Man, those two towns! places where it felt like McDonald's or KFC was the best place to be - although this is not in fact true, at least for Chuzhou, which has a nice Buddhist mountain and some good restaurants (and until last year at least, didn't actually have a KFC). The buildings in those cities I found horrible: perhaps designed by somebody who had only ever seen large buildings in a book, Stalinist buildings at that. You also saw a lot of three-wheeled cars and tractors, machines which made Ladas look luxurious.
The vista from my place of work in Chuzhou
The Pearl Man, for curiosity and the lack of having anything better to do, accompanied me to both of these places. After a long day's work in Chuzhou, I arrived back to the hotel room to find the Pearl Man drinking beer. Sharing the twin hotel room with him was a little rough, but he wasn't going to pay for his own. Pearl Man had been out shopping: he had bought a pitch fork and a farmer's sickle. "Wielded by the peasants during the Cultural Revolution." He had also found some place with posters for children featuring inexpertly drawn Disney characters. He hoped the posters would sell in America for their novelty value; he showed me one with a demonic looking Donald Duck holding a lantern inscribed with Chinese characters.
In Yixing he had pursued flower pots. Yixing is known for its pottery, especially teapots. It also is the greatest distribution spot for stone in Eastern China; if you want to buy stone lions for the entrance to your Chinese restaurant Yixing is the place to go.
I had met the Pearl man some five years earlier.
I was wasting another day of my youth standing behind the bar, taking my liquid wages. The barmaid working with me was slumped asleep in a chair. She was a nice intelligent Shanghainese girl, with the usual mercenary streak. Last time I saw her, she was heading to Austria to meet her boyfriend's family. On this last meeting, a dinner which she paid for, she told me not to hang out in the bar so much and looked at my paunch with disdain - she had once quite liked me - but our insistence on each speaking the others language stopped it ever developing into anything...I need not elaborate here for my fellow Anglophones.
That night, a Monday, was not a waste however, as in fact a customer did wander in, that super-bum, whom I came to know as the Pearl Man. Leaning tiredly on the bar, he immediately claimed some kind of friendship with Uncle Stan and asked for a free beer - as it was in my power, I obliged. Pearl Man was a little surly, and in one of his early utterances declared his love for President Bush (a little more forgivable back in late 2002). From a staunch Republican family, and hugely anti-Clinton, it seemed his whole soul was revolted by hypocritical left wing democrats; the most cruel immoral people in the world. Since that night I've always found Pearl Man a bit of pain to talk politics with, but his pro-Bushness was consistent for a man who always takes the most controversial view.
His politics did not fit in with his lifestyle however. He had never held a real job: kicked out of Franco's Spain for smoking pot in the late sixties he then studied anthropology at an American University in Mexico City. A man with varied interests, he once left the US for Mexico via Puerto Rico with a kitten, he then returned with a young Ocelot (using the certificate he had for the kitten, no I don't know the original kitten's fate) - the grown Ocelot later escaped from his garage. He was also a frequent visitor to the Dominican Republic, where his father, a pharmacist, had once thought of setting up a business. Eventually he moved away from his family in Connecticut and became an art trader in Santa Babara.
That night he also went into his various Beat Generation experiences - he was evidently drunk, because sober he would have detested himself for such name dropping. Apparently he was friends with a certain Harry Smith, who was some kind of mescalinite gay anthropologist of the Beat Generation. He also told a few fetid stories about meeting Burroughs and Corso. On the topic of woman, he was a jilted cynic "I have nothing to say to women - so I might as well just go down to the local hairdresser/brothel." He was still hung up about some coke head Brazilian chick in Santa Barbara it later came out.
What was fascinating about this fifty year old was what he did for a living. He had a sister in New York, he seemed to detest, who held jewelry parties - kinda like Tupperware parties. At these parties she sold pearl necklaces to the well-to-do. These necklaces were also advertised in (amazingly) Teen Vogue, and a few websites. The necklaces were the love child of the Pearl Man. He frequently travelled to some small city in China to buy cheap pearls, then cleaned and dyed them himself. He got them stringed by a guy in one of those buildings which is an endless maze of people and knickknacks. He used this particular person as he was the only Pearl Stringer in the building - he didn't want his designs to be stolen - in fact, he was paranoid about this. He went back to the US once or twice a year to deliver his Pearl Jewelry and this kept him in beer and girls in China.
His brother was a famous cancer doctor in the US. Through this connection Pearl Man knew an Australian cancer doctor in China; a good connection for Pearl Man's fragile health. He was quite often convincing himself he had cancer. He was also chummy with an Italian sculpture and a Japanese real estate agent, but mainly shunned human company, and so I was happy to be his friend. I even saw him in America once, where he felt it his duty to take me to a gun shop and a strip bar.
He was in the habit of ringing me up when drunk to talk about obscure (to me at least) furniture designers and New York notables, but this has ceased, I think he got pissed off the last time I left Shanghai, apparently I didn't tell him I was leaving. He was on the knife's edge as far as the pearl business was concerned at the time, and maybe needed to borrow some cash...?
The last time I saw him we roamed Shanghai, drinking beer, taking taxis and buses, I think we were trying to sell something to an antique shop, me acting as a not very good interpreter. We passed an old British built fire station, "you know that fire station tower used to be the tallest building in Shanghai in the 1920s" he commented. That's Pearl Man, wandering round from antique shop to brothel, lonely and full of knowledge...
Hamilton House, built around 1930, if memory serves. New York style modernism, with concave frontage - this style being unique to Shanghai according to Pearl Man. This building is on the intersection of Fuzhou and Jiangxi Roads. Diagonally opposite and also across from Hamilton House are similar buildings, but the forth corner lets the side down. However, it's still the most architecturally stunning corner in all of Shanghai for mine, and a favourite haunt of the Pearl Man. He was always off looking to buy ancient laboratory equipment on Fuzhou Road. Don't walk too far away from The Bund up Fuzhou Road though, it becomes unspeakably crowded on the stretch with all the bookshops..
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