The Customer Is Always Wrong

In the last language exchange I learnt quite a lot of new words, I only hope I manage to remember a few of them. Unfortunately, I have the impression I forget words as quickly as I remember them. Trying to extend my vocabulary feels like bailing out a leaking boat with a teacup, that is to say with effort I can get ahead of this problem but relax for a moment and I am in trouble. One word that I will remember, and hopefully not in the place of another, is the word for computer 电脑 the two parts of which are ‘electric’ and ‘brain’. So simple and so correct.

When I read and listen to Chinese I have the problem of not knowing the compound words like the two parter ‘electric brain’, so I don’t know where to cut the stream of characters or sounds coming at me into intelligible chunks. This is the same problem that trips up the translation software. It may be that in this problem there is something that can work for me. I’m not quite sure what it is but I feel like I have to explore my difficulty with the language and use this very directly rather than view it as an obstacle that is preventing me from making a more fluent performance. I will have to look for ways to translate words into actions and vice versa. I will probably start on a quite literal level and see different ways that this can be framed and then go from there. It should be intelligible as a system but it should also prove flexible enough so that it does not feel like a straightjacket after ten minutes. I hate one trick pony performances.

The ideas board is coming along and starting to register more of the things I am working with.

Finally, I saw a nice example of Chinglish yesterday CARVED IN STONE. It is so much better when the stakes are higher and you see this sort of stuff in stone rather than simply on a menu. Seeing how the different examples of Chinglish all have different flavours I think there is more to this than simply Google translate. There must be some Chinese software that performs a similar task but in another fashion. I will have to get hold of some Chinese translation websites and/or software.

Here is one that can filed under ‘Customer’.

Yesterday I had a language exchange and we were looking for a new place to hold it in. We went to a tea shop. Xiamen has a profusion of these, many of them representing the family businesses of growers from around Fujian province, famous for its teas. The tea shop we went into not only sold tea but also had a number of small rooms upstairs where you could drink tea. We went to one of these and it was quite pleasant and productive. I drank and learnt a little about about ‘Gong fu cha’ or ‘kung fu tea’ known for killing not opponents but for killing time. It is the staple tea of the older folk down by the ferry who spend their afternoons playing games, drinking tea and chatting. The tea drinking room was bijou but comfortable and mercifully quiet. Most places I’ve been to play music or are somehow or another hectic in a different way. This room was not, so I profited from the silence which allowed me to listen to how I should be speaking Mandarin. The sting in the tail came upon going downstairs and paying. We made the mistake of not checking the price in advance. The lady who ran the shop then gave an absurdly high price which I was in no position to challenge so £17 poorer for the pot of tea, I paid up and left. What can I say except avoid the little tea shop by Jin Shan Xi Zhan on the 96 bus line in Xiamen… and always get the price up front otherwise it is liable to multiply.

I spoke to another friend about it and she told me it was unfortunate but that this does still happen, particularly to foreigners who are perceived as cash cows to be milked by some. She added however that it can also happen to Chinese people too. Her colleagues were once played the same trick in a restaurant in their own home city.

I had some similar experiences to this the first time I was in China but have experienced it less often recently so I was somewhat taken by surprise this time round. By creating a category that I will call ‘Customer’ maybe I can develop ways to either avoid or document this sort of thing and thus bring it back into the language of my project. I now regret not taking a receipt or a picture of the transaction, for example. In any case, I now have two examples to place here in the customer category: the tea shop by Jin Shan Xi Zhan and Air France/KLM. May they both wither!

On the subject of Air France/KLM, who cheated me so royally and who to be perfectly honest I am much more angry with, I have had no reply from either of their customer care departments. Nearly a month has passed since I first contacted them so I may need to send a reminder. What have I got to lose, except a little time?

I’m back in Xiamen and found my laptop sitting there by the door in its bag, just where I left it when exiting in haste. Having neither the laptop nor my camera was in some ways good as I had less to filter my impressions of Hong Kong through, just a few notes scribbled into a small book, rather than through the habitual frame of technology. Seeing how the taking of photographs and videos is so much a part of the visitor experience it is good to take a distance from this and see it as a very contemporary habit.

I feel it is often the case that we remember things through the records we take, whether these be the images from cameras or the stories we repeat and expand upon after the event. While these are very powerful tools, they can, at least for me, skew my memories in particular directions if I am not careful. Space, smell and rhythm can become less important, relatively speaking. My memory of Hong Kong island has much to do with the physical effort of walking up and down steep inclines and the pleasant surprise of finding an extensive system of public escalators wafting pedestrians up one side of the hill. While this could, with effort, be made into a story, it does not lend itself to a good narrative and so could easily find itself omitted in a retelling of the experience, even though it was important at the time.

I am also quite aware that making a performance here in China and then presenting it elsewhere it will be difficult to not partake in this mythologising process of memory, however the memories are filtered and then represented in abstracted ways. Even with work that is in a state of continual creation and which has the best intentions to stress the moment of its performance, I expect it will still be somehow or another about a distant there and then.

In Hong Kong Museum of Art I saw an exhibition on the tourism industry in Canton in the mid-19th Century. Whilst the paintings and items were quite conventional in character the narrative they wove of colonial trade, expansion and exoticism taking place within the context of the two Opium wars, was downright odd. There was a selection of phrases in Chinese Pidgin English printed. These ranged from ‘Justee now what time?’ to ‘Long me catchee ten piecee coolie’. The expressions construct an identity for the visitor which I was familiar with from my Chinese lessons which are also designed for Western visitors to China. Fortunately my classes no longer include such things as how to order a ten man work team and instead cover such useful topics as how to say I really don’t need something when being pressed by vigorous salesmen.

I picked up Julia in Hong Kong airport and saw her have her first jet lagged impressions of visiting Asia. The entrance was a gentle one with Hong Kong being familiar in many ways as it is quite Western and has a distinctly British flavour. Shenzhen just across the border was another thing however. Luo Hu shopping centre is just plain crazy. Built over five or six levels it has hundreds of small stalls on each level, all selling more or less the same things. The sales staff zealously try their best to drag you inside their stalls at every opportunity but we were in need neither of fake Rolexes nor of mobile phones so I had the opportunity to practice my disinterested consumer Chinese vocabulary.

Later, we met a theatre director and anthropologist who live in Shenzhen and we learnt a lot about this city of 15 million people that has erupted from a small fishing port in the space of only 30 years. The night bus back was a horror, nothing more need be said about it. Back in Xiamen once again, I will start taking pictures, making stories and taking in the Spring Festival/Chinese New Year which gets started in earnest very soon now.

I managed to leave Xiamen without the bag of mine containing my laptop, camera, agenda and information on where to go upon arrival in the city. It has worked out OK however and I found the visa office and have got two more bursts of 30 days authorised.

The city is quite interesting to study for my purposes as it is a mix of Chinese and British cultures, the result of which has a quite unique flavour. There are some subtle and not so subtle forms of segregation but there are also some attractive blendings and cultural hybrids. I managed to buy a book on Chinglish and also read some observations of English teachers in Hong Kong on common errors Cantonese speakers make, ‘I have curry hair’ being my favorite. I have been thinking through the performance’s form and the bi-lingual approach remains attractive but it needs to be integrated into the ideas on identities and needs to relate to some physical actions for it to really work. Easier said than done, but the simple fact that the form of a Zhonglish/Chinglish performance remains interesting and has genuine depth is encouraging. I will probably experiment with it for a performance I can do mid-February in Xiamen for the opening of the new CEAC gallery.

I just met up with an old school friend of mine who I have not seen for many years. He is now living and working here and writing philosphpy books in verse. He gave me one so I have my reading cut out for me.

Travel back threatened to get very messy due to Spring Festival here in China, the world’s biggest annual migration, but I finally found someone selling coach tickets from Shenzhen to Xiamen for tomorrow night. Without a reservation and going into peak travel time it could have meant getting stuck in Shenzhen an extra night or even more. The TV news here is reporting little else but this mass migration right now. I think it is going to be quite crazy in the coach station.

The weather was better today so I managed to get my photo taken at last. As I was preparing it, writing in the sand in both English and Chinese I attracted quite some attention with a group of men crowding around to comment on my Chinese. It seemed passable enough that they could read what I had written. They seemed surprised when I then tore my clothes off and jumped into the sea in my swimming trunks but they seemed entertained enough by it. Irina, another artist in residence here, kindly took the photo for me.

Now I am off to Hong Kong on a night bus to renew my visa.