If you'd care to learn about one of the more interesting vendors I've ever had the pleasure of meeting (in a sixty-year old train carriage, no less) then point yourself to the inaugural piece in Makeshift's new "Getting By" column about vendors the world over.
Consider why trashcans are equipped for battery disposal in a given context. These sorts of trashcans are sprinkled (seemingly) randomly throughout Chongqing - certain public squares, the airport, etc. Is this calculated inconsisntency, or are certain contexts more recognized users of disposable batteries than others.
In preparation for presenting at Pecha Kucha Night in Hong Kong next week, here is a piece I wrote about tuolaji for the second issue of Makeshift (see link below - an incredible magazine, and that's not just personal bias).
Wish me luck as I channel mobile metis.
Drivers of a broken-down 20-liter water bottle delivery truck in downtown Yangon turn their cargo into hazard warnings through a bit of strategic placement and just-in-time repurposing.
As I get into the swing of things here in the Middle Kingdom, I aspire to get back on the wagon with more routine longer-form updates on my research (as opposed to the tidal wave of Instagrams to which I’ve recently been subjecting everyone). In the meantime, as I make my apartment here in Chongqing more inhabitable I was reminded of an incident following a move-in from the past:
A faint knock on the door turned what would have been a drizzly evening spent at home into something more memorable. In the midst of moving into a new apartment in Yangon, I had forgotten that I’d scheduled a large vinyl poster to be delivered that night. As the trio of workers kicked off their flip-flops and filed into my apartment, weighed down with timber and tools, I realized their plan for getting a seven-foot wide poster across downtown Yangon consisted of simply carrying the frame and poster over in separate pieces and assembling it on site. It just so happened that, in this case, “on site” was my living room.
The supervisor had a bolt of insight: Grabbing the plug at the end of the power cord, he produced a razor and neatly sliced that end of the wire off, tossing aside the plug and cutting away at the vinyl coating around the pair of exposed wires. Handing the two exposed wires to his assistant, the supervisor grabbed the drill and directed his assistant to plug the wires into the two available holes of the nearest outlet while he stood upon an adjacent chair to drill the holes.
It was at this point that I distinctly remember regretting delaying my decision to purchase a fire extinguisher.
Amazingly, the drill functioned as normal, and nobody ended up cooked. Still, the supervisor would likely not have elected to cut the end off of his drill if he had had the choice. It was the lack of compatible outlets that drove him to sacrifice the functionality of his drill - although one could argue that, were a wire-holding assistant always available, he had just created a universally compatible power drill.
The plugs in Yangon are a seemingly random combination of all possible options, and a given outlet may feature interfaces for multiple plug types. A place's “standard” plug conveys that context's particular history, as the most common type of plug may ends up being from the country that once occupied/colonized a place, or from whom electrical goods were first imported for use there. Think of places like Myanmar that lack a standard, or, depending upon how you frame it, has many “standards” – how has their past dictated their present in these terms? Will a "standard" emerge in Myanmar's future based upon what happens in the present?
Zooming out, how are we all progressing towards a common standard? Here, I don’t mean a world of only one type of plug and one voltage – I mean a world without any plugs or concepts of "voltage" whatsoever. Considering recent technological advances, how far off is universal wireless charging? After that, how far off are we from forgetting what plugs and wires ever were? From a colorful past of many plugs and multiple voltages, how far off is convergence upon a true “standard”? Why is/n’t this “good”?
A 20-liter water bottle has been repurposed to feed a constant supply of water into a generator. For institutions with high electrical demand, such as movie theaters or, in this case, a hotel, insuring generators are operating smoothly can be a full-time job during the blackout-prone dry season. Overemployment in such large institutions also helps, sometimes making it several people's jobs to insure the generators turn on when they need to (and diffusing other employees' collective rage across multiple individuals when they inevitably sometimes fail to do so).
Although typical street vendors must consider how best to display the goods they sell, there are also plenty of interesting examples of vendors displaying available services. For this sidewalk-based masseuse/manicurist, the display (and advertising) is simple: the pink chair is for clients, the wired-together green plastic stool is where the masseuse sits, and the remaining stool acts as the "shelf" for holding nail-cutting tools and fragrant oils for anointing customers' feet. When I walked by, he asked whether I wanted a pedicure.
This 61 year old man collects plastic packaging cord from various stores near his home outside of downtown Yangon during the week. After having filled several bags, he rides a Hilux truck-ferry ("linecar") into downtown to walk around the largest market (Thein Gyi Market), selling the packaging cord to various merchants. He charges ten kyat per length of cord (850 kyat equal one US $). He says he used to make the trip more often, but that since he has gotten older, work has become more challenging and he has had to rely more upon his grown children to support him.
Sliding metal doors in a downtown Yangon alley. What do these non-standard street-level doors convey about the business (or residence) within? Also, by whose authority are those words painted? They read, "Don't toss garbage here".