Megan Shank dot com

My whole life feels like a picture of a sunny day… (Sleater-Kinney)

Lots of stuff to catch the folks up on:

1. Put to bed the March issue of NWS, which shaped up to be full of compelling, insightful content. I was especially proud of the story I oversaw on homosexuality in Shanghai. I had a great journalist/photographer, Peijin Chen, for the piece, and working together we created what the NYC office described as: “an excellent effort — absolutely newsworthy, well written, and well reported.” My boss Tom later told me that the Executive Editor for Newsweek’s foreign editions said the story had “set a new standard for Newsweek Select.” Also noteworthy was the collection of seven fantastic women sharing with readers their successes and struggles. I’ll put all these up on the site after the March issue has been out for a week.

2. I saw an inspired dramatic performance last week at Creek Art, a warehouse space on the outskirts of town. My intention was to see an old friend, Mao Dou, perform some vocals, but little did I know that the performance also had a one-act, performed in three scenes (though they are all one scene) play. The play depicted a story in which a rich woman driving by a bicycle repair shop bumps a bike with her BMW. Upon discovering her BMW (an allusion, no doubt to the incident in Harbin some years back) has been scratched by the occurence she charges the bicycle repairman (a rather slow, somewhat befuddled man) to pay up. Her pearls and curls swinging in fury, she ridicules and scorns him and when he is slow to produce the money, she calls up her parents as reinforcement. Her mother, played, hilariously by a broad-shouldered man in heavy make-up and a beehive wig paid a sick sort of homage to the post-menopausal Shanghai new money 50-plus set that seem to occupy every living quarter of my gym’s sauna, and the BMW woman’s father, played by a short, tough-talking chain-smoking bloke, show up. The parents bully and beat up the bicycle repairman who eventually cedes that he will go retrieve the cash to pay them. He instead comes back with a three-meter-long Chinese opera ax and slaughters the family. The most interesting part of the piece, however, is that each group of characters is allowed to go through their entire dialogue alone. When the BMW woman goes through her bit alone and then the parents through their bit, they break the fourth wall and interact with the audience as though we were the bicycle repairman. We thus cringe and cower in the wake of their wrath. Finally, when the bicycle repairman goes through his piece, we are at the end of a man pleading with us for pity and are thus forced to deal with our own unearthed classist contempt. Between each scene, which were performed on various podiums throughout the audience, the lights dimmed and Mao Dou and his band played increasingly intense hardcore goth with Chinese characteristics. At the end, as we are being slaughtered by the bicyclist, feverish traditional Chinese opera renders our most horrific impulses vanquished. We stand before the defiant, exhausted repairman and witness not only his defeat but our own failure. Bravo! How refreshing and powerful this was to see performed!

3. By default, I saw Roger Waters play with a pretty good replacement band on Tuesday, Feb. 12. I had refused to buy tickets, as I am too stubbornly principled to pay more than $50 for any show, but I scored free ones when a friend had to give hers up because of work commitments. Score. The show was pretty cool. I won’t write too much about it because Shamus Sillar at Shanghaiist already did an excellent job. And I mean, I like Pink Floyd and all, but Dirty Three, which put on three shows in Shanghai in October, is more my cup of tea.

4. Finished off an essay for the book project I’m working on, and I was pretty satisfied with the result. I can’t publish it all here until the book comes out, but I can give you a sneak peek. Clue: this essay is about a hotel in town… “On tiptoes, we scurried through midnight’s halls past portraits of famous dead men who had once slept here. Occasionally our fingers, still chilled by the October night of strolling along the Huangpu River, interlaced. Stifling giggles, we pulled them apart. Quick stops to tug at a hip, to breathe warmth upon an ear, and we were off again. Only the 137-year-old teak-wood floors acknowledged our presence—we young lovers wild with delight. Around the halls we went, listening to the radiators pop, cracking open antique windows for the scent of the wet air, dancing in the tinted glow cast by spotlights on stained glass windows. Love comes with great courage, and courage enables curiosity’s finer impulses.”

5. Heard a really cool speech on Tuesday, Feb. 13 about the growing Chinese middle class given by CEQ Editor Arthur Kroeber and Paul French, research director of Access Asia. I will write more about this when I’ve more energy and am feeling more inclined.

6. On Sunday, Courtney and I leave for Malaysia. We’re arriving in Kuala Lumpur in the middle of the night on Chinese New Year’s Day. We’ll play around in the city for a day or two before heading to peninsula Malaysia’s central region to trek in Taman Negara, which is a 130-million-year-old rainforest. It’s the only rainforest never to have been affected by glacier nor volcano. We’ll do some hiking and nature watching before heading south to stuff ourselves in Melaka on Nyonya cuisine.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 at 9:25 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.