Protest in Guangzhou: Why would you burn garbage?
Obama in China: Long gone, and still headlinin'
Barbie Spa: For the cosmopolitan plastic beauty in you
Interview: Coco Zhao, from jazz to M. Butterfly
Week Around the Ists
In this week's edition of "Shanghaiist Trashes the Media" we have an article from the Sydney Morning Herald. Here's the premise:
Given that I'm no stranger to bashing my credit card in the more established fashion capitals of Paris, Milan and New York, I decided it was only right that I took myself and my slightly less enthusiastic shopper of a boyfriend, David, off to Shanghai for a week of bargain hunting -- and to discover whether the city is really more Marc Jacobs than Chairman Mao.
How delightfully droll! Let's see what adventures are waiting for Ms. Imogen Fox in Shanghai ... but first, some cliche descriptions of Shanghai:
After a quirky communist breakfast of liquid yoghurt, tinned fruit and powdery bread, we set off down the Bund, Shanghai's most famous promenade, past an elderly couple silently practising Tai Chi and countless hawkers offering Rolex watches and Louis Vuitton bags. Meanwhile, builders busily repair the side of a building on bamboo scaffolding.
Quirky? What a typical thing for a person weaned on a capitalist diet to say. When you've lived here as long as we have, you find the commie breakfasts grow on you. Then there's this:
Eating in Shanghai isn't as daunting as I'd been led to believe. We did see photo menus of blackened turtles, but armed with a Mandarin sign that read, "I am a vegetarian but I will eat fish" I ate some of the tastiest food I'd ever experienced. From Cantonese dim sum in the Secret Garden restaurant, to $5 noodles at the Ajisen Ramen chain, I quickly became a Shanghainese food convert.
That's great, but she didn't have any Shanghainese food. This kind of food you can get in plenty of cities around the Pacific Rim. Fox ends her whirlwind tour like this:
All too soon it was time to leave. Our taxi sped down the Bund for one last time, past a sign that read "I heart Shanghai". I do too -- I love its contradictory mix of rampant consumerism and communism, its glamorous old architecture and uber-modern buildings. It's like New York only a million times more exciting.Back home, our purchases proved to be a roaring success, my tailored trousers fit better than any designer pair I've ever bought. I'm with Confucius on this one: "Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart." Oh, and take some roomy luggage with you, too.
If we were to use just one paragraph to sum up this person's writing, it'd be this from the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus:
hackneyed adjective. Your hackneyed arguments fail to persuade anyone. OVERUSED, overdone, overworked, worn out, timeworn, platitudinous, vapid, stale, tired, threadbare; trite, banal, hack, clichéd, hoary, commonplace, common, ordinary, stock, conventional, stereotyped, predictable; unimaginative, unoriginal, uninspired, prosaic, dull, boring, pedestrian, run-of-the-mill, boilerplate, routine; informal old hat, cheesy, corny, played out. ANTONYM: original.
Image of a real Chinese breakfast from ttuhsc.edu.
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I'd like to point out to Ms. Fox, and any other unwitting vegetarians out there, that it is next to impossible to eat a vege meal at Ajisen.
All the standard noodles are cooked in pork broth. Unless your Chinese stretches to: "I know that this is cooked with meat, no matter what you say. Replace the normal soup with miso" I'd suggest avoiding it.
From my experience, most of the staff:
a. will deny that the normal noodles are cooked with meat.
b. will insist that it is impossible to change the soup unless you are very pushy.
I realize this is a pretty niche observation, but hey, no one else has seen fit to comment...
P.S. Cantonese is a pretty high risk choice too.
Peijin,
Much as I agree with the basic tone of your article, (which by the way originally appeared in the Guardian a few months ago http://travel.guardian.co.uk/activities/shopping/story/0,,1783887,00.html), your article would be a fantastic parody of that which you complain about, but its clear that your not attempting to be humourous and are pissed off about it.
Yes, I am also a little bit jealous too that someone else gets paid to fly to Shanghai and write a contrived, shallow and banal article about it, whilst anyone (like us) who has lived in the city even for a few months would be able to come up with a far more insightful piece. The annoying thing I'm sure you will agree, is that we are not in a position to be paid for it, unlike the writer in question. The point is that they are paid to visit the city for a few days, and write about it based on that. It's hardly surprising, then, that they come up with the cliched fare that they do. But they are writing it for a different audience - people back in Europe or the US who know only marginally less about Shanghai than the writers themselves.
I share your frustration, but my point is that we regularly have these bash the media stories, and, I'm starting to find them find them rather, well, hackneyed.
cameron:
well, the good thing about not getting paid to do something means that you are free to say what you want. you will notice that i did open this post with "this week in shanghaiist trashes the media", which i think shows that we are not taking ourselves too seriously. I would love to be able to parody this, but alas, but my writing skills and focus are not up to snuff--the parody requires more "composure" than i can usually cook up in the half hour it takes me to write a post. You are absolutely right about their audience; and I have no quibble with that--that's a battle I'm always willing to fight, but i hold no illusions about winning it. It's not as if all this is going to disappear and be replaced with intelligence or insightfulness. The readers might want that breezy writing style, which gives them a taste of that "buzz" that someone on a whirlwind shopping spree might have. In that sense, Fox's writing is quite successful, and far be it from me to negate someone's talents, even if those talents lie in something i cannot particularly sympathize with.
I say keep it up! Eventually these writers, and their readers, will stumble upon shanghaiist and become enlightened. Mainstream media needs more hecklers!
I have to agree with Cameron on this one - the article is a simple piece, thrown into a travel section just for a bit of fill - although it is a bit contrite, I don't think it deserves major trashing.
It wasn't positioning itself as a serious bit journalism nor was it from a well known writer whom you would expect more from - its just a bit of fluff.
At least that kind of articles gets Shanghai into the mainstream media again, and hopefully people will travel here and make up their own minds.
Actually, Frankly is right Peijin. Mainstream media is often rather mindless. And I confess that I missed the "shanghaiist trashes the media" intro, that kinda puts it in a different perspective.
Keep up the good work.
if this was a major trashing, i am certainly unaware of it: i was going for acerbic, bitter humor, not a straight-forward slam. i agree that there is a place for fluff in the world, and that fluff has a place in all of our hearts (that is, we all need it now and again) but let me ask this--does "fluff" have standards, or is it defined by the completely lack of standards? I would argue, personally, that if i were the one writing fluff that there would be certain do's and don'ts that i kept in mind. Fluff is entertaining, but somehow i don't believe that entertaining means dumbing down or writing banal things. Or may be it does, in this particular context--certainly, i might have had some problems when, in front of my computer facing deadline, i decided to come upw with phrases like "quirky communist breakfast." Would any of you, given this assignment, have written that phrase?
Furthermore, a person doens't get to be the deputy fashion editor of the Guardian UK purely based on their ability to write fluff. She's capable of better, and you can read her other writing to see if that's true or not. No, she's not writing about war crimes or genocide, but why you insist on holding her to lower standards simply because she is not well-known is beyond me. In fact, the more well-known you become, the more of a clown you become. I am thinking of Tom friedman at the NYT but i'm sure there are better examples out there.
If the point is that this has become too repetitive in the context of Shanghaiist, which i think is what Cameron was alluding to, I can accept that. I know that others have done similar things, which makes it seem repetitive. On the other hand, if you think that i'm marshalling the full force of a critical intellect against one piece of fluff writing, i would say that you've misunderstood it. This is more something of passing interest that i might mention to a friend over beers...
"but let me ask this--does "fluff" have standards"
Great line Peijin - you win - I now expect higher standards from the fluff I read! :)
Your post reminded me another guy's words I read a while ago...
http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://peternh.blogspot.com/2006/04/shanghai-as-straight-man.html#comments
I agree with Peijin - all these shitty articles need to be trashed and trashed severely.
"It’s like New York only a million times more exciting."
Now that's great travel writing. The bitch ate at a pseudo-japanese fast food place and stuffed some crab dumplings into her mouth and thought that she was 'all cultural'. Ridiculous.
Yeah, the "million times more exciting" thing got me going a bit too. Is it a million times more exciting to shop on Huahuai Lu than to shop on St. Marks? Is it a million times more exciting to go up the Pearl Tower than to go up the Empire State Building? Is it a million times more exciting to eat $5 noodles - not sure if that is Oz dollars or US, but anyway she got ripped off - than to have a slice of Sicillian in NYC? Had she had stuck to shopping and gone no further, she would have been on firmer ground, but when she starts talking about just about anything else she just sounds like a snobby bimbo (sorry girls, but she does - bamboo scaffolding - trying to envoke HK movies? - not so much in SH, most sites prefer good old steel) Also, turtles taste just like fish - I wish some QUIRKY SH fuwuyuan would have brought some turtle to the table and pointed to her little Mandarin sign - now that WOULD have been a million times more interesting than her article.
Peijin is just jealous of her. Get off your high horse you wanker. The girl is writing about shopping in a travel section of a newspaper. She knows her readership better than you do.
so people interested in shopping and travel require and enjoy cliched and stereotypical stories? interesting. didn't know that.
hdp, you have managed to call someone you don't know a "chink" and a "wanker" today, and it is not even noon yet. keep up the good work!
hdp: sorry to get your day started on a bad note, but yes, I am a chink, and yes, I masturbate. I tried to make clear in the comments what i did not make clear in the post itself--that this wasn't meant to be as "mean-spirited" as some took it. This was a friendly thrashing, like when a movie critic pans a film. These things aren't always done with the aim of hurting people -- they often derive from somewhat more nobler impulses, like trying to up everyone's game.
One last thing to mention: I know Shanghaiist readership better than you do. And most of them get my jokes. I know that sometimes the delivery of these "jokes" makes it uncomfortable, like when standup comics broach sensitive topics such as racism or sexism (in the US context, at least). I don't plan on toning down my humor -- i only hope to improve the way in which i write, so that perhaps it's meaning isn't always misconstrued.