South Gate

We are in a city of 11 million people, yet living on campus creates its own kind of isolation, its own community. Sichuan Normal University lies in a liminal zone: it’s not quite urban, not quite the sticks. A ten minute bike ride in one direction lands you in the center of urban noise, and twenty minutes gets you to the glittering towers of downtown; on the other hand, there are farms just past the university grounds, and the condos and row houses that line the highway to the school quickly give way to less developed tracts of arable and pre-construction land. A half-hour bus ride in that direction leads to fields of flowers and more rural suburbia. We are right on the line of nowhere.

The university is laid out roughly in the shape of a sloppy diamond, and the main entrance is the South Gate, or Nan Damen, a busy, clamorous affair with a security gate and a number of small, serious men in oversized uniforms, white cotton gloves, and great big guns slung awkwardly over their shoulders. They glare a lot, but I’ve never seen one actually do anything other than collect a few coins for toll, or wave others through with a bored salute. A huge metal arch looms over the entrance, looking unfinished and temporary, like a snap-together structure from a state fair. It is occasionally slung with great red banners welcoming this or that esteemed visiting group or announcing some victory on the part of a local club. The South Gate is more or less the cultural center of campus; due to some calamitous grease fires in the past, no restaurants other than the formal, expensive, state-sponsored variety are allowed on campus property, so the real food action happens here at the perimeter, along with most other commerce.

In the daytime, the South Gate is a grubby, tiled plaza littered with last night’s trash. Unofficial “cab” drivers park helter-skelter in a great, un-navigable mess of tuk-tuks and undersized cars, each at a senseless angle to the next. The drivers lounge and smoke and yell at one another; occasionally, someone will bargain with one for a ride, and then five minutes of grumbling and swearing and jostling ensue, as each vehicle adjusts only slightly to let the other through to the flow of traffic on the highway that runs past the gate, leading into town one direction, and the boonies in the other.

Inside the plaza itself is a dusty knot of hundreds of bicycles and scooters packed tightly together in a tangled parking mess. Packs of tiny, filthy, homeless dogs roam and scatter like nervous fleas; they are often covered in mud or muck, and they chew miserably on bits of greasy paper and dropped goodies they find on the ground. No one seems to notice them, and they congregate with a strange social silence, holding brief telepathic conferences with one another before dispersing and wandering underfoot in the crowd – tiny, tiny dogs, the largest no bigger than a beagle. I often wonder what they’re up to; I have a creepy feeling they’re running the show. They definitely know something I don’t.

Looming over the plaza is a four-storey structure covered in billboards and small plastic signs. It’s more or less a mall, shaped liked a horseshoe with the ends facing out to the street. A long-dead escalator rises up along one side, and is followed by some broad, tiled stairs that are deadly slick when it rains. A few new-looking tea kiosks with happy signs are nestled beneath the stairs, and offer bubble tea and milk tea and smoothies in huge plastic cups. One has the unfortunate name, “The Jack Hut.” We are big fans. Next door, a small barbecue stand grills tofu and meats to order. A flower seller wraps roses in blue paper and sprays each leaf with glitter or false dew.

Each tier of the mall has its own function: the lower level is full of noodle stalls, shoe shops, bright boutiques offering hideous underwear in laughably small sizes, ice cream carts, plastic jewelry, pirated DVDs, and what they suppose are Western-style bakeries, attended by robotic young women with matching uniforms and painted-on smiles, selling identically sweet and substanceless baked goods in a variety of misleading shapes and forms (“baguette,” “dinner roll,” “cake,” “muffin,” “green thing,” “jelly roll with beans” – they all taste exactly the same and contain “pork floss.” Don’t get me started.)

The second level has a handful of beauty salons that smell of soap and tortured hair; they are staffed by incredibly hip young men with spiky do’s who smoke while they work, and work until midnight. Beyond that are a series of fascinating little clothing stores; these shops have the quality of childhood dress-up games, or yard sales. All of the items are different; there are no alternative colors or sizes in a given style – there is a gauzy green dress shaped like a pom-pom and fit for a 10-year old; there is a sleazy backless tanktop with plastic beads sewn across the bodice like a necklace, to disguise the wearer’s breastlessness; there is an oversized yellow t-shirt with an iron-on decal of Holly Hobby and a patch that says “Slipknot” in what is undoubtedly a trademarked logo ripped off from a nearby sweatshop; there is a purple shirtdress with a painting of an octopus on the front, and glitter, and lace at the cuffs. There are no tags on anything, and no labels, no brands. Shopping in these places is like wandering through a mad tailor’s dream, where colors and cloths have collided and stitched themselves together and then swum through a storm, washed up on a strange shore, dreamt of glamour, and finally thrown a party for themselves, hanging around on pegs and hangers with charming attendant girls who eat and talk on the phone and watch TV while they wait for someone to come in and haggle for a skirt made of car upholstery and velvet fringe.

The third level has a pool table exposed to the sky, where cooks from the restaurants play on torn felt while they wait for customers. There are multiple hotpot places, and a number of KTV (karaoke) bars full of twinkly lights and smoke, and giant cardboard ads for beer. The fourth floor is taken up by “hotels” – campus life is cramped and not at all private, even for teachers and postgrads. Students often live as many as six to a room, which makes romantic encounters unlikely and awkward. This is, however, no impediment to sex, as the South Gate hotels conveniently only rent by the hour, and are happy to bring by cigarettes or condoms or bottles of booze from nearby KTV joints.

In the daytime, this area is all about mundane commerce. On the far side of the mall are cell phone stores, fruit stores, sports equipment. People come and go and shop and pay, they shuffle and mill about with plastic bags and freshly cut flowers wrapped in colored paper and silvered silk. They eat loudly and throw their napkins and bowls on the ground. A vegetable market in the downstairs basement has stalls for eggs and meat and chicken feet, carts of nuts and tubs of live fish, row upon row of fresh green goods – heaps of radishes and onions and lettuces, all with the dirt still on; bakers sell cookies, and soy vendors sell blobs of wet tofu and cakes of rice starch; butchers have hunks of red flesh dangling from hooks, and glass cases full of small skinned bodies that look upsettingly like cats (I’m told they are rabbits…). Students and teachers and locals alike move through in a busy but sparse hum of trade and activity. Everything is colored but muted by thin layers of dust and the murky grey light of the Chengdu sun.

At night, however, the place is transformed. It becomes a riot, a carnival of noise and light and food smells. The darkness is broken up into bits by colored neon chasing up and down dozens of enormous flashing signs; strobes and twinkles season the air in small burst of blue and red and yellow. Voices grow louder and car horns compete with canned music pumped out of doorways and hidden speakers all around the square. Carts move into the plaza and become temporary goldmines: the Muslim man with his white hat and his open-coaled barbecue, where he grills skewers of meat in plumes of delicious smoke and small showers of sparks; the fruit lady, hacking up pineapples into peeled wedges and selling them on bamboo sticks; the woman with the magical cast-iron like a ice-cube tray – she pours a mixture of eggs and onions and shrimp into the pockets of iron, and then lines up the resulting little cakes onto a handle. Everything comes on a stick in China – deep fried lotus root slathered in chilies and numbing spice, vinegared loops of tofu skin, terrifying little sausages in unnaturally smooth pinks, spicy hot chicken feet, French-cut fried potatoes in chili sauce. Everything comes in four bites and can be carried away; the Chinese eat in motion even more than New Yorkers do.

Across from the carts and behind the thicket of bicycles is a row of arcade games, things that bleep and bling and whiz and bing, games where you shoot real-sized basketballs into hoops 6 feet away as fast as you can, games where you shoot real-sized rifles at targets in arm’s reach, games where you toss and yell and jump on each other when you win, where lights flash and buzzers sound and vague rock music leaks out of unseen speakers and spills over the plaza and gets lost in the noise of the crowd.

The crowd itself grows and swells and polishes itself to a gleam: young men and women on dates, nice shirts, heels and frilly dresses, nervous looks, laughter; flocks of girls linked arm in arm and hand in hand, smiling and talking in loud voices, not listening to themselves or each other; old ladies shuffling with bent backs and identical blue vests; cooks in white coats and sandals, and shirtless beneath, their bare chests smooth and flat like young boys’; businessmen in serious-looking suits and shining dark shoes hurrying somewhere upstairs; old small men with grey-whiskered chins and faded blue jackets that tell stories of forgotten recent pasts, their hands knitted behind their backs as they stare around at the glitz with tired eyes. It is noisy and busy and happy and loud. The young men get drunk on a handful of cheap, light beers, and toss back sips from small glasses, toasting each other and leaning on one another’s shoulders for balance and affection. Down the hall, attendants sit quietly in front of dank, unlit tiled rooms smelling rankly of piss through open doors; they charge a few cents to enter and relieve oneself, a few cents more if you want a handful of napkins, as well.

At the other foot of the gate, a temporary night market springs to life: people spread blankets on the ground and offer all manners of worthless kitsch: handheld colored lights that blink and spin for a few hours before breaking, looking for all the world like artifacts from raves in the 90’s; cigarette boxes with Communist Party logos; fluffy socks with Hello Kitty and other icons of Japanese pop culture; cheap jewelry and rings. Occasionally, pet sellers will come out of the woodwork, and the ground will be covered in stacks of small cages selling tiny bunnies nearly dead with boredom and captivity, or boxes of hamsters, gerbils, small white mice, tubs of goldfish and little koi – all things disallowed in dorm rooms and certain to live short little lives, made shorter by disease or neglect. There are essentially no veterinary services in China – pets are a disposable luxury. For those who prefer longevity, floppy stuffed animals are a popular gift. It is common to see a young woman walking back to her dorm room, all smiles and fluttering eyes, with an enormous toy dolphin or lion or bear in her arms, half her size and a serious token of someone’s affection.

It’s a strange scene, all of it. It’s equal parts Bladerunner and Clueless, a dystopic fiction, a Pleasure Island for the young and the silly and the emergent middle class. It feels like a shopping mall at times, normal and boring and full of superficial wants and trades. At other times, it’s more like an outpost at the edges of reality and time, a Star Wars cantina, and a blinking, dirty look at the mess of the future, full of pirated goods and things wrapped in plastic which is held only moments before being tossed on the ground. I try to make it feel normal, to imagine it as simply the student commons that it is for those who live here, but it is so wild and full of information that I always feel instead like an explorer, instead, like the most common things in their lives, noodle shops, snacks, bras, are somehow beyond my comprehension. All of it becomes an overload, a desperate snapshot of the frontier between now and things and worlds to come. I wander around and consider getting a haircut from one of the fashionable young men. I chat with clothes sellers who long to be tall like me when I complain about not being able to find jeans that fit. I buy fruit, and I buy those fantastic fried things that are stuffed with spinach and green onions and taste like heaven in hand, and I see a small, dirty dog looking at me from behind a pile of used paper boxes and the stench of washing water and offal. What does he know that I don’t?

~ by knifemaker on May 11, 2008.