Drinking with the Manchurian Hairdressers

In Shanghai I stayed with my friend Tim, who has got to be the perfect host. However, there was a price to be paid for his hospitality, he warned me. "We have to go drinking with the barbershop guys."

I thought this seemed like a fine idea. I'd met the hairdressers last year, the staff of the barbershop where Tim gets his hair cut. Apparently they're always bugging him about when he's going to bring some of his American friends by. They are quite a colorful bunch, mohawked, streaked and dyed hair, fancy embroidered jeans and Renaissance-style shirts. All of them are from Harbin, in Manchuria, though the Boss (e.g., "Laoban") has lived in Shanghai since he was a kid.

I wasn't sure why the occasion had an element of dread for Tim, since he likes the guys a lot. Plus, we were only going about a half-block from Tim's apartment, to a restaurant across from the barbershop.

I started to get an idea when I saw the amount of beer involved. "Harbin" Brand, naturally.

There were five of them, and Tim and me, and we started with a case of large bottles - I don't know metric well enough to tell you how large, but they're big. Everything seemed to require a toast, and toasting is "Ganbei!" - meaning you have to drink it down.

Well, I'm a girl, right? I figured I had to be exempt from some of this.

I figured wrong.

"Lisa," Laoban would say. "Nide yanjingde yanse zhen piaoliang." - "Your eyes are such a beautiful color." Now, the Boss is probably a good 10 years younger than I am, a stocky guy with the sides of his head shaved and somewhat bloodshot eyes (he'd already been out drinking today, he informed us, and his head wasn't feeling very good, but such was the importance of this occasion that he made the sacrifice of drinking more. Much more). This did not stop him from being a real flirt. Laoban liked my eyes, told me I should wear bright colors more often and not so much black, and all the guys liked my standard Beijing accent. I told him that I was way too old for him. He insisted this was not the case.

Then, somehow I ended up with a new husband, the kid Tim had nicknamed "Mozart" because of his hairdo, which could certainly be described as baroque. Mozart looks like he's about 18, with delicate good looks and a high-pitched voice - if they were still casting men in the female Peking Opera roles, he'd probably be a prime candidate.

I can't remember quite how this happened, because I think we'd finished the first case of beer by this point. After that, it was never one more bottle, it was always two. Laoban insisted.

Then we had to sing. This is one situation where all those years of singing in a rock band pays off. I belted out a couple of verses of "Hang On Sloopy" (something I can manage regardless of degree of drunkeness). The guys were surprised and impressed. If you are going to find yourself in the role of performing dog, it helps to know the tricks.

But like Tim said, he wouldn't go along with the barbershop boys if it weren't in good fun and good spirits. The next day, I had two text messages from Mozart, addressed to "Beautiful Friend," asking how my day was going.

Beijing/Shanghai

Much has been written about the differences and rivalry between Beijing and Shanghai. In the past, I've always come down on the Beijing side. How not? The time I spent in Beijing in '79 had an inestimable impact on my life, even if it had its traumatic aspects. Besides, I didn't actually visit Shanghai until 1993, for the first Shanghai International Film Festival. At the time I was too jaw-agaped with the vast changes in China to even absorb much about the character of the city.

When I visited Shanghai again last year, I came away with a much more positive impression.Shanghai may be a chaotic mega-opolis, but it strikes me as more pedestrian-orientedthan Beijing - at least there are more neighborhoods that you can easily walk, especially along the Bund and the French Concession.

Shanghai people have a reputation in China as being, well, a little stuck-up and unfriendly. I didn't find this to be the case. For one thing, there are so many "New Shanghai People" - "WaiDi Ren" from outside of the city - that the character of Shanghainese has changeda great deal. You don't hear nearly as much Shanghai dialect as you once did,which used to be a way of excluding outsiders.

Northerners are considered more uncouth, but also more friendly and genuine. Why citizens of the cultural capital of China are regarded as somewhat uncivilized, I couldn't say. I will note that taxi drivers in Beijing are almost universally Northerners (many with near-impenetrable Dongbei accents - so "rrr" ladened that they would be prime participants for "International Talk Like A Pirate" Day). The shopgirls that work in places like Silk Alley and Hongqiao Market are almost all from the South. These are the kinds of shopping areas where you will get ripped off right and left if you aren't careful, end up with counterfeit bills, pay far too much for fake brands, even if you do speak Chinese and are therefore "a friend of China, so I give you the special Chinese price!". I ran into plenty of girls who gave me that speech. I also had some of the nicest encounters of my trip, chatting with some of these women, the ones who didn't try to rip me offor treat me like a cash machine on legs. One, another person born in the Year of the Boar, immediately tied a second red string around my wrist, just to make sure I had enough luck to get through the trials of my animal year. If you didn't know this, your animal year can be a very good year or a really bad year - there's a lot of energy and challenges you have to deal with, apparently, and it can go either way. I figure I need all the luck I can get.

Anyway, I always feels a little silly making blanket generalizations about millions of people, even if Chinese themselves tend to do it.

One thing I'm pretty sure of, however. Beijingers swear more than Shanghai people. My friend Tim, a long-time Shanghai resident, tells me that Shanghainese consider expressions like: "ta ma de!" pretty strong stuff. I'd always heard that "ta ma de!" (literally, "his mother!" but used like, "son of a bitch!" or "dammit!") was very mild and even used in mixed company. Certainly it's nothing compared to what I heard in a Beijing net bar the other day. This was one of the dumpier netbars I've ever been to, off Jiu Gulou Dajie - that's Old Drum Tower Street for you waiguoren, probably one of the most picturesque areas left in Beijing. This bar is down an alley, up three flights of stairs above some weird-ass department store selling cheap shoes. Dimly lit, painted beige and third-world green, sagging and dusty gold curtains, upholstered metal chairs with gaping holes in the seat, the only decoration occasional posters of warrior chicks in armored bikinis. A smoke-filled room with "no smoking" signs on the wall. Row after row of young Chinese guys played online games - maybe three women in the place, other than the workers, and one foreigner (me).

The gamers were a rowdy bunch. The guy next to me was particularly intense, with a friend coming over now and then to perch on the arm of my chair and offer advice on killing attacking demons. Everyone was cursing like crazy, shouts I could hear from the other side of the room. Stuff that Chinese friends had taught me and expressions right out of one of my favorite books, "Outrageous Chinese - Beijing Street Language." Stuff like: "Wo c**!" "Sha b*!" "Ma b*!" and, I believe,"Shou c** ni ma b*!" which is far too nasty for me to translate on a public forum.

The guy's little elf avatar must have really gotten nailed by one of those demons...

I found this whole scene incredibly entertaining. For one thing, how often do you get to have your spotty knowledge of Chinese obscenities confirmed? For another, I had used Chinese netbars as frequent settings in the novel I just finished, the one I submitted to the First Chapters contest at Gather.com. I got mostly positive responses from the opening chapter of my submission (that's all that has beenposted so far), but one complaint I had from a number of readers was the amount of profanity. I'd thought the language appropriate to the tone of the book and the narrator's voice, but apparently this really flips some peoples' switches.

Now I'm thinking, "Hah!" Because if a gamer next to me in a netbar says stuff like "Wo c**!" and all that talk about some guy's mother's hoo-hah every five seconds, I figure I pretty much got it right.