China at 33⅓ revolutions per minute

It was while browsing the antiques market in Shanghai that I found a new way to marvel at the invention of the vinyl record.

LPs have captivated me since infancy. I was making futile attempts at playing records before I could walk, throwing Beatles 45s like Frisbees into the console player, and of course forever ruining them. When I became successful at crawling up on a chair to watch the turntable spin, I'd stare enraptured at the needle as it gradually made its way across the spinning black plastic. I noticed the shiny bits of the vinyl where the music would go quiet, and the blacker patches where one could expect a song to explode into cacophony. I could tell so much about the tracks by looking at a record album in my hands. That song is short and loud. That fat one that goes dark at the end must be Hey Jude.

To this day I admire how simple but mysterious a record is – how there are rich, human voices and glorious sounds buried into the near-invisible grooves on a plastic disc. Even when the speakers are off, spin the record with your finger and put your ear up to the needle just to hear the clanging guitars and miniature people shouting "She loves you, yeah yeah yeah" from the flimsy surface. It's physics doing its thing before your eyes and ears. Try getting an iPod to do that with a dead battery.

It wasn't until I found myself staring at a wind-up gramophone in Shanghai's Dong Tai Lu street market that I saw this simple contraption as something more profound. Here is an invention from the 1880s, a time we'd think of as a technologically primeval era. Electricity and the lightbulb were perhaps the major innovations of the time. And here I was looking into the horn of this beautiful gramophone and imagining the era in which it might have been constructed. Virtually none of the technology we have today was around at that time, and yet the sounds of entire orchestras could be captured and reproduced.

This must have been a more surprising achievement than some of history's greatest breakthroughs. Manned flight, which came about 15 to 20 years after the gramophone – that was predicable. The principles of aerodynamics had been obvious since da Vinci dreamed up the helicopter 500 years ago. But recorded sound – who would have guessed that its future would lie within microscopic bumps embedded in wax? If sound recordings hadn't been possible by the time computing technology had been developed, surely people would have been able to foresee a time when digital information would be able to reproduce sound. But these wax cylinders, and later shellac and vinyl LPs, came decades before we envisioned computers. And for that, I find the invention of the phonograph to be one of the most offbeat and unpredictable of any modern advancement that we enjoy today.

Calling Dong Tai Lu (or Dongtai Street) an "antiques" market is a bit of a stretch. It's filled with Mao kitsch, trinkets, and all sorts of musty memorabilia. There are antiques to be found, for sure, but even then you have to beware of the plethora of counterfeits. For me and my friend David, Dong Tai Lu was one of those curious things we had to see, but without any intention of buying anything.

Until I saw the records.

As anyone who knows me is aware, I love records. I'm not the world's most avid collector, but I do enjoy coming home with some rare and novel vinyl pressings from wherever I visit. I didn't expect to find any extraordinary Beatles LPs, as you might in Japan or Europe. Given how closed off China was during the most interesting parts of the 20th-century (not to mention that pop music was just plain illegal in the Communist bloc), there was no chance of stumbling across an obscure pressing of A Hard Day's Night on some defunct Beijing record label.

But I was dumbstruck by what I found in the cramped little shack beside the stall with the gramophone. Here the old vendor had piles of 10-inch records containing operas from the Cultural Revolution. It wasn't the music I was after. It was the covers that were astonishing – vivid and dramatic paintings of revolutionaries and army soldiers striking heroic, inspiring poses. When it comes to collectible vinyl, here were items I would not find at my local used record store in Vancouver – or anywhere else in the world, for that matter.

What makes an antique precious is how much it tells us about ourselves and our own time outside of the object's own history. Any collector of old things will not just be able to regale you with tales of where his collectables came from and their worth, but what his own relationship is to the antiques. Yes, these old records contained a story about China in the 1960s. The unexpected story that struck me, though, looking at the propaganda records and the gramophone outside, was how important and universal this technology was in shaping the world on both sides of the Red Curtain.

In the Western hemisphere during the 1960s, you had the vinyl LP emerging into an art form. No longer just a medium for distributing frivolous pop songs, comedy sketches and radio shows, The Beatles (along with the folk singers who preceded them, and Bob Dylan as their contemporary) legitimized pop music as a way to express complex, personal ideas, sequencing songs on each album to fit themes and moods. Not to credit The Beatles and Dylan for everything, but together they created an environment that made it safe and commercially viable for other musicians, singers and rock bands to take stands that were both personal and political, and to influence the way an audience  thinks. The Summer of Love and a revolution of sorts were in the air.

While The Beatles were singing a song called "Revolution" in 1968, Mao's Cultural Revolution was happening in the Eastern hemisphere. At that time in history, nothing of significance about China was really known to us in the West, and it was obvious that however fast our own society was changing through the sixties, nothing about our culture really was known or shared with the Chinese, either.

Seeing these records in the Dong Tai Lu market, however, suddenly made one thing obvious to me – we may not have shared the same music, but the same technology played a vital part in how our societies were shaped. We all listened to records. The vinyl LP was essential in disseminating the propaganda of hippies and the avant garde on one side of the world, and the propaganda of the political elite on the other side. We all had our lives influenced by records.

Ruminating on all this while flipping through the loot outside the merchant's shack, then going inside and displacing stacks of 10-inch vinyl around the cramped shop and stirring up decades-old dust and mould, I picked out a few specimens to purchase. This is where things got a bit sticky.

The stall owner, a spry old man whose deep wrinkles were like the history of China etched into his face, pulled out his calculator to type in the price (easier than speaking English). Five records, 500 yuan (C$80).

Every guidebook I had picked up, every "old China hand" that I spoke with, even the helpful Projects Abroad staff who helped with the logistics of my Shanghai work assignment, all of them had one essential piece of advice for shopping on Dong Tai Lu – Bargain! Do not pay the first full asking price of any item offered in the market. Haggle, pretend to be disinterested if you must, but never, ever pay the hyper-inflated asking price of any of the merchants. We were guaranteed by all sources that we could haggle down as much at 75 percent.

So I grimaced, hummed and hawed, and put the records down. I took his calculator and presented a counter offer. 300, I typed in. I thought I was being generous, considering all I'd heard. I expected the shopkeeper to say 400 yuan, and that would be that. But no. He typed back 500. " Tài guì le!" I cried ("Too expensive!") and walked away. I was anticipating the old man calling me back to negotiate. But I kept walking. And walking.

Could I not afford $80 for this extraordinary find? At this point it wasn't a matter of what I could or couldn't afford. All things considered, 500 yuan was well worth it. But if everyone from Lonely Planet to the crazy auntie at the pirate DVD table outside the supermarket were screaming for me to BARGAIN! in Dong Tai Lu, well, how am I supposed to feel when the old man in the metal shack with all the old records won't play ball? Despite their value to me, I was starting to imagine that this collection of old Cultural Revolution operas – from a painful time in history that most Chinese would rather forget – was the Shanghai equivalent of a flea-market stall full of scratchy Captain & Tennille records. Seriously, $80 for five Captain & Tennille albums?

Having spent the afternoon in the market, David and I were ready to leave. But I wanted to back-track. I tell David I'm making one more pass at the records. The old shopkeeper is sitting outside. I walk by slowly, hoping he call me over to make a sale. We make eye contact. I nod. He smiles and nods back, arms crossed. I'm desperate and I want to make a fresh start and just hand him five 100 RMB bills, but I'm too ashamed to lose face.

Some days later, I realized my folly and found my way back to the market on a rainy night after work. In the darkness and pelting showers, I found the shop. I flipped through the stacks and picked out five records. Some were the same ones I selected before, others I didn't recognize, but I liked them all. "Duōshǎo qián?" ("How much?") I asked. If he wasn't going to haggle before, he had no reason to negotiate now – I'm the one who returned. 500, he typed on the calculator. I swallowed my pride and considered writing a letter of complaint to Lonely Planet.

On my way out, happily carrying my new purchases in a plastic bag, a merchant across the way noticed my interest in the old records and called me over to look at some of his own. I hadn’t noticed this stall before. Now, it might make a funny ending to the story to tell you that he had a much better selection that he was willing to part with for pennies. But in fact this guy didn't even have the facility of a metal shack like his competitor. This collection was in a box under a table, covered poorly by paper bags, half exposed to the rain and soaking. They were ruined. I shook my head and walked away.

The only other question I thought about when considering the purchase was: Are these records real or counterfeit? Considering how much it would cost to press a vinyl record and re-print its cover, and then fake years of wear and tear, it would likely be more profitable to find and sell the real items, which I'm sure circulated in abundance.

Back in Canada with my loot, the first order of business was putting one of these platters on the turntable. The noise from the scratches and decades of grit that accumulated in the grooves was the real music to my ears. Sure, the crunchy sound prevented unadulterated enjoyment of the shrieks and clangs of opera as only military propagandists can write, but that's what made these records authentic. The music tells one story, but the surface noise tells the tales of the generations of families who mishandled these records. Maybe one of them was a little boy who tried throwing them onto the spindle of his father's gramophone.

Chinese characters and the link between language and culture

Written in 2011, while I was studying Mandarin Chinese in Taipei:

Learning to write Chinese was not my priority when I came to study in Taipei. My purpose in learning the language (or what little of it I could absorb in three months) was to converse; to speak some Chinese and develop some listening comprehension. The intricate characters themselves just seemed too dense and problematic to put any real effort into. I thought this aspect of the course, learning to read and write the characters, would have to be tolerated but would provide no joy.

Somewhere along the way, perhaps in the first week of my course, I felt my interest shift. Writing Chinese characters, which I first thought would just be a pain in the ass, has been an enriching and emotional experience. Not to say that learning speaking and listening skills hasn't been meaningful. But, despite how much time is required to memorize the characters, I've found a certain meditative peace in reading and writing, whereas the other aspects have provided as much frustration as reward.

Much has been written about the connection between language and culture, and certainly the best way to understand that connection intimately is to learn a language that uses a character-based system. Compared with the grace of Chinese writing, the alphabet used in English and other Western societies feels downright clinical.

Learning to write Chinese characters (I know about 300 now) has infused me with certain cultural predispositions in ways I couldn't have predicted. Specifically, having learned Traditional characters has now created a bias within me against Simplified characters. But there is no way to develop an affinity with either Traditional or Simplified without also forming attachments to the cultures in which they're used. Consider this: the Simplified system was developed primarily (though not completely) by the Communist regime of mainland China to improve literacy rates. The Taiwanese have proudly held on to Traditional characters as much for cultural as political reasons.

Those who are from mainland China would counter that Chinese characters have been evolving through different forms for thousands of years, and that Traditional writing is simply an arcane system that is impractical in the modern world. Considering that those who use each system are from specific geographic areas with their own political sovereignty, for me to express my own preference for Traditional script is bound to imply that I also carry certain political or cultural biases.

And it's somewhat true. As I think about continuing my Chinese studies in Vancouver, the one aspect I dread is that I will have to re-learn my characters in the Simplified format. The thought of abandoning the style of characters that I've been steeped in is offensive. The culture that has passed this knowledge to me has done so with a certain pride and appreciation. For me to abandon Traditional characters for Simplified would feel like a betrayal of sorts, not just to the culture that taught me, but toward my own attachment to the characters, whose strokes have left indelible impressions on my psyche.

These 300 characters that I know are 300 little pieces of Taiwan that are in my heart. But as the personal is also political, certain other biases start to creep in. I write the character for "Love", for instance, knowing that each part is related to love – the top represents "accept" while the middle is a "heart" and beneath it "perceive". However, the heart is omitted from the Simplified form. Leave it to the Communists to have no heart! And there I go, letting my love for the writing transfer some of its cultural and political biases. It's one thing to just prefer one script over another, but try to defend Simplified to a Taiwanese, or Traditional to an average mainlander, you will be in for an exchange of heated words rooted in homeland pride.

It's obvious that I have my preference. If I had learned Simplified first, I'm sure I'd be loyal to that system and would feel relieved that I didn't have to go through the hassle of learning the more complicated, repetitive-strain-inducing Traditional characters. But it didn't happen that way. Every traditional character I write is now infused with a fragment of a memory – of sitting in the NTNU library for hours scribbling in my notebook as I prepared for dictation tests, of my teacher, of my classmates, of overcoming my struggles, of the friends and people who helped me study, of practicing my Chinese with Tzuching's family, of my daily life in Taiwan. Each character is like a Rorschach inkblot, conveying its own personality and significance.

Anyone can make a good argument that Simplified characters are more logical, easier to write, and that the Traditional system is full of redundancies. But if the moment comes that I have to write 喜歡 as 喜欢, or 電視 as 电视 , it will not be a relief but a sense of loss.

If I feel that way after only three brief months of study, it gives me a flicker of understanding about how deeply, significantly personal these writing styles are within the people who were born into them.

Both the Traditional and Simplified systems have interesting arguments for and against their usage. For a better understanding, read here: Wikipedia: Debate on traditional and simplified Chinese characters

How Singapore helped me love Joni Mitchell (more than I already did)

One of the sweetest memories from my earliest days in Singapore involved finding a connection to my Canadian heritage in the room where I first stayed.

Having landed in Singapore on a friend’s invitation, I arrived at the family estate and was shown my way to the room of my host’s brother. The absent family member, working abroad, left behind enough personal effects to give my lodging a refined sense of home. This was no mere guest room.

The ledge that lined up alongside the bed held books, family portraits and personal photos; the shelf above the desk stacked with cassettes and CDs and musty issues of Vogue going back through the 1980s, all of which imbued a bit of the personality of the missing tenant. To this day, he’s the only member of the family I haven’t met, but I’m grateful to him for the room and the chi he left behind. For my first taste of a new country, feeling the surroundings in a local home was impressionable.

This was my first afternoon in Singapore, fresh off an 18-hour journey and a taxi from the airport. I’d barely unpacked when I found a copy of Joni Mitchell’s Hejira among the compact discs. Nothing should have been surprising about it, but it did seem out of place to the child in me – the child who grew up in the frozen Toronto winters, hearing Joni’s tunes drift out of my sister’s room on a winter’s afternoon, thinking of the singer as a distinct personification of Canada.

The Canada of my youth, from my perspective in suburban Toronto, was still just an idea – the loneliness of the prairies, the mountain towns of the Rockies, skating on a river at Christmastime, tapping a maple tree in a snowy forest. For most Canadians, those of us who lived in cities rather than the towns and villages of our folklore, it was a country more evoked than seen. It was our artists more than our experiences that gave us our sense of place: the Group of Seven painters, authors like Margaret Atwood and Mordecai Richler, CBC nature documentaries, the poetry of Pauline Johnson… and our singers, foremost among them Joni Mitchell.

Now, to imagine the Peranakan descendants of Chinese emigrants having their imaginations touched by the same soundtrack to my own snow-covered Canadian childhood, it was all so contrary.

I slipped the CD into the multi-disc player and listened to Hejira for the first time. Blue, Court and Spark, The Hissing of Summer Lawns; those albums I knew. This one, though, was not one of the Joni Mitchell records in my sister’s collection all those years ago. Hearing it for the first time so far from the landscape it depicted – the coyotes and motel rooms and seedy jazz bars and the long lonely roads stretching across a frozen prairie – it was as all so incongruous with the heavy tropical air and the cicadas whistling outside the window.

Hejira provided a pleasant solace during the vacation, in those quiet moments between making plans and doing them. What was special was how the album brought back memories as if it had always been part of the backdrop to my own childhood, as if it had been something heard a hundred times before. It became a little slice of home to comfort me throughout the day. Yet, despite how unmistakably Canadian this music is, it eventually impressed upon my memory the humid, languid days among the colonial shophouses and tropical greenery of Singapore. 

Today it wells up a melange of emotions and memories from both my Canadian childhood and my Singaporean adventures. As someone who is often guided (and misguided) by emotion, the sound of mid-1970s Joni Mitchell records now cross the wires of reminiscence, calling me to return "home" to a Singaporean childhood that exists in a false memory, a time of my life that I can sense, even though it never existed.

I will always treasure the way Hejira conjures impressions of the endless cycle of hot days and warm nights that were unconstrained by seasons; the palm trees and the pool outside the window; the sound of Joni singing about the Bay of Fundy and the “refuge of the roads”, with her voice echoing through the large but modestly furnished room, surrounded by foreign books and faded photos of the Peranakan relatives.

It wasn’t until years later that I realized that Hejira has almost no percussion. Its beauty and passion emerges simply from layered, jazzy guitars and a melodic bass. What a peculiar soundtrack to a Southeast Asian holiday. But then, maybe certain lyrics called out to me, foreshadowing the life that this impressionistic vacation would inspire me to follow:

The drone of flying engines is a song so wild and blue

It scrambles time and seasons if it gets through to you.

Then your life becomes a travelogue of picture-postcard charms…

People will tell you where they’ve gone, they’ll tell you where to go

But until you get there yourself you’ll never really know.