Sensual City Studio

SEVEN – GHOST MONTH – GHOST DAY

Seven is one of the few numbers that is as lucky in the West as it is in the East.   In Chinese culture, all annual rituals are determined in accordance with the moon. In Chinese, as in Latin-based languages, the moon is female; it is the yin  ; and it is the moon  that determines the propitious day for every Chinese ritual. Accordingly, the seventh month in the lunar calendar belongs to the ghosts, and so it is known as the “Ghost Month”; (鬼月) and the fifteenth day of this month is the “Ghost Day”. On this day, the deceased, emerging from the lower realms, are believed to visit the living. As an important Buddhist and Taoist festival, many rituals are performed in order to ease the pain of the deceased, by transmuting and absolving their suffering; to achieve this, their appetite should be satisfied and prayers should be said.

CIGARETTES

Being a smoker in Shanghai is fun. You’re allowed to smoke almost everywhere, and the best part is being able to smoke in the taxi back home.
This custom is comparable to the traditions surrounding food.
In particular, it is bad manners to eat everything on your   plate, as this signifies that you are still hungry and consequently want and need more food in order to be satisfied. The plates on the table will be endlessly refilled, until you finally give up your Western ways and leave some food to be thrown away.
With cigarettes, it’s kind of the same: sometimes you will still be smoking a cigarette and your Chinese friend will offer you another one. In this case, you should simply put out the one in your mouth and take the new one your friend is offering; later, it will be your turn to do the same.
And, believe it or not, it is actually normal to eat while smoking.
In a taxi, sometimes you can simply ask the taxi driver if he wants a cigarette, and hey presto, there you are in a mobile living room or smoking lounge.
Not accepting cigarettes is like not accepting food: it’s not good manners. However, they will accept a refusal, if you are truly a non-smoker. Just make sure they understand that it’s not an unfriendly gesture, but simply because… well… you’ll need a good excuse for this one! Personally, I don’t know of one…

DÉRIVE

Thanks to Shanghai’s safety, size and language barrier, it is the perfect city in which to dérive – to drift, to wander…
Get in a taxi, walk, take a bus, follow any metro line, until you arrive somewhere…
Get lost and discover the metropolis.

FEELING SPECIAL 3

We started walking through the lanes, past the many shops. And then, at the junction between the compound and the lilong, a man took out a microphone and started singing. Some people nearby started singing along, too, while others continued to play mah-jong or folded their arms and just listened. We decided to go to the park. It was a hard decision initially, as so many unexpected things were happening in the street and it seemed that even looking away for just a second would mean missing something amazing. I took him by the hand, and we entered the park. He didn’t have to wait long to experience more of Shanghai.
There was a big group of Shanghainese people dancing in couples, and after a while my dad joined them. He was dancing with a woman to music he had never heard before. This became our ritual: we would sit down to eat and then go to the street corner or the park, and then sometimes someone would take my dad’s hand and offer him a folding chair, so that he could sit in the first row and hear that night’s singer more clearly. Othertimes, he would be distracted, and someone would ask him (us) to come back to their home, in one of the lilongs, so that they could explain to us the beauty of the wooden staircase, the spiritual and material value of it, and for how many generations it had served the family. We couldn’t speak Mandarin or Shanghainese, but that was never an issue.
He became like Shanghai: sleepless. And when he had to leave Shanghai, he left behind a whole city that had become a home.

PERSONAL SQUARE METRE

When you   come from the West, many Chinese customs can seem shocking when you   first encounter them in Shanghai – actual culture shocks.
Food, religion, ways of crossing the street, ways of addressing men, women and foreigners, clothing rules and decorum at the table – everything is different. Many questions suddenly present themselves: what things can and can’t I talk about? Then there’s the tactile aspect, too: am I allowed to touch someone? Are they allowed to touch me?
One element that quickly emerges in guise of an answer to some of these questions is space.
When queuing, waiting, taking public transport, buying tickets for the train (or indeed tickets for anything at all), dancing, whatever, remember this: your space is everyone’s space; your square meter of “personal space” doesn’t belong to you alone.

MIMICS

It is remarkable how you can have long conversations “just” using hand movements, facial contractions, bodily contortions and so forth… You find that there is always a way to communicate… well, maybe… actually, no, not always.
The way Westerners represent drinking with a hand gesture, for instance, might turn out to be the gesture for the number six in Chinese; the number eight might be used for indicating a person or object; and the number ten might mean to be close to someone. Most of these hand gestures correspond to the way we learned to make shadow animals on the walls, with our parents, before going to sleep. The way Westerners usually represent eating doesn’t mean anything to most Chinese people… but you can always keep trying… until the person on the receiving end gets bored and leaves, that is.

喜  (xĭ) means « happiness ». 喜 + 喜 = 囍 (shuāng xĭ) – DOUBLE HAPPINESS

Double happiness has a beautiful connotation in Chinese. It is the addition of single entities and its conversion into a double entity. Being double happy became a common expression symbolizing love, since love multiplies when it is shared.
It can be found on nearly every kind of item: rugs, clothes, fabrics, matchboxes, ceramics, doorbells, invitations, teaware, jewellery, cigarettes… These items are placed everywhere, and are essential items for any weddings, birthdays, anniversaries and New Year celebrations.
However, the moment when I really came into contact with this notion was when I solved my first dilemma on arrival in Shanghai, namely the question of what to smoke. At first, I tried the Western cigarettes, which didn’t taste the same as back home – too strong. Later on, I chose the packaging that appealed to me most: a golden packet with the Shanghai TV tower on it… it later proved to be a nice souvenir for friends, but not something to be smoked.
Afterwards, I start asking others and observing what the Chinese would smoke. There were so many different brands, but one caught my eye: a white packet with two red stripes at the top and bottom, with this 囍 symbol in red – a symbol that I had seen somewhere before… the double happiness symbol. It was not as bad as others I had tried before, but after a long night I would lose my voice for a while; this double happiness seemed to be double strength, too. Indeed, it turns out it has 15 mg of tar per cigarette, compared to 10 mg for a Marlboro Red.
After doing some research, I discovered that this cigarette used to be called “Happy Days”, and its literal translation “Red Double Happiness” is a truly Shanghainese cigarette brand created in 1906 by what is not only the oldest but also the biggest tobacco company in the People’s Republic of China.