Wearing another man's clothes
May 3, 2023
Last night my girlfriend and I went on a quest to find a store called “Uptown Records.” It’s a place I’d read about on the internet that apparently would have a lot more underground Chinese rock bands than the typical still-surviving record store. If for whatever reason you find yourself reading great quantities of my writings, you’ll slowly realize that I’m filled with a massive guilt over not knowing enough about Chinese Rock. Even after spending hundreds of hours consciously looking up bands, and slowly listening over and over to the bands that resonate with me, reading whatever written record exists documenting those bands, staring at their videos when I should be sleeping — I feel like I still don’t know anything. I blame this partially on not having a massive physical collection of music for me to look through, so on coming to Shanghai, one of the first items on my agenda was to go to a bunch of record stores.
What I discovered at the first few stores I visited was that everyone seems to care a lot more about vinyl records here than CDs — which of course isn’t any different from the United States. But, if you ask me, it’s a lot weirder for that to be the case here. China’s economy began liberalizing in 1979. The Compact Disc was released in 1982. By the end of the decade it mostly replaced vinyl records as the premier music format. On the other hand, as far as I’m aware Mainland-Chinese Rock and Roll only started being recorded and sold in stores on a large scale in 1989 with Cui Jian’s Rock 'N' Roll on the New Long March, which, according to Discogs, was first released on cassette, then CD two years later. It would be a decade and half until vinyl had its resurgence. So for record stores here to emphasize vinyl seems to indicate a marked preference towards foreign music — or maybe music from Hong Kong and Taiwan — since vinyl was never really the dominant format for the Mainland during the years that people could make music besides model opera. There’s not anything wrong with foreign stuff — it’s just, I know there is a lot of interesting Mainland Chinese music, but sometimes it feels like no one wants me to listen to it. I want to go to a place that shoves Chinese Rock in my face, trying to get me to join their little club the way Christians on American college campuses try to get you to join their Bible studies.
Maybe actual cool things don’t advertise themselves. That’s what this Uptown Records place seems to be trying to tell me. When we got to their listed address there was just an unmarked staircase down into the darkness. An old man standing outside saw us beginning to walk down the staircase (or rather just my girlfriend — I’m too much of a coward to step into unknown darkness myself) and told us the store moved two years ago. He gave us an address about two kilometers away. We biked over to the other address and just found a closed garage door without any sign or marker that this is a store. So who knows if the place is closed — or if it’s just a cool person place that doesn’t advertise itself. We came the day after May 1st, which is a national holiday. I’ll have to wait for there to be a bit more temporal distance from the holiday to visit again.
The whole time we were outside yesterday, I was wearing a shirt that my girlfriend’s roommate’s dead boyfriend had made for himself during one of his birthdays several years ago. It has the silhouette of a cake on it, the letters “HBD” and the numbers “520”. My girlfriend thought it was nice looking, so when her roommate was about to throw it out, she claimed it for herself, however she never actually wears it, since she’s scared it would make her roommate upset. Her roommate wasn’t home when we went out, so I figured it was my chance to try it out.
My girlfriend’s roommate, who I’ll refer to as L so that I don’t have to keep typing “My girlfriend’s roommate”, has a very tiny room, despite paying more rent than my girlfriend. Perhaps the nominal reason for this is that the living room is filled with racks of her clothes. She also has a monopoly on all the decorating. The dominating motif is Skelanimals. The sofa is covered in them, and there’s also a bookshelf just for storing Skelanimals with comically large syringes inserted into their heads. There’s also Skelanimal stickers slapped all over the mirror leaning precariously against the wall the next to the desk I’m typing at. During evenings it’s not uncommon for L to try on outfit after outfit at the mirror while my girlfriend practices DJing and I stare at books about cohomology that I don’t understand.
When I first started dating my girlfriend, L would be really nice to me when she was sober, giving me all of the food she didn’t finish or asking me to let her know if I met any handsome guys at my school. Whenever she was drunk she’d tell me if I ever hurt <my girlfriend’s name>, she’d murder me. After saying that though, she wouldn’t actually wait for me to do anything to hurt my girlfriend — she’d always immediately start hitting me or trying to push me down the staircase before my girlfriend could restrain her. I of course found this all quite endearing (I wasn’t in any actual danger). Now that it’s been several months since she’s drunkenly tried to kill me, I feel something akin to nostalgia as I write about it. I wonder if it will ever happen again?
Last night when we got home from failing to find Uptown Records, L was at home in her room. She felt sick. She asked my girlfriend to get the thermometer for her. She didn’t end up coming out of her room until I had already gone to bed, which is for the best, since it meant she wouldn’t see me wearing her dead boyfriend’s shirt.
All I know about L's boyfriend is that he was handsome -- so handsome that she is unable to find anyone new who remotely compares with him -- and that he died of heart disease. My girlfriend also mentioned an incident where he shaved a strip of hair off of L's dog's head to give him an inverse mullet. Later on my girlfriend would take the dog and raise it as her own, just as she took L's boyfriend's old shirt.
Stumbling upon his shirt last night it my girlfriend's closet and the immediate need I felt to wear it made him feel less like a piece of fiction. I've still never seen a photo of him. I'm sure he is much cooler than I'd ever be. What kind of music did he listen to? What kind of clothes did he wear when he wasn't in his special birthday shirt? My girlfriend doesn't really know -- she wasn't close friends with him -- and I can't ask L without making everything awkward. So I guess I'll never know.