MeMaories

A recent stroll through old town took me through back alleys, open air meat and vegetable markets, and of course, YuYuan Gardens - a tourist hotspot that I wasn’t expecting to find interesting at all. Except, I found Mao. Lots of Mao. Maybe after so many years of hardship, the Chinese are starting to laugh it off a little. Expression through design seems to be cathartic.

I’ve been seeing a lot of propaganda art reinterpreted everywhere, in everyday design and in high art, on t-shirts (at boutiques like Shirt Flag), and in art galleries (from the Moganshan enclave to the more institutionalized Shanghai Art Gallery). And then there’s the Propaganda Art Museum on HuaShan Lu and another museum with some 30,000 genuine pins from the cultural revolution in Shanghai.

China’s dear Chairman continues to be quite an icon here after his death. Just as Mickey D’s golden arches are a universally recognized symbol in the west, Mao’s portrait can be found on all sorts of knickknacks at every street corner in China. This month’s care package of design inspiration for my advocacy group in Palo Alto was a small subset of these things, which include a traditional book bag with a Mao screen print, a kitschy but hilarious alarm clock. Mao’s little red book (with English translation), a deck of cards with a different propaganda graphic on each face, a genuine Mao pin from 1968, and a smoke box with a forward marching laborer.





Before I mailed the package, I laid everything out for the Shanghai IDEO-ers to respond to. Andy Xu left me a note that said: ‘A feeling of warmth’. He then explained to me that although years of hardship ensued because of the Cultural Revolution, in general, the older generation feels that the times past are still simpler than the capitalistic chaos today. Many Chinese people continue to collect me-mao-rabilia with historical meaning to remind them of the old days and to bring them good luck.



This gives me some clue as to why design expression is still so young here. For most of the 20th century, the only government sanctioned and heavily promoted designs for products and services were political in nature. Design that the everyman experienced in every day life was propaganda in some form – from movies, to playing cards.

Now the doors of the world are open to China and its designers. How will old symbols be reinterpreted and new symbols integrated?

Raw inspiration by extremes

Shanghai is so raw, so beautifully organic and imperfect. This makes a walk through old town in PuXi (literally, the area west of the Huang Pu river) just wonderfully delightful. The contrast is even more extreme when PuXi is compared to PuDong (the area east of the Huang Pu River), which seems so George Jetson, sterile, and well, western and modern.

On a chilly clear Saturday morning, Ela’s friends Ben (design professor at Olin) and Connie schlepped out with us to the markets in Old Town. We started off at the HuaNiao Market where one can find crickets, birds and other odd sounding animals.

As someone who had two pet cockroaches (named Sid and Dis) as pets during her college days, I was still absolutely astounded by the crickets here. Ranging from 20 yuan to upwards of 1000 yuan depending on size, coloration and breed, crickets are well loved here. The nicer stalls had crickets in transparent glass jars with beautifully carved lids. The less legitimate ones have their crickets inside used tuna cans with the price labels on the lid. The higher the price, the more scared I was of peeking underneath the hood for fear of what could leap out at me. We also discovered an entire world of tools to support cricket fighting. I picked up a pair of bamboo tweezers, a bamboo ‘tunnel’ that you would sweep your cricket into in order to transport him safely out of the jar, and a hollow bamboo tube for keeping scraggly sticks that crickets like biting onto.



Similarly, birds and dogs and cats were all available for purchase in the vicinity. Depending on how deep your pockets are, or how much you love your pet, you can buy a correspondingly plain or extravagant cage carved from wood. For dogs, there is an entire business of clothing, including doggie ponchos to keep your furry friend from getting wet during the rainy season. Having a pet is a really new thing for China, but my Chinese conversation teacher Zou tells me that it is because of the increasing numbers of young people who live and work alone here, away from their families.

Our wandering soon led us to FangBang Lu, which takes the cake for shocking sights. If you are an animal rights activist, you might want to stop reading here. What you see in the photograph below is indeed a pile of frozen giant eel sitting in the middle of the street. Behind that pile is the proud stall owner with sample sections of meat flayed open for you to examine.



Down the street not far away is a young man selling something that looks a lot like a fancy Zyliss mandolin cutter. He is convincingly demonstrating, in the middle of the street, at a very legitimate looking stall, how well his tools work for making vegetable slices and julienne bits. But look to the left and right more closely. Yes, the budding entrepreneur next to him is selling porn and sex toys, out in the middle of broad daylight. Even more curious is the fact that most of the men on the street are excitedly hovering around a street vendor selling business and software magazines, rather than the porn.






Further down the street, someone has an open suitcase full of spools of thread, presumably for sale. Next to him there’s a man with a Zippo lighter sized blow torch which can melt metal. And then nearby, on a piece of cloth, there’s someone selling a bear claw on a piece of cloth.


Fangbang Lu in Old Town ain’t no organized flea market, but everyone seems to be coming out of the woodwork to sell one thing or another.

After Ben and Connie took off for the airport, Ela and I walked further into the Old Town jungle. Ela had ran past the food markets during the daytime previously and suggested meandering through the area again. As darkness fell, the colors of the meats and vegetables in the open air stalls became even more intense given that any electrical lighting was focused on illuminating the goods to be sold. Fruits and vegetables spilled into the streets, making it impossible for anything larger than a cyclist or pedestrian to make their way through the alleyways. Chinese beer was sold out of large clay pots, like it has been done for centuries. Nursing our sweet tooth, every few stalls or so, Ela and I bought snacks to try, often fresh out of the ovens and steamers.

What a delight it was to sample balls of rice with red bean paste, chinese ‘egg mcmuffins’, flaky cakes with peanuts and sunflower seed filling (which Ela thought was pork the last time she had it), black sesame and peanut brittle, and handfuls of crunchy and chewie things that I cannot describe. If it weren’t for our fingers freezing off, we would have skipped dinner.

With Shanghai’s push for modernity, for clean sleek buildings and shiny new metro lines, I hope it maintains some of this imperfection and rawness. The interactions with the people and the goods in these markets, which are so poo-pooed these days, are so much more organic and engaging than at places like the Superbrand Mall (deemed a ‘model unit’ by the local government). Everything is out in the open for one to see and experience in its purest form. There are no closed doors behind which things are processed and prepared.

What would our malls and grocery stores in America be like if products were allowed to spill out a little more? What if physical boundaries of space were less delineated? What if zoning laws were less rigid? What if more people could set up their own lemonade stands anywhere they want?

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- Emily (who is two months in and 33% through her Shanghai Journey)

Here’s us brushing our teeth before getting on the night train from HuangShan Mountain back to Shanghai.

Food that is fast

Fresh fast food may be a bit of an oxymoron in America but in China this is the norm. The fast food restaurant fare here consists of noodles and dumplings freshly prepared and rapidly cooked in boiling broth. Freshness is so important that ‘leftovers’ are a foreign concept and are rarely taken home after a meal, and that even complex foods are usually cooked when you order them rather than ahead of time and kept warm. The fish should be killed only when you are ready to eat it.

A weekend ago, a group of us headed out to nearby SongJiang by bus. Hungry when we arrived, we hit up the closest hole in the wall place we could find, and smell. A dark skinned man making magic with the dough in front of the store was enough to convince seven of us to crowd around a tiny table and take a chance with the non-English menu.



For 4 yuan a bowl, we each ordered a large bowl of vegetarian ‘la mein’ (pulled noodles). Pulled noodles are a specialty from western china (Gansu and Xinjiang Provinces), where a single piece of dough is pulled and folded over and over again to make one very long noodle. We watched in fascination as this man from XinJiang cut a block of dough and turned it into a perfectly uniform ball of noodles within seconds. Each noodle was then tossed into a boiling broth for less than a minute and served with fresh baby bok choi, cilantro and spring onion. So within five minutes, the seven of us each had our own bowl of noodles, each made from scratch. I guess Marco Polo really liked the noodles he discovered on the Silk Road, but didn’t quite manage to take the noodle making technique back to Italy.

Here is the noodle-y video on google: La Mein Noodle Making



So this is fast food. Nothing comes in a frozen package. Nothing is shoved in, smashed in, fried in or processed in a giant computerized industrial machine by an operator who knows nothing about cooking. Efficiency comes from the craftsmanship of the head noodle maker, and his supporting team managing the broth and the toppings. I don’t think I can ever look at Taco Bell and McDonald’s the same. How can fast food in America be more intimate like this? How can fast food in America be more experiential rather than something merely focusing on convenience?



Street food is equally tantalizing for the snack lover. Although weary of stomach troubles at first, Ela broke me into street food a month ago and it has been non-stop since. Our common street corner (Fuxing Lu and Shaanxi Lu) presents a new surprise every day – there’s the old man who sells sweet potatoes that he roasts on a 55 gallon drum, there’s the entrepreneur who discovered that the movie going crowd would enjoy the fresh caramel corn that he makes from back of his bicycle, and there’s the battle-worn woman who sets up a shack once or twice a week selling fried egg omlettes and tofu. Perhaps the simple fact that these street vendors need to set up and tear down their stations quickly means that they can’t make whatever they are making in bulk quantities and hence the resulting freshness of single batches. I have never tasted a fresh batch of caramel corn made specifically for me, from scratch with sweet butter and raw cane sugar, until now.

In the western world, I believe we have lost touch with where our food comes from, which is dangerous. I don’t know what is in my food or where it comes from because everything comes in neat tidy packages that resemble nothing of its original existence. A piece of fish isn’t supposed to look rectangular; a piece of chicken breast patty isn’t supposed to be perfectly round. If I order a fish dish and the fish comes with the head and the tail attached, I know I am getting a fish and not some processed piece of random mixed meat.

As much as I cringe when I go to open markets here and see live animals in cages, I get the sense that the Chinese have a much deeper understanding and respect for their food because everyone is exposed to the journey of raw material to meal regularly in daily life.

More food photographs from China: Food Photo Album

Forging university relationships

One of the main reasons why I work for IDEO is because the company believes in strong university relations. I’m not talking about purely fostering university relations for the sake of recruiting, but the simple fact that we can learn a lot by spending time with professors and students, teaching and mentoring.

On Thursday, a gaggle of us went with Opher to JiaoTong University outside of Shanghai to break ground in our efforts to start working with Chinese universities. JiaoTong is one of the most well known universities in China, alongside BeiDa and TsingHua (both in Beijing) and Fudan University, which is also in Shanghai. Our very own Andy Xu and Tony Zhou are JiaoTong alumni.

IDEO Shanghai was introduced to a group of design professors at JiaoTong through our dearest Stanford Professor Bernie Roth, whose name will make Ela and I cringe from memories of trajectory math. I was impressed at how forward-thinking and open-minded these multidisciplinary professors were for China. Many of them had traveled to the US and the UK to study design, at least two of them practice design outside of the university with clients including GE Plastics and Philips, and all of them understood the importance of user research.

Design and design education is still young in China, and it turns out that this handful of professors shared many of our curiosities and concerns. As we huddled in an unheated room inside a very institutional and uninspired building (for the design department nonetheless!), we talked about these challenges:

1. What is the Chinese Design? Although design has been around in China for decades, the Chinese design language isn’t coherent enough to be iconic. What is considered Chinese ‘design’ is still considered more of a cultural souvenir than design that is internationally recognized for its form and function.

2. Lack of Industry Recognition for Design in China: ‘Squishy thinking’ and creative problem solving are not synonymous with China. Where math and science and the bottom line are of utmost importance, industry has no idea what design is and why good design can equate to good business. As a result, top level executives in China are not investing in design. The business schools are definitely not talking at all to the design schools. All this talk starts to make me want to introduce Rotman B-school Dean Roger Martin to China.

3. Holistic Education: Given that the entire educational system of China is still very institutional, design education at the higher levels is still very institutional. I realized how lucky I was to be able to do real-life team projects and to actually build and tinker with things in school using my bare grimy hands.

This makes me wonder whether the history and culture of hierarchy in China has resulted in the lack of renaissance thinkers. Women had their feet bound because it was a sign of wealth not to have to walk. Does that mean that as an intellectual in China, one is limited only to higher level strategy and none of what would be considered as the ‘dirty’ implementation work? Are the most talented students not getting practical skills in debugging and building things themselves because it is expected of them that someone lower on the ladder can carry out their plans? Why would a petite young woman like me want to sweat over making a part on the manual mill when I should keep my hands clean at a desk job that uses my brain instead? I hope that the frowning upon manual labor doesn’t pose an obstacle to holistic learning.

After our meeting with the professors, Opher and Eddie gave a fantastic presentation to a group of 150 students about design thinking and innovation. I am hopeful for China and suspect that there are many design thinkers here already who take the form of successful entrepreneurs. The trick is to help large Chinese enterprises and dare I say the Chinese government innovate. How do we help bring the entrepreneurial spirit and design thinking into these entities?

P.S. Yes, it is possible to eat dumplings with all the liquid fixings in a moving van.

The longer life cycle of fashion

I believe in Joseph Schumpeter’s philosophy of ‘Creative Destruction’ but what does change, trends, fashion and even innovation mean for sustainability? It takes a lot of money to develop a new car for example. Here in China, if it’s worked for the last thirty years, why change it?

For example, the VW Santana has been the staple vehicle of choice for taxis. For as long as I’ve watched Chinese TV, I’ve known what a VW Santana looks like. In Hong Kong, they are iconic red with a white roof. Here in Shanghai, they are either green or yellow. The Santana has been around for thirty years and they are still getting pumped out in Shanghai and JiLin.

Although fashion is important in a metropolis like Shanghai, worldly goods seem to have a much longer life. I saw calculators sold at the ‘Modern Electronics Store’ that looked like they were from the 1970s. But as old and dusty and second hand they were, there certainly is a market for them. Has the extreme wealth gap here in China (poverty line at 85 yuan $10US per annum, no kidding), made it so that consumer goods have a longer viable marketable life?

In the US, it would be hard to find brand new clothes that are three or four years out of fashion. Not here – in the mish mash, you will find GAP style khakis and sweaters from the 1990s. If it’s still functional, someone will want whatever it is at the right price. More importantly, someone will want to sell it. I haven’t found anything equivalent to a flea market or second-hand store yet in China.

Take One

If Beijing is the DC of China, Shanghai must be the New York. Though no Broadway, Shanghai has a history of performing arts. Its picturesque backdrops of European buildings has lent itself to old and new movies alike, including ‘Shanghai Tang’, which is also the name of an upscale boutique, and the recent ‘In the Mood for Love’ and ‘2046’, starring Hong Kong talents Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung.

On New Years Eve, a few of us went to see a live performance of ‘I Love You, Your Perfect, Now Change’, a popular off-Broadway musical that was recently adapted for Chinese audiences. Up to this point in time, all the musicals that have been performed in China have been direct transplants from Broadway, like the Lion King and the Phantom of the Opera, with Chinese subtitles. Hence, I was pretty excited to see what would become of a cheeky New York romance in the hands of a Chinese playwright. How would they preserve the catchy rhyming tunes? How would they translate words like ‘sex’? Would the adaptation exclude controversial scenes like a man and a woman falling in love at a funeral?

For the first time in China, the Chinese audience members were able to directly appreciate what the actors and actresses were saying (while us foreigners read the English subtitles). I couldn’t understand much of the Chinese, but the musical still rhymed in Chinese, with efforts to preserve the meaning. Groaning was replaced by ‘it gives me a headache’, and sex by ‘go to bed’. The controversial funeral scene wasn’t eliminated though anything more explicit certainly would not have passed muster. What was interesting too was that I think I laughed the loudest out of the few hundred people in the entire theater. The jokes were genuinely funny, but maybe westerners just happen to make a lot more noise when we are humored. We heard a few wholehearted yet subdued laughs from the audience, but not on the scale I would have expected from a Broadway crowd. This makes me wonder how ethnic culture shapes our respective concepts of happiness.

On a separate note, a group of us also recently went to see ‘The Curse of the Golden Flower’, a beautiful epic film set in the Tang Dynasty starring Gong Li (Memoirs of a Geisha) and Chow Yun Fat. In a long string of epic movies made by Chinese filmmakers in the past decade, beginning with ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’, this has to be the most jaw dropping one to date. The special effects, the costumes and the stage made my eyes want to pop out. I was told that 3,000 costumes were hand made for just one of the many battle scenes. I guess that’s appropriate when the main plot line involved the Empress making 10,000 chrysanthemum embroidered scarves in order to signify mutiny against an Emperor who was trying to poison her bit by bit because she slept with the crown prince.

Anyhow, ‘The Curse of the Golden Flower’ was chosen by Chinese officials as the China’s entry for the Best Foreign Film category at the Oscars. The locals tell us that epics like these are for foreigners. I find it a bit unfortunate that in order to get international recognition, that Chinese filmmakers are driven to produce period pieces that so clearly scream ‘I’m made in China about China’ because Hollywood demands it. There are plenty wonderful films set in modern day that are equally fascinating. My favorite is ‘Infernal Affairs’, a movie set in modern day Hong Kong about the relationship between a gang mole inside the police force and a police mole inside the triads. Chewy stuff.