sushipanda

Another year, another ridiculously drunken birthday party. This time in the VIP room at the new Paramount Party Club, I celebrated with fantastic friends, both old and new, until the early hours of the morning. Let’s just say I spent a good amount of time hanging out in the bathroom with people pounding on the door; it was just one of those nights. And I’ll never forget it!

Click on the photo above or here to check out the pics on Flickr

So my birthday was two days ago. I spent it with my family, who was visiting and took me and Lydia to South Beauty. I think the event would have been more special if they didn’t ALWAYS have dinner at South Beauty, mostly because they like to stick to what’s safe and what’s close. Still, it was nice to have dinner with them and the grandma; and especially nice when she handed me an envelope full of crisp red Maos.

Every time I walk past the mini day-care at the bottom of my apartment complex on the way to the gym, I always stop and spend a minute staring wistfully at the big ball-pen that they have in there. I remember the sad day when the punks at Chuck E. Cheese’s in San Gabriel refused to let me into the ball-pen because of my age; who the hell says a 21 year old kid is “too old” to roll around in a mass of plastic balls. Those fuckers.

So in the absence of playing with my balls, getting birthday cash from my grandmother is one of the few remnants of my childhood that still makes an occasional appearance in my life now that I’m *gulp* so close to adulthood (being that 30 years old is officially adulthood). That, and throwing cafeteria food at my co-workers and wearing diapers, but who doesn’t do that?

Anyway, I asked Timmy last week if he had any suggestions on how I should celebrate my birthday this year. His feedback went along the lines of: “Dude, if you get a table somewhere at a club and get smashed, it’ll be just any other birthday and you won’t remember it a year later.” He’s more than right; typically, when I do something like that I usually don’t remember it 24 hours later, let alone a year. So, did he have any ideas? “Hmmmm,” was his response, “just do something special.”

What’s something special for someone as non-special as myself? While gorging on the massively wasteful and expensive Sunday brunch at the Westin, Jason and Alex proposed that I walk into Babyface surrounded by a completely Caucasian entourage and pass myself off as some sort of foreign big-shot. “Tell them you were the guy that started Youtube,” Jason said. I’ve seen the guy that started Youtube (pic here and he’s much better looking than I am, so I couldn’t pass that off.

I met up with Jamie and Stephen and a couple other folks at Barbarossa the next night. Stephen understood my dilemma; he was going low-key for his birthday, which was one day earlier than mine, and simply having dinner with a small group of his pals.

“What YOU should do is rent one of those double-decker buses, get a DJ to play some tunes, and then just drive around Shanghai getting totally sauced out of your mind!”

I quizzed him, “A DJ can fit on one of those things?”

“Beats the hell out of me, but it’d be pretty damn cool!.”

Cool indeed. So much cooler than the actual act of celebrating the birthday here in Shanghai. There is such a glut of parties and events and expressions of simultaneous egoism and insecurity that anything I could cobble together would be pointless, meaningless, and result in a smattering of digital photos simply indistinguishable from the millions of party pics sitting on servers across the world.

Already though, I’ve had a wonderful celebration. The night before I had dinner with my parents, Lydia enlivened an otherwise dim day by throwing a surprise dinner for me with my closest friends. She tried so hard to keep it a secret that she let me plug away at my computer, trying to finish an urgent presentation, rather then rush me to the restaurant so my friends didn’t have to wait. So they waited. They’re awesome friends. We got trashed and laughed so hard it was almost 2004 again, when nothing was repetitive and everything was so damn interesting and important. 3 years later, can we repeat all the good times, or is it time to move on to other , older good times?

I booked a massive table at a club for tomorrow night and will try to figure out then. And that bastard Timmy better be there.

I had always wanted to introduce my expatriate friend Jason to Yuxin, regarded as one of the best Sichuan restaurants here in Shanghai, so finally we decided to have a mid-week supper to take a break from work and have some delicious spicy fare. As he usually does, Jason invited his driver, Xiao Pan, up to have dinner with us.

I ordered sesame-glazed walnuts, a little appetizer that I always get at Yuxin. We were all ravenous and started to dig into all the cold dishes: beef tendon in spicy oil, garlic pork rolls, spicy vermicelli. Of course, I kept picking at the the sweet and crunchy walnuts.

Xiao Pan is Shanghainese and speaks only enough English that he knows when Jason wants to be picked up and when he wants the car stopped so he can vomit on the side of the road. When he joins us for meals, he typically focuses on the food and doesn’t say anything as the rest of us chatter on in English. Every now and then, one of us will engage him in some conversation so he isn’t completely bored out of his mind. That’s what Lynn, Jason’s girlfriend, tried to do.

She pointed at the walnuts in the middle of the table. In Chinese, she asked him if he knew how to way walnuts in English. He didn’t, so she taught him, enunciating every syllable: “Wah-uhl-nuts.” Xiao Pan repeated it perfectly: “Wah-uhl-nuts.”

Next, she pointed to the almonds in the shrimp dish. “All-muh-nds.” Again, Xiao Pan repeated it without error.

Lynn then asked him if he remembered the English name for 花生 (peanuts). He got excited and tried on his own.

“Pee….Pee….是不是 Penis?”

I may be turning 29 tomorrow, but like I always tell my grandmother: penis jokes and fart jokes never get old. My eyes got big and I started laughing obnoxiously loud.

Xiao Pan then turned to me, sticking his chopsticks in Jason’s direction, and said point-blank: “Jason 最爱吃 Penis (Jason loves to eat penis).” I wished I hadn’t laughed so loud a second before, because I wanted to laugh even louder after hearing that, and couldn’t. “他最喜欢的就是吃 Penis (eating penis is his favorite thing to do).” Awesome, just awesome.

Some things are just universal and transcend the language barriers that so often prevent us from expressing our true feelings and intentions. Yes, like saying that Jason likes to eat penis. Yeah, just like that.

There are a handful of reasons why you’re better off watching a DVD at home then venturing out into a movie theater here in Shanghai:

• No buttered and salted popcorn. For some reason, the Chinese never got around to ripping-off this movie-going essential. Instead, caramelized popcorn is the only thing you’ll find at the concession stand. It looks like popcorn, it feels like popcorn, but it tastes like Crackerjack; good for a Dodger game, not for a movie.
• Image and projection quality.It’s a commonly held belief amongst theater owners in the U.S. that by dimming the bulb on the projector, they can extend its life and save some long-term costs. In China, not only do they dim the bulb even more than their overseas counterparts, but they also hire clueless projectionists who don’t calibrate and adjust the image when switching to the 2nd reel. This results not only in dim, flickering images but also blurry ones as well.
• Incessant talking during the course of the film. This has got to be the worst one by far. For me, time spent watching a movie in a theater is intensely personal. Being a bit of a fanatic, I like to be enveloped by the experience and not have outside distractions puncture that. For many Chinese, however, they treat their theater time as a personal event in different way in that they act as if they’re in their own living room, commenting and analyzing the film in un-modulated tones and volumes for everyone else to hear.

That being said, this is the Transformers movie we’re talking about here, a film that I had been literally waiting years to go see. Trying to hedge against the above annoyances as much as possible, we decided to watch it at the IMAX over at the Raffles City mall, and to get the latest showing so as to avoid contact with other human beings. This way, we could get a high-quality projection with as as little disruption as possible.

Surprisingly, even at 12:40 am (all the other shows were sold out hours in advance), there was a pretty decent crowd. And projection quality was just as bad as it was in any other theater I’ve been to in Shanghai, with the 2nd reel being inexcusably blurry. Yes yes, I have a stick up my ass, but anyone who knows me knows how particular I am when it comes to a movie-watching experience (TV shows are a completely different matter).

And you know what? I still found myself sitting through the entire thing with a huge grin on my face. I’m even bold enough to admit that I pumped my fist a couple of times, especially when all the Autobots show up and Optimus Prime’s iconic voice boomed through the speakers. Although I own many a stereotypical fanboy accoutrement, you have to believe me when I say that the only things that inspire fanboy-like craze in me are Transformers and burritos, so you’ll have to forgive my somewhat raw and unfiltered reaction to seeing the characters I grew up with duke it out on screen.

While we were walking out of the theater, I observed the faces of all the other Chinese attendees who I had decried as being obnoxious and annoying. Danwei has a pretty good reason why their faces were full of the same bliss that I’m sure was on my big round mug that night:

For a special group of people in China, the influence of the Transformers is quite out of the ordinary.

This group was born between the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Transformer TV cartoon series was irreplaceable entertainment for them in their childhood. As the first generation under the one child policy, they had no brothers or sisters, and most of their spare time was spent sitting in front of a TV set which may have even been black and white.

At that time, Tangram (七巧板) was a typical “mainstream” kids program on CCTV. It taught kids how to do simple paper folding and sing children’s songs – all the TV station cared about were the educational aspects of the programming.

Then the Transformers arrived, greeted by surprise and wild enthusiasm. Now, with those kids all grown up, they will take their own children, wives (they were mostly boys), and childhood memories and flock to the cinemas to see the new movie.

That’s why the Transformers is much more influential in China than it is in the United States, says New Century Weekly in its cover feature.

They made a movie for me, and all of those kids who grew up just like I did, no matter in China or in Southern California. And that’s something no shitty projectionist can take away from me. Whew, guess I am a fanboy after all.

Blurry picture of a blissful me

Also check out this great piece from Wired

Excerpted from today’s New York Times:

Surgeon General Sees 4-year Term as Compromised
By Gardiner Harris
Published: July 11, 2007

WASHINGTON, July 10 — Former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona told a Congressional panel Tuesday that top Bush administration officials repeatedly tried to weaken or suppress important public health reports because of political considerations.

The administration, Dr. Carmona said, would not allow him to speak or issue reports about stem cells, emergency contraception, sex education, or prison, mental and global health issues. Top officials delayed for years and tried to “water down” a landmark report on secondhand smoke, he said. Released last year, the report concluded that even brief exposure to cigarette smoke could cause immediate harm.

Dr. Carmona said he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches. He also said he was asked to make speeches to support Republican political candidates and to attend political briefings.

And administration officials even discouraged him from attending the Special Olympics because, he said, of that charitable organization’s longtime ties to a “prominent family” that he refused to name.

“I was specifically told by a senior person, ‘Why would you want to help those people?’ ” Dr. Carmona said.

The Special Olympics is one of the nation’s premier charitable organizations to benefit disabled people, and the Kennedys have long been deeply involved in it.

When asked after the hearing if that “prominent family” was the Kennedys, Dr. Carmona responded, “You said it. I didn’t.”

And then, this caught my eye:

Dr. Carmona, 57, served as surgeon general for one four-year term, from 2002 to 2006, but was not asked to serve a second. Before being nominated, he was in the Army Special Forces, earned two purple hearts in the Vietnam War and was a trauma surgeon and leader of the Pima County, Ariz., SWAT team. He received a bachelor’s degree, in biology and chemistry, in 1976 and his M.D. in 1979, both from the University of California, San Francisco. He is now vice chairman of Canyon Ranch, a resort and residential development company.

No THAT, dear reader, is one helluva resumé. Compare that to the people running the current administration, and you have a severe case of human capital misplacement. God, I can’t wait for a White House-cleaning.

This morning it’s going to be another one of those dreaded early meeting days. My office is located so far away from Shanghai civilization that normal city taxi drivers never venture out here; in fact, the county has its own taxi service, so on one of those are days when we venture out to grab a bite at a local eatery, we almost never feel like we’re in Shanghai.

So, I’m staring at a 45 minutes cab ride starting at 6:30 am, and my disposition is about 180 degrees south of cheerful. I walk out of the lobby and am not at all shocked that it’s starting to rain. Rain is rarely pleasant in Shanghai. By the time the droplets reach your terrestrial existence, they’ve essentially traveled through 10,000 layers of soot and other unpleasant particle layers and leave a sodium-enriched film on your skin. Rain should never taste salty; it should be pure and clean and wash foulness away, like it needs to for me on this morning. And of course, my umbrella is somewhere upstairs in my apartment, leaning against the closet and surely thinking to itself that it is blessed to have an empty-minded dolt for an owner.

We travel quickly through the neighboring streets. There is never any traffic in the early hours after the sun has risen over the Pudong horizon, and the drive through the Shanghai backwaters is rendered even more solitary by the diminishing view of the city as we push away from it. The past couple of weeks have seen Shanghai bundled in a dusty and broiling blanket of humidity, relief coming in rare bursts of acidic showers and Northern California dreams. Sometimes the heat and moisture are so thick that you feel like you’re walking head-on into a wall of acrid syrup as you leave the friendly air-conditioned confinement. People don’t walk in the air here as much as they swim in it, using lungs and tolerance in place of arms and legs to paddle through the city jungle. Good moods don’t find their way out to the streets in this weather.

There is a general unpleasantness all around that forces me into a desperate search for an ephemeral reprieve from the dankness. Or maybe it was the greasy noodles I ate yesterday for lunch that is making me feel so ill-suited to do or think anything mirthful. In any case, I arrive at my desk as the ayi’s start prepping their day’s worth of thankless wiping and mopping and polishing. Grey is all around, and the voices on the conference call begin to drone and meld into single minor key of buzzing. I lean back and close my eyes and take a deep breath. It’s Tuesday in July and I am waiting for October to come, when demons go away and the world I am in cools to a steady, comfortable beat. Until then, the heat marches on.