vignettes

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Peng!

All’s fair in love and mahjong – by Amy Daml

 

It’s summer in Beijing. The city’s street corners are dotted with knee-high folding tables, each one magnetised to attract all men in the neighbourhood. The magnetic field grows in strength with every addition to the huddle until no male passerby can repel it. The inseparable gentlemen roll their sweaty shirts up over their bellies, puff their cigarettes and collectively exhale a heavy, smoky breath that saturates the air.

At the center of one such force field, a friendly mahjong game is interrupted when Peng’s petulant opponent smashes a Tsingdao bottle over his head.

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Five Taxis

The good, the bad, and the ugly – by Sam Duncan

 

The taxi system in Daqing, a city in China’s far northeast famous for its oil fields nearby, is an interesting beast. Drivers are in theory required to use their meters and not allowed to share rides, but in reality most fares are negotiated, whether the flag falls or not, and drivers will always want to pick up extra passengers along the way. It’s pretty fair, though. If you know the usual fare to your destination you can usually save a couple of kuai; if the driver picks someone else up you can use this to renegotiate the fare; and if you get in a taxi which already has passengers in it you know you can ask for a lower fare than usual.

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The Rubbish Lady

Talking garbage – by Sam Duncan

 

Yesterday I was walking home when the old lady who collects garbage in my apartment complex in Daqing spotted me from afar – she has eerily good eyesight – and yelled something at me. Usually she calls out one of two things: “Have you finished work?” or “Do you understand me?” But this time she said something different. I thought maybe she was talking about a butterfly. As I got closer she repeated herself, and I thought she was asking me something about my father. One of her favourite topics of interrogation was my family and why I don’t live with them.

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Boredom and inspiration

Fragments from an artist’s mind

 

Contemporary artist Guo Hongwei’s fridge is full of Chinese yam. I assumed he had a taste for it. It turns out he is mushing them into paste to use on canvas. Art over hunger.

Just a short titbit today, snatches of a conversation I had with Hongwei when I visited his studio a short ride from Beijing’s 798 art district. It’s a large space with high windows and a dusty musk. Various surfaces are covered in sketches, photographs, cuttings, pressed leaves, dead butterflies, scissors, protractors, cups of tea, rolls of loo paper, an old sewing machine and a basketball.

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Finding my Way

Revelations from a Taoist mystic

 

The Taoist priest looked at me askance and guessed correctly that I was British.

I was in his temple three days before the Chinese new year, following an artist I was writing about who was there to light incense and drop money into the collection box for good luck in the year ahead. The red-faced deity guarding the box stroked his metre-long beard and accepted the bribe.

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