis T-shirts (the uniform of the Guangzhou wealthy).

We also tried a Sichuan restaurant with a cavernous interior decked out in vaguely Gotham City style, tasty food and woeful service (“papaya juice – its supposed to be served warm”).

  

Both restaurants were located on the lower floors of brand new office towers. It seems that much of the city’s entertainment and nightlife is stashed away in these generic looking buildings on its big, broad streets.

Guangzhou Sculpture Park

In addition to its enjoyable arts village, Guangzhou is also home to an impressive and beautifully maintained sculpture park, with ponds and shady pathways, lawns and all kinds of sculptures.

  

The most intriguing sculpture perhaps is the bizarre monument to the victims of SARS,  where great, flu-masked figures stare out over the lawns in bas relief:

But there are also Albert Einsteins, Aztec-like carvings, surrealistic designs..

 

…and supposedly somewhere, a statue of Michael Jackson. Although we failed to find that, I thought this other ‘homage’ to Western pop culture was unsettling. I originally mistook it for a parody:

What!?

Drugs and whoring are NOT allowed?

Guangzhou: Black, (brown) and yellow

STOP PRESS: A day after this post was written a mass protest was held by African immigants over an alleged case of police brutality in Guangzhou. It seems trouble might be brewing. More here.

Xiaobeilu is probably my favourite Guanghzou neighbourhood. It is a cosmopolitan mix of sex shops and STD clinics, leafy expat streets with Starbucks and a German bakery, glitzy Arabic restaurants and cheap hotels and  malls catering to the city’s community of African traders. It is here that Guangzhou – and China – meets the world.

At the centre of the neighbourhood, next to a garishly coloured Smurf-like reproduction of a castle ( the Childrens’ Palace, hence its crayon-like colour scheme), is a pedestrian overpass above a roaring freeway. Here street photographers ply their trade with visitors from the far provinces, or Africa or Indonesia, taking their portraits for 2 dollars a pop.

When Joerg and I walked past a young Somali-looking gent in a bushy, fundamentalist beard, red hipster T-shirt and blazing orange silk pantaloons was striking a pose for his picture. I found a video of the scene here but unfortunately Vimeo won’t let me embed.

After exploring the winding African and Uighur sidestreets (below) Joerg and I crossed over this bridge to buy Turkish chocolate bars at the middle eastern supermarket and have lunch at an Iraqi restaurant (Mr T’s African Restaurant was closed). But the Iraqi place had Babylonian-themed wallpaper, a faux-chandelier, Al-Jazeera on the TV and China’s blinging-est toilet, as well as this interesting menu item:

Echoes of the silk road – in nylon

 

Just around the corner from where the video above was shot is this little street I discovered on my last trip to Guangzhou; it begins with discount African fabric malls sitting cheek by jowl and then narrows into a fruit market in an alleyway under an old banyan tree where Uighurs and other Chinese Muslims mix with the Africans and Cantonese. This Central Asian feel, and the different peoples mixing together for commerce, gives the area an echo of the old Silk Road.

  

Sugarfree tea.

Refreshing! On the left.

Eat the f*ckers!

It is famously said of the Cantonese that they will eat “anything with four legs not a chair, anything that flies and is not an aeroplane and whatever swims except a submarine”.

Guangzhou is famous as a centre for the consumption of exotic and rare animals such as pangolins, civet cats (hello SARS) and – as I saw myself – crocodiles.

But it seems that is not all. The Australian press is this week reporting that an Aussie tourist stumbled into a restaurant in Guangzhou’s Panyu district only to find a live, caged koala – and its meat on the menu. The restaurant offers “braised koala” – cue the outrage South of the equator (although koalas are not endangered). However, there is some doubt the animal in question is even genuine. The picture accompanying the claim is rather unclear with some suggesting the creature is some kind of Asian sunbear. Besides which, the dish is being offered at  what website “The Shanghaiist” describes as “the meager price of 139RMB. Surely underselling one of the bestselling trinket animals of all-time, no?”

Kaiping and Chikan redux