Preface: 一時

Since last I raised the pink lantern I've moved to Shanghai, loafing around this city more and more in line with (I wanted to say Whitman but must resign myself to) H.D. Thoreau, who decried fripperies of all types when a simple shirt, holes or no holes, will do you, and measuring myself in detached contrast. All these are others and I've banked enough waves of changed mood about Shanghai to know better than to make generalizations. I can't speak about the China that Shanghai tries to beat away with hukou regulations and a sweet, humid cuisine. Even this is a polite generalization, but you and I are having a conversation and my condition- being a foreigner in China- gives any two foreigners something to talk about. If my words stab at truth, I feel I've missed the vein; there's been talk about relaxing hukou regulations for some time and off in dreamy Pudong, on one of the seventy-story billboards viewed from across the river while strolling on the Bund, between drifting shots of Expo pavilions I saw a dictum from Premier Uncle Wen exhorting us to cherish the peasantry- and for us, too, if that's what it means that it came translated to English.

今天晚上，在地铁3号线从中山公园到上海南站. I'm still wearing rags, a very old t-shirt light enough for swimming through this air, and shorts I pulled from the end of my armoire and pulled on, smelling like a year of moths. Shanghainese youths come and go, talking of Michelangelo; or, at least, we have the yellow fog rubbing against and licking the windowpanes on elevated Line 3, pushing so cinematically past 上海南站, passing away from South Station alighted on the rail lines and then banking a turn around the southern lip of Xujiahui, past the Lipstick Towers at 港汇广场 and on north to Zhongshan Park. These first clothe themselves in laughter and purple shirts, black pants, mostly black for the guys, but if the girls are on the metro they're not wearing their summer dresses- these will take taxis, and in the next post I intend to return to taxis. They'll laugh and curl around poles like cats flirting for his or her attention whose hand he or she will be holding striding through the door. I don't mean this sexist; the boys curl too. 女士 over there used to be one of them and holds her form as Pearl Cream holds the skin tight. I thought of an easy dichotomy and chucked it. 先生 stands staid; my Chinese friends tell me Shanghainese men are pussywhipped, and 先生 opens the gates for me to scrutinize all the inconspicuous individuals on this train, and stands there pleased in his pressed shirt and suit pants. The other night I ate in a little restaurant on Changle Lu and along with me, prowls of salarymen. Peasants sit upright in the seats they've seized in Baoshan or Songjiang or somewhere else at the telomeres of 上海地铁3号线, and already I've said too much.

Hitotoki is a moment and I can't stick to it. I tried at the last HAL Groupthink to justify it as "people-time," 人時, but Japan won't countenance such an interpretation and authenticity was pulled from under my feet, leaving me cold on the table. It's 一時, the twelfth part of a day, or else a simple moment whose explication is the only way I can see of explaining this city. But Shanghai rolls like a bitch in heat to show you its signs, and you do with them what you will.