Our standard(-less) world

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”?

Thirsty generator

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).

Ambiguous service advertisement

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. 

What level of exposure to such a street-based service display is required before one is able to discern who is selling their services as a manicurist and who is just sitting in a patch of shade with some empty stools? What is the price of misidentification? Is there an equivalently "ambiguous" example of a street-based service advertisement in your context?

One square inch: Pansodan Bridge's vendors

The sidewalk adjacent to an elevated overpass in downtown Yangon is full of examples of informal business (as is the case with most sidewalks in Yangon). The vendors that have taken up this covered portion of Pansodan Bridge take advantage of the shade and protection from the elements provided by the covered sidewalk, as well as the railing that separates the sidewalk from the road. 

In this first example, the potential for a 50-foot drop on to the train tracks below makes the goods display technique for these bananas somewhat risky.

This walkway-based vendor located nearby the above bananas does not push her luck as far. She sells fried snacks, with her kit representing the quintessentially pared-down carry of a mobile vendor in Yangon:

- One stool for displaying goods, upon which is placed the metal platter favored by numerous mobile vendors across Yangon. 

- One stool for sitting upon, which has been extensively repaired using a combination of packing tape, wood, plastic twine, and newspaper).

- One shorter plastic stool, upon which is placed:

- A plastic basket, directly in front of her for easy access to plastic bags for wrapping customers' purchases and, beneath that, some food and drink for personal use. The basket also contains this microenterprise's "cash register" - a small bag filled with money for making change and storing the day's revenue (another reason to keep it within arm's reach at all times).

The young boy, who co-runs the papaya and watermelon operation with his mother, uses the ledge of the walkway's railing to balance metal platters crowded with fruit. While the fall is less serious than the bananas' potential plummet, to have one metal platter tip over would eliminate a significant share of inventory - along with any hope of profit for the day. 

Here, a customer takes notice, approaches, and purchases some papaya.

Down the railing a bit from the papaya and watermelon one notices a creative pineapple goods display solution. This vendor has capitalized upon the ridges cut within each fruit to remove the inedible exterior "eyes" to build miniature structures for displaying his goods. Also, note the level of trust implicit in placing the "cash register" (here, the recycled bottom half of a discarded one-liter water bottle) in such close reach of customers (or those with less pure intentions).

The Carry: Recyclables, Yangon + Mandalay

 

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.


This employee of a recycling collection shop has gathered together enough material to justify the trip on the commuter train out to the suburbs, where a large recycling facility will pay him handsomely for his cargo.

Finally, I didn't have the chance to speak with this man at length as he was busy loading cargo on to the train upon which I was a passenger. Bound for Mandalay, this was taken in an upcountry town several hours' from the city. Besides cardboard, other Mandalay-bound cargo included coal, straw baskets, bamboo, garlic, and even some sewing machines.

Shoes in the window

Inside what was once a cavernous meeting hall, the top half-foot of this (now boarded-up) arched window frame forms an ideal shoe storage space - an unexpected (?) architectural convenience created by the installation of multiple floors. The painted plastic sign hung over the space reads, "Please remove your shoes" - a given for entering most homes in Myanmar.