Two haircuts and no real jobs

JANUARY 18, 2008: In Shanghai, apparently for the next year or so. News is that at some point very soon i'm going to have to start being a journalist. On that note, i'll indulge in a mournful lament: The comic life and tragic end of old trusty $3 camera. Photos

A few years ago in Melbourne, i didn't have a camera, had never owned one and wanted to take some pictures. Shocked by the price (and concept) of disposable cameras, i didn't buy one. But soon after i was in an Op Shop, where i first laid eyes on that special unit, that which was to become 'OT'. About 50 grams of sturdy black plastic, no flash, no batteries, one blue button - to "take picture" - and no hint of any brand name - though it did have a high-tech sounding model number - 'T-808' - slowly fading away on the front. And a high-tech slide-across lens cover.

The camera plus 3 rolls of film - effectively three disposable cameras plus a camera to keep - totalled $13. This expendable Victorian op-shop unit proceeded to follow me to the edges of my world - to London, Dili, Busselton - accurately depicting the fuzziness with which i saw many of these scenes. And, pricelessly, my faithful companion required no attention or protection at all to keep within my possession. I could leave him unattended and his appearance of worthlessness would keep the wolves at bay.

Old Trusty came with me to China. But signs of a breakdown were showing. Winding the film back at the end of each roll now required inserting a knife directly into the film. Which in turn led to a prising open of 'OT's plastic shell and the leakage of sunlight. But, like a senile old man whose stories keep getting better as he gets closer and closer to madness, OT's leaks made for more and more interesting pictures. OT ended up on a bicycle expedition, where his owner encouraged his madness by hanging him off the bicycle handlebars in the direct sunlight. This also allowed him to snap people and things without interrupting the flow of the journey, or interfering with the scene. And you should've seen us - him and me - against the girls in the Chinese photo processing shops. EVERY SINGLE TIME they'd hand back the film, having done none of what we wanted, saying, "These pictures - all no good!" To which i'd reply that, yes, we knew, and no, we didn't give a fuck what they thought of our photos, and yes, go back right now and do it...every single damn photo...yes, 38 for the price of 36, yes, even the black ones at the end...And they'd look back at us like we'd just told them to go remove the gizzards from the flat cat on the road outside because we were hungry. In short, Old Trusty was at the peak of his game.

Taking this into consideration, you'd expect i'd become a little more protective of OT once we moved to the peasant truck stage. But OT's life was always happy-go-lucky. Messing around with different positions, safety ropes - paying attention to safety generally - was against the spirit of OT's existence. So he sat beside me on the front of the truck, ready to spring into action.

Then one day he wasn't there. By the time i realised, it'd been 20 minutes at least since he fell. I turned the truck around but already i could feel the tears welling up in my eyes. For in China there are people who literally subsist on what falls from passing vehicles. So, of course, after close to an hour, the search was called off and an era was over.

I tried to console myself with the thought that some really poor person had probably picked it up - poor enough to pick it up off the road - and they'd now have it as their first camera. This was indeed comforting, but the reality soon descended that, even if it did happen that way, as soon as they got the first pictures back from it - if not sooner due to all its stickytape holding it together and the requirement for a knife to wind back the film - they'd decide it was worthless and Old Trusty would be condemned to rest among rotting chicken hearts, feathers, light bulbs, engine grease, dog bones and torn plastic bags on a lonely open garbage pile on the banks of the Yellow River.





Old Trusty $3 China photos. RIP.

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So, as the title would suggest, after two weeks in mainland China's richest city, we're poverty stricken. Once again, maybe i've been in the countryside too long but i don't think it's worth it - for the most part Shanghai's rather boring, especially to to look at.

What's struck me most about Shanghai is its sheer completeness; systematic, orderly and insanely busy. The subway system is practically flawless; the trains come every 3 minutes for 18 hours a day. That's nearly 800 trains per day, just on our line. Not only that, it's close to 100% utilised, i.e. you can almost never get a seat. Not exactly comfortable, but a rare combination of extremely convenient yet not wasteful. Peak hour is insane...the people cram onto these trains literally moshpit style. The subway is almost new (built in the 1990s) and most stations have these as glass barriers to prevent crowd surges into the path of the oncoming trains. People here are so busy that there's a marriage market every weekend in the city square - hundreds of middle-aged to elderly people (the parents) gather to seek a match for their children. This can take many months. The people i spoke to have been going for almost a year now and haven't found the right match. That's obviously because they're very specific in what they want; one lady's requirements were good job, good education, high income and not good looking because good looking is "too hard to control".


The magnitude of this city's hard to grasp. It's so big that it takes almost half an hour to walk two blocks as marked on my metre-long city map. The population is 10-12 million. That doesn't include migrant workers - the peasants who come here to work factory jobs to send money back home - of which there are millions, 5 million by some estimates. Shanghai railway station is where a great many of them enter and leave, and it's getting close to Chinese New Year. Even that kind of chaotic process is done in an artificially orderly fashion, for China.



At street level there are legions of traffic inspectors preventing jaywalking and batallions of street sweepers - human ones in concert with mechanical ones. There's also an extremely orderly network of high-speed "Elevated Roads" - basically freeways on stilts, that allow people to drive around the city at 100km/h with no traffic lights. Now, the spaces below a stilted highway or metro railway, you might forgiven for expecting perhaps a bit of decay, bit of graffiti, a few patches of wasteland - at least some disorder of some kind, right? But in Shanghai even that space is utilised in a neat and orderly fashion, mostly with low-speed normal roads following the same course as the "elevated" ones above, and of course, immaculately kept gardens in the median strips. There are, i admit, occasional examples of the chaos and contradictions you'd expect in China's biggest city.




And in the former "foreign concessions" there are a few old European buildings in pretty good condition. But in most areas i've seen, whatever was here before, if anything, has been pulled down and rebuilt since the 90s, so most of the city as it stands today dates back only that far. You may recall that in Songyuan can be observed many fine examples of 90s decay. But outside appearances actually count here and the apartment blocks withstand the winds of time a bit better.

Thankfully in many ways, the Shanghai prices and our dire financial situation forced us out to the fringes. Here it's a tad more interesting. We live in probably one of Shanghai's best attempts at a canal-side slum area. The housing's low-rise, mainly 2-storey, and hemmed in among several woodwork and cardboard factories - although against the cracked, whitewashed walls - almost all of them - is a network of immaculately manicured hedges. The back wall overlooks the canal.



We live in a ground floor "apartment" in a complex full of (fellow) migrant workers from the provinces. The complex is aimed at them - the name means either "Residential Area" or "Little Migrant Housing Area", depending on how you interpret the Chinese. My money's on the latter because i've yet to meet a Shanghai person in the vicinity. To get to our place you have to take a left off a main street, walk 100m then turn right at a driveway, go through the left hand gate when you reach the dead end (the right one leads into a factory), then take the first alleyway on the right, walk straight for about 100m, bear left past the first building of the complex and you're there. We do, technically, have an address but it's next to useless: even a professional courier couldn't find it when he tried to deliver my mail. I had to meet him at the main road. It's really a maze, and the out-of-place hedges lend a strange authenticity to that feeling.

Our place is really more of a room than an apartment. Bare concrete floors, squat toilet, cracked windows that don't close properly and very, very cold. We had to buy two heaters with a combined power of 3000 watts to even make it livable. And this is a 12 square-metre cupboard we're talking about. The 1-inch gap under the door doesn't help. Strangely, those long grain-filled draft-stoppers that are common in Australia - where houses generally aren't drafty - are impossible to find here. So we feebly try to stop the cold air with a broom. Our bed consists of a pot-holed old couch and a wooden board propped up on six stacks of bricks. Can't complain, however - i think the previous tenants, migrant workers from Anhui province, slept four people on it. Many of the other flats in the complex are loaded with numerous bunk beds. Also the fact it has running water and an indoor toilet at all means it's still above the whole-China average.


Obviously Shanghai foreigners in general are another story. "A city of foreign decadence" is how Shanghai is often described - both old and new Shanghai. There are scores of foreigners here - westerners, that is; locals say there are scores of Japanese and Koreans too - and when it comes to anything involving money, beggars excepted, they do not hold back.


Most cafes and restaurants are simply out of our price range. We have hit the western pubs and clubs a couple of nights, and it's like being in a room full of division one Lotto winners. There is a genuine sense of of people throwing away vast amounts of money in a very indiscriminate and rather vulgar way. One Australian told me westerners enjoy something approaching impunity in Shanghai, due to a rule that says only English-speaking 'tourist police' can talk to foreigners. Told me the story of a friend of his who was parking his expensive SUV and collided with a guy on an electric bicycle. Story goes, he inspected the paintwork of his car, assessed the cyclist as being very poor, picked up his electric bicycle and put it in his wagon. Cops showed up, he told them what happened in charades, drove away with the poor dude's transport. End of story.