Sensual City Studio

THREE

We were walking down – well, it could have been any street in Shanghai, really. Someone offered us a “lucky red envelope”, explaining to us that this envelope would bring us wealth. Inside, there was a red card, with the symbol of this year’s animal painted in golden brushstrokes.
My friend looked away, but I was curious and wanted one – two, in fact. I thought it would be a nice present to offer to someone like me, someone superstitious.
He said that he could sell us one envelope each. That would not be a problem. However, if it was just me buying, I could have one or three envelopes, five, even, if I wanted. But he wouldn’t sell me two, or four.
At the time, I didn’t understand the principle, which is in fact very simple: odd numbers are lucky. Chinese tradition dictates that material things should be given to others in odd-numbered quantities. Public holidays, too, last either one or three days. When venerating a statue or an image   of an ancestor, you should bow three times, or five times, or once… Seven or nine times would be better still. After nine, though, the golden number is twelve – an even number.

KITCHEN 1

No matter how delicious Chinese food is, and how keen you might be to learn how to make it yourself, DO NOT GO INTO THE KITCHEN! The Shanghainese say that heaven has Chinese food but hell is its kitchen.

TELEVISION

Of course, one of these lives on display could be mine, too, as I live in one of these towers where there is no need to hide. I used to live in a lilong, though,which taught me to understand that this whole city is mine, and that we all form it, create it and make it breathe together. No need to hide. My window becomes the best possible TV, a screen showing what is happening here and now. At home, I just want to watch the city passing by my eyes.

THREE-DIMENSIONALITY

Every turn you make, every step you take, however fast or slow you travel  , you cannot fail to notice that Shanghai, despite being flat, is a highly three-dimensional city. When you take a taxi at night, you climb up and over and down so many bridges, flyovers and junctions, some as high as a ten-storey building. All the buildings display a cross-section of their living innards to the outside world. The light flooding in and shining out of their windows exposes the lives of their occupants to the random passengers of a car, just for an instant. I, sitting in the back of the taxi, get a glimpse of these lives, and it is then up to me to either abandon these memories or imagine the possible lives that these people lead.

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.

SHARING FOOD

A dear friend came to Shanghai to visit me. Over the previous couple of months, I had been seeing such fast development, not just in terms of buildings going up and coming down, but also in the choice of restaurants available. Not only were international restaurants starting to appear but, more importantly, Chinese cuisine was becoming more prominent in restaurants. This made my life in Shanghai even richer. Although food unifies this country, the variety of options available in China  is endless. Different food customs are passed down through the generations, whether regional cuisine or food associated with certain rituals. For every ritual and custom, there is something to be eaten at a specific time and in a specific place. In particular, there are daily rituals – the familiar rituals of day-to-day life. Sharing food, sharing the same food from the same plates at the same table, for instance. The moment when Chinese people eat together is a moment of joy. The Chinese will hold meetings with business partners around a dining table. The difference in the West is that we would often rather go somewhere for a drink. The Chinese, on the other hand, go somewhere to eat. Of course, you can drink while eating. But the importance of the restaurant must not be ignored.

GREY

Grey is an omnipresent colour in the city. It is the colour of the sky as seen by the citizens of Shanghai. It is the background of most pictures, regardless of the weather, the season or the time of  day.