Imagethief

Imagethief has learned a hard lesson about life in big Chinese cities: do whatever you have to do to minimize your commute. There is simply no elegant way to get from point A to point B during a Chinese rush hour. Your choices include: tedium in a taxi; suffocation in a subway; broiling on a bus; or, especially for reckless youth, being bulldozed on a bicycle. (And how is all that for a pointless feat of alliteration?)

Confronted with these unappealing options, Imagethief has elected to walk. Optimistic that I won't change jobs anytime too soon, I rented an apartment a ten minute walk from my office building. Fortunately my office is on Huaihai Middle Rd., on the edge of the French Concession, which is a very nice part of town indeed. If my office had been in less pleasant area perhaps I would have re-thought this approach. Ninety percent of Shanghai is, after all, just another huge, grey, unremarkable Chinese town. You can think of it as Wuhan with two good neighborhoods, a spanking financial district and better shopping.

There were, however, a couple of disadvantages to the pedestrian commute approach. First, it necessarily limited my choice of potential apartments. In the end, I wound up living in an appallingly ugly complex on Fuxing Middle Rd. "Oh, you mean the building that looks like it doesn't belong," said Shanghaiist's Dan Washburn to me over a beer recently.

That's the one. If a Chinese nouveau riche, neo-classical wet-dream McMansion humped a Kowloon tenement silly the offspring would be something like my building. It looms out of our low-rise neighborhood like Godzilla's urinal. Also, as has become clear as the weather has warmed up, the designers of my building hadn't discovered the miracle technology of the u-bend drain trap. We keep the bathroom doors closed. Still, it is by most standards a reasonable apartment from the inside, and it is just a short walk from work.

Appearance is just one of my apartment's idiosyncrasies. When I first looked at it the agent said, "many French people living here." Yeah, right, I though. She was right. It's French-central. Even my neighbors. Which makes it all the more disappointing that the only local bakery is one of the unspeakable "Croissants de France" chain. On the other hand, it might mean some nookie on the side for Imagethief (or Mrs. Imagethief). "Rotating bedrooms," said a friend of mine in Singapore when I was there recently. "Any building full of French people, the moment someone goes on a business trip, look out." Imagethief has not independently verified this assertion, and apologizes in advance to any French readers who feel that their nationality has been insulted by either the accusation of mass infidelity or the suggestion that French people would live in an un-stylish apartment block.

But I have no issues with the French, and they are certainly not the cause of my complaint. The office tower I work in was built right across the road from Shanghai's old Xiangyang Market, since bulldozed to make room for, one must assume, the Chinese property developer's default option, a shopping mall. Xiangyang Market was Shanghai's answer to Beijing's Silk Market; the place to go for all your knockoff luxury goods and pirated Hollywood entertainment. I have been told that the new market is somewhere in Pudong, where only bankers and Reuters correspondents will ever see it.

When they demolished the market, however, they didn't send the pirate trade out of Huaihai Middle Road. They simply atomized it into the surrounding neighborhoods. When the wave of demolition receded the mom-and-pop pirate handbag and watch stalls washed up in the local lane houses, apartment buildings and the Fuxing Road IT mall (another architectural masterpiece).

Naturally when foot-traffic can't see your storefront there is only one option left: touting. And man, do they tout. The streetcorners of the entire area are prowled by men and women carrying laminated brochures displaying the latest in "reproduction" handbags and quartz-movement versions of luxury watches. The stretch of Huaihai Middle Road from Xianyang Rd. to Shaanxi Rd. and the corners of the Shaanxi Rd. - Nanchang Rd. intersections are particularly infested, but the entire neighborhood is pretty well covered.

The touts tend to sleep in, so my morning commute is pretty peaceful. But my walk home is a brutal run of the touting gauntlet. The touts don't actually speak English, but Shanghai is a tourist friendly town and they have worked out their English sales-pitch: "Hey, mister? Bagwatch you want? Watch? Bag? Looka-looka!" Then, in the face of indifference, the tout's eyes will narrow and he or she will unleash the big-guns: "DVD? Hello? DVDbagwatch?"

I am patient and non-confrontational by nature. I rapidly learned that joking about having a watch and sunglasses or Prada not matching my eye color, especially in Chinese, was an invitation to more pitchery. If I had a watch, after all, well then I was clearly the watch-buying type. And I spoke Chinese! That meant I could hear the full sales-pitch! So in lieu of ineffective bonhomie I have perfected what I like to think of as the "Jedi mind-trick" approach to dealing with the touts, which is a studious avoidance of eye contact accompanied by a dismissive, waist-level flick of the hand.

Unfortunately, sheer density means that the dismissive flick is only so successful. I give it about a sixty-percent success rate. With the arrival of warm weather the tout quota has increased, as has their operational radius. They tend to concentrate along Xianyang road and the stretch of Nanchang Rd. that runs behind the plot where the market used to be. Fortunately they seem to peter out in alleyway where I cut through to Fuxing Rd., although I gather this is where a couple of the actual stores are. The net result is that I now often get five or six pitches on the way home (once last week, in a novel approach, by a guy with his three-year-old daughter on his hip). On any given day at least a couple of them will persist.

Honestly, there is something admirable about the relentless optimism the touts bring to their job. One of them can watch me blow-off two or three of his competitors or collaborators (I am not really sure) but still give it a try himself. Sure I've just waved away three other touts, he might think, but he's got the special sauce that means a deal for sure. "Hey, mister! Bagwatch?" Silence. "DVD?"

The repetitive consistency of the offering is part of the problem, I think. It's always "bagwatchdvd". Or, just occasionally, "dvdbagwatch". I began to think I was being mistaken for Mr. Bagwatch. I've learned to turne those nouns out complete. Really. If you were to say to me now, "Will, would you like to watch a DVD? Pull one out of that bag." I would hear, "Will, would you like to pull one out of that?" And I would think you suffering from aphasia brought on by some kind of siezure and roll you onto your side so you don't choke on your own vomit.

My recommendation to the touts is to mix it up a little. We creatures of the modern age are conditioned by a lifetime of marketing saturation to tune out the repetitive and familiar. Vary the inventory a bit and you'll get a lot more interest. Try it out:

"Hey, mister! Bag? Watch? Norwegian elkhound? U-bends?"

Now you have my attention.