Propaganda Poster Museum
Saturday turned out to be a complete wash for me. Aside from lying wilted on my bed or tiny IKEA couch – pretending to read, study, write – I didn’t leave the apartment until evening and even then, it was too hot to really have a good conversation. In fact, my brain felt fried and my tongue felt heavy in my mouth. I think Christina thought I was drugged, and I was only braving the heat because it was her last night and she really wanted to go to the “Juice Bar” around the corner from our apartment.
The Juice Bar turned out to be a café (they also listed five kinds of juice on the menu, though they only had two in-house – potato [POTATO JUICE?!?!!?] and orange). But, the café was really just a front for a tanning salon. A male tanning salon. I don’t know if women aren’t allowed to tan at this place or if women just choose not to, but the whole thing was geared towards men. (A DVD of tanned, Asian male models strutting back and forth in swimsuits, two VERY tan boys working behind the bar, checking themselves out in all reflective surfaces, etc.) In fact, right before we left, a foreign couple entered the café. The man purchased some time in a tanning bed and the woman sat at a table, talking on a cell phone, waiting for her man to tan.
Saturday evening continued to be pretty uneventful: after a couple of hours slowly sipping the overpriced drinks we purchased from the tanning salon, Christina and I went to Century Mart for her last shopping excursion in a Wal-mart-esque multi-floor “super-mart”. The place was “super-crowded” and we ended up standing in line for at least 30 minutes. The best part of that experience was watching people try to cut in line, but doing so in the least subtle way possible, as if their bravado would elicit praise instead of censure. Not one of these people managed to make it more than a few seconds. Usually people would just tap them on the shoulder and say something along the lines of, “Yeah right”, but we did see some really annoyed people get a little loud with their reprimands.
After Century Mart, I bought “The Break-Up” from our neighborhood DVD cart-lady and said adieu to Christina. She’s now safely back in Switzerland getting ready to begin her first year of University.
I don’t know if the heat has made my film appreciation nerve endings a little fuzzy, but I really liked “The Break-Up” – it was pretty funny! Especially the part where the DVD had two very small holes in it that made the disc do dances in my computer. I had to start watching 25 minutes in, in order to get it to play.
Before going to sleep Sat. night, I mapped out a rigorous adventure for Sunday. I had not yet tackled the French Concession and wanted to cover several sites that were all about two to ten blocks from each other, starting west and heading east. As this is already a long post, I’ll discuss the Propaganda Poster Museum first and leave the rest of the French Concession for another post.
This museum isn’t easy to find. My guidebook warned me of this fact, but I had no idea. I took the Metro to Jing’an Temple (located right next to Yuan Yuan Canting) and started walking southeast on Huashan Lu. It was a hot, hot day and I felt gummy and low on energy as I trudged along the big, bustling Huashan Lu. Suddenly, the road forked west and what had been a typical, new SH street, became a lazy, winding, tree-shaded lane. I had reached the French Concession. I continued along, fortified by the shade and stopped off at a grocery just before arriving at the address in the guidebook. I bought a bottle of iced tea and drank it all while waiting in line to pay.
Outside again, it didn’t take long to find the address listed in the guidebook for the museum. I walked through a half-open guard gate and was about to knock on the first door I saw when a guard came out of a little gate house and handed me a business card with a map on it. The card said, in English, “Propaganda Poster Museum, we are this way – find us in basement of number 4 building”. The guard pointed towards a circle of residential high-rises and motioned for me to walk behind the buildings. I found building 4 and took the elevator to the basement. Stepping out of the elevator, I was hit with the smell of building decay – mustiness and mildew and mothballs. I saw a glass door and the hint of red and yellow. As I was making my way to the door, a tiny little Chinese man in his late 50s-early 60s opened the door and shouted, “Yes, Hello, Please, Hello, Yes!” He pushed me out the door, took my hand and guided me down a dark hallway to another door, this one made of cheap wood. He opened the door to a world that could have been billed as “Chairman Mao’s final resting place” or “The Chinese idea of Mao’s Heaven”. Three rooms were literally stacked with posters from the Revolution. In the corner, below the aircon unit, stood a dusty Buddha with a few sparse offerings – mostly small water bottles filled with now-stale water – and below the statue sat a huge poster of two men and a woman: workers and army folk working together to oust Imperialism from beautiful China.
In the center of the first room stood an enormous portrait of Mao and an explanation of the museum and its purpose. The museum is not state-run or supported. The work of one obsessed man, the manager searches high and low for surviving posters across China. Sometimes they are accidentally kept by peasants in the small villages and other times, they’ve been kept almost in fear that destroying them might make the Revolution happen all over again. Either way, the manager finds it isn’t difficult to wrestle them from their previous owners. Almost every poster in the museum happens to be for sale. The government would like to see all of the posters destroyed and strictly forbids reprinting of any propaganda from during the Revolution - hence the price tags. The museum manager believes the posters will find a safer existence in the homes of foreign collectors than sitting around in the basement of a residential high-rise in Shanghai. The lowest price I saw was 800 kuai, which is a little more than $100. But these things are real! It was chilling to walk around the room, being started down by angry Chinese eyes on all sides. One of the more interesting titles was, “People are not Scared of US Imperialism but US Imperialism Scared of People” and the poster was right, I was a little scared of the people.
The introduction told of artists being forced to participate in the Liberation. During the Cultural Revolution, many artists didn’t want to have anything to do with the propaganda machine, but if they didn’t create the images of strong, angry Chinese men and women crushing their opponents and shutting out the rest of the world, they faced public criticism, branding as a “bourgeois intellectual” obsessed only with self and personal exploits, or even worse: being sent away to “reeducation camps”, jail, or even death by beating or starvation.
The museum gave me a lot to think about. On the one hand, I can understand why a country would say, “Enough is enough” and fight to get rid of their foreign oppressors…(Didn’t the US just celebrate Independence Day?) but on the other hand, I wonder how much of the deep-seeded hatred of foreigners, especially Americans, still lays dormant (or, not so dormant) in the hearts, souls and minds of China’s people. And, more importantly, how would China’s people view foreigners today, had Mao never managed to overthrow the Kuomintang and “Liberate” China with his propaganda and little red book of Communist quotes?
I’d like to think that the manager of the Propaganda Poster Museum is doing history a favor by selling these posters so they do not disappear, but what good will they be to an engineer in Germany or an artist in Canada? They need to be saved and protected, but by the Chinese people foremost FOR the Chinese people.
