Pedal-powered creative re-use artist in Chengdu – photo (c) 2012 Brian Awehali

Car ownership is on the rise, but bicycle culture in Chengdu, and China generally, remains amazing. Many, perhaps most, main roads have dedicated bike lanes, and it’s really common to see things like hard-working (and exhausted) trash recyclers carting Seussian-levels of stuff around on pedal-powered vehicles (above), or a lone cyclist pedaling calmly through a terrifyingly busy intersection (left).

I’m sure lots of the Chinese (Mandarin) lettering on t-shirts I see in the U.S. is mangled or just downright wrong, but since I can’t read traditional or simplified Mandarin, that’s nowhere near as funny to me as the botched English translations I saw everywhere in Chengdu. There’s quite a lot of emulation and outright copying of Western culture — especially consumer culture. This teenager stalking into an underpass near the Chengdu bus station might be expressing his esteem for striker/winger Ryan Babel (not Babeel), the Dutch football player who used to play for… Liverpool (not Liverpoot)… but it’s just as likely that the kid just liked the way this looked.

At Chengdu International Airport, the wheelchair-accessible stalls in the men’s bathroom have the pictograph you might expect, with Mandarin lettering and then, below that, in English translation: “Deformed Man End Place.” Picture after the jump:

Wheelchair-accessible stall sign in men’s bathroom, Chengdu International Airport

Some things really are the same everywhere. Though McDonald’s and KFC are considered kind of upscale in China — a place you might bring a date for a nice treat, and the employees have kind of stylish outfits compared to their U.S. counterparts — fast food work sucks about the same everywhere. I’d recommend not eating at a Chinese fast food chain called Dico’s unless you’d like to punish yourself and everyone around you for several gruesome days you’ll probably never live down.

Public life is really active in Chengdu. Riverside teahouses seem always to be packed with tea-drinking and mahjong playing. At People’s Park, there’s kite-flying, teenagers cruising, coordinated musical acts, men doing tai-chi (or qi-gong) and, in the mornings and evenings, women filling entire squares dancing along to the exhortations of lead instructors amplified through PA systems.

There are also things like those depicted above, where a woman with her mic and karaoke machine sits, with her bored-looking friend, singing to no one in particular. Maybe thirty yards away, the men depicted below were playing a form of badminton that doesn’t require a net.

Chengdu, and Sichuan, are known for their spicy food, and “ma-la,” which is about spiciness, but also a unique kind of numbness effected by the Sichuan pepper, or huājiāo (花椒; literally “flower pepper”). I found an informative post about Sichuan spice at Asianpalate.com.

The spice markets in Chengdu are impressive, and the medley of colors and aromas you experience walking through even a relatively modest one, like the one shown below, can be dizzying.

I’m pretty sure the guys below, who seemed to me like they ought to be speaking in Jersey accents about some effin’ guy or other, did not appreciate a laowai (foreigner) like me taking their picture as I strolled down the street.

Chengdu wise guys, wishing they could offer the obnoxious foreign photographer a very bad deal? – (c) 2012 Brian Awehali

Several times a week, one of my hosts (and probable future mother-in-law) would take me grocery shopping with her. We’d stroll down a smaller side street, where the better markets seemed to be, and she’d make a point of tormenting me by asking which dimple-skinned and beheaded duck or chicken looked good to me. I’d made the mistake of saying they all looked unappetizing to me, laid out whole. Half a block of roasted ducks, hanging upside down from hooks, often with their heads and fried-smooth, featureless eyes somehow comically horrible, was not an uncommon sight. For most of my time in China, I lived in small but persistent fear of politely accepting soup, only to crunch into a rabbit head, or the organ of something before I could do anything about it.

So my host — a lovely woman, who grew up in the country, and whose family raised and regularly slaughtered chickens and pigs — would laugh at my delicate sensibilities. I really hated it at the time, but looking back, I think she was right to laugh at me. After all, I wasn’t saying I didn’t want to eat chicken or duck. I was saying I didn’t want to see them looking so much like their animal selves. I’ve since undertaken a year of eating (mostly) vegan, but at that time, I’d gobble up a chicken nugget or patty without a second’s thought.

Maybe I won’t ever eat poultry or meat again. After all, even the prized show birds in the final two photos of this post, in a Chengdu bird and fish shop, live in something like a sedentary dolorous gulag. Last year, after I photographed the “harvest” of a family farm’s organic, free-range chickens–basically the kindest, most humane, and cleanest circumstance available for chickens slated for the dinner plate –I came away feeling like  maybe it just wasn’t worth it.

If I lived in anything like a “natural” state, where I was foraging or hunting for food for my survival, I can’t imagine having any moral qualms about killing and eating an animal. I’d gladly hunt it down, kill it, give thanks and my respects, and then gobble it up. But this processed, mechanized, for-profit world I actually live in too dearly loves its various cages.

Chengdu market bird gulag – (c) 2012 Brian Awehali

Chengdu market bird gulag – (c) 2012 Brian Awehali