 
822

by S. Michael Choi

Published at Smashwords

Copyright S. Michael Choi, 2014.

All rights reserved.

Cover photo Creative Commons attribution Torben Früchtenicht.

The use of this CC attrib photo does not constitute an endorsement by the photographer of this work or the views expressed in this work.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real or living persons now or in the past is purely coincidental.bcr

Shanghai, 2027 – beyond

(Reader's Note: 6 rmb is roughly equal to 1 USD.)

1.

[Being the transcript of a conversation with 42]

You know...you know. I had this summer English teacher once, a professor John Hadley, professor of linguistics or comp lit or actually it was English Literature straight after all. [*coughs*] Well, you know, that's a rare thing, you know. A really good English teacher I believe is one of the most beloved personalities people tend to meet. They really do tend to love and adore the English tutors of sixth form, A-levels whatever you call it from whichever secondary school your country terms it. Americans say "high school," right. Well, anyway, John Hadley taught me the genre and word "expository writing." Really, it's something rare. It means like you're a factual fiction or a fictional fact; it's the genre of the "essay" which is from the French, "to test," first done by Montaigne who was pioneering what was up to then a heresy. Writing was supposed to be about the glorification of God, and to "test" yourself, to explore your depths was an immense act of narcissism or even a strike against God. Well I digress, I digress I guess. The important thing is that John Hadley had that wistful quality, that slightly subdued sadness that makes people really love you. Nobody's going to really love me. I'm the graphic artist, 42, the anonymous drawer and narrator behind that mildly famous to those in the know series FENWORLD. It's this far-future thing—the ice glaciers have come, wiped away all the countries of the world, and then now they're melting again, now everyone is gearing up and searching for all sorts of weapons from the past to try to fight for the lives or the future. When I saw "mildly famous," I mean that like people who read graphic novels know me, but I can walk into a supermarket and nobody knows my face. I'm not famous famous. I'm not a cultural celebrity, writers and graphic artists rarely area. (Although I'll tell you, every once in a while a fan comes up to me in a supermarket. That does happen.)

[Subject lights up cigarettes, drinks coffee heavily.]

Well, you know, you're all being really decent here and all, allowing me to just spout out Shanghai, Beijing, 2021 to present day. Pretty exciting hey? Not like anyone knew all those things that were going to happen in China right at that time. Known in retrospect, they say; you choose a city and just a decade later realize you were right there, right then, at the fulcrum of history. But hey, man, how were we to know? I mean, people talked, people knew things were going on China, but to have one country define everything for ten years—well that's rare of course. But yeah, I know, I know all the ground rules, no talk about 877, nothing about Xinjiang, striclich verboten, streng, ja? I'm to cover Shanghai, talk about my life, the girls, the food, culture. But as John Hadley said, "give us the essentials first." I'm not really about style or the "aesthetic deep structure," this is just information forward conversation, yes? "Give us the facts, give us the facts!" thank you John Hadley, thank you John Hadley. Hope he's well.

Well what are the facts. I'm in my thirties; I'm the semi-famous 42, the creator and creative behind the graphic novels FENWORLD; I consider my genre science fiction; I'm told I have a great visual capability, that image of the young heroine Genevieve lookup at the ice melt right when the war is going to begin and nobody knows she's about to start fifty years as a battle hero of a ferocious, red-in-tooth world. That look of innocence, right? Because we all know what's going to come, but in that moment she looks kinda sad, right? Unforgiving world. Plasma bolt rifles and .30 shells husbanded against the scavengers who have found the real ammo dumps. Readership of thousands, hey? I can't complain. It's a visual artists' life, I suppose.

The weird thing about my career as the graphic novelist is that I sort of fell into it. See, I moved to Shanghai in 2027 after I was ripped-off by my Chinese partner and had my share in the GREATWALL restaurants snuck out of my hands through their greasy lawyer machinations. People know it goes on. You sign a document as "foreign partner, 49%" for some trusted Chinese businessman, and yes, it works for a while, for a long while, but if it takes off, if your 49% share makes you a millionaire, wow, poof!, guess what, 51% share Chinese partner is going to find some cheapo lawyer somewhere, and there goes your 49% share. They know all the rules, they're completely ruthless in the sphere of business. But, you know, air still comes when I breathe, food is in the fridge, I'm still married, Chinese girl, 822, and that's what you have. "By Chinese standards," as they say, you're lucky as sin. I mean, "you had three girlfriends?!?!," that's what the Chinese guy you try to explain things to responds back to you. "Be freakin' grateful! I'm thirty-three and I've never had a girlfriend!"

[Subject mumbles something unintelligible although the word 'chinks' is audible.]

But anyway, I invoke John Hadley, long may he live, once again. Essentials, essentials, don't waste a word. Let's see, Shanghai, city of almost 30 million; 300,000 foreigners; People's Republic of China spinning both intensely in and out of favour with the outside world, it's currently 2031, I'm in my late thirties, married, hopefully with children in a year or two, requirements are no talk about Xinjiang or Urumqi, and no talk about politics, it's not all that hard. I'm a graphic artist of moderate success, although in fairness by where my classmates are probably closer to lower-moderate success just like my first salary 8800 rmb—that would be renminbi, yuan, or in other words the Chinese currency, was lower-middle in all estimation. Some migrant workers without papers were earning 3500 rmb/month at the time, but that was the absolute lower limit of things. That itself is just a headache to describe, how your quality of life depends extremely on what other people are making. You can definitely survive indefinitely on 8000 whatever-currency in an economy if there is a whole segment making making less than half; by definition that means you have access to a dating life, and whatever friends you have in Luxemburg or whatever making ten times your income don't even matter; they're in Luxemburg, you're in Shangers.

Is that enough to describe economics? Just bear in mind that costs are 40% less in China so you can't really do a straight line comparison. The quality of life is about 40% higher than if you were making the same income but seeing your friends who didn't even graduate university taking home a bit more than you. In a way, it's a sort of artistic Shangri-la, that can't be denied.

Well I've gotten away from myself again. The front image, the main thing is that when I arrived in Shangers for the first time, I had a confused crowd-written tour guide downloaded to my smartphone and it told me to get on the wrong bus, and suddenly I found myself at Jingan temple in one of the centres of the city, and seeing just a spot of green, walked into a park, and in a shady copse, I fell asleep! Yeah, far out, city of thirty million, but with my luggage just right there, I fell peacefully asleep in a little bit of woods, by a pond, and nobody molested me. Turns out later that that little park is the old foreigners' graveyard. Two hundred years ago fortune-seekers from the West who had failed, died of cholera or dystentery, ended up there, and that was a vote from the dead. Maybe it's morbid. But why did I end up there? And how could I just fall asleep in my first few hours in the city I'd live in for four years and counting?

Second major point, what is Shanghai? Well, it's the second city of China, the Osaka, Los Angeles, or St. Petersburg; the Manchester, Munich, or Marseilles. It's "counter" the main culture; it's feminine where Beijing, Tokyo, New York, Moscow, London, Berlin, or Paris are masculine "alpha-cities." It's the alternative. I loved it from the start. Beijing is a squat, twisted-face peasant suspicious and hostile to outsiders, and Shanghai is the free, internationalist, outgoing, port-city response. It's part Western in feel, that's the appeal. Beijing and Shanghai expats tend to be mutually hostile, just as Beijing learns Shanghai's nightclubs are open to 4am and then imposes a 2am curfew. Beijing's Washington D.C. rather than the free-wheeling Enyce. It's the maternal or paternal overseer rather than the wild child of excess. Beijing is suspicious of Shanghai. Long-term expats 'migrate' to Beijing. Beijing's the real China whereas Shanghai is China lite. The characterisations are endless.

I've invoke John Hadley one last time. Who, what, where, when, why, and how. I, the graphic artist 42, took on a contract from Sany Music as a label scout, in Shanghai, China from 2027 to 2031, as it was an interesting and fun if poor paying job, by myself in the aftermath of losing my first 49% share and then 33% share of a GreatWall restaurant in Beijing, thus reversing the so-called "typical" movement of the foreigner from Shanghai to Beijing, but finding myself more pleased and satisfied with my new setting in a port city and given a reprieve, so to speak, from obsessive Han culture. Expatriates number 1% of the Shanghai metropolis area and so you're surrounded by Han crowds, pushing and shoving and spitting for most of your day, and this amounts to "Shanghai is heaven for the rich and hell for the poor," yet working in the music industry gave me the creative contacts necessary to survive and then achieve some minor limited success as a graphic artist. It seems to be the case that I will start a family here with my wife, 822, a flat-faced peasant-type Chinese girl, but something of a gymnast, underdeveloped by Western standards of female beauty, but an object of attraction for the pervert, what can I say. John Hadley said, "imagine your audience and speak to one person," and I do that. I fulfill this basic writer's task.

You. You are a decent person whose parents have passed away leaving your younger siblings to take care of. Thus, you have entirely forgotten your dreams of college and spend most of your time making sure the little ones can graduate and possibly hopefully go to at least community college because things are tough, things are quite tough. You don't really have the luxury of thinking you're going to be able to travel and see all sorts of things, and learning foreign languages is an impossble luxury. Or you, you are a loving wife and mother who has suffered a medical condition. You're confined to home and television doesn't endlessly fill the hours. That is you; that is who I write for. I tell you this story in expiation and in communication. I know the paycheck from Sany says 11300 rmb, and I know royalties from FEN won't be more than a couple thousand on top. If I go teach English I can do 400rmb/hour but there's invariably 40 minutes there and 40 minutes back, the numbers aren't all that pretty in the end. Some people say, "make your house the English school," but it's a little different for a semi-public figure. I can't let a fan use my English teaching gig to get a free "tour of the author's house;" I keep it all compartmentalized come what may.

Perhaps it's all a luxury in the end. That's the promise and peril of hard core Communism, what with Mao Zedong's face on every bill and a portrait of the chairman at People's Square. What can I say? Each and every country has its privileges and drawbacks and possibly the access to women is what makes it all worth while for the China situation. From the moment you land at the airport, it's no exaggeration, the girls here are after you. The effeminate men, whatwith their flowing garments and thin wrists excitedly criticize you, "all foreigners are just here for women," but that's part of the whole societal picture. Few outsiders can understand.

I'll get to "peak experiences" soon, but the first half hour is the interesting part, maybe the first two weeks. You can sometimes see, at the airport, a girl hanging around uncertainly having just passed passport control and the seasoned expat knows what's up. She's frightened. She knows of all the travel warnings. Both the police and the taxi hustlers look dangerous. If you're of a certain gentlemanly streak, you offer assistance. The white face and taller height provide assurance: you're not out to kidnap, you've no problem finding women. Love affairs have begun on less. But beyond this, the incredible high you experience in the first few minutes of your first foreign country, there's also the matter of "being surrounded by the alien." Expat life offers a consolation to the lower income stream of the lifetime expat in that every moment is charged with the different and the oblique. One wakes up in Dalestown, Oklahome, takes the truck to the market, selects fruit and meats, and then returns home. There; that's it. Now run that again in Xian, China. Suddenly it's, one opens the elaborately carved door of the antique furnished apartment, meander your way across 1960s era Chinese style semi-public hallways to the elevator, notice the rat in a cage, the elderly mahjong players, the trees swaying, and stepping over some polluted puddle of chemical discharge, narrowly avoid a barely paid coolie on motorbike (deliveries; 25 rmb per), and enter the foreign supermarket. Inscrutable ideograms peer out from unfamiliar packages where you are just able to identify what is not cow tongue and goat liver, chicken eyeball and shark fin, whale brain and pig gallbladder to find the plain old veal and just navigate your way home.

Adventure, peril, "implication," and the puzzle of the every day: that's expatism. But while I've just discovered through my smartphone that "not having seen the world" isn't actually the number one death bed regret (it's fifth or something), "not being myself" actually is. So I'm being myself. It's who I am.

As a graphic artist, I've discovered that there's no stopping the flow. If you're drawing, if the pen is moving, somehow it all gets used in the end or gets sucked up into a later chapter. There's no point in holding back and waiting for the perfect word (le mot juste, according to Flaubert, who disagrees) because the perfect word doesn't exist. The era of "defining a style" has ended centuries ago and we're here on the darkling plain, equipped with torches rather than setting up the bonfire of civilization's beginning. Ergo, a quick numerical sequence:

2027: I begin my work with Sany and in conversation with the livehouse owners discover the quirky mathematician who runs electronic music nights. Apparently it can be precisely modeled, how much to raise and lower a pitch on the basic Pachelbel melody and its run on 60% of club nights. Though making almost nothing, I'm happy to discover that there are other eccentrics in the world with low salaries and strangely satisfying jobs.

2028: Negotiating with Sany, I get the same 11300 rmb/month contract but half-hours officially and live the life of the supreme being of leisure. At this time I begin Fenworld which is a net financial loss, but I manage to take a whole bunch of art classes and quickly get up to speed on my new hobby. I'm excited to attend a rare wedding in the art circles, and first get involved with MILKCOCOA.

2029: Salary increase with an incremental increase in hours. My peak experience is discovering the beach-zone near Huang-pu River. I look up some obscure historical sites, and I have a slightly 'down' year, although its useful in its own way for discovering the mechanics of the artist's life. 822 has a health problem as well which occupies a chunk of time.

2030: Beijing hosts the 2030 World Cup in a strange sequence of events dealing with international tragedy but despite the problems and its essentially non-existant World Cup team, still holds a competent event. This is considered the high point of Beijing's profile on the international stage, since it's before the Cyberia Data Republic incident, and its rounds out the Olympics – World Expo – World Cup trio of "national arrival" milestones. I manage to see the event from the outskirts by flying in once in a while and note its elevation of national mood. The city is manic.

So, possibly you're underimpressed. That's fine. Words flow out, the clouds skud past, and the clock ticks forward. A beach, a wedding, a down-year with artistic circle examination, and then the national event. Probably no more greater than your past four years, although 2031's 'peak event' is probably just going to be something musical related, that 'highest of arts' according to Schopenhauer. (Schopenhauer says that since music has no meaning, it therefore represents the pure will.)

Doing this numerical thing, I'm also aware that my obligation is also to point out weirdo strangeness. I mean, it can't all be gravy and honey, our house was kind of a dump and I think 822 endured it all only because she herself came from "grassroots," as the polite euphemism goes, backgrounds. It's one element of the Chinese female identity, and an excuse for a lot of things. That's a discussion for people other than myself. Yet I found wisdom, right? I had dallied with that truest of true love, that intensity that sweeps away and transforms you and takes you all over the world, but I'm not really to talk of 877, it's too intense for some people. Then I had found the Japanese 'koi,' the affection that flows across a country, a mother's feeling for her son, the domestic kind of love. That too has to be saved for another day, although maybe only a few months who knows. 822 is a flat-faced peasant-girl small, childlike, not even pretty by any mainstream standards. It's nice to think we'll find love, but if all you find is the desire to take care of someone a little more helpless than yourself, I'm not sure reams and reams of paper need be expended on that perfect burning love or that quiet hidden away thing. There's not much to her: that is the point. She is 822.

To not fully confuse matters I'm with 822 because the 7 got away and the 5 and I parted after things that were, I guess in the end, my fault. Yet with a girl who grew up in a dirty peasant's hovel in Yan'an Province, I might not be totally narcissistic to believe I'm improved her life. We're married—or to be absolutely precise, we're marrying right after I finish this. See, an engagement ring. Thought I'd never pull it off, did you? If the world batters you around, I guess the outcome is only when you've adjusted your heart to those parameters. The idea of an endless pleasure ride called mindless and mindless sex, hundreds of willing partners dies in the embrace of a woman who knows more than you. Possibly's that far to much for a thirty-something to claim, but we have some operating set of beliefs no matter what, and children sometimes speak the wisdom of ages in their babbling. It's my situation.

[We break for lunch, after which the subject continues.]

I've thought about this subject, Shanghai, more during mealtime. You know [subjects sighs]... the thing is that I think I'm a huge describer of trees and I'm always bad with the forest. Yeah, I have to confess that's the thing I am. A lot of my teachers at art school said that I seem to be beating out the curve in terms of volume of individual items that are good, but I lack the gestalt. It's probably a lifelong artistic problem of mine. I won't be able to fix it really. But somewhere in the volume there's god too, possibly. His face peeks out in the strangest corners.

Shanghai... Shanghai is like the woman who's been left behind on the wharf as you take the slow boat back to Blighty; she's staring at you with longing but she knows she won't be welcome in your world. It's a romantic kind of place, despite eighty years of communism. The image of Western architecture overcome with vines or falling into decay—that seems to summarize the place even though it's not quite tropical. You can imagine the feeling of walking through endless Cambodian temples and suddenly finding a French manor, but it's fallen into disarray. The French had the biggest concession there, actually, still with all the trees, Bubbling Well Road, Avenue de Joffres, etc. If you know the old names you're in two cities at once.

I'll tell you like a perfect night. I went out. Some African guy tried to sell me marijuana; I went into the converted bomb shelter that's a nightclub; I met a Japanese girl; I met two Italians. They forced on me their languages and I was trilingual all night, flirting without flirting, Western without Eastern, Eastern without Western. On champagne and bubbles in my blood, I had two phone numbers and the girls on tiptoe, and all around the poverty ridden Chinese sold their vegetables from their night carts and the Muslims roasted goat on charcoal grills, and just meters away, there was both French Empire architecture and Chinese low-rent squats. It's the juxtaposition, you know; you never get that in the developed country. You can't feel fully Western unless there's a swarm of really poor people around, and the issue of "haute couture models in Third World settings" which so angered Ray Bradbury completely misses the point. Style is style when it's in spite of poverty, not because of it. It's insouciance or a boldly individualistic girl. It's verve. You can't get all the great qualities in any one person nor in any one society, but you never feel quite that way in Japan. It's completely middle class in Japan.

Shanghai is like a girl in threadbare pantyhose, but she's still sexy and still forward. Japan's the cute little schoolgirl with perfectly put-together blazer and skirt, but inside she's terrified because her father's lost her job and everyone's faking they're still middle-class. I guess that comes off Sinophilic. You're one way or the other, though, and I've spent my lifetime in Shanghai's. Japan is elite, diffident, distant. Shanghai is close, democratic, but accepting and assertive. It's a country I guess I won't leave. The plan is that 2 and I are getting married shortly. It's a life love. But I can't escape numerics, I suppose, or my formal training. Everything has to be a tableau.

Un. This past summer, sitting at the expat bar that's a step up from the total dive or "English teachers' den," I'm at the "next step up," or the bar that still has near-Chinese prices but a little more of a pub feel, and possibly has foreign management or co-ownership. At this place, famed for its daily specials (small hamburgers on Monday; chili on Tuesday; fish and chips Wednesday; chicken wings by the piece on Thursday, etc.), I am glancing at the 'Gray Lady,' who is a Scotswoman of, again, not quite English teacher background but not really the finance sector, tall, late twenties, gray eyes, and containing an air of glamour and possibility. I'm there on the threshold; we've spoken for about a half hour and we're both aware of the possibilities of becoming a "power couple;" one of the talked about couples in expat society who together are able to fit in anywhere, whether the cheapest grunge punk rock event amidst mud and grease and squalor or an elite Chamber of Commerce dinner with the best company and top educations. I can leave 2; I can forget the "expat's life" and recreate intelligent society of the best of the west, but the best of the west in the east. All of Shanghai awaits; we've flirted; she's mussed her hair; all I have to do is walk forward—but against all that possibility, my girlfriend is waiting at home, and my love affairs have run their course. Should I have gone forward? I might at this moment be brokering some financial deal in a serviced apartment, having worked with the Gray Lady to access the real information markets and finance byways. But against this entire shift of life, I allow myself to float away...

Deux. I'm sitting on the constructed beach at Huang-pu, looking at that famed skyline that is the pride of peasant China, skyscrapers, the Pearl Tower, and these massive 40-story apartment buildings with penthouses that represent the full untrammeled wealth of the true white collar class. It's Friday a little before lunch; I admire this trio of Germans who have a motor trike, (I've never actually gotten the driving down in China; it's far too insane); 2 is sitting off to the side on one of the outdoor beds; I can order mojitos delivered to us, but I'm at the moment preoccupied with the beach sand. It's actually the worst day—the pool is being drained and refilled for the weekend's crowd, but on the way there, in beach attire and clutching a large fluffy towel some tourists gawk at me, unaware that leisure isn't restricted to the developed countries. It's a moment of true expathood and dissociation from the entirety of the universe.

Trois. Sany has sent me to meet and greet a 17 year old who has heard of guitar school in Osaka and wants to know if she's a genuine creative who's going to spend seventy hours a week playing the guitar or just a Chinese peasant who's figured out a clever way to get a student visa to Japan. We go to one of their showcase things, and in a simulation of the 60s era student revolt, the music school is running a faux "revolutionary" event which you know is faux only because they use a little heart inside the red stars they're sporting on their gear. The students give "revolutionary" speeches from a balcony while the audience, in on the concept, appreciatively applauds each "declaration of honesty and manifesto of dedication to the revolution." It's a real photo-op event because all the elderly in China can just remember when such things were real, and all the shouted Chinese does come off as intensely revolutionary even if you know it's an event.

Quatre. Technically this takes place in Beijing, but it happened during Shanghai days so I include it here. After going to a folk-punk group show, one has to be part of industry to get word of the decamping out to a further commercial crash with VIPs passes to the industry room, but then one has to be actually personally and with it, to even find out about the after-after-party which is in an illegal venue, a residential hutong through which you pass two heavy oak doors to be surrounded completely by people who have completely flung away all practical lives to live as musicians. The Chinese Janis Joplin lounges in one corner with her leather jacket discussing something through a translator with a half-English guy who wants to video-document her first meeting with her parents in years while a tattered tribute poster to Cui Jian is hanging on the wall. Amidst all this pure-industry only individuals, you sip a beer and just soak it all in.

Cinq. Overcome by all the hustle and bustle of city life, you jump out by bullet train to the Tibetan plateau, 4500m. For some time you've struggled with a 4000m peak that's not too far away, but suddenly by public transportation you've shot past this distance. Following the old adage, "if you plan it out weeks in advance, it's a failure; if you just go do it, it works, everything always works the first time," you spy a mountain and just walk up it. Suddenly you're at 5800m above the surface of the earth atop a peak where it almost seems like the wind spirits can pick you up and dash you down a sheer cliff. The entire world is just below you, at your feet, stretching to an infinity if not for the haze of dust and pollution. With your windbreaker, you're not really capable of remaining for long at this snowline elevation, but you've done it.

Six. The problem of "2 pm." Most 9-5 job holders don't realize that music professionals have a problem at 2 pm. Where do they go? What do they do? It's the sinkhole of the day, in which there's no possible work to be done, and nobody is really out or about, nor does anyone really want to meet each other since they're all going to start seeing each other in five hours' time. I remember one in particular, a Mexican restaurant we had all crawled into hung-over and bleary, and just sat there in silence with Ray-bans on. Everyone had that year's fad cell phone which we kept on the glassine table. The restaurant had faux murals; not far away just down the street there were 1960s Cultural Revolution slogans in extremely faded paint. "Snap." A photo.

Sept. Her sisters (not sisters in real life; I use this term in the Mandarin sense, to refer to any 'mate' or 'close associate.') having departed the scene, 2 decides to shine and like a 1996 Atlanta summer olympics chinese women's gymnastics team, she's turning somersaults and doing splits. Bring out your psychotherapeutic doctors or whatnot, answer the exact question: why would an educated, socially secure, upper-middle class Western male find something like this intriguing? Well yes the theory goes the ideal love (AI) is two partners, both at the top of their performance, both in the groove, both in the flow. (KOI) is one person taking care of another, a mother's love for her son, an eternal older sister bringing up the child in the man. The 30-something man with an apparent 12 year old girlfriend (hey folks, her papers say 17) is at most the DAISUKI, great like, or simple love, uncomplicated and straightforward. We call it that when we know the past was the past.

Huit. It's the 2030 World Cup, and there's fireworks in the air, reflecting off the rivers and Suchow Creek. I've a handful of snack foods and the gang is out to escape all our worries and the anxieties of the future. Yet this one time, we can forget all the chaos of life and strife and the worrisome fear-mongers in the media. The blue LEDs that Shanghai claims to have invented are everywhere and in this neonistic city, our cabs reveal holographis on the windshield to advertise the smooth taste of milk liquor. Yet the great bridge rises up suddenly, unexpectedly, and for a brief, shimmering moment, it feels like we can live this way forever.

Neuf. Something dark. The regular drummer's fallen sick and backups one and two are nowhere to be found. I'm roped into keeping percussion on that secondary way of making money, the wedding band, but ah-ha, upon arriving, a sudden realization why nobody else can make it. It's a gangster's ball, some party labor chief good at destroying strikes is providing his daughter to a true organized group from South China, Dongguan, city of sin. All the shady individuals present are eager to present their business cards to the Westerners, a sign of face and respectability, but we're all too frightened out of our wits to do more than politely accept. We have a big argument afterwards with the booker, as obviously that was a disaster waiting to happen.

Dix. Our little Hong Kong girl with all the cultural inclinations turning towards England rather than China is actually a fey, tallish, tomboy who "floats above" swarming Chinese society. For her graduation speech she talks about the necessity to carry on despite what "friends and lovers" do, and there's an exchange of looks among the Australian guitarist and the Brazilian trombone player. To add further complexity to the scene, the mother has seen me twice, privately. I think it's all a little joke, but she suddenly turns fat afterwards so I am given to understand that she had actually been quite serious.

Onze. Competing music festivals—two groups centered around music festivals and briefly you can bounce back and forth between two competing music festivals on the same long weekend. The trials and tribulations of internal Chinese society are impossible to decipher yet it's said those completely outside the system are actually quite well off. The mistake is to partially enter it. "Bubble foreigner" strategy bounces up against the reality that some entryists report a string of a hundred girlfriends. Nobody seems really impressed, until in an echo of the whole MilkCocoa affair, there is that weird moment when the bands seem to be arguing with each other, competing lyrics actually just your imagination running wild unless it isn't.

Douze. Up so amazingly high it's kind of wondrous what lack of regulations and a lawsuit culture can do, we partake of an outdoor patio on the 88th floor, looking over the square miles of skyscrapers, and concluding that China has definitely arrived. Christo from Chungking is in town and complaining about his real estate, but everything turns from the stupid Chinese bar game of dice to the much more complicated game of "what-if?"

2.

[Subject returns the next day, seemingly none the worse for wear, dressed casually but stylishly, 'UNIQLO' chic, khakis, robin's egg blue polo, a scarf that signals an aesthete's sensibilities. After more heavy drinking of coffee and cigarette smoking, the subject continues.]

People ask, "what are you getting out of China? Why would you live in that hellhole?" What they don't get is that in the space of 4.5 years in Shanghai, I think I've passed on half a dozen opportunities, genuine real opportunities. You just get that anymore in the West. Although listening to me talk, you've already picked up I see the world in visual terms. Can't say I've hallucinated these opportunities, but listen to three Westerners talking at a bar in New Jersey. What do you hear? Well, (a) the factory that used to make steel got lit up for a film and hundreds of people lined up outside because they thought it was re-opening. (b) There's some new government welfare fund being organized to match 10% of profits for all small businesses that open up in Camden for the first year; it being completely assumed that making a profit is so hard in that zone that the government has to provide incentives or food simply won't be shipped there. (c) There's some new psychosomatic laughing disorder in smalltown Jersey, and the high school cheerleaders started laughing hysterically and now they had to shut down the school.

That's the issue, see. That's what people talk about when they talk in the West. Actually I've had to distance myself a bit from engineering and science types here in the city because they seem to talk about nothing else about the decline of the West, which is a pain in the ass because they're the applied types; they're going to be making $50k/year eventually somewhere, so I really don't need to hear it; my life's tough enough. (My salary's quite low, too.)

But you get it, anyway. I'm a visual artist. It's twelve tableaux twelve frozen memories, although I'm sure I'm missing heaps, just giving you the broad scan before you plunge in, get to know the city. Shanghai is the Biggest Urban / Conurbanation in the World. It's 30 million people. That's a lot of skyscrapers. Some places you just walk for miles and see nothing but huge housing complexes, shooting up in the sky. Yet, that's its weakness and that's its strength.

What outsiders don't get. What people "who would never move to China don't get," is that expat life is pretty high end here. You have to realize money is relative. To make $40k/year in the U.S. is to always wonder why you can't get ahead or keep up with others. To make $40k/year in Shanghai is absolute tops. It's upper upper middle class, several servants, serviced apartment, the works. The Chinese do things in broad masses—their holidays, most famous—are declared two weeks beforehand by the Politburo and suddenly the entire country goes on vacation for a week. That makes for huge economies of scale someplaces, and huge opportunities in a sense in others. I've had rich Chinese just drop $5k to me with regard to some work thing; you hear stories like this all the time, foreigners being paid just to man the front desk at a corporation to show "hey, we have white people working here." Everything moves on a gigantic, massive scale here and if you start the master the language and you begin to dance with the culture, cash can hit you like a ton of bricks. You see heaps of people all the time, washed up at home, trashy failures, and then three years later they have a Chinese Volvo. It's not 100% the Swedish Volvo, but it's a joint venture and a lightyear ahead of Great Wall or whatever those trashy Chinese vehicles are.

The end result is that there is easy money to be made. You just have to be nimble....

[The subject appears ready to go on, but I am compelled to interrupt. A day's interview has been more or less wasted, and we can't indulge all these 'artistic flights of fancy' and 'verbal pictures from a visual artist's mind' endlessly. Time is a resource like anything else, and I am required to show some assertiveness with regard to the issue.

'Mr. Forteaux, I apologize to interrupt. Unfortunately I understand completely that you are an 'artistic temperament' and would wish to go on endlessly on your vein of thought. Unfortunately, we don't have the luxury to indulge you so endlessly.' (Forteaux looks dismayed, and then attentive. In one sense, he knew this was going to happen all along.) 'What I am asking for are the straight and outright facts, not flights of fancy. You are Mr. Forteaux; your fiancee's name is Yan. In one kind of thinking, congratulations, you find the comedy after all in life, ending the next few weeks' in a marriage between you and as you describe her, the 'flat faced' Yan, which is your happiness and your life in China. But others disagree: China is full of pollution, the people on the streets are uncommonly rude and aggressive to strangers, and much of what goes on in business and administration is highly corrupt and owing to financial bribery. These are things everyone knows and we are not looking for a tourist's brochure guide to China. We just want the facts of your life, without embellishment or 'set pieces' or 'visual tableaux.' If I wanted 'visual tableaux' I would watch a Jean Luc Goddard movie. Please, Mr. Forteaux, stick to the facts. Start at the beginning. Qi is out; we agreed to avoid politics; and everything about Wu can be reserved for some other day. Why did you come to Shanghai? What are your circumstances? How do you see you future?"]

Okay, okay, fine you win.

My name is J. Nicholas Forteaux. I'm 37 years old, a Canadian from Toronto, Canada, educated in Switzerland and the UK, who's a part-time talent scout for Sany Music, Japan; a web-publishing sensation for my graphic novel 'FENWORLD,' and occasional English coach to rich Chinese businessmen. I'm engaged to be married to my future wife, Alissa Yan, who is a native Shanghaiese girl frequently mistaken for being underaged as she's four feet ten and eighty-five pounds, and a friend of mine from Xinjiang and Beijing days. As agreed from the start, we are avoiding politics. We are not talking about Xinjiang. We will talk about Beijing at some future date. Alissa was the little sister to two slightly older girls, Qi and Wu; Qi whom we'll never speak of and Wu which we will discuss some other day. I'm happy with my life. I look forward to the challenges of becoming a father and husband. It's not 2027 or 2031 but actually 2021. There's been some border conflicts in Siberia between rising China and the newly constituted Russian Dominion, but the world is as bloody, messed up, and chaotic as it's always been. Or maybe things got more unsteady and chaotic since 2012 or thereabouts.

In truth, you'll never understand me. I'm an event promoter and DJ and label scout and live music aficionado. I built up Shanghai's pop rock scene; the people who know me and who stop me on the street to chat are an investment in myself; they're who will get my back and they're ultimately the people who pay my bills. I don't make more than 2000 euros a month, but easily five times that switches places through my hands because I can get you comped at Velvet, and I'll have lunch at the place atop Shelter. I was behind the card-themed bar in the northern part of the French Concession; I once owned a restaurant in Beijing; and I basically have the city wrapped around my finger. I don't really care too much for you, Mr. Interviewer-Know-It-All, but you live your life by your Western titles and fixed salaries and expect the water to come on when you turn the tap, every single time. I don't need that. I'm happy to do laundry in a bucket; I've done so countless times.

You know what you're missing? You know what you can't understand? You're like my friend Mickey the lawyer whose ridden only taxies since starting work in Shanghai, and who jets off to one hotel or another every other weekend doing presentations on investment opportunities in Florida, but he's never noticed the make-it-yourself soup store right in front of his apartment. He's in China, but not really. He doesn't talk to anybody in his apartment complex, and they all respect him as a white and a foreigner but they think he's totally out of the loop. He's surviving, sure, but he won't last. You can always tell who's going to last. You always know who's going to stick around for the seven years it takes before you're fluent in Mandarin. China is a universe. It's a world into itself. You outsiders will just never get it.

You're curious; you want to know about a life different from yours. I'll tell you. It's not hard for me to describe. Okay, Friday. You wake up. The clock says 2pm. You're still in sweat-drenched club clothes because you went out last night even though there wasn't much, but the DJ was a friend of a friend you're developing to improve your contacts in Seoul. Tangled in bed with you are your fiancee, Yan, who's small and childlike, and another girl, Sonya Xu, who's slim and petite and at least decent looking, and that's the thing, man. That's what you don't get. China's a man's paradise. The girls are there to serve. They understand that you're saving them from the life of the 8000 yuan/month that their father makes after fifteen years with one manufacturing company. The balance of power is totally weighted to the Westerner, the white Westerner man, and it is the one place on earth that lowly English teachers have three girlfriends. That's just the way things are. If you're a fat, bloated American girl with no Asian background then probably you should stay at home. Fine there's pollution. Fine there's disease in the water and the plumbing systems aren't always perfect. But the situation is just what it is, and after shooing away Sonya, you can jump out to a city, you can call for dumplings to be delivered; you can slide off your black satin sheets to hit the remote for your mood lighting, and in your 27th story penthouse, you can pause to think about just how excellent your life is. But maybe just to keep things up and peppy, you'll jump out the clothes stall market, bargain mostly for the sense of keeping up relationships, get your iPhone unlocked, and just reflect on how excellent you are.

Almost, so to speak, by definition, if you always keep a strict accounting of your expenses and income, if you know exactly the unemployment rate of the UK down to the decimal point, if you think of life as a sort of arrangement of boxes and steps that are always one hundred degrees this way, and then a shift and turn one hundred degrees that way, you'll never get how the anarchy all works. There's no social security here. There's no Environment Agency. Everything you buy at the market is haggled over, and Wang Fu the toothless old peasant from China actually has a million quai in the bank but you'd never know it. The Chinese system is built around the market, and then irrelevantly the police are trying to tame the anarchy and failing. That's why the outsider never gets it. They fly in, see the street stalls and sidewalk vendors and then they get scared and run for home. Only the Chinese could build socialism. Only the Chinese know how to sign a contract and then get an additional 10% discount after the fact. It's a juggernaut, and they're completely prepared for win. They're driving everyone else in the world mad.

At 2pm—you know—at 2pm you wake up, you pile your bevy of Chinese hotties out of bed, and you hit the sleek black display to get your Bauhaus shower running, you scrape your face with a Gillette, and you put on Old Spice, you get yourself at least decently dressed, you run into five people you know on the way to and inside the silk market, and your cellphone is already buzzing with texts. For dinner you eat at the Greek restaurant because the owner put in a lot of patronage at the skyscraper place near the Bund, and then your day begins. Because the club and the crowds and the music are all being created by professionals and all the professionals know each other. One party after another. One nod and one quick conversation and one introduction, and deals being brokered at 7pm for events three months from now. You got the fliers being made up, and you're going to do a vinyl sign, and you pick up your iPhone which was been unlocked, 300 quai, and then you head out into the hot Shanghai night. The taxis are streaming, the handbags are being knocked-off and then hustled off the road, and all the lights are glittering. Friday. Friday. It's on everyone's mind, but the industry folk consider it just the start of the workweek. We have saxophonists coming in who have agreed to do three or four shows depending on take, and I'm balancing all the pot-smoking folk musicians from Wisconsin against one cool cat pianist who just on colour is going to bring in the crowds. [Laughs.] That's the beginning of the Friday night.

[Mr. Forteaux went off for nearly an hour more, but I've redacted this content as all in all, that hour's worth consisted primarily of "You don't get it," "I've seen a thousand people like you come in to Shanghai and don't last six months," "You're stupid," and "The system is different here. It's totally misunderstood." I don't especially believe Nick has become Communist; it's just that it's clear that he's bought into the system and his value per se in the economy is all strictly local. Nick has contacts and a place in the music-arts-drinking world, the 'water economy,' so he knows who is going to get him fed next week. Still, I've noticed that his apartment stinks of cats, and furthermore, I actually cajoled him to show me this afternoon that he is describing, and he overpaid for the iPhone unlocking, he seemmed to negotiate extremely poorly for getting a vinyl sign printed up, and following his instructions for how to get an airplane ticket, I ended up overpaying myself over Internet prices. Nick apparently doesn't use the Internet very much except on his phone, and he's cut off from what a calm, sedate, eyes-open Westerner can do by himself.

Because of Nick's over-excitation, I scheduled our next meeting for a week hence, and in a series of interviews I believe I've gotten the heart of his experience in Shanghai. To better organize this material, now that his personality is established, I've organized that in specific topics below. Really everything up to know probably has to be taken with a grain of salt; promoters know how to promote themselves, they are their own brand, and I'm not sure that living in China is a skill set of its own accord, for 1.3 billion Chinese do it every day. There's pollution. I got sick in my few weeks here from food-poisoning. It seems a grimy, slick, poverty-ridden place. But in any case, without further ado, the topics of the next few weeks,

MILKCOCOA:]

Well, Coco you know, there's a special girl in my life. [Nick appears wistful.]

Well it all started on some random Thursday when Shanghai Daily did a two-page centerfold article on her; you know, centerfold meaning a special two page article not a pin-up, although it had Coco's face right in the middle, a third of the centerfold. She was unusual. The nongs didn't get her. She jumped around in goth makeup blood-splatter and sang death metal for a while, and then eased back into indie pop, sounds of Death Cab for Cutie with a splash of Cranberries. The truth of the matter isn't extremely complicated. Her music was corresponding to a number of painters' output, and between all the stories I heard, she seemed the centre of art world Shanghai for a while.

I know that Sany did pick her up, but only for music teaching at the mouth of the Tamagawa in Tokyo. She's had input for Sei-Owa, that's a top band. It's just some internal thing they have, artists consulting on other artists, 'creative input' or whatever they term it.

I don't know if there's heaps more to talk about her. People have read the write-up; she's really cute, she has those Chinese girl bangs, she dances a lot. It's an interesting little setup she has, or had. I hope she's well.

[FEN/PHEN]

Fenworld lasted about eighteen months, putting out a handful of pages a day for Shanghai's first art zine, and then I'm working on the sequel Fen/Phen. It's my little thing.

[THE PAST/BEIJING/GREATWALL]

Well, you said we're going to definitely talk about this far more at some later date, although it might not be you in particular who's going to interview me about this. The fact of the matter was is that I had a one third share in a Beijing restaurant but it's been grabbed out of my possession. That was the old days, when I had Wu, Qi and Yan and was living with three girls. Blows your mind. Wu was a caretaker, "older sister" type girl. Qi survived seven weeks in a prison cell, and went off to fantastic things in Cyberia. Yan is who I'll marry.

[BREAKDOWN OF THE FOURTH WALL]

The tradition began in ~1904 when the British Empire had its Silver Jubilee or World's Fair featuring the still-remembered "Crystal Palace," a temporary glass/transparent building in Hyde Park inside of which were manufacturers of all the world. An Expo or Fair is a sort of national party, illustrating the global reach of a great power, although its importance as a national event has sharply decreased in the West. The honour, for which cities once competed, is now seen as aa dramatic expense, one whose value goes to the attendees rather than the city. The city enjoys little lasting impact or development, the attendees get a trip of a lifetime.

Britain's World Fair showed what was revolutionary of the time: working steam locomotives, of course, but these had existed for eighty years. More importantly, 1904 was the beginnings of a consumer life: before then, most people had a hovel, some handmade clothes, the basics of kitchen and farm implements. Tradesmen earned more wages if they owned tools. So, the exhibition showed the beginnings of what was promising to be a golden age of the British Empire: a sewing machine in every home, trade goods from India, all the early manufactures that would dramatically improve the lifestyle of the UK elite and middle classes. It was an optimistic and forward looking event.

Next, in the 1920s, the US had the first of its two great expos, the 1920s St. Louis World Fair, which, in the aftermath of WWI, demonstrated the US's global reach, its manufactures, and all the countries that came to represent themselves. 1964 saw the New York's Space Age World Expo, its theme the opening of a new frontier. We'd all live in Jetsons floating buildings with white plastic kitchens, furniture, and futurist robots.

Within this tradition, China electing to bid for and then get the 2010 World Expo represented both a continuation of the declarations of national arrival as well as a declassé revival of a forgotten tradition. "We don't really care about World Expos," declared most Europeans. "The very idea of having one is old-fashioned." Whatever the expectations of the organizers, however, of course 97%+ of attendees, 73 million in all, would be Mainland Chinese. 6% of the population. Only a tiny fraction of foreigners/non-Chinese would attend—and Expo is not really enough inducement to get a person to invest $700 in travel costs, which is a sort of absolute minimum a trip to China costs.

In reflection of the non-importance of the event even to Chinese, I got an apartment less than 300m away from the main entrance for some $400/month. Prices barely went up in the neighbourhood—most people would spend money inside the grounds and not linger at even restaurants a hundred meters away. But, because of proximity, I guess I saw it all. I was the most forwardly-located Western observer of the entire phenomenon—a dozen visits, almost every major pavilion. I knew, moreover, many of the countries from my travels and could manage basic conversation with each.

Naturally, of course, rich European countries made the best pavilions. What occurred, of course, was that the Chinese government established the grounds, restaurants, several industrial and regional pavilions, and then set aside space for each country. The Europeans, who understood state diplomacy, having invented it, went all out with 100x200m national buildings that held several hundred attendees at once. Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, Russia, Spain—these were all the first tier of gigantic complexes and in many cases, a smaller commercial, tourist, or city building. Of the non-European nations, Saudi Arabia, Japan, South Korea, Australia and India, and just about Indonesia, put up "First Tier" buildings using the maximum space allocation and containing multiple floors and displays. For 60 million+ attendees, it would be their one and only chance to see the country in question.

Now what major countries are missing? Well—drumroll—the United States and the United Kingdom. Why? Well, if the Chinese people's declaration that they are an arriving nation, the vanguard of revolution, that the Chinese are now, finally, overthrowing the chains of imperialism, then automatically the UK and US are the opposing, declining force; the imperialists and racists who interfered in "a century of humiliation" within China and now still hope for its collapse. The question is begged who must be departing if somebody is arriving. Because of this innate, baked-in outlook conflict, the UK and US only reluctantly participated in China's national party. The UK built a tiny, but beautifully crystal (hence, subtly evoking their own fair) hedgehog, containing only seeds—reflecting environmentalist concerns—while the US dithered and delayed, sought commercial sponsors and finally put together on a site now located off the main axis, a fairly large but bland box, being mostly movie screens and moving walls, the stuff of Disney. Actually Disney itself was finalizing plans for a Shanghai park—admission to US partners would be a profit-making venture.

For the world traveler, culture specialist, gourmet and linguistics specialist, each 2-3 hour tour of the national buildings would be an experience enriched by actual knowledge. The committee in each case built a site for benefit of an expanding and enriching class; the third-placed observer could partake and for comment based on personal decision, resulting in explanation both of national taste and national decision-making. When that observer superfically appeared to be Chinese, the result perhaps was the most depth-explanation of all.

Clearly special laurels have to exist for the "note quite absolute Atlanticist/US European countries." Although there can be differences in taste and if by chance you were in Denmark when the musician/cell-player was there, you had a special treat, the top tier of European countries have to be commended for displays that were worth a visit during a concert or performance or not. Italy, perhaps, wins top honors, allocating an entire million-dollar Ferrari mounted out on an angle to show ceramic brakes, state-of-the-art turbochargers, composite panels, and an 800hp+ V-12 engine—pistons, fuel injectors, radiator—demonstrating that while the automobile may be more firmly integrated into American life—where everybody drives—the Italians still retain the edge in craftsman appeal and specialist design. Those excellent and futuristic vehicles—there were a few cars displayed—made the subtle point that while Lexus and Infiniti were perhaps the global upper-middle class preferred in quality and reliability, for absolute sex appeal and performance, nothing could surpass the Italian super chariot. It's not just a matter of handling and sheer acceleration—in an Italian vehicle you could imagine yourself to be in Italy physically, with its concerns of fashion, cuisine, style and music rather than introverted, self-cringing, squinty Japanese close-mindedness. To be born Italian was a glorious blessing, to be born to drive an American Oldsmobile was a sad fate, a curse or failure.

That was the first major display. The rest of the pavilion featured pottery from archeological digs (including a live workshop) as well as fashion. Nobody could dispute Italian clothing ideas and the Italian name was a sign of correct and forward thinking. Italy's suspended grand piano, its exhibits on composers, and its parquet floors set off by white walls was part of the reason Italy retained the pavilion after the Expo as a permanent culture house for Italian design. It was not a major success and today seven years later, the Expo site is still deserted and underdeveloped, but presumably ten years from now there will in fact be luxury housing there.

So Italy won top honours, but then the situation becomes a bit more complicated. Between Germany and France, for example, do we give more credit to the French concept of awrap-around promenade that took in the central with, was it, Rodin's sculpture, or do we salute Germany's "Fireball" crowd participation event that gave the people something to do? That would be an example of a toss-up, both pretty good, but arguably not the second best.

At the slight risk of controversy, I'll go out on a limb and call the Netherlands the second best national pavilion. The reasoning here is a bit complex. Any of the first tier has an argument for or against—the Danes had brought their Little Mermaid and gave a clear plastic cell prformance; the Swiss had a moving seats ride through a simulated Alps; Poland's exterior showed lacework design; the Greeks had grapeleaf for 10rmb—accessible to peasants and limited budgets—but the argument for the Netherlands is that it is, after all, a fairly small country. Had the Dutch just built a relative "place-holder," nobody would have been extremely criticized. But they went out and created a series of little suspended rooms accessible by exterior walkway. The outside was pretty, the displays showed Dutch products and design; because the walkway was accessible, just about everyone—including one-day only visitors—got to see the pavilion rather than had to trade-off (picking and choosing only what they could get to see) and at the end the Dutch staff gave out cheese cubes. I tried to troll the staff. "Hier ist käse?" and without an eye, the staff replied in Dutch rather than German, "Yes, this is cheese." A classy response to the attempted insult.

Dutch culture is not unbelievably perfect: that's not the point. One doesn't feel swept away by depth of outlook or excellence of life, it's just that for such a tiny country, clearly the output from the nation is remarkable and impressive even today. Philips electronic goods had great market penetration in the PRC and the Dutch, although notable mostly for their bright, childlike color palette of fashion colors and seeming work ethic, industry, and innocence, nonetheless managed not to make huge numbers of enemies. They were traders and middlemen, they were merchant marines and ineffectual Peace Keeping Officers. The Dutch somehow almost led Allied forces to disaster in the East Indies and joined the SS to no great damage to their historical reputation. Their pavilion had some tiny canvas by Van Gogh, who they imprisoned, and they had a prime location and punched above their weight. So, the Netherlands Pavilion through accesibility rather than any one display or experience, earned the #2 spot and sold Heineken and frites on the ground level.

If calling the #2 pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo 2010 is difficult, #3 is a multi-stage headache. Doesn't Saudi Arabia's moon boat, by virtue of its continued existence after exposition close signify how this most expensive of all pavilions fare? Shouldn't France's interpretation of an entire Michelin-starred restaurant complete with viewing portal to the kitchen deserve accolades? Shouldn't we at least rate "the magic forest" of the children-focused Russian house? Yes, all of these are excellent points, but a personal write-up ultimately has to reflect tough calls and personal tastes, so the JAPAN PAVILION gets the bronze medal in my estimation.

The first and most complex point is that we have to provide some scale adjustment for difficulty of taste. The Japanese, although physically closer with all the advantages of that, nevertheless have to navigate the most negative of all national relationships—the Sino-Japanese—yet at the same time they also have to be true to themselves. Thus, the "spikey purple bedbug" design, was a triumph of innocuous cutesy style, distinctly national, yet forward-thinking, and it was well-thought out inside, all nooks and crannies used, to show both technological displays (water-recycling), robotics, cameras with facial recognition, and a full theatre that showed robotics in a ballet-inspired modern dance. The staff members had to actually work—unlike in Spain's and Germany's—and they were supported by locally hired guides, giving a nice feminine touch. Japan's Okura restaurant was authentic; the commercial pavilion in Puxi was a nice annex, and the totality demonstrated good taste and balance. You got a free culture show and paintings displayed, but you also saw some recent "helper robots" that showed where Japanese industry was going.

Although an expensive GTR would have been a nice capstone, of course every pavilion can't do everything. Japan's national pavilion showed a good range without being dominated by any one thing. Moreover, its "spikey purple bedbug" was memorable—who remembers the Korean design? Who can describe the French architecture in three words? All in all, Shanghai Expo 2010's bronze medal.

Describing the top three pavilions I think captures much of the experience of the physical Expo, the question now is a human one. Which crowds, people, conversations stand out as excellent, bearing in mind that of course the richer countries continue to have the advantage in this task, capable as they are of more and greater displays and personnel.

Winner #1 in the human dimension or "public diplomacy" I guess is France. Both Germany and France held "city buildings," but the French staff was actively friendly, rewarding my singing Les Marseilles with a bag of free crisps. The Germans just showed their teeth and told me to move on after I tried to belt out the Horst. The French attitude was a nice touch and the aforementioned in-pavilion restaurant certainly deserves a shout-out, even though the Chinese girl at the front desk couldn't reach French, pathetic. I'll also fold in points to the French since the Belgian pavilion, although small, had a brasserie. See, cuisine builds friendships. Good beer.

Cuba wins the #2 slot. Again, we're adjusting for national resources—but every Cuban was smiling the whole time, unlike Chile's house manager, who couldn't be bothered to return a friendly "Buenas dias." I would have talked more to them, but Angola's took my interest, explaining socialist doctrine at length whilst reviewing the history of her much invaded country. Africa's group pavilion did accomplish through numbers and cooperation what any one country could not. The unique African food was an experience, and the hand carvings perhaps the best store items.

Once again #3 is a conundrum. Does the Uruguayan or Chilean big screen TV showing the World Cup get special honors? Mexico's welcome upon hearing a North American accent? Finland's white wolf pelts? Estonia's wind tunnel—although never when I saw it? I overheardd but could not linger for Australia's blues guitar hooks, whereas the Indonesian restaurant might have been best value for money. (Australian food offerings being pretty fast food, all in all.) Actually the PLO and North Korea set-ups were of course big experiences, but in pure friendliness, naturally, Israel was more cosmopolitan, placing my accent to within a few hundred miles. Smiles from Nigeria—in fact, some Chinese girls thought I was rescuing them—but none too many from South Korea, who thought I was Chinese. Iran's rugs, Egypt's artifacts, Spain's animatronic baby, India's pretty architecture. I run out of lists.

3.

Since time immemorial, the advice given frequently to workshop writers has always begun with "do not under any circumstances write a poem about writing a poem." It's been done. It's been done. It's been done. Still, the problem of narrative focus and narratological identity might be argued to remain open for the question of the extended prose piece, as opposed to the poem. Actually maturity might be realizing that you simply don't care. It doesn't matter, it really doesn't. I'm thinking in particular of the inestimable CLOUD ATLAS as well as Murakami's short "The New York Mining Disaster." Simple first-read analysts should wave their hand in dismissal of these post-modern word games, but somehow strangely this particular micro-speciality continues to exist despite its naysayers, and further, since you've reached this sentence, by definition you haven't thrown down this work in disgust yet.

This light novel "822" was originally conceived of as appended to the work FENWORLD, bringing up the possibility that the entire 25th century world of FW is merely an artistic creation of a near-future struggling artist in Shanghai of about 2020: one book nestled inside the other. Yet, upon finishing FW, I thought that third and last twist was a little too much, and the first two sections could stand by themselves. Furthermore, the trend in one significant literary market has been towards the "light novel" rather than the tome novel; a benchmark of twenty thousand words having been reached, FW stands on its pluses and minuses by itself, with whatever consequences associated with its peculiar genre or specifications to come. That freedom having been opened, this work 822 also becomes a standalone piece, possibly in reference to the earlier work or fully capable in its own peculiar way of being a text that requires no other point of reference. To be absolutely thorough, this very sentence is also a problematic simultaneous reference to its self and inherent to the nature of its larger containing work. All of this amounts to a headache.

My interest in covering Shanghai as a city comes about partly from an old university classmate of mine, who wrote up my blurb that I have been "examining the socio-political revolutionary changes on the Asian continent." In the world of East Asian or Oriental Studies, the divide between China scholars and Japan scholars has been noted repeatedly, with the former, in one sense of thinking, considered the "deeper and more profound" specialization. I can't resolve this irresolvable conflict, nor, actually, can I even answer the question, "has the Chinese revolution been a success." Like Zhou Enlai, I'm left to utter the cryptic reply, "it remains to be seen," but any coverage of Shanghai and China necessarily takes on a deep and polyglot nature. Japan is a teacup created seemingly spontaneously yet containing subtle depth. China is a gigantic world and universe unto itself, the scholarship of which I can add only in the form of a teaspoon pouring into a sea. 822 moreover saw its intellectual birth as part of a three-part series, 822, 855, and 877 published in reverse order and spanning the coverage of a country seen through three of its women. Yet events intervened, I cannibalized my own notebooks to elicit whatever the dragon that came out, and pursuing whatever kef-haze dreams I saw, I created this work and it is whatever it is. Nobody can answer the question of 'China, the 21st century juggernaut' because in a sense all futures are possible.

In truth, you've become liberated when the important thing is the output flow, and the meta-, misdirectioning, alternative aspects of this work are key to this work since it's unclear whether it's narrator, character, or author who is speaking right now, and in all truth, it shouldn't even matter. The issue at stake is whether the China expat or Japan expat has a better view of reality or brighter future, and such a question cannot be answered outright either. Either Nick42 "gets" what living abroad is all about, or his interviewer. Either it's better to live in Japan on contract for eight years before you bust out as a successful and intertextual writer, or all the world is waiting for you in Shanghai to process, accept, analyze, and hopefully profit from. I don't know what weird gummy-faced Chinese is going to harass me with his profit-making scheme next when I'm physically located in Shanghai, but nor do I know what tangents and secret currents of thoughts swirl behind the mask like faces of the ever polite Japanese. There is much in this world that can't be communicated out right and must be averred or implied, so in that sense the aesthetics of this work lend themselves to the codes of the developed rather than developing world yet billowing waves of smoke and pollution throat-rasping prove the case that even easy money comes with hidden costs.

Yet, here, finally, it's time to drop the last mask of all. You're reading a fictional story. There is no actual Nick42, although, as per authorial convention, one is permitted to create characters who are composites of at least two people one knows, and so in that sense the construct is meta-real while not real per se. Actual China-skeptics of the interviewer type also exist, and the question of handshake business or contract business is the better varietal remains open. Still, the writer is not making everything up wholesale. He has in fact lived 4.5 years in Shanghai and speaks from experience. Nick42's life does reflect changes that happen to the long-term expat, and his views are roughly congruent with many thriving in the territory. In contrast to Nick's situation, the author worked as Placement Officer for a prestigious national chain of private schools, putting students into Oxford and Cambridge as much as possible. His first year was almost all boys reflecting the inexperience of management which had lost most of its intake girls (chaotic schools tend to drive away girls, who are susceptible to becoming pregnant *cough *). They were abrupt and overly-confident students who ended up with lesser placements. The next year included the heavenly Hana Wing, who had Hong Kong papers and well-off parents (although most of the students had quite well-off parents) amidst a large crowd of girls. Then there were the third year's crop and the fourth and things become regularized. Probably the clock for departure began ticking when the first Obese Western Woman Abroad (OWWA) was hired, returning all the aspects of Western office politics to the workplace without any upside. But I guess I digress.

From the Expo year to the implied description of Yuyintang and MAO Livehouse, I think a dramatically broad description of the Shangers expat scene has been accurately described, although the exposition misses DADA which had Tuesday free movie nights with free popcorn and probably constituted the best artsy-indie dive for those of that inclination. We're missing also the eccentric Oxford maths graduate who had been diagnosed with a registered DSM-IV psychological condition yet still commanded a solid wage. That was part of the eccentricity of life abroad in a developing country, and he still knew how to order multi-soup from the hole-in-the-wall outlet. People sold goods from their apartment windows or oftentimes just on the street, and the chaotic crowds ignored such things and even late model car knock-offs covered to the boot with plush animals. China capitalism has that quality, and it's either the big drawback or the subtle way Deng Xiaoping capitalism is going to dominate all sectors at full volume. Such a question also enters the world of the irresolvable until the outcome is seen. We know Berkeley was meant to educate the sons of pioneer farmers of northern European extraction and today is one third Chinese. A way of thinking that considers this a tragic collapse exists, but the actual dot-coms thriving in Silicon Valley don't care. Their mantra is vitality and profit.

I discard the pretense of the narrator medium and address you directly. In a sense this is a relief for it permits the direct statement of things rather than their allusion or implication. In 4.5 years in Shanghai, 1500+ days, my regret is possible the Gray Lady of previous writings but almost certainly that I didn't use the indoor ski slope to retain mental clarity and balance. The buzzing miasma of Chinaland, source code for Nausicaa and Advance of the Titans and a dozen other artistic works, confuses the mind, it befuddles it. China's advantage was that it permitted a genial and rough democracy; Nick never moshed until he went to Shanghai. One is bombarded with girls. One becomes inured to female attention. The years passed and I thought about how everything took place against a backdrop of the peasants' revolt and the patriotic slogans slathered on building walls some fifty years prior could still be read and pointed to the possibilities within.

Was the Workers and Peasants Revolt of 1948 a triumph? Once again, it remains to be seen. We'll know in five years because in five years the battle lines in the Middle East will be better understood and at that point, according to schedule, the ISS or International Space Station is scheduled to be de-orbited at, always as if by fate, China's Tian-gong IV is set to mark the PRC's entry into permanent Low Earth Orbit habitation. But there, politics is underlying things after all, we can't discuss even a book reading at the top of the Peace Hotel unless we know that it was the same as Ballard's Peace Hotel yet also completely taken over by the Reds.

For years after the revolution, Mao freely admitted that he had done nothing to change China except for the lives of peasants within a hundred kilometers around Beijing. The eunuchs were gone. The Forbidden Palace had been breached and the old feudal order lay in shambles. But not until the turn of the millennia did actual CN alter significantly on the world order, shaking up things against as the long delayed dream finally begin to reach that 'escalating growth pattern' of capitalizing economies. Even the physical look of the people begin to change, with the 'nong' farmer peasants taking on a look of greater competence and competitiveness as they entered the world economy with a storm. The world was awash with Chinese manufactured goods, but even a lyricist's switchover and haphazard use of past and present tense couldn't capture the weird juxtapositions this imposed, completely illiterate peasants cracking sunflower seed shells on a magnetic levitated train or the ironies of assembled iPhones being smuggled back into the Mainland, where they were actually scarce.

Unfortunately, it appears at present, the year 2015, that I'll never go back. But my fingers move of their own volition and record 877, 855, 822, the first of which is lost to history and can never be spoken of. 822 that flat-faced girl with Nick's own, and in Korean saunas, completely legit, pools of ice cold water and near boiling provided in alternation a cleansing of the inner self, an opening of pores. I put on a cucumber and raw yogurt mask and waited for the attendant to bring tea, baths of salted water, other such luxuries at some minimal cost. Everyone was a slave. Everyone knew their place. Then as night fell I wandered off to Yongking Lu, and the taxi's seat back display showed the advertisement for Bailey's amidst a stream of singsong Mandarin. Had I known that a girl hiding the intonations was engaged in a process of flirt, perhaps I would have flirted back, but that's gone and dead and faraway and lost, and my creative function is spinning words about China because it too is gone.

My assignment is not actually all that difficult in its parameters. The word count reader on the lower left of my LibreWriter window declares "13500 words," and another 6.5k takes me to the light novel level, and I'm writing about the process of writing simultaneous to the characterization of the now and then. Was it the ferry, 0.5 rmb, that attracted most my characterizationable abilities? I think rather I could talk about "Jessica's Kitchen," the chain that served blackened tuna and braised chicken. Food was immense, provided by Muslims cheaply and cleanly, but you were no worse off going to Saizeriya near People's Square, where a bomb possibly dropped by Chennault himself killed a thousand peasant refugees. 1937's battle remains one of the key moments in literature, reproduced in a dozen or more significant works but none so well as J.G. Ballard's semi-fictional memoir, and his isolation camp is now a high school with the aerodrome's terminal some kind of apparently dubious looking hotel. I found the control tower. I located everything about that monumental work of my youth, but the only thing missing was the Kwantung Expeditionary Army.

Still, of course this work is going to stand or fall by the presence of women, and not merely hinted at for that. The work is about 822. Well, she had a predecessor. She had maidservants.

Maidservant #1: What I'm going to do is describe 822 by describing her features in commonality with all the really odd girls I've met because descriptions of kooky females is inherently interesting and women love to read about other women. Furthermore, the line between 'oddness' and 'mentally batshit crazy' is razor thin. I am referring to other people, not my own artistic temperament of course. Furthermore, my 'oddness' is a well-recognized psychological orientation called 'being a writer.' Evidence you are reading.

One of the oddest girls I've ever met I will call 'Bumblebee.' She wasn't fat; she didn't have yellow and black stripes on her abdomen. She was "Bumblebee" because she had some psychological compulsion to either always be trying to pinch you, grab your arm, or maniacally non-stop talking. Now people use the word "always" to refer to a frequent or annoying habit of a friend. For example, one might say, "he's always fixing his pickup truck," and it means that that person is doing that hobby for hours every day, every time it's sunny, etc. Not in this case. When I say Bumblebee was "always" either talking or twisting your shirtsleeve or shoving her body against you, I mean literally, always, every 98 minutes out of every 100, 59 out of every 60, always no-break nonstop ceaselessly literally talking, scratching your arm, chasing you around the room, always compulsively contacting or interacting with you with the sole and absolute exception of when she had to go to the bathroom.

So I nailed that bitch. Still, I don't know that she necessarily took great satisfaction out of the act. I know girls for whom sexual intercourse is a kind of relief; ie., you nail them for three or four hours straight and then sweating, they lie back in bed panting and completely relieved of some dark interior need of theirs, but in any case, it's spent. They're exhausted. They're sated, completely, they just want to sink into high thread-count Egyptian cotton and wake up twelve hours later to orange juice and croissants. Bumblebee wasn't like that. Being nailed didn't solve anything. She wasn't orgasmic and she felt exactly the same about a rod exploding in her conch as she would about a facial squirted all over her face.

I don't (and didn't at the time) have any feelings for Bee. If I met her, I mean, I'd buy her lunch for old times' sake, but I honestly don't think she has a brilliant life right now or will in the future. People who compulsively need to talk when in the presence of others are externally-directed and they are probably suffering from mild schizotypical orientations. Schizophrenia seems to be heavily social in composition: imagine the schizotypical Jew compared to the silent, self-reliant cowboy deep in the plains. Now while compulsive talkers can do quite well in sales. They "latch on" so to speak to a prospect and before that person knows it, they've bought the used car or committed to some cruise ship vacation they didn't know they needed until they met you. Yes, compulsive talking itself may lead to a rich and successful outcome, but they are actually apposite silent compulsive writers. We are different.

Maidservant #2: Before going on to the real doozy #3, I will mention odd chick #2 because she was seventeen and a total nymphomaniac. My understanding is that Nympho became sexually active at thirteen, fondling her male classmates' thingamabobs before discovering that older boys were a lot more knowledgeable and receptive to her overtures. Cue onslaught of several hundred sex partners. I don't know what all the academic research of sexology says, but street instincts declare that when a girl becomes sexually insatiable at thirteen—she is going to have a lot—I mean a lot—an incredible lot of sex. A true insatiable teenage girl is going to nail hundreds of men—coming on to strangers in bars, walking into alleys for zipless nails, getting laid in bathrooms and in public spaces. Nympho was seventeen when I met her and I was north of thirty, so technically I was in violation of New York State law, but there's no evidence or proof of this act so I'm totally in the clear.

I would actually celebrate Nympho and her ginormous appetites more in prose, but as it happened, just the week before I had happened to have run into Acrobat, whose sexual practice included completing a full 360° flip heels over heads, with her lips sealed around my philtre, so I was actually kind of sated when I met Nympho, alas. Even when she told me she was seventeen, I realized it was a sort of rare experience, but Acrobat had taken for a few blasts out of me, we had banged against sofas and dressers and I couldn't offer Nympho more than two rolls in the hay. Too bad! Seventeen-year-old cheeks are flawless—a peach without wrinkles!

Maidservant #3: I save the especial #3 slot for Tara Lin, whose mental state possibly comes closest to textbook DMS-IV pathology, although for precisely that reason her 'mental fauna' or whatever provides the greatest possibility for fascinating elaboration. Lin, as her last name suggests, was Chinese-American, and she lived in Washington City, Ohio, which was a fairly standard redbrick city in the Ohio River valley, before going off to Harvard when she was eighteen.

Committed to a path of excellence and graduating with an honours degree reading Chemistry, Lin ended up hired by a top pharmaceutical firm in New Jersey at a good salary until she filed a sexual harassment suit against her boss. The investigation completely cleared the boss, and Lin was gently let go with a little severance perhaps to ease the blow, but from an upper-middle class lifestyle in the richest per capita income state of the Union, she returned to her mother and a little railroad flat in Washington City, downscale and fatherless, but now at last free.

Lin, walking down the street, was instantly recognizable—she was the girl with 0% body fat whose body language screamed "why are you all staring at me?" She was actually quite beautiful. The only problem was that Lin actually suffered from pathological narcissism. Women seeing her on the street threw her a look, "baby, you're something, but you're not everything." They picked up on what her thing was—she was, in her own mind, the cinematic star of a movie about her, and her posture and gait screamed this with every over-affected sway. She held herself out. Any amount of conversation confirmed this impression—nothing could be discussed for three sentences without the topic being spun around back to herself. The other conversation item was her ex-boyfriend, who was a nice boy but finally tired of her pathologies. In any case, Lin privately believed that highway signs were installed years ago to comment on her current mental state and that essentially, our entire world was created to showcase, well, her. I don't believe she was schizophrenic per se, but narcissism taken to extremes is destructive to both the sufferer and others around them.

So that's 822, seen by her handmaidens. I think actually in quality her personality was more sedate, but these might amount to visions of what fantasies are aroused by the possibilities of a 4'10" lover weighing 88 pounds or less. Of course the dyed-in-the-wool feminist has an intricate series of psychological explanations to make about this matter, but that's the conflict of the male characterizer and the female object of worship and admiration.

4.

Nick Forteaux had his wedding on February of the next year, in Ningbo, a prefecture capital across a wide inlet of the sea that had been bridged just a few months before. As per Chinese custom, the happy couple rented a sleek white sports car, put a bouquet on it, led a caravan around the city and photographed themselves in a public park. The wife, Yan, was complimented on her beauty and people from all over the world flew in. Many agreed it was a charming affair.

In the months that followed, most of my friends moved on to new jobs and lives abroad, with perhaps the sole exception of Neal King, who was half-Chinese and intended to live in China indefinitely. He accepted a new job at a Tier III city with about thirty people under him and got to work in electronic goods. Not unsimilarly to many businesspeople in China, Neal had experience in real estate, finance, advertising, furniture, and now electronics. There was a broad range of experience in his C.V. and he was obviously the pick to lead the group of thirty with his people skills. People around him noticed his tendency to disparage the Chinese peasants whom he kicked, pushed, yelled at and otherwise motivated away from their usual tendencies to shirk responsibility and hold down empty titles. That was his future apparently.

As the number of people in my circle grew fewer and fewer, I found myself betided with a sense of inescapable grief. The emotion came as a surprise, for I had thought I hated China, but as the inevitable outflow continued, I realized that despite all the interpersonal rudeness and the basic lack of civilization of ordinary people on the streets, that nowhere else was there such a sense of promise and optimism about the future, and nowhere else could Westerners immediately assume high leadership positions at companies based on nothing but their looks and then achieve four-fifths of their salary back home once corrected for prices and services. It was completely not unusual for a basic white-collar Westerner to start his day with a jog at a fitness club club he was chauffeured to and then get a 60-minute rub-down from a masseuse complete with aromatics and hot-compresses by a secondary staff member. 200-channel cable television on five-foot flatscreens, duplexes, penthouses, Volvos and even used BMWs, professional-quality kitchens were not unheard of for the late twenty-something, and moreover, although the Chinese language had an intense sing-song quality and once was subjected to market harassment and spitting and the spectacle of odd skin diseases all over the streets, nowhere else had the economy gone from the guaranteed iron rice bowl to paper millionaires in so short a time, and new buildings were being jacked up all over the city in a perpetual tumult of construction and pollution-dust-noise. Everyone you met had some angle, and all people appeared to be rising in the world, the speed of that ride being the only thing that varied.

The final point: whatever you did, it was with the backdrop of the 1 billion peasants rising up to complete the process of national reconstruction.

Aesthetically speaking, this work should end here. We understand Nick; we understand the interviewer. We have gotten to understand circumstances surrounding the expatriate community in Shanghai, and the historical changes that have occurred over the past few years does get some perspective. But, in another sense, we don't know anything at all, and it becomes necessary to discuss 877 after all, to develop perspective on her hardships and triumphs.

Nick came to China in 2017 and left Beijing in the company of three girls, 877, 855, 822. In truth these girls were professional sauna staff, their numbers representing their employee numbers rather than actual surname and forenames. Through a process of psychological breakdown elicited by his horrifying sanitary and quality-of-life conditions, Nick became convinced that he was some sort of male "Joan of Arc" liberator, sent to free Chinese workers from their slave-like conditions. He began plotting with other anarchists to attack and destroy the Apple factory in Shenzhen, and only the good fortune of a good police investigation stopped the terror attack before it actually began.

In this sense, we see the example of the "doing it for your own good" intervention, where Forteaux was given a rehabilitation sentence in Xinjiang Prison and followup psychological therapy. Nevertheless Forteaux continues to maintain that he is a psychological prisoner, and he claims that 877, 855, and 822 are "near-Politburo professionals" part of the Sing-and-Dance troupe of Wangzai. Unfortunately, mental structures such as these are extremely difficult to eradicate even under the influence of powerful benzodiazepines and we must regard Nick's marriage to a flat-faced Chinese girl of grassroots background as the best possible outcome in a chaotic and multifaceted world. The marriage has proceeded successfully thus far, permitting Nick to continue to believe that he is married to a "near-Politburo" song-and-dance professional, and while falsifiable belief structures left untreated generate new and bizarre substructures of belief, that will presumably be China's problem to solve some years from now. They have rejected Western treatment models and can rely on "love-bombing" cult-type social treatment as much as their own cultural values permit.

Rather than Nick, though, it must be admitted that 877 offers the true possibilities for the heroization permitted in this specialty. Evidence about her doings after the Xinjiang affair and Beijing is not easy to come by, and in fact, there is considerable hearsay as well as contradictory statements made on all sides. What apparently occurred was that 877 was placed into productive custody after the maglev bifurcation. China's 2027 magnetic rail offered speeds up to 500 kph, and for these reasons was targeted by the known Dzunga Republic liberation movement, that controversial event that can't be fully assessed since Beijing imposed a media lockdown after the incident. We believe the D liberation movement has been acting independently and of its own innate situation without Great Power involvement or even unofficial support. But, whatever the actual circumstances and rumours involved, D-Dzunga clearly established an autonomous zone of operations by the end of 2019, and the resulting three-way clash between Eurasian Union forces, the central government in Beijing, and D-Dzunga demonstrated that borders might be more fluid that once thought even in our post-secessionary world.

What happened? Apparently 877 was arrested shortly after the four passengers of that Chinese Humvee reached the city. Or, to be completely accurate, she found herself in jail some six months after the group had arrived in the city, taking up their life of "artistic simulation" or what other excuse they gave for their behaviour and arriving at the odd pattern of behaviour they would call "the family." It was probably ideal for Nick: him and three girls, an excitement seeker's paradise. Still, he was a cutie, especially then, and in all likelihood, his mere presence there added variety and multiculturalism to a region of the country that was restless and on edge.

The history of what unfolded of course can just be looked up on online sources or whatnot. Police forces vs. insurrection is one of the oldest situations facing any country, and the history of Dzunga remains heavily disputed all over the world. But, all the details notwithstanding, the armored forces that assumed control over Xinjiang found 877 incarcerated for her "antisocial" or "vice" crimes, and possibly for this reason, she found herself liberated not just to earn a menial living, but indeed to work as an invaluable translator and liaison officer to the new Han minority, and thus began her ascent to culminate later in the Cyberia establishment. One writer about the situation wrote about it thus:

"Should the Eurasian Union appear to be behind D-Dzunga, the rest of the world fears a Eurasian hegemony and begins to supply Beijing. With external support, especially of technologies beyond the creative generative ability of Beijing, China begins to project its culture abroad and has a vast array of 'overseas Han communities' from which to push its ideals and national characteristics.

"Should, however, China manage to foment instability abroad or even encourage external regions to revolt against their central authorities, then all of a sudden sentiment abroad shifts the other way and China appears to be the rising tomorrow. In this case, new trade restrictions are made and the coalition begins to form against Han menace."

Because of the pendulum-like shifting of global sentiment, it becomes impossible to write intelligibly about the geopolitical situation. What we have are at times speculations and/or theories about the nature of China and whether or not 877 is now indeed the "folk hero of Cyberia," the Robin Hood figure who is liberating communities out of the melting permafrost and ice-cut ravines that mark that territory. White birch trees and skimmer Ekranoplans: this is Outpost Cyberia or the First Cyberian Cyber-republic with its revolutionary ideas of universal citizenhood or 'affiliate citizenship.' Now instead of the terror of double-barreled Eurasian heavy tanks, the media is now abuzz once again with fears of Han Oriental supremacy and sinification of all global countries. The containment coalitions after ten or more years of relative quiet begin to emerge as a universal alliance against the Han menace.

Since somewhere, somehow, there's always an ultra-romantic, the absolutist Byronic story needs to just be laid out as well. Simply put, adding together all the video feeds and reported sightings and assuming every last rumour is true, 877 after surviving weeks without food or water, drinking the condensation off prison cell walls and nearing death from lack of nutrition and calories, was picked up by advance units of the D-Dzunga and after establishing her credentials, gave her a translation/liaison role in the new government. Due to perspicuous work, she ascended to becoming one of the new republic's core leaders, but at this point, overwhelmed with her absolute connexion to history, she recalled those core feelings of being Han and single-handedly led skimmer divisions in the Cyber-republic, establishing new territories and rising to the top of the global imagination, a female warlord and woman soldier.

I tend to think the eight-double-seven of Cyberian culture history is just somebody feeding off the Qi legend, and probably has nothing to do with Nick, Xinjiang days, or the episode of driving off in a matte green Humvee knockoff. Probably Nick is rueing a love story that ended when it had to, and because of the rise of mass cyberpropaganda, even we Free World citizens can't know for sure what exactly occurred and where. We know technologies have been surging for decades now. We realize that there's issues of balance of justice on all side. Still, the story seems to want to circulate, and significant percentages of the population quietly believe in the 877 legend nonetheless. Its aspects of slightly dubious morality only give the legend a certain earthy flair.

I wish to glorify 877, that female military commander who fought to become a Dzunga guerilla leader and then fought to liberate her own imagination-come-to-life, Cyberia, the Cyber-Republic, the macro-nation that existed completely within legal structure and could evoke itself into existence only after the widespread acceptance of virtual cash and processor-centered economies. At its peak, Cyberia was said to have a thousand datafarms with ten thousand servers each representing mass-purchased gaming machines which were sold below cost in the hopes of selling arcade titles but instead snapped up by research facilities and then finally tor-coin hash farms. We're left instead just to characterise things as best as possible, Irkutsk before the fall, the ice fields, the cities of population aggregation amidst large, moist-damp birch forests and fern/moss ecologies. Yet all of that becomes politicized in the end, and we can't dwell here; we can't.

What happened to everyone around the circles—that's the question. Surprisingly bits and pieces of the odd crowd remain connected in strange ways, with Lethermann doing photovoltaics in cooperation with Guangzhou industries and the oddest of the Beijing culture specialists taking vacations to Teheran or jetting off to Dubai as the Middle East becomes more of an economic centre. I understand people are living half a year off-and-on in Greater China or amongst the rapidly industrializing zones of the Cyber-republic or southeast Asia. In fact, there's always stories of course of 19-year-old brides met in the southeast, and I think that was a legend of a kind too. A kind faced man, a blushing bride; that's gotta be the end state of people abroad, the "WAWA=West Africa Wins Again" known slogan that applies even to people living in developing countries of Asia.

Aren't I failing this then? Haven't really communicated the "end of the world" sensation as a party of individuals leaves China, which certain people seem to think means the cycle has run its course and you should check out too. It was the weirdest thing, vines creeping over 19th century French architecture in the midst of subtropical jungle—subtropical, mind you, not the pure tropic thing, but still the juxtaposition the source of that emotional high, wandering a rainwet city whilst beneath you, beneath the asphalt, there had to be some tonnage of bone matter, 1937 having involved a hundred thousand or whatnot. Wearing a trench coat, walking amidst the architecture, the place felt timeless and creeping towards modernity after all. And after all, we'd done it, we'd gone to a foreign place and made it our own, and when the party wound down, it was only good manners to bid a fond adieu.

I don't know. Less might be more. It might not be brilliant taste to just go on and on about "the expat feel." Lethermann has his PV, but then so does the Czech guy. In contrast to the "absolute brilliance" of bouncing between a civilized Italian table and a civilized Japanese one, aweing the girls with their own language, there was also the night when violence lay just beneath the surface, a fat group of Sinophilic Japanese or was it Japanophile Chinese chattering away in the Japanese language while their own professional waitstaff showed deference. That was the night with the Turks. But these two issues aside, I guess the peninsulars show up after all, the topic that had to be avoided yet existed nonetheless. They had some amount of cash; the women were smooth-skinned and at times beautiful, but other people say whatever impression you picked up was probably all wrong anyway. I wouldn't know.

The hard thing to deal with in China were the never-ending crowds, the rudeness of ordinary people, the shoving and jumping in front of other people, and the pushiness of ordinary affairs. Yet seen in their own cinematic traditions, it was clear that they had developed some sort of lowest common denominator civilization, yet a civilization nonetheless. Nobody accused them of being nomadic or African per se, it was just that their cultural norms seen against the backdrop of proper Western behaviour obviously came off as low.

With the ending of the episodes, various crowds and cliques worked their way into different kinds of adventures in different far off lands. I'll remember always the quay at the Bund, with the iron bridge leading across Suzhou Creek and the lights strobing in Pudong New District. Photographs of the area demonstrated the pride of the Chinese race, which compared the 1920s flatland to the 2020s cyberpunk light bazaar. Lying down in the wave pool in the New Apartments, I let my Lacoste polo shirt get soaked and studied the condensation on the iced margarita which amounted to an insouciant rejection of the now. I was the scribbler of secret things, and the American youngsters that formed a group at one edge criticized the Germans and the Japanese. The Chinese, were, according to the dominant ethos of the time, beneath contempt.

So, that is it: the last barrier removed, the time and place understood. All of these words are taking place in the mind of a creative writer around whom gigantic towers are soaring to the sky and surrounding which the normal, complete, standard business of day proceeds, start-up bars, DVD ripoff shops, Chinese convenience stores with their strange range of products, a taste palette with only a 10% overlap of edibility. Nobody can answer the question, "is this the peak of civilization or the least civilized of all?" The Urumqi boys with their swagger walk down the street, eyes keen for unattended iPhones and willing to declare their open desire for the refined, unreachable Han. The subtropical foliage does not hide long the ordinary business of life, and knockoff Mercedes proliferate on the madcap streets, juxtapositioned against three wall pull carts and the laborers who sell the work of their muscles.

Possibly, all in all, I overestimate. Hundreds left, but they were intending to leave anyway, the early twenty-somethings who were abroad for their first time and dismissible. Next to this demographic, heaps others actually remained after all, the music promoter, the China scholar, the researcher, the individuals keen on finding a Chinese mate and settling down. It was discussed in papers since ancient times—the explorers and conquerers who were absorbed into Han civilization rather than capable of remaining above it all. When all gesture, so long as non-violent, was permitted, then edges of your personality were torn away and you began to accept coolie behavior as the norm. IBM and top Fortune 500 companies had to pay a 40% premium on wage, in addition to the price-of-living adjusted higher salaries, because it was hardship to live in China, it was hardship. From the taxi drivers who continually played games to the spitting in the streets to the diseased passerbys who reminded you of their unfortunate plight, there was a clanging of gongs and hammers and a noise production at all hours of the night, but the essence of China remained unchanged after all, that perverse spectacle of the sons and daughters of peasants living in Paris and gawking with their two front teeth protruding.

This proved in the end a major argument against the bitterness of the less powerful and prestigious. Translated elegantly, word-for-word, oftentimes the intellectuals and people of China could powerfully articulate the nature of their disadvantage. But as soon as you left the over-heated apartment or walked out of the alleyway or traditional building, the _hutong_ , you were always confronted with the evidence of the culture's self-evident inferiority. If they were so great, why was there so taste so noisy, garish, and clashing? Why did they talk in sing-song tones and find it impossible to develop some internal system of honour and pride? Why was "Chinese style" so obvious and self-evident? One didn't even need anything to make your point; you just sat there and stared back at the outraged Chinaman, delivering his 'ching's' and 'bong's' and 'pao' noises that resembled only the clatter of kitchenware. That was the most elegant refutation. That was Chinese values.

At time of writing, a Bulgarian scientist is getting married. Another succession of summer weddings is drawing to a close, and new children are being produced, the testament to the life-centered Chinese. Love of babies; love of families, this marked the extended Chinese clan which worked in a process of agitation and in-fighting but always took care of its own. Especially susceptible Westerners would take the admiring glances seen on the street for granted, and then began to believe in the myth of their own invulnerability. But like a tide going out, one generation passed out, and another flowed in. I was possibly the only one who saw it all, from beginning to end. But there's a darker side, of course, as well, for those who stand and watch rather than participate in the play of life. I can report that if a girl is small, one might be able to put a dog collar on her, a leash, an open-cup bra and waistlet, high heels. Have her crouch on a table with a mirrored surface, or even make that mirrored surface yourself with a mirror and glass overlay and after congress, make her watch your production slide slowly out of her, drop by drop. Mirrors are great fun for highly visual girls, which can take the form of their watching as you mock choke them, sharp objects placed threateningly but consentingly nearby, or even to the point of touch and indenting skin, a meat hook even or with the willing partner, even some actual choking / asphyxiation play. Auster wrote positively of fishnet body suits; you can't go wrong with garters and intricate silk lingerie, clothes pins, bandage. There's a fine line between the visuals of consensual force and the actual nonconsensual crime of forcible congress. Do not cross it. I'm keen to exacerbate directly into the conch of a slim and attractive, light-skinned and willing girl. Yet that 'melting' of body into body, that self-hypnosis of a really compatible partner. The star deep within. Who can characterize that? H ended up in an insane asylum yet later collected thousands from insurance. Maybe I should better understand these processes. Some other life.

When you encounter a girl, you tend to instantly know—and I mean both of you tend to instantly know—whether you're going to "melt" into each other, whether it will be a long and intense love or just a hot frantic five hours. Groups sex is that other possibility, three girls who know what they're doing delivering a gestalt larger than any one conch. Who invented these things? What restrictions throttle my prose? Who invented facials? Shaved public regions? I don't have any huge objection to crotchless panty-hose, toplessness in general, acrobats. Acrobat turns twists and flaps on one's staff—hard to find such females with that kind of flexibility. It's a shame really, submissiveness will tear you apart, tear apart your heart. But then, that's what the authors always reported, wasn't it. Story of O was that bedroom submissiveness eventually gives the bottom a strange power over the top. I wanted to put a dog collar on H; I asked her to model various clothing items, it's been a lifelong preference. But like most healthy adult males, I refrained from the tiresome virginal who lay back and awaited instruction. I was fully cognizant of the dark recesses of human nature and by a WASP cleanliness managed to steer clear of the trap of Eastern European women; the Chinese. My words spill out. I haven't confessed anything yet, you're still no closer. I was a mystic. I finished where you normally began. But man, it was wild. Even five girls, even repeated defloration, blood.

They wanted it, man. Who are you kidding? I thrust in and pulled out, thrust in, pulled out. The girl screamed with delight. They themselves poured out. Putting oneself directly into mouth. An explosion of seed and exacerbate. What were you kidding? What consequence did you seek? Nailing a seventeen year old; feeling up even younger. A Cambodian brothel where the staff looked like schoolchildren. Is that an admission? Ha, Eastern promises. Asian stories. Backpacker's paradise.

Man, I don't know where things are doing because there's never an end. Nailing endlessly. Blast! Stringy seed thrown across a girl's face. The shaft entering and exiting, a quivering, wet slang. Slang juice on your thighs. Girls turning flips on your body, hanging onto red ribbons while they twirl. Pole dancing, writhing, ecstatic convulsions of flesh. This is our inheritance. Yet man also tires of this. Man tires even of the act. Man does not tire of information or data creation. Should I reach sixty, I'll still be scribbling away, although even less coherent. My writing completely conforms to standards of polite writing although the meaning is instantly apparent. I'll switch my topic more to cooking, nature, mountains, forests, analysis. For now I'm ending youth and aroused to the possibility of the word itself. Hands on a girls' hips, simulated forcible act, actual for the act. The climx more intense when a woman's body is resisting. Resistance. The Saturday that's still here no matter how many sentences pour out. Nine pages and nine more. My mood must have self-repaired. More confession? I nailed a girl with a cartilage disorder—her waist must have been eighteen inches in diameter. Spongy body. But breasts droopy even though she was young. But I guess that wraps it up. Visual displays of forcible non-activity, two seventeen year olds, cartilige, some mentally crazy chicks. No gay sex, just a little group play straight. I've never done the back, no interest. I don't mind backdoor for the frontal portal as in doggy style, actually prefer straight missionary. The innocent look is nice, but youth is the more important quality so long as it's not an actual child. Know a nineteen year old who got "Forever Young" tattoed on her lower back. Kinda daring....

There was in the end, the only consolation of taking one of the high speed trains out to the plateau, to wander among 4000m villages and using a day's effort to jump above the 5000m level. The bulk of the earth lay miles below stretching to infinity, and here, finally in thin air, the stars could be seen at night and the giant clouds of pollution flowed distantly, away, towards the sea and other countries. A gigantic dust storm was indistinguishable from the monumental scale of the ash that was spewed into the skies, and I had little recourse but to recollection of each and their own, their fates written now on stone.

MILKCOCOA dissolved into music lessons, more measured expectations, and its own internal dynamic, Coco fleeing to Japan, becoming a shaman-type advisor to generations of new guitarists and BCG label aspirants.

The photovoltaic specialist continues to crowd-source his sales even as the trio of Euro-Chinese seek to open a new market, opposed only by regulatory measures regarding tie-in to the local grid. The Czech specialist in the this same field but not cooperating with the group seems to be doing his own thing; he's an avid scuba-diver and highly introverted.

The new school network connected with Shanghai City briefly hired the protegee / youngster of one of its business managers but he proved insufferable and borrowed cash from his parents to open a hole-in-the-wall cafe. At last word, he is making a living.

Several of the new school networks' students have fulfilled their aspirations to Oxford and Cambridge and are currently finishing degrees there. The US universities remain harder to get into (and vastly more expensive), but somebody finally got into UCLA and somebody else finally earned admission to NYU. Hopes of breaking into the Ivy League continue, most amusingly when stated by a community college student with Ds.

The adventurer and stimulus seeker, the "four month internship" seeker JJ has made it to NYC. She is, ironically, joined there by the unwonted Internet celebrity with high demands who received some sort of humanitarian entry status and makes some kind of living in the metropolis. Her situation is a little less defined since she doesn't have residency quite yet.

855 is rumoured married now, with sexual mores in China changing and the girl-known-not-to-be-virgin now semi-acceptable in Sinic circles. She has three children and is taken to be content.

There's a rumour of marriage as well for Hana Wing, although she was accepted to Edinburgh, and was a delightful "best in class" girl. Possibly the issue at stake is that of her alleged fiance's extreme wealth. The wealthiest student of all is said to have the Lambo.

Frank J has disappeared from the scene, and nobody knows his doings.

Shan never showed up again, and is also presumed completely gone.

The German Doktor of Laws married again, and his wife is quite beautiful and reticent. They have had a child and appear to be a happy family.

The insane type girl ran off to Hong Kong where she is proud of her "skyscraper" placement at a skyscraper English school, something unique to the Chinese economy.

A few of the people went on antidepressants and/or antipsychotics and seem calm.

Most other fates are commonplace and don't require heavy elaboration.

AUTHOR'S PLEA

Author's website available at:

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7736573

As you face the realities of normal workday life, of course we are dealing with high unemployment, a moribund economy, and other such features of life in the developed world. But, if you might be feeling generous, consider that a text output creative faces all of these circumstances, yet also compulsively writes...

An aspiring writer is said to have to put out half a dozen books online before a formal contract can be signed. Can you, reader of 2015 or 2017 accelerate the process? If you're short on time, a brief note to one of the (now) Big Five publishers merely stating, "this is my favorite online writer, please sign him to a debut contract" will work wonders. If, on the other hand, you're a teenager with lots of time but no cash, actually there's even more you can do. You can simply download all my works. You can tell your friends through mass email blast about the good time you've been having with the free ebooks. You can drop a phonecall to a prestigious New York City literary agent or any of the public relations offices of the top publishers asking them to sign "S. Michael CHOI, author of HARAJUKU." Even if you're only seventeen years old, you'll really make a difference!

I understand that the easiest thing to do is just to sit back and do nothing. But really, it takes at least 10 months and sometimes 2 years of working "lower end" jobs to generate the cash necessary to write for a few months. Further, the more hurried and contract-less the situation, the worse off the quality of the books I put out is. Really—scout's honor—if I can land the debut publishing contract, I can put a carefully plotted out and original Science Fiction work. You can make a difference.

Harajuku (+): The Summer That Never Ends (2013) and Sunday Rewrite (-) (2015). Both can be downloaded here:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/307180

Although now the original text has been divided into two modified parts, the work still remains a coming-of-age story about a young American expat in Tokyo, being caught up in a cocaine and champagne milieu, and eventually coming to terms with his reduced circumstances. Love and adventure, as they say, and "really close" as the opinion of the NYC publishing establishment goes. It's recommended for any audience who enjoys reading about twenty-somethings and their louche spending habits, and goes beyond "story of English teachers in Japan" to cover high finance and real estate. Key words: comingofage, novel, Japan, Tokyo, artists, aesthetes, finance, druguse, MDMA, ecstasy, Molly.

If you are sickened and disgusted by stories of overly rich born-to-money finance scions and their hangers on, my next book was called The Korean Flower (2011) and can be downloaded, again, completely for free:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/112372

Due to various marketing schemes and ad spends encouraged on me by the best-meaning publicists, the exact copy you get may have a slightly different title, but don't worry, it's all the same book and it's free and always will be. The story concerns 200 Japanese girls studying Korean in Seoul and features an ensemble menage of characters including one talking green elephant. Key words: languagestudy, exchangestudents, Japan, Korea, Seoul, Hindu, Hinduism, artists, female.

My third and latest "near-novel," (light novel, chapbook) would be Fenworld (2014) which can be downloaded at:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/474636

Oddly, although being the "light novel" size of 33000 words, Fenworld has been the quickest out of the gate in terms of reader issued copies, although in a sense it's light sci-fi and light entertainment.

Description: In the year 2471, a 74-year-old man begins writing his memoirs... the world has survived extensive glaciation, but how will the global power New Atlantis survive the GEIST onslaught? Which white walker mechs will battle what Geist abomination, and what is the true story of the culture hero Genevieve? Science fiction with a Happy Science twist, and revelation of the end days.

This is a work that purports to be an old man's memoirs, of course, but it verges mostly on ice combat in the 25th century. Contains the story of the battle of Paris Bas and the Battle of the Pyramids, as well as verbal word portraits of human society after it has survived the ice caps meeting at the equator and the fall of industrialized civilization. Key words: post-apocalyptic, post-glacial, scifi, Manhattan Mining District, novel, mecha, walkermecha, national myth.

Finally, there's a couple short stories and some other reading material just generally available:

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/SMichaelChoi

To be specific, the short stories "Sweets for the Sweet" and "Dancer, Zero" have received praise from off-site sources. Keep a copy on all your devices! Every download counts and helps assure a steady stream of the science fiction and anime-inspired aesthetics whether in the form of novels, light novels, short stories, or artbooks. Since this work is being published by the delightful Smashwords.com website, I will refrain from pointing out that I took iBooks Author for a spin and had to agree to an exclusivity upload if you searched my name on that site. But I do encourage and evangelize Smashwords.com website with my free time, and I do read other people's work.

Author's website available at:

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7736573

Find, if you care, a note of sympathy despite your hurried days and pressing work obligations. A single work contract of one year's advance can result in a great and complete Sci-Fi work. For example, "Sweets for the Sweet," the short, can be expanded, and there a handful of other science fiction ideas that can be fully fleshed out with your support. Download, review, rate, and tell your friends! Thank you.

 http://publishing.about.com/od/BookPublishingGeneralInfo/a/The-Big-Five-Trade-Book-Publishers.htm

Hachette Book Group

237 Park Avenue

New York, NY 10017

(212)364-1200

hachettebookgroup.com

Harper Collins

10 53rd Street

New York, NY 10022

(212) 207-7000

harpercollins.com

Random House Offices 1745 Broadway New York, NY 10019 (212) 782-9000 Penguin Offices 375 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

(212) 366-2000

Dorling Kindersley

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

(646) 674-4000

penguinrandomhouse.com

Simon and Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 (212) 698-7000

simonandschuster.com

MODEL LETTER:

Dear Major Publisher:

I'm a keen indie fan of the writer S. Michael Choi and his works "Keiwha," "822," "Fenworld," and "Harajuku Sunday." Would you consider signing this excellent writer to a debut author's contract? I'm especially impressed with [WORK] and [QUALITY] or [SCENE].

Thank you sincerely for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

[your name here]

MODEL LETTER 2

Dear Major Publisher:

Indie authors today are forced to put on small works at the 20000 word level because of the general scarcity of debut contracts. Can you sign my favorite author S. Michael Choi to a debut author's contract because I know he can put out a full length novel. The work of his I like best is called [WORK], and I really hope to see something like [WORK/PROPOSAL.]

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

[your name here]

