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.Nothing high style trades hands here, mostly objects of enduring and affordable pleasures.Pet owners everywhere show off, and these shops offer owners a variety of status symbols.Birds of fine feathers, sweet song, or rarity lend prestige to their keepers.Cages too sing a tune.The bamboo bands that ring the bottoms of a cage might be plain or etched, detailed or crudely fashioned.The minute ceramic pots that hold seeds and water come in all the grades, from stoneware to fine porcelain.More subtle are the dainty finger-length wooden finials that connect the cages to the metal hanging hooks on top.In the best cages, the finials are cut from rare hardwood blocks carved with rural scenes at postage-stamp scale.The finials can cost pennies or, as with the few locked in glass cases, hundreds of dollars.The trade in the market is unhurried and social.At the outdoor noodle shops that serve shoppers and workers, tables are shared with critters.The pet market is also an urban hollow, where the country lives inside the city.In addition to working from the shops and the bicycles, some vendors just plant themselves where they can.With bundles the size of lawn bags by their feet, some stand by the entrances to the shops selling amphibians and fighting bugs.The market is one of the few places in central Shanghai where one can see Chinese still donned in Mao suits and ragged military outfits.Either their work is too dirty to risk nicer dress, or those in them are simply too poor to wear much else.Pet markets in China are places where one can work, literally, from the ground up, and in the new China the ground is all some people have, as was the case with the Lis when they first moved to Shanghai.But sometimes migrants bring the ground with them.There are, for example, the two ruddy-faced women holding small bamboo trays covered with bits of peat.The women look down at the glances of citified passersby, as if they are ashamed to have walked so recently out of China’s deep past.These women sell worms.They pluck them from the clods of earth on their trays one by one, taxing customers to come up with the smallest denominations of Chinese currency in their pockets.“Can you imagine the indignity of that job?” asks a cosmopolitan woman walking through the market.“That is the lowest of the low, selling worms.Selling worms for people’s pet birds and bugs.” She remarks how poor the two women look, how thin, how short, how short of calories.Shanghai, she says, is full of them.Distinguishing between the rural poor and the better-off urbanites is easy business on urban streets.Or so it seems to the Chinese, who can pick up the signs instantly, judging build, complexion, dialect, and fashion to make a quick assessment.There is the expected haughtiness and sneering that passes between them.It is tempting to see the slick side of the city as the vanguard of change in China.The big city is certainly where the big money is betting.But places like Shanghai’s pet markets, where the country comes into the city, show off an equally important side of the current revolution.That there is a worm market at all is just as telling as the expansion of the giant Baosteel works, the new GM Shanghai plant, or the city’s building boom.The women selling worms may look to be the lowest of low, but their presence in Shanghai is a reminder that the new economy’s Big Bang was set off in the country, and it is the momentum of China’s rural population, once a collective but now atomized and in motion, that is changing not just China, but the world.Before reform, selling worms for profit in a pet market would have been an utter impossibility.Communist ideology on nature, work, and class all would have conspired against it.Nature was to be conquered.Workers were to serve the state.Business that promoted a leisure class endangered the revolution.The Communists under Mao gave themselves a mandate to radically refashion China’s earth.They used the will—stoked by ideological campaigns—and the labor of the people to do it.The Party’s penchant for giant public works projects is well-known.Less well-known is how savagely the Chinese people were set against the natural world.American scholar Judith Shapiro1 spent three years in China talking to people involved in government campaigns designed to reorder nature.2 One campaign in the late 1950s and early 1960s, called Wipe Out the Four Pests, directed the Chinese to wipe out all rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows.Mao drafted the whole country to the campaign, including a national army of young grade-schoolers.In massive coordinated attacks on birds, whole towns would conduct search-and-destroy missions for nests and bird eggs.Patrols marched through fields beating pots and pans to chase birds out.When birds flew off to more remote sanctums, antipest armies lay in wait, beating pots and drums again, allowing birds no place to land [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]