June 2008, Sina News remarked on Bertelsmann's closure in Chinese market in the following words - "Bertelsmann terminates its business in both online and offline distribution of books, along with Der Club Bertelsmann, which has over 1,500,000 subscribing memberships over the country."
+ +The catalogs that I saw, subscribed by the students in my parents' school, are from Bertelsmann. For 20 RMB, a customer can subscribe for a year-long membership. As a requirement, members should purchase at least one book per season, under designated categories.
+ +This tradition is descended from Bertelsmann's business model from its early days. During the WWII, Bertelsmann became a major publisher for the Nazi party; generating revenues by printing contents populated with Nazi propoganda. After the war, Bertelsmann faced nationwide economic recession. As a strategy to stimulate sales, Bertelsmann founded a book club "Lesering". It re-prints materials after 4-6 months after the initial launch, therefore circumvents national policy of fixed pricing, making book price much lower. This strategy attracted large population of memberships.
+ +In the following decades, Bertelsmann grew into a global player in media industry. In 1997, Bertelsmann entered the Chinese market after initial market research. Its business model is catalog based membership subscription. Before e-commerce became popular, shopping by catalog was a prominent business model. Do you remember television shopping as well?
+ +In 1999, Bertelsmann launched BOLChina, distributing media product online. Although it subsequently closed due to many reasons: the dot come crash, and immaturity of e-commerce market.
+ +Despite the fact that Der Club Bertelsmann is now history, the Bertelsmann corporation is still connected with our daily lives in its dissolvment. According to BAI, Bertelsmann Asia Investments, we see many familiar names. Mobike, a bike sharing company; Douban, a media platform for contents related to music, books, and film; Lagou, a hiring platform. The list continues.
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+ "A digital network is alive, fully in motion, unstable, ever growing, decaying, dying, restarting.How do we publish that?" is a question raised by my colleague Rita from XPUB. She developed a domentation tool to publish network status in its perished form, which we tend to neglect.
+ +To review network in decay is to rewrite digital network's ontology. I didn't think of digital network as alive or deceased beings before. The Internet Archive provided a glimpse to BOLChina's appearance in 2004. As today, BOLChina as a DNS no longer active.
+Argentinian writer Borges have said, "I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library." He have also said, there was once map that was so comprehensive that it covered the entire earth surface, to which it was representative of.
+ +I nearly confused Borges to be the writer of The Invisible City, and realized it's written by Calvino. I probably established this connection because Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, through which a reader will read into a reader's experience reading a book called If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. It was this recursivity that I connected Borges and Calvino together.
+ +Another two writers with unique writing structures are Nabokov and Claude Simon. +
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+ "Are you going to Dr. Stephen Albert's house?" Without waiting for my + answer, another said: "The house is a good distance away but you won't get lost if + you take the road to the left and bear to the left at every crossroad."
+ +The advice about + turning always to the left reminded me that such was the common formula for + finding the central courtyard of certain labyrinths. I know something about + labyrinths. Not for nothing am I the greatgrandson of Ts'ui Pen. He was Governor of + Yunnan and gave up temporal power to write a novel with more characters than + there are in the Hung Lou Meng, and to create a maze in which all men would lose + themselves. He spent thirteen years on these oddly assorted tasks before he was + assassinated by a stranger. His novel had no sense to it and nobody ever found his + labyrinth.
+ +Differing from + Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not think of time as absolute and + uniform. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading + network of diverging, converging and parallel times. This web of time - the strands of + which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the + centuries - embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some + you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet others both of us + exist.
+ + +The Borges bookstore is a node amongst a network of cultural institutions centered in Guanghzhou. The network is ran by Chen Tong, a local artist, along his team.
+ +The bookstore is located on ground level of a building on Changxing Street, formerly populated with tailor shops which made custom suits and western clothing during years of Republic of China. These days it's a quiet back street, extended from the ever-busy, tourist flooded main road.
+ +On the upper levels nested few other nodes within the same network. Video Bureau, a video art archive; and a working studio that gives drawing courses, ran by Chen Tong's former students.
+ +In the case of closure of Bertelsmann, the shrinking of Nanhai Book Center, we witness operation strategies in publishing industry, and how outdated strategy suffered from economic effects brought by information platform. How independently ran bookstore such as Borges Bookstore retained its vivial form and impact to cultural dynamics to Guangzhou, and its radiation area is truly unique.
+ +From the late 90s to early 2000s, bookstore business was highly profitable. My aunt had made her first bucket of gold, running a small business printing pirate copies of books.
+ +Between 2008 and 2013, a wave of independent bookstores' closure hit across the country. However in 2014, there has been a recovery, due to subsidiary policies issued by provincial goverments. In Guangdong province, several non-state owned bookstores were awarded annual subdiary stipends of 1,000,000 RMB. Several other provincial governments had followed, allocating fiscal budgets accordingly. These are gestures of the government to acknowledge indepedently run insitutions of their cultural contribution to the society.
+ +Chen Tong and his team interprets operation strategy differently than other independent bookstores. It is very common to see bookstores generate revenue from providing coffee and drinks to readers today. For Chen Tong, sales of drinks equates reading to leisure. Borges bookstore does not participate in this kind of business model.
+ +Since 2016, the Borges Bookstore team has been recording live literature podcasts to Lizhi.fm on regular days of the month. The bookstore also maintains a Wechat account, with which to post content, and interact with readers online. Gradually, bookstores are adopting informatics tools that hit the industry in early 2000s.
+ +Another node within the network is a gallery, Bonacon Gallery, opened in 2016. It's normative for the bookstore not to generate revenue, however the gallery must make profits. Aside from Chen Tong's intention to promote local artists and ecosystem to more international industry standards, the gallery is to support the rest of the network, which are not for profit - the Video Bureau, and the Borges Bookstore.
+ +During his speech to receive "Best Small Independent Bookprize", Chen Tong remarked that, their experiences are not worthy to promote, because from a free market point of view, it's running against free market laws. For him, in order to maintaincultural activities, revenues from bookstore business is far less than enough; unless that the bookstore promote trash, meaningless publications, that are enough to disintegrate one's faith.
+ + +
+ My colleague Bo had developed a decentralized annotation tool. Via XMPP chatrooms, users are able to comment to a main body of text.
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Additional testimony to these laws of economical use to space and time, I remember once that the library has rented its space to a butterfly specimen exhibition. taking place in the main exhibition hall of the library. A lady living upstairs gave me an extra ticket from her young son. The guard wouldn't let me in, gesturing that, the ticket was for even younger children in kindergarten. I did not make it to the exhibition and saw facilities carrying boxes of butterfly specimen, they were dismantling the exhibition.
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+ The four classics in Chinese are, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, Water Margin and Dream of the Red Chamber.
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+ See what's up in other rings
Most classmates from primary school lived in Haitang Compound, 1.8 kilometers to the Nanhai Library. + +
The few one I knew, their parents worked in the post office, and Nanhai Car Factory. It could be possible that the Haitang Compound is developed and provisioned for employees working for a list of institutions and enterprises. Two of them were neighbors right next to each other, their fathers both worked for Nanhai Car Factory.
+In Wijnhaven to Foshan, Simon recounted his experience walking from Piet Zwart building to my home, where I self hosted my server. In his account, walking as recorded by GPS contained layers of abstraction of embodied experience - movement, altitude, speed, and time.
+ +I had not walked to my former classmates' compounds, despite that they lived only 1.8 kilometes away. This 1.8 kilometer is not measured by geometry alone, but loaded with weighted boundries of social belonging, which were already quite perceptible, although the idea was not eloquently conceptualized amongst young children.
+ +To live in whichever district represented distinctive social belongings. I think of the row building, which happened a generation before me, prior to market liberalisation. It aimed to provide equal chances across the network. It was a form of decentralization to distribute resources and reach a equilibrium state. However, I still had doubt how much of that was true in social reality, because even under provisioned regime, workers in higher position had priority for resources. Equilibrium is an abstraction that needs to be unpacked in social practice.
+Lastly I want to mention Claude Simon's Le Jardin des Plantes, and a comment I saw from Douban. "Read half of it and discarded the book, such a pain. This is not only a novel but a visual work. It's a book not for reading but for looking." Out of curiosity I bought a used copy from Kongfuzi, a website specializing in second hand books, since there were not any more new editions.
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+ 
+ Libraries amongst others: A network publication
+a part of the publication
+ +The Network We de(Served)
+ XPUB Special Issue #08
first presented at
+ Varia, Center for Everyday Technology
+ Rotterdam, April 2019
Network and nodes attributed to the publication are
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Simon Browne, Tancredi Di Giovanni, Paloma García, Rita Graça, Artemis Gryllaki, Pedro Sá Couto, Biyi Wen, Bohye Woo, Roel Roscam Abbing, Manetta Berends, Lídia Pereira, André Castro, Aymeric Mansoux, Michael Murtaugh, Steve Rushton, Leslie Robbins
+In 1994, the State Council issued a transition policy on real estate. Employees were able to purchase state owned housing at regulated price. It is a transiton policy from state provisioned housing to commodified housing market.
+ +In 1999, my parents bought an apartment from the school they worked at for 28,000 RMB. + The next year they relocated to another school, they tried to rent it out and it was problematic. Within the enclosed area were school students, teachers, staff and their families. The tenant complained that he couldn't park his truck into the compound after 10 in the night.
+ +In 2001 my parents sold the apartment at market price, around 130,000 RMB, and used it as down payment for the market apartment they bought.
+ +Their experience finding the later apartment and eventually buying it in was quite personal. + One evening, they left a note without specifying why they'd left, I went to the school's post room to call their mobile phone. They said that they've gone to Guangzhou, the provincial capital an hour away.
+ +During the time I spent in the post room, I saw lots of letters scattered on the desk, many of which are sent from Der Club Bertelsmann to subscribing readers. Seventeen year old readers in year 2000 is thirty seven or eight now. My parents confiscate romantic novels their students were reading during class and brought few of them home. I am at complete disinterest to those books, nor do I have any appetite for those book covers.
+ +Almost until ten they came back, with two bags full of junk, as a gift from the seller. A bag and a half is full of clothes the family was discarding; What were interesting was a can of imported American salted almonds, and an English wool jacket the owner's daughter had outgrown. + +
Soon after their visit to the seller's family, they bought the apartment with mortgage. They were in their mid 30s, it was the time to place this life decision. In fact, my parents' housing timeline collapsed with many changes with national housing policies.
+ +Unlike peaceful moments roaming around in the public housing compound, life after we move in to the private house was a nose down. "We are carrying 200k debt" was a constant, pressuring remark. Later I learned why they made visit to the seller's house: the apartment was a form of bribe from local official to the seller, who was in higher position in provincial capital; she was involved in our city's urban planning, thus was able to present to my parents, how our apartment will situate on the central axis. In ten years time the vision was realized. From our balcony, we witnessed former farmlands developed to new, expensive compounds, that came along with larger economic inequality.
+In these pages the topic of land appeared.
+| 1993-1996 | Mayor of Nanhai City | +
| 1996-2003 | Secretary of Municipal Party Committee | +
While being in position as mayor of Nanhai, Deng Yaohua advocated progressively for technological reform. In 1996, Deng Yaohua established e-commerce infrastructures; due to Deng's high profile, large investments from IT industry flowed to Nanhai. Deng thus became known as "IT Deng".
+source: Sina News + +
Housing provided by institution to employees. Before 1994, it was common for employees to be assigned housing units.
+Between 1996 and 1999, within the compound my family moved several times from one unit to another. The units are labeled in series of A1 to A8. We lived A1, A3, and A7. In 1999 my parents bought one unit in A2 during the transition policy
+ +The policy was issued in 1994 for period of 5 years. After 2000, employees were responsible to buy their own homes at market cost. Institutions start to limit supply of housing space, for example using housing spaces for other purposes. The school my parents worked at expanded enrollment, former employee housing spaces were adapted to student dormitories.
+ +I asked my father to whom the apartment was later sold to, he said it was sold to a couple also working at the school, which made them my parents' former colleagues. We could interprete the timeline this way - after 2000, employee are no longer entitled for provisioned housing. The couple had spent a sum nearly 4 times as much as my parents did when the policy was still effective.
+If you come across compounds that were built sometime after the new republic, the building were often in formats of "row buildings". The row building embodies a different lineage than the row houses, its capitalistic counterpart. They are remanents that shows influences from former Soviet regime.
+ +The layout of the row house is simple. Imagine a long rectangle, identical units line one by one, except that two ends are used for shared stairs and toilets. In the 60s, families reside in these housing units that occupied 15 squaremeters. Makeshift kitchens were set up outside the unit, in the shared, narrow corridor. This type of housing is also called Khrushchev building. While led the Soviet Union as first secretary of the party, he aimed to provide sufficient housing for the people. To achieve this goal in a short time and low budget, the designer seeked for modular design as a resort.
+ +The ideology behind Khrushchev building was descendant of the International Style, which hoped that machinic extension such as concret and modularity will provide universal benefit.
+ +
+ In these pages the topic of land appeared.
+Weekends in the children's reading room was always quiet, the only events that took place were returning the books at the lady librarian's desk, stamping books before leaving to borrow home. Returning, borrowing, reading, spending a whole afternoon there. Only this one time I remembered a particular event. A boy wanted to bring his friend in, who didn't have a library card. The lady librarian won't let him, he raised his voice and asked "Why lady, are you administering in such inhumane way?" As I heard this at other side of the room my mind was in entire shock, one child hearing another mentioning the concept of being "inhumane in public administration". It was an astonishment, the lady librarian let his friend in eventually.
+ +My grandmother was a librarian. I'd never thought of that. She studied biology and worked as a qualification examiner in the meat packing factory. "So you decide if the pig die or not", I summarized her job. She later contributed the fact that she had committed karma as a cause to her ongoing illness.
+ +She's worked in the meat packing factory as her first job for decades, before working as a librarian in university library until retirement.
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+ After the free market reform, the meat packing factory became an enterprise working unit; enterprise unit generates more revenues than public institution; at that time, the meat packing factory lacked advantages during planned economy (as opposed to market economy); everyone can buy meat freely. Besides that, we lived on the university compound, it was very far away for her to communte to the factory. On days of snow she tripped several times. So the only solution was transfer to the university library. After all public institution is a gurantee for stable pension after retirement. After grandma was transferred to the university library, her former colleagues were only entitled for a regular factory worker's basic salary during their retirement.
+ +It was also planned that grandma can be transferred to the biology department and become a teacher there, but, during the audition, grandma was left-handed, so her lecture notes written on the board were from right to left, so it was settled that grandma wasn't fit for being a teacher. At the end she was transferred to work at the library.
+ +But, every benefit comes with shortcoming, despite relative easy work at the library, she spent lot of time reading novels; it was a cause for her later cervical spondylosis. She read lots of biographies, books on history...Because after all, what can you do working in a library? What can you think of she could do, in the employee's library?
+ +An additional note, because the meat packing factory could provide employees with sufficient supply of meat, working there was an entitlement, a symbol of privileged class.
+Flower City is Guangzhou. Flower City Press is a publishing house located in Guangzhou.
+ +The children's reading room have housed lots of peaceful memories of childhood for me. I would usually go on a Saturday afternoon. Since Nanhai Library is right next to my parents' workplace, which was also our living compound, I would walk there on foot. There were many books that lasted an impression. Adapted versions of Detective Conan, detective novels authored originally in Chinese for children. One of the series featured ingenious cover design: when the spines are placed serial order, it forms an unknown man's face. It's to indicate putting traces in order. There was another series of books that made an impression, a series of children's dairies published by Flower City Press. A main contributing writer for the series is Zhang Meng Meng, similar age as me. I began reading her published diaries I was in grade three; and didn't follow onwards after the fourth one, for some reason, partly because the author had gone to middle school, and I couldn't empathize her later writings too well from the age gap.
+Goosebumps is a series of horror movies for children written by R.L.Stine published since 1992. The series survived in large quantity - 233 books were published under the umbrella of Goosebumps.
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+
+ 
+ | by Biyi Wen |  |
+
=============== 33 storyspaces
+
3 backdoors =================
+ Start from here
+
+ 
+ me: Guess who this is?
+mother: I don't know.
+me: It's Deng Yaohua, mayor at the time. I am using him as background for a project
+mother: Why do you use him as background? He was dismissed afterwards because of corruption; please have senses in political matters. +
+Network is both used as a writing strategy and subject of narration in this publication. Interlinked narratives about institutions that present rigid and flexible qualities interweave to each other. Public library, privately-held bookstores, printshops, and readers are nodes within networks, in context of a lived, social reality. I attempt to address concerned topical interest in the Special Issue 08: network contingency, dependency, and autonomy by lense of lived stories. The vivid narratives reveal network and nodes as entities elusive to define. Rather, it's the inter-layering topological quality that defines their nature.
+
+ Lots of books made their covers by kraft paper in the library. Reason for cover replacement is to protect for the frailed titles. Or is it for visual anonymity? In beginning of each primary school trimester, we were assigned with new text books. Some students would return the next day, with the text book covered, with different methods. Paper ripped from outdated calendar was a usual choice for its larger format, plus the flip side is blank. Stationary store sold variations of produced book covers in soft and hard plastic; some came with plastic spines.
+ +Factually, the decision to cover text books is additional. The printing press had already layered a thin film before they arrived to our hands. However the decision on puting an extra layer indicated a choice about preservation. At the end of the semester, when they would unwrap the outer layer, the book cover would appear as new.
+ +Some readers have the habbit of buying two copies one title of book at once. Once for underlining, the other to retain original appearence. One day I borrowed a book from the Hogeschool Library, the text was filled with underlines and comments made from pencil. The traces brewed quite some anger, until I used one morning's labor to erase the comments page by page.
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+ [About us] Foshan Lingyu Bookstore was founded in 2000 (yes, we are 19 years old), with a combination of book sales, cultural activities, space management, and lifestyle transmission.
+ +[Recruitment requirements] clerk & marketing planning post 1, age 18 years old, love books, strong sense of service, good team spirit; 2, work carefully and responsive; 3, have a good ability to express, Cantonese Fluent in Mandarin, computer operation; 4. Young artists with hobbies such as music, reading or movies, or those who love travel strategies, wine tasting, hand-made and flower arrangements.
+ +[Work content]1. Daily product sorting, cleaning, inventory, new book shelves, etc.; 2. Provide customers with comfortable and high-quality services, timely answer questions and make appropriate product recommendations; 3. Responsible for the creation and management of store space atmosphere. Maintenance of store facilities and equipment; 4. Marketing activities and communication promotion planning based on business content; 5. Complete other daily work in the store.
+ +[Remuneration] The clerk has a seven-hour working day, and is closed once a week. The salary structure is two basic salary/skills salary; the planning post is eight hours per day, and the weekend is closed; the salary structure is: salary + project commission. Social security is regulated by the state.
+ +If you are interested, please send your resume to 181827788@qq.com. Please specify the direction of the job you want to apply for, as well as your strengths and past qualifications.
+In the above recruitment announcement of Lingyu Bookstore,the bookstore clerk's responsibility is not only limited to traditional tasks, but also extends to organization of profitable cultural actities, which is a common business model to bookstore these days.
+ +Read on to following pages to browse the landscape of bookstore industry.
+ +Zhang Meng Meng was the young author that published a series of diary collections by Flower City Press. As an encouragement for her to keep writing diaries, her mother awards her a small sum for each piece written. Collections of diaries eventually become published when her mother's student, editor Zhang Ying came across Meng Meng's writing.
+ +The series continued until Zhang Meng Meng was 15.
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+ The law of mixed business formats applied to the public Nanhai Library as well, since its storefront had been rented as a music academy and a bookstore for prep books. I had lessons at the music academy for one year, before it declared its closure. The teachers giving lessons there were young girls from the provincial conservatory. I disliked playing piano, at one lesson I finished early, the young teacher asked "Can I play for a while?" After my mother knew, she questioned her at the next lesson about the unlearned fifteen minutes and demanded that she would compensate the fifteen minutes accordingly.
+ +The music academy that occupied the Nanhai Library storefront came to place admist classical music trend in China since the 80s. Before taking piano lessons there, I learned electronic keyboard from a retired music teacher's home. He was my parents' colleague, at that time, all school teachers lived in the same compound.
+ + + +It was strange to think the first learning instrument being eletronic keyboard. It's more of a performative instrument than a classical, pedagogical model such as piano. I wondered, if that was because piano was expensive? My father's sister also lived in the same compound as us. Apart from the apartment provisioned by the school, she took the opportunity to buy an apartment in Panyu, formerly an independent city and now a suburb of Guangzhou. A piano came in with that apartment, as part of real estate marketing strategy. They transported the piano to their real home and my cousin started learning on that piano. The ever present script on the stand is from a pianist called Richard Clayderman. Records of his music could be heard all over restaurants and shopping malls during 90s and 00s.
+ +Few years ago I encountered a stories from a flute player. I found that her story is reflective of trajectories of music learning in China around that time. She was born in the early 80s, the same age as two other famed music prodigies Li Yundi and Lang Lang; in fact she studied with Lang Lang. Reaching her 30s, professional music performance became equivalent of washing dishes; she's fed up the routine. Professionalism no longer derived exploration in this art form for her.
+ +After music academy in the library closed, my parents subscribed me to another one that's opened in the shopping mall. It was founded by pianist Liu Shikun. Suffered greatly during the cultural revolution, he established branches of Liu Shikun music academies across the country since the 90s. A girl from my primary school also took lessons there. How I recognized her was by a yellow backpack printed with name of "Liu Shikun Music Academy", to put children's scripts in. The yellow backpack at the same time was also a mobile marketing device.
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+ In Music and Meaning, musicologist Lawrence Kramer discussed music as a autonomous expression. This following excerpt is particularly luminous at interpreting music as an expression that preserves an individual's autonomy
+ +"Experiencing music is an extremely intimate act because the sense of distance, typical of visual art, is collapsed in an immediate sense embodiment. The suspension of autonomy and contingency is shifted from outside to inside ourselves pointing at the core condition of our subjectivity. The subject is posed in a 'liminal' zone between autonomy and contingency, and has the power to set his own experience deciding where to put his boundries, what to incorporate or exclude."
+ +The concept of collapsable distance reminds me what the flutist have once mentioned. "The best intrument to learn is human voice, it's the most immediate". Compare it to other instruments which are extensions, the human voice is an intuitive gift. The comparison between human voice and intrumental music corresponds to the concept of extended sense of distance.
+ +However, I couldn't be convinced entirely. We have long lost the a priori innocence. In Disorienting Phenomenology, writers interprete a priori suspension as embedded in social realities after Phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty had founded this branch of philosophy.
+ +In A Critical Phenomenology of Dwelling in Carceral Space, Writer Lisa Guenther writes about her experience living in the gentrified, historically black and working class suburb of Nashville. Despite the fact that she enjoyed gestures of openness such as riding the bus with the rest of the residents, she found herself still instinctively protective of herself. "Late one night, I was riding in a friend's car and we stopped at a red light on Gallatin Road near a bench where a few people were waiting for the bus. Without thinking, I reached for the button to lock the door, then I stopped myself, too ashamed of my impulse to follow through with the action. After a short time in the neighborhood, I had incorporated the steel frame of a car that wasn't even mine into a kind of personal exoskeleton that made me feel vulnerable to the very people with whom I would be otherwise be sharing a seat on the bus."
+ +Extended criticism, such as Queering Phenomenology shows formerly undiscussed social realities to concept of a priori suspension.
+ +Looking back to my experience with learning music, I felt that the immediate experiences such as musical experience embedded many layers of social reality. Does it provide a sense of autonomy? Yes, it is an spiritual uplift, a peaceful seclusion. However, realities as recent as the music training industry are processes through which music is no longer an innocent medium of experience and expression. Learning and practice provides precision and skills however the same time it is an disciplined practice.
+ +Once, a very unorthodox orchestra existed. The Portsmouth Sinfonia. It is required that the member must be without musical training; if they had musical training before, they must choose another instrument. The orchestra ceased performing after the members become skilled at playing their instruments.
+ +Listen to a recording here.
+In 1999, my aunt's print shop was probably still operating. When I visited in 1999 I see bundles of copies in the storage. The print shop was in her house, which was a yard house.
+ +Very soon after the visit in 1999, my grandmother received a letter from my aunt. Due to municipality's city planning, the road the yard house was located at was due to expansion, hence it needed to be demolished. Under her eyes, my aunt's years of work become dust. The material of the house so solid that the demolition team had to extra round of engineered blasting.
+ +Due to tightening of anti-pirate copy policies, my aunt stopped running the business. Today she lives in an apartment assigned by the municipality, as compensation to her demolished house.
+me: Can you tell me a bit about aunt's printing business?
+ +Father: The business is not printing pirate copies as you assumed, they are printing illegal copies, which were, publications that were not formally published by a publisher, mainly prep books for primary and secondary schools. In Linfen, Shanxi Province, there is a industry chain of printing and distribution of illegal publication. Many primary and secondary school teachers were responsible for drafting tests. Farmer families in Guo County set up workshops in their own yards, with 3-5 printing machines, printing illegal prep books day and night. Farmers from two nearby counties, Hong Dong county and Huo county, would proceed with the industry chain by distributing copies across schools all over the country. A generation of farmers become rich from selling book; and a generation of printshop owners become rich from printing; teachers earned remuneration but didn't become significantly richer. After ten years of prosperity, the industry chain was banned by central government.
+ +Your uncle(aunt's husband), was amongst that generation of printshop owners. After government banned illegal printshops, he became unemployed. Until now, he hasn't been working. In these some twenty years, he tried to run a transportation business for a few months and lost money; two years ago he tried to raise goats in the mountains and lost money.
+ +Now he stays at home, cooking, smoking some cigarettes, and drinking a bit.
+ +And that's it.
+ +In Hong Dong county and Huo county of Shanxi Province, every single farmer is going out, making book business across the country.
+ +In Linfen City, every single teacher is drafting tests.
+ +In Linfen City's Guo Village, every farmer's family is running printing machines day and night.
+ +Hundreds of families, over 10000 printers, farmers all become workers; In Linfen City, Hong Dong county, Huo County, over hundreds of thousand farmers travel to secondary schools all over different parts of the country to sell prep books. This unprecedented industry chain had been broadcasted by the BBC.
+ +Your aunt, had applied for temporary absence from the school she worked at, to help with your uncle's small print factory. She was doing accounting work. After the business closed, she returned to the school and resumed her teaching life.
+ +Now your aunt and uncle have quite an nice, easy life. Because they had some compensation for the demolished house and some money left from the printing business.
+ +Father: This reflects in historicity how urban villages became marginalized in China; reflects transformation of outer villages of urban areas; reflects in context of economic liberalization, how farmers became residents; reflects how farmers lost their land.
+ +Before, farmers' land cannot be traded. These days, real estate developers purchase their land. Farmers lost their land, and are compensated of a few apartments. It may seem that they are well-off temporarily, however their offpring lose their land forever, which is the most precious asset. +
+ +Farmers in Guo county from now on, are dispossessed of their productive material; degrading to labor force in production process. +
+ +me: What a history expert.
+ +Aside from being known as a writer, Nabokov is also a collector and researcher of butterflies of published writings.
+ +In 1975, while collecting butterfly specimen in Davos, he slipped into a valley. His health significantly degraded in the next 18 months and died in 1977.
+ +In his later years he had remarked that, if not because the Russian Revolution, he would have been a professional lepidopterist, and would not have written a single novel. Born in an aristocratic family in St.Petersburg, Nabokov's father was a progressive statesman during the last years of the Russian Empire; one of the founding members of Constitutional Democratic Party; and a advocate for Jewish rights in the Russian Empire. After the Bolshevik Revolution, his family fled Russia to seek refugee. During this time Nabokov was enrolled as a student in England studying zoology.
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+ After Wang Zhen's family bought private apartment and moved out of the dormitory, it's been that there was no children of my age in the building. In that two years I had these few ways of spending time: Hang out with newly moved in children, who were three years younger than me; visiting the library; pretending practicing violin. Upon finishing primary school, our family moved out. According to my mother, the dormitory was meant to be transitional for the employees, for them to stay temporarily before saving up down payment to buy a real house. It was due to vicinity to the library and my primary school they overstayed in the dormitory.
+ +Afterwards we moved to commodity apartment, one of those that called "so and so garden estate". Walking from here on foot I can read books in Nanhai Book Centre, but reading here is different than reading in public libraries. The books are less interesting than in the reading room's, filled with market stuff. Best sellers are usually series similar to Goosebumps. The children's reading room had these series as well, but in less prominent placements. And lastly the reading room never shelf prep books. The ground floor sold accessories such as music instrument, stationaries, and records. There was also a prop up point for trying out physiotherapy instrument for the short sighted, I tried it once and my eyes had infection.
+ +Nanhai Book Center occupied four storeys of the building, located at a main boulevard intersection. In memory I thought the four storeys was all there is; the same enlargement in impression applied to the Children's Reading Room. In fact there are more than four storeys above the book center, possibly office space.
+ +Today the book center shrinked to a section of one floor in another mall. The original location is modified for an insurance company.
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+ Read on to following pages to browse the landscape of bookstore industry.
+ +The very first library came upon image of the library card. Name is printed at the bottom; at the top, calligraphy print of "Nanhai Library" is printed against a blue block background. The card provided me access to the Children's Reading room, where other young readers and a librarian lady was my weekend company.
+ +How will I verbalize the impression of childhood past, to generalize an untainted overview to audiences who have never set foot there? On the right side of the front entrance, there was a storefront owned by the library. It's been rented out to a + music academy; after its closure the tenancy is resumed by a bookshop specialized sales of test prep books. Heading into the entrance, the left wing of the building is the children's reading room. Facing you would be the main section of the building. To the right side, sits the right wing of the building. The volume of the children's reading room is light, comparing to the rest of the entire library. It only takes up one floor above the ground. Despite its light volume, it housed much more time of me lingering there, and realizations of growing up in age. I visited the the rest of the library once, long after when I was a child. The namely adult section looked dull to me, shelves are occupied by books covered in yellowed kraft paper. The ambience suggested a smell specific to libraries. After checking out a relatively new foreign novel (Steppenwolf published by Yilin Press), I never bothered to make a trip back to return it.
+ +For that while during childhood Nanhai library was the only library there was. Nanhai is the name of the city, which is divided into several districts. Before grade 3 I was in a more remote district, which there were no library. There wasn't. To make sure I looked up "Xiqiao Library" online. There was an entry, on dianping.com. One of the comments remarked "Was a bookstore, bought all prep books and what not here. Had gradually dwindled later". As I saw the picture I immediately recognized it was from that bookstore my parents bought me a box set of illustrated The Four Classics Chinese Novels. Dianping.com marked this location as permanently closed.
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+ Libraries operate at different scales. The Guangzhou Library for example, is a major library that perform centralized roles. On scale of smaller communities, flexible community library also exist. Read the following pages for libraries on different scales.
+ +Dang Dang and Amazon were major online book distributors.
+ +After 2007, it became common for middle school students to buy books online from Dangdang (click link to see site as of 2008! and Amazon (as of 2008 was called Joyo Amazon) , one of the benefits was payment upon delivery. Delivery personnel would send in the books during lunch break; we'd not take lunch to pick up the books at school gate. One of the series that we ordered was Complete Works of San Mao. We each contributed a small sum for Li Yuxian's birthday. Once Da had a strange remark, "Did you ever notice that, if you take the exam right after finishing up a book, there be a high probability of getting high scores?" These are classmates from grade 10, after we took up grade 11, we had less time to read.
+Zhong Chu Rao, a classmate from high school had not read borrowed books, her books are all bought from the bookstore. She told me that, in her Parvenu Mansion, her father + built wooden tatami platform for her. As she rolls forward and back on the tatami she could read books bought from the bookstore.
+ +Parvenu mansion was how Zhong Chu Rao referred to her parents house. Since late 80s and early 90s, her parents quit their state assigned jobs and started up manufacturing businesses. They quickly earn their first bucket of gold, bought their first car in 1998, a Nissan Bluebird.
+ +She also told me about her uncle, an accountant who, during rave of betting on stock market in the 90s, had used his company's money to bet and lost it all. The crime her uncle had committed had a prosecution limitation, during that time, he hid in the Parvenu Mansion and attended for pumpkins in the garden. He was caught eventually when the limitation was nearly due. After he was released, he remarked that life in the prison was more easy than in real life. His calligraphy became much better from daily practices in the prison.
+ +The mansion is built upon a piece called Zhai Ji Di (homestead land), which means this land is collectively owned by a village, and the village residents have the right to use assigned pieces of land to build homes.
+ +Apart from homestead lands, there are lands for designated purpose, such as construction and farming.
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+ Just as yesterday, villagers of Shunde are subjects of every homeowner's jealousy, as they are free to build houses upon their assigned homestead land, going from as many as five or six storeys, which amounts to over 20 meters.
+However, today, the village area construction planning has issued a new policy today, specifying that all privately built residences built upon homestead land should be no higher than 15 meters.
+This regulation is to implement landscape metric aesthetics in village environment. It is advised that villagers should build adhering to reuglar needs, rather than ambitiously looking towards scales used in urban planning.
+ +As reported by Sohu News as of Novermber, 2017. + +
+In these pages the topic of land appeared.
+My mother bought me one of these physiotherapy device for the shortsighted in sixth grade, after my eye sight signficantly degraded. It was recommended by her colleague, whose son had used it, and had positive effects. After looking at floods of positive reviews online, we decided it would be a right choice to buy one. By telephone hotline we placed the order
+ +Few days after an appointment was arranged to deliver the device. On that afternoon, two salesmen arrived with an eye chart box. They were to set up an initial eye test, so that the progress effect of the device can be measured afterwards.
+ +A eye sight measuring session is to be arranged in the living room. However our moderate sized living room is not lengthy enough for a proper arrangement, since the dormitory apartment layout was only to fullfill basic needs. One of them improvised that, the diagonal length of the living room rectangle could be taken advantage of. Hence, my initial eye sight is measured, the device was delivered
+ +Each morning, I look into the machine's neon color variations, accompanied by relaxational classical music. The device accompanied me a year or two without testified improvement in sight.
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+ This structure of narrative reminded another account of Nabokov's Pnin, in which the narration is circular. That the end of the novel connects back to beginning of the novel. The beginning portrayed Pnin, a Russian professor emigrated to the U.S. during the 1920, on his way to deliver a lecture at Cremona College but was on the wrong train; the end of the novel depicted that, after Pnin has been fired from his department, his former colleagues recounted between themselves the story of him boarding the wrong train as an laughing anecdote.
+ +Not only the structure of storytelling that lasted me an impression. The image of Pnin lived vividly. As he unknowningly sat on the wrong train, the narrator described Pnin with words such as "apish uppder lip, thick neck", "spindley legs" and "frail looking, almost feminine feet".
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+ Recent star architecture for public institutions had become a phenomenon. In 2011, a new Nanhai Museum was built to celebrate the district's cultural heritage. In 2012, the new Guangzhou Library was completed. It's adjacent neighbor is the Guangzhou Opera House. Designed by Zaha Hadid, it is the provincial government's hope to establish it as a cultural icon and institution.
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+ Libraries operate at different scales. The Guangzhou Library for example, is a major library that perform centralized roles. On scale of smaller communities, flexible community library also exist. Read the following pages for libraries on different scales.
+ ++ Romantic Novels write about fictions in popular themes. A glimpse to its title can summarize its content - "The CEO's Young Wife", "Hard to Fit a Wife's Role".
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+ + Then, it was a treat to have imported food. +
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+ The union library took up a humble fraction of space, with very limited collection. There was also a union fitness room, employees would go there and play ping pong after work.
+ +Additional to ping pong, there are several fitness devices. For example, there was an device to place a band over your waist, and than a motor would vibrate the waist band. The function of this machine is to loose belly fat without actively excersizing
+ +In the gallery are variations of early fitness devices, found on The Old Look Magazine.
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+ When I first had my library card I was in grade three. Before that I had never gone to a library, the place that I lived before didn't have one. Before that, I owned an illustrated version of The Four Classic Chinese Novels, adapted for children. I did not like neither of them, nor do I understand its content. I've never encountered classmates from my school during my weekends there.
+ + Wang Zhen did not have a library card, she was the daughter of my parents' colleague who lived upstairs. She'd borrow from the employee's library at our parents workplace, there is a shelf for children. Now I am curious where the children come from in the children's reading room. + +After Wang Zhen's family moved out from the employee dormitory building, I visited her in her new home. We went to Ling Yu Bookstore together. Plastic bags from Ling Yu bookstore were a common sight circa 2002, later that branch had closed.
+ +It's fair to say that Wang Zhen and I were two nodes that nourished from overlapping networks. Our parents worked in the same place. Because of that, Wang Zhen, me and other employee's children all went to the affiliated middle school. Upon finishing middle school, my father and her father schemed into midnight about our high school choice. We ended up in the same high school together.
+ +Last November, when Wang Zhen was preparing application for going to France for school, the minister of France, Edouard Philippe announced that tuition for non-EU students will increase to over around 3000 euros; at the same time the near 3000 account for one third of actual cost to educate one student. The rest is subsidized by the government.
+Zhong Chu Rao's father, collaborating with her mother, owned a factory that produced wooden doors. In an effort to paint her father as a businessman with erratic interests and discontented being in the dull wooden door business alone, she told about her father's repeated venturing outs such as importing Malaysian snacks and manufacturing mooncake boxes. He enjoyed making mooncake boxes because, he would assemble together how the box would look like. But eventually, the wooden door business was the most lucrative and supported the family.
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+ Zhong's father enjoyed designing mooncake boxes, as a manufacturer, he had an eye and intuition for packaging merchandises.
+Read onto the following, which + tell story about a packaged product and packaging for books. +
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