Poagao's Journal

Absolutely Not Your Monkey

Aug 23 2023

Another old video

The latest, and possibly final “old” video is up now. It concerns my time as a shoe inspector at factories in Kaiping, in China’s Guangdong Province, in 1993. I had just sustained a serious knee injury practicing Kung-fu in Taipei and couldn’t work as a cameraman for a time, and it just so happened that a company operating out of Manhattan, NYC was looking for people to oversee quality control at the factories of their manufacturers in China. My friend Will Avery and I both interviewed with them; I got the position, in my naivete not thinking too much about why.

I spent several months in Kaiping, living out of a hotel on the wide brown river that runs through the city, being driven back and forth to mainly one factory in Cangcheng, about an hour away, inspecting shoes and communicating with the NY office by fax every day. Every so often I would take a boat down the river from Jiangmen to Hong Kong for a break, staying at the Dynasty Hotel on the Kowloon side of the harbor. I also spent several months in Qingdao doing a similar thing, but for some reason I can’t find any video footage of that time; if I come across any I’ll make another video on that.

It was the classic expat businessperson lifestyle, lonely and isolated, and I missed Taiwan terribly the whole time. Of course I could communicate in Mandarin and did hang out with the workers sometimes, but the folks in Kaiping understandably had poor Mandarin skills, and I had failed to pick up more than rudimentary Cantonese. Qingdao was too close to Beijing for comfort; I did enjoy my time there, but the winter cold was anathema to me.

My “fellow expats”, with the exception of the fellow I was replacing and who soon left, were just annoying, and I avoided their company. One was a grifter trying to scam the company out of as much moolah as possible, and another was a lazy slacker with a drinking problem; he couldn’t even be bothered to get up in the morning to get to the factory, so…more work for me. Eventually I learned that the reason Will had been rejected was because is Black, and while the people back in Manhattan insisted that they were just being pragmatic as they felt Chinese workers wouldn’t listen to an obviously Black man (yet they had no problem hiring white scammers and slackers), I decided I couldn’t continue there and returned to Taiwan.

But all that was 30 years ago, a previously impossible number of years. Will recently visited Taiwan with his wife and daughter, mainly staying at his wife’s family’s place in Taichung, not far from Tunghai University where we studied together in 1989. We found some time to hang out, just like old times. They headed back to Virginia yesterday.

Also yesterday, I decided to walk up to the North Gate for some unimpressive lunch, and then to Dihua Street. The weather was nice up until it wasn’t. I had just bought some bitter tea at the oldest such purveyor behind the Yongle Market when CRACK lightning struck and the skies opened up. I stood on the corner chatting with the tea boss, sipping my drink and watching people run through the typhoon-like wind and rain with their pathetically inadequate umbrellas. The boss treated me to another cup of aloe tea, which unlike other iterations I’ve imbibed was green. “That’s because I included the skin,” he said, claiming that this boosted the drink’s invigorative qualities. It was rather tasty.

I eventually managed to run through the deluge across to the Yongle Market, where a most peculiar scene presented itself: In the middle of the hallway amid the various stalls, a yellow dog was pushing around a cage that held a trapped rat; the sudden deluge had apparently driven some of the rodents out of the sewers. The dog appeared to be quite excited, and I took an Instagram story of it playing with the cage, assuming that the owner would take the trapped rats someplace and release them. Then, just as I finished the video and put my phone away, several things happened in quick succession:

The owner walked over, picked up the trap and let the rat out.

The dog immediately chomped down on the rat.

I said, rather loudly, “Oh shit!”

Other people in the vicinity exclaimed, “Hey boss, what the hell are you doing?”

The owner’s wife ran up, snatched up the dog by the scruff of the neck and hit its muzzle until it dropped the now obviously dead rat. She must have known that, had the dog swallowed the rat as it plainly wanted to do, both animals would have been doomed instead of just one.

The rain outside had subsided, and I suddenly felt that I needed to get out of there; I walked over to the riverside and watched the fish jumping out of the swollen waters as airplanes flew under the departing storm clouds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thirty years, man. Damn.

posted by Poagao at 12:10 pm  
Jun 04 2012

London trip – Conclusion

Getting up on Saturday morning was a leisurely affair. The day outside was coolish but pleasant, and we headed out to the Portobello market, a long street full of shops and stands knickknacks, food, clothes, old cameras, old handbags, and even tiny pocket trumpets even smaller than mine. Unfortunately, they were barely playable. Or fortunately, I should say, as if they were playable I very likely would have bought one. I did buy a cupcake with the British flag on it, though. The entire city, I’ve realized now, was in a terribly good mood due to the week of pleasant weather as well as the upcoming Diamond Jubilee.

We walked all the way up and down the market, encountering several blues performers on instruments such as slide guitars and banjos, and had a delicious lunch at a cafe where Chenbl had been caught at earlier trying to use the bathroom. This happened to me the other day as well; you walk in, thinking you’ll just slip by the counter and borrow the “customers only” restroom, and some damn employee rushes up and says in the most pleasant, bright and cheerful tone you can imagine, “Can I help you?” If you admit the truth of your urinary quest, you’ll be told the restrooms are for paying customers only and asked if you’d like to buy something. If you’re not willing to own up to such a thing, you’ll have to come up with a bullshit excuse that you were “looking at the view” or “waiting for a friend,” etc.

After lunch we realized that we’d missed the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, which we’d entertained vague ideas of seeing, and instead took the underground back to Waterloo Station, where we passed over two Thames River cruise boats that were not to our liking before settling on the third, a large red affair with seats on the roof. It was grand sliding down the river, the crew making snarky comments about the buildings. The sun came out, the skies turned blue by the time we disembarked at the Tower Bridge. Crowds of tourists thronged about London Tower, and we walked across the bridge to the south side of the river. Camera crews were setting up on the sides of the bridge for the jubilee coverage the following day. We walked to London Bridge Station, stopping for some sweets at a Tesco, and returned to Kings Cross to check out of our hotel. Aside from the water pressure issues, the Fairway & Central Hotel has been great, with a great location, quiet rooms, reasonable prices, comfy mattresses and a filling English breakfast each morning. I highly recommend it.

We took the subway out to Heathrow, an hour-long journey that would have been quick and expensive on the dedicated airport train, and were told at Terminal 1 that our tickets were wrong that that we’d have to go to Terminal 4. Terminal 1 was full of white people; Terminal 4 was not, serving destinations in Africa and Asia. A mainland Chinese man in the line in front of us was in hysterics at the news that his newspaper-wrapped monstrosity of a carry-on was refused, and he shouted and threatened and nearly roughed up his tour guide while the airport staff stood by grinning nervously and rolling their eyes. I was thinking, try those antics at a US airport and see what happens.

Our departure gate was full of children for some reason. The weather outside was turning nasty, but we got on the plane soon enough and flew in a rush down the rain-soaked runway and away over the city into the skies of northern Europe and Asia.

Shanghai was grey as well. We decided to forgo the maglev and take the subway into town this time, but regretted it when this took over an hour and an inexplicable change of trains. Downtown, we walked around the alleys near Yu Garden station and then up the street behind the Bund, having a dinner of very good noodles at a nearly empty restaurant along the way, before taking the subway back. Only the subway to the airport had closed, so we ended up taking a “black car” back while the driver told us how poor he and his wife were. I dozed off a dozen times along the way, and sleep came quickly as we watched on TV as the hundreds of boats struggled through gale winds and torrential rains up the river we’d cruised in the sunshine under blue skies just the previous day.

This morning was spent mostly in the Pudong Airport terminal, as we were staying once again at the airport hotel. Fortunately there was a book of nice photography in one of the bookstores, so the time went quickly, and before we knew it, we were winging back to Taipei, where the weather was, again, grey. Back again, reconnecting things, washing things, transferring files. Work tomorrow.

posted by Poagao at 11:42 pm