Now, the current trip in Taiwan as I wait out the coronavirus on the Mainland
Fort “Red Hair,” which is what the locals called a Dutch colonial fort in Northern Taiwan. There are a few other forts around Taiwan dating from the Golden Age of Exploration (including Spanish ones).
Taiwan has been colonized repeatedly and only marginally under the control of the Ming rebels and later the Qing dynasty. When the island was returned to Chinese rule after World War 2, there was a lot of resentment among the locals for the government of the Republic of China on Taiwan. There still is…
The adjacent building became the British Ambassador (Consulate?) residence after World War II. They had a dandy exhibition about British fashion, tea culture, tennis etc.
Even more Japanese colonial architecture in Northern Taiwan
Guanyin Mountain, across the Tamsui river where I used to live
Tamsui is a popular street food location
“Oxford College”
Self-explanatory
I toured Taroko Gorge again, a massive canyon in Hualian, Taiwan
More monkey business
Cat in a box
Asparagus juice – complete with picture of caucasian babe bending over. It’s an ok beverage
I am writing from Hualian (Eastern Taiwan) and Taipei, Taiwan. This is after the Chinese central government extended the Spring Festival holiday and the Shanghai Municipal government delayed the opening of businesses even more until February 9, because the coronavirus is really doing a number on the country.
Taiwan only has 10 confirmed cases of the coronavirus as of this writing, with almost 200 cases in Shanghai and counting. One death in Shanghai: It’s mainly been older people and or individuals with pre-existing conditions passing away, but it’s hard to tell who the rest of the people are. Facemasks are no longer readily available in Taiwan, with the government limiting everyone to purchasing only 1-3 masks per store per day, and forbidding the export of masks to China. Weird flex but ok. In addition, I will only be able to bring up to 5 boxes of facemasks (50 per box) to China, not that I can find that many anymore.
“Please leave N95 masks for medical personnel”
Forget about the virus, I’m just worried that there won’t be enough food when I get back, but from what I can tell online at least some people seem to be out and about back in Shanghai, much to the detriment of local quarantine efforts. It’s hard to keep people indoors for more than a week.
Anyways, I was in Taiwan for Christmas as well, so here is a two-part photo essay combining those times and the current stay. Enjoy!
Oyster pancake in the night market, which is a pancake made of egg, spinach, yam powder/paste and oysters with some orange sauce added.
Night market, where I had other food like fried chicken, pork’s blood cake, bird’s eggs, etc.
F-16s climb into the blue sky from a Taiwanese base in Hualian
Beach in Hualian
Not so appealing – grab a doll, except it’s a cockroach
Cats on rooftops of Japanese colonial era houses – Taiwan was a Japanese colony from the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1895 to the end of World War II in 1945. It retains a lot of Japanese influence even today
More Japanese houses, now owned by the Taiwanese government/military
Election posters for Han Guo-Yu, who did not win, above a betelnut stand, a common sight in Taiwan
More Japanese colonial architecture, which later became an officer’s club for the American military after the end of WWII
Before we start with the Shenzhen photo essay, I want to highlight how integrated QR codes are into daily Chinese life. You can scan QC codes (or have your own code scanned) using WeChat or AliPay to make retail payments, but you can even scan (indeed, must scan) a QR code to pay your electric bill. Take a look:
A lot of vendors (including taxis, fruit stores, etc.) leave their QR codes up for customers to scan and submit payments, while most established retail stores will bring a QR code reader to scan the QR code that is randomly generated from your WeChat or Alipay app.
Interestingly, because Alibaba (which makes Alipay) is headquartered in Zhejiang and Tencent (which makes WeChat) is in Shenzhen, only Alipay is available in much of Zhejiang, and WeChat Pay in Shenzhen, in a sort of e-payment turf war.
Ok, on my way to Shenzhen: Starbucks are everywhere in China but their menus are different than the ones in the states. Just check out these items below. They have to compete with shops selling crazy flavored teas and boba drinks, so they come up with these exotic beverages:
“Modern Mixology” replete with coffee mixed with lemon and other monstrosities“Fortune Chestnut Molten Mocha”
Now I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves:
Shenzhen airportHotel LobbyNow we need theseBeware of crush
Tencent, the internet giant that makes WeChat and other apps, is headquartered in Shenzhen
All the people going into Tencent in the morningShenzhen skyline
You can (and sometimes have to) order by QR code at restaurants by scanning a code like this at the table (including the table number) or the counter:
It will bring up a menu of items which you can add to your shopping cart and checkout with, this is a screen capture from the Luckin Coffee payment menu, which is like a cheaper Starbucks which is still decent:
Mmm, durian cashew nuts!
You pay in the app, and once your order is ready, you pick it up from the counter or they bring it to your table.
Lunchtime in Shenzhen, which is a huge business center rivaling Hong Kong or Shanghai:
A restaurant devoted entirely to serving frog dishes, which I did not partake in:
Special Soldier in Fast Food
Frozen ads on the plane for Shanghai Disneyland, which is now closed because of the coronavirus:
Obviously there was more to the trip than just this but hopefully it gives you a flavor…
My life has gotten a lot more exciting over the past couple of months so I haven’t gotten to writing the Phables recently. But now things are clearly getting very exciting over here, so I’m back at it again.
First, mandatory pictures of ordinary life in Shanghai:
View from the Bund to Lujiazui, in the Pudong New AreaArt Deco buildings on the Bund, a former foreign concession area
But probably the biggest question on everyone’s mind is how it is being in China during the coronavirus.
It’s clear that people’s attitudes changed drastically after the government announced that there was people-to-people transmission of the virus, because then it seemed more like SARS, which a lot of people still remember. Then the masks started coming out more in public and at the office, where previously few people were wearing them. As readers of the blog will remember, I was just in Wuhan as recently as last November, so this current crisis comes as quite a surprise.
Nicole, the laundromat dog
I remember SARS, as I was attending local junior high school in Taiwan at the time. There were accounts of the virus spreading until finally someone in our school (or their family member) was infected, so they shut school down. I do remember distinctly one vignette, that is when we were put in a different classroom to wait for the school day to end and everyone to be sent home (we had to wait because some people’s parents were still at work I imagine), everyone was wearing masks in a classroom with a projector.
Decorations in a fancy SH karaoke place
Our teacher or some admin person thought it would be a good idea to play a movie for us while we waited to go home, so they picked the enlightened choice of Resident Evil. Good times.
Anyway, in lighter news, I recently went on a business trip to Shenzhen, which is a very advanced city in southern China, less than 2 hours away from Hong Kong by road. I could do some research into how Shenzhen is one of the special economic zones (SEZ) of China that was first opened up to world investment and trade, but I’ll let you figure out the details. I’m just going to show what I saw, since that’s the sort of day-to-day details that seem to interest my readers. Tune in next time for the Shenzhen photo essay…
This is part of the back-to-back posts on China adventures!
The weekend before I represented my company at a forensics conference in Wuhan, China. Wuhan is a huge city about two hours away from Shanghai by plane, so I flew out from the airport closer to the city in Shanghai (Hongqiao).
Air travel in China has gotten a lot better since the days of “rude inflight behavior” that was quickly quashed by the government.
The ride to the hotel from the Wuhan airport was very long, and featured row after row of tall, dark apartment buildings. It felt a little bit dystopian, Ghost in the Shell-like.
The Hetian hotel itself was nice – Hetian means field of lotuses – and the accommodations were pleasant. They did have creepy pandas at the entrance and rip-off Peppa Pig statues though. Why are there always creepy animal statues everywhere in China? Is it just creepy because they are putting cutesy things in non-family spots?
Anyway, allow me to introduce a little about part of what I’m doing in China. Over the course of civil litigation in the United States, there is a Discovery phase where the litigants have to surrender (almost) all of their records related to the case. The scope of discovery is determined by a judge or simply by management if they are doing an internal investigation.
Right?
So our job is to go and collect as instructed by lawyers all the documents and data related to the scope of discovery, including emails, Word, Excel or Powerpoint documents, mobile data like text and instant messages, other specialty data types, sometimes social media, scanned and paper documents, everything. Obviously this can get to be a lot of data.
“Greatly nurture and actualize the core values of socialism”
Then we process and load that data into a database where lawyers and (our) investigators can review the documents in a page-by-page format.
Military Olympics in WuhanWuhan University
In my next post, I’ll go over some details of the conference.
I realize that the Shanghai Edition of this blog is my most popular feature, so I am pushing out back-to-back posts about more of my experiences in China.
Two weekends ago I travelled to Hangzhou to support a colleague running the Hangzhou marathon. I did not run the marathon myself. Hangzhou is a very developed city about an hour southwest from Shanghai on the high-speed rail (HSR). It is most famous for its picturesque West Lake and for being where Alibaba’s main headquarters is located.
Not my picture
Booking the HSR ticket was a pain as you need to connect your real-name authenticated identity with a Chinese railway app called 12306 to book a train ticket (no such requirements for plane tickets, I guess it’s impossible for people to enter or leave the country otherwise). But I ended up having to go to the train station itself a day or two before to stand in line for tickets, and “tying” my passport (i.e. real name) to 12306 in person at the train station service center.
The other alternative is to buy tickets at special ticket counters throughout the city, but none were close to where I live or work. Then there is a special lane for foreigners when you go through the gates at the station.
Shanghai or Hangzhou station
Saturday evening I arrived at a Holiday Inn, which was an experience in of itself. These hotels aren’t exactly luxury ones in the US, but they are in China. Because of my status as a Spire Elite member with Intercontinental Hotels (a distinction I earned while staying at the Crowne Plaza in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay for more than a month for work) around only $80 a night I was upgraded to a very nice room and given 2 drink vouchers. I also got a 15% discount on the food I ordered for dinner.
What?? You’re lucky to get bottled water in the US! There must be so much competition between the hotels leading to such niceties. The wine with the drink vouchers was quite good Chilean (?) wine and the Hainanese Chicken Rice was good too. At a Holiday Inn. I forgot to take pictures, you can look it up yourselves!
The next morning, the marathon itself began and ended near West Like, but we never got to see the lake because it was so crowded in the vicinity of the finish line (the Huanglong sports stadium). Below is a picture of the stadium. It was pretty interesting because the inner ring of the stadium, not in the stadium itself, was filled with restaurants. Everywhere around the stadium were restaurants.
We arrived around 11 AM and the marathon ended around 1 pm. Apparently this marathon is a lot easier to get spots in than the Shanghai marathon, which gives spots mainly to foreign runners.
My other colleague and I watched the finishing runners from a vantage point and ended up cheering on our colleague as she approached the finish line. After it was done we went to a local restaurant and toured a creative colony (? essentially a lot of creative industries and cafes in the same area).
Hard to believe China has such a place, but there you go. Most of Southeast China is considered the cultural center of the country. On the other hand, the traffic is notorious for being very bad, so we spent a lot of time in DiDi rideshares.
There were a lot more people than this makes it look like
Actually I have been to West Lake and Hangzhou before, since I have family in the area – My grandfather on my dad’s side has a sister who lives in the vicinity, and I visited her and other extended family members around when I was in middle school. They lived a hour or more drive away from Hangzhou in nice villas now that they made some money off of owning a factory. They also had a small lake where we took a speedboat ride (grandpa’s sister included) and I remember playing ping-pong with some extended family as well. Needless to say, times have changed since those folks were growing up.
These are the family that my grandfather could not return to in China after 1949, as he had gone to Taiwan prior to the Nationalist Government escaping there from the mainland. He did not see them again until the 1980s.
Ads running outside of the subway train (on the walls)
There is one more tidbit about the Hangzhou trip that is interesting: I booked the wrong ticket going back so had to quickly get another one at the ticket window in East Hangzhou station. But they could not provide any more tickets on the same train going back, they only had tickets for the next train. Fine, I thought. But my colleague ended up actually booking a ticket for me on the original train through CTrip, one of the travel booking apps I covered in my other post, by “competing” for an online ticket for that train. You compete by inviting friends to support your “competition” for that ticket as they click into a link and “push” you forward in the app. We won the ticket, so away I went.
Here we go again – To round out the Early Period of my computer gaming, here is a closer look at four titles that I remember quite distinctly, along with casual mentions of a few others.
Hellcats Over the Pacific (1991)
I began to learn a little bit about World War II and World War I when I played the combat/flight simulators based off of these conflicts. I think I really got into the WWII stuff after I read an account of the Battle of Midway from the point of view of the American torpedo bombers (note: this is getting turned into a questionable movie about Midway featuring Nick Jonas which I’m probably going to go watch anyway). Basically the story I read is they happened upon the defenseless Japanese ships by accident, which were refueling and reloading so the Japanese had all their fighter-bombers on deck when the Americans attacked. Fun fact: The Hellcat was not invented until after the Battle of Midway, so it did not partake.
But in terms of this game I mainly just played the demos and shot down Japanese fighters time after time. The demo was randomly generated which made it replayable. This title was particularly memorable because the graphics were quite good for the time and the Japanese fighters were bright yellow, which made them quite easy to track, along with the guns of the Hellcat which conveniently shot out black dots as bullets. There was also an instant replay and bombing function built-in to the simulator.
Honorable Mention: An F-16 simulator that I don’t remember the name of, but allowed me to learn about the different missile types used by that fighter jet (Sparrow, AIM-120 etc.)
U-Boat – and Battle of Britain (1994)
This game was from the perspective of German U-Boat sailors operating in and near the Atlantic. You would go on missions to find merchant vessels, or destroy military ships, which got progressively difficult (some of the merchant ships would surprise you with weapons or were actually destroyers). I remember trying to sink a battleship, that did not go well. If you didn’t destroy the enemy at a first sneak attack you likely had to run away or dive deep, and hope that the enemy didn’t sink you. It was very suspenseful waiting for the depth charges to go off and dealing with “battle damage” while underwater – the sound was very atmospheric. Of course all the Germans on the U-boat are speaking English with a German accent. This was another fun game to play with my dad.
The Battle of Britain came with U-Boat and was an interesting simulator around the titular air battle. You would be in charge of directing British fighter planes (Spitfires, mostly) towards incoming German bombers and fighters as shown on a radar screen. It was pretty difficult to anticipate the movements of the Luftwaffe, usually the Germans won when I played the simulation – meant to show how difficult the battle was for Britain, I suppose.
Comanche (1992)
In this game the 3D graphics are getting noticeably better, so it’s getting harder to run it on our old Mac. But Comanche was a great game that pit you as an American assault helicopter pilot against Russians, warlords and drug runners, etc. The variety of enemies was interesting and the missions were fairly engrossing but not overly difficult. This is where I learned about the stinger and Hellfire missiles at an early age.
This was one of the games where the user manual was super detailed and interesting, starting a trend where I enjoyed reading user manuals and strategy guides as much as the games themselves. In the guide, it introduces the player-character as a US pilot who used to fly fixed-wing aircraft and was now being trained for what was then a prototype Comanche. If you think about it, most of the coverage of American military helicopters are Black Hawks (like in the movie) or Apaches, not this helicopter.
SimCity 2000 (1993)
This one is a classic. Maxxis would later make the best-selling computer game at the time, The Sims, but started out with this city-building simulator. It was recommended for urban planners, which is how my father started playing it. At first it was too difficult for me so I ended up using a lot of cheat codes and turning natural disasters “off.” The classic natural disaster was the alien robot that would cause havoc on the city from high above in the sky.
In the game, you can build residential, commercial or industrial zones and had to provide for everything like hospitals and police stations, schools, waterworks, power lines and power plants, and parks and so on. I think one of the most interesting parts about this game was the high-tech power plants that were available later in the game, like a dish to convert energy beamed from the sun’s rays or a fusion power plant. In addition, there were Arcos, which are massive self-contained structures that would increase your population substantially. These had a heavy influence on my thinking and sci-fi writing.
That’s it for now. Next time we will begin the Landmark Period of my computer gaming, from when I was 7 to 11 years old, where my gaming…habit?…really took shape.
Sometimes I get into these one-night cycles of constantly having dreams each time I fall asleep, wake up, fall asleep and dream again. It isn’t good sleep at all, but quite interesting to record – especially the last dream featured here from the early morning of 10/26.
First of Three: I think this was the first dream, either that or it’s the second one. Thom Yorke of Radiohead is playing drums and singing in some unspecified apartment living room, and my friend from high school Winston Kung is there enjoying it too. Then I am in a dorm and am having a night terror (in the dream), my body is contorted and I call for help down a hallway where my father opens the door to another dorm adorned with a banker’s lamp I used to use in college and a calendar similar to something I had in the past.
Then it’s a bit fuzzy – something about clownfish, an awards ceremony/hall of fame, the Radiohead song Creep and Thom Yorke’s solo career.
Analysis: I have been listening to a lot of Radiohead and a bit of Thom Yorke’s solo work, which I did not find very interesting. Winston and I shared a liking to Radiohead’s song paranoid android from the OK Computer album which is probably why he’s there. Sometimes I have nightmares/night terrors/paralysis within dreams and always try to reach out to someone for help but there’s never anyone there. And then when there is someone there I don’t get the night terrors.
Second of Three: I forgot the first part of the dream but there is a platform high above the sky and rain, and there are people from Georgetown who are walking around trying to accomplish some tasks on the platform. I have to come down from the platform which is way up in the sky on a slippery ladder with other people coming up and down, so I go slow. My mother is encouraging me and I think about my grandfather for support. There is no rung at the bottom of the ladder so I try to breathe deep and I wake up.
Now – sometimes this can happen – I re-enter the dream as/in a plane, and fly across a map like the maps in the commercial airliner entertainment consoles. There are green, blue and orange markers and routes. There’s a lot of traffic in the sky and I’m trying to fly back in the direction of the ladder but I lose speed and land somewhere away from it, and turn into a jeep – the whole thing now looks like a comic book – and I’m frustrated that I can’t get back to where I was.
Analysis: Ok, I’m starting to think I have a subconscious fear of heights, because these types of fear to fall dreams occur a lot. The map just shows that I fly too often. There is a Tintin comic I’ve read called Land of Black Gold or something that features a jeep in the desert as well.
Third of Three: This is a wild one, and dreams like this are quite concerning since I feel like they are using parts of the brain that are normally subconscious, and for good reason. I see a lot of languages in bright pink made-up/random script overlaid over commercials, essentially the script/letters are randomly generated from what I think the languages look like, or the prototypical shape of the languages’ written form.
I see what looks like closing credits with “Arabic,” “Korean,” others and other languages, scenes of deserts, stones. The Korean “commercial” is a travel/airline commercial featuring an airliner and a woman garbed in traditional clothing flying in front of the plane – basically one of those celestial women. Again, a lot of squiggly lines, accent marks, curves, shapes – it’s like Chinese characters but exaggerated, ending credits, text overlays etc.
Analysis: The problem with these dreams is that I recognize my brain is in a state other than the one it was in in the previous two dreams. A “manic” state, so to speak, which I find to be slightly dangerous or, at least, similar to the night terror/sleep paralysis states that I experience otherwise. Or maybe I’m just overthinking things.
As the dust settles and the “new car smell” begins to fade after
my arrival in China nearly two months ago, the reality of living here for two
or more years starts to set in.
I think this is a good thing, as it allows me to focus on my
work and my writing.
On the other hand, the end of the honeymoon period came
about rather quickly and with some unnecessary consternation. It is easy for me
to live in Shanghai, but to enjoy it is a different story.
I have come to frequent a jazz bar in the neighborhood where
I live and work called Wooden Box. It is pretty much that, a single-story wood-enclosed
structure with a small area for live performances. The first night I went there
the remnants of a typhoon were blowing through the city, so the light rain and
the wind contrasted with the warmth and jazz within the venue. I even went up
and sang a rendition of the song Night and Day a la Frank Sinatra to a crowd of
about five people. The intimate venue allowed me to speak with and interact with
the musicians as well.
The jazz bassist Danny spoke of how it was becoming
difficult for foreign musicians to stay in the country due to tightening
restrictions on visas. For whatever reason, we also discussed where everyone
was on 9/11 (Danny was working as a legal proofreader in New York at the time).
Another evening I was there, some Chinese (probably)
musicians were performing bluegrass music. Yes, American bluegrass music. It made
me think of a bluegrass festival I went to with my grandparents in North
Carolina when I was young. As these things go, it made me a little sad, since
the world and America my grandparents lived in is no longer in existence, and I
really don’t know what to make of its replacement.
Jazz and bluegrass, bluegrass like what I heard on public radio when I was living in North Carolina, those haunting winter nights. Who put the record on every Friday? Someone has to keep the light on for the arts when the onslaught of now threatens to extinguish them. The songs my grandparents used to listen to, so many of them from the 30s, 40s, 50s, are gone with them. Someday, I too will grow so old that I won’t know any of the songs on TV, on the radio, on the internet, whatever will be the form of communication then. Telepathy for all I (and Elon Musk) know.
It’s a scary thought, which is part of the reason why I try to listen to new songs to keep up with whatever’s going on in music right now. But sometimes I still find some interesting bits, like an Apple Music album called 1930s Radio Show Classics. Live from the Hotel Lincoln, in New York City, is Artie Shaw and his Orchestra. Right now I’m listening to a song called Night Over Shanghai, about “pale yellow faces and sad old eyes.” Ha!
Actually, I doubt they will ever stop playing Beatles or Jimi Hendrix songs in my lifetime, so I might be safe there. And the artists like Beyonce and Taylor Swift will want to maintain their dominance for years to come (Note: I am not a fan of either). But in 2017 I remember watching the MTV awards, again with my grandfather, and there were quite a few artists and acts that I couldn’t recognize at all, until Jared Leto showed up with tribute to Chester Bennington of Linkin Park (the band’s lead singer who had committed suicide). Finally, some people I knew.
Where am I going with this…music, jazz, getting older, music will always be my refuge. But it’s what happens when the music ends, that’s the problem.
My dreams have either been too vague or too embarrassing to write recently. But I heard you wanted dreams, so here are some more – uncensored (well, almost)!
Two dreams. The first is probably the first well-formed dream I can remember since moving to China but ends in a sort of silly nightmare. I am at some sort of hotel and get into a car downstairs at the entrance. We drive towards a train station through cloudy/misty/polluted cityscapes and enter a parking lot where I climb a spiral staircase to a semi-hidden room where top brass from what appears to be the US air force and army are gathered for a meeting in a sort of WeWork/hotel lobby with cushioned chairs/cushions for chairs.
One of the meeting participants is a “Rand person” i.e. from one of the think tanks and I recognize her as someone I saw on a Tinder app once but is kind of crazy. She is very driven and comes up to me to say hello. Her name is Laura Anderson [no connection to anyone I know in real life] and she has crazy person glasses even though she is quite attractive; anyway people know to avoid her in terms of romantic connections. Then suddenly a pillow is shouting and talking to me, which I take to be real life because I’m in bed and “woke up,” which is quite scary indeed. Then I finally wake up from all this nonsense.
Analysis: This is very heavily influenced by what I am seeing in real life, being in China. The meeting scene is influenced from being in DC for so long and attending various events where US military or thinktank personnel are presenting, but it also gives the allure of a secret meeting on/in China at the top levels of the US military that I get to participate in. Perhaps I always wanted to work in the military or a thinktank. The Laura Anderson part is somewhat self-explanatory, at least I know people like that in the DC space, having lived there for so long.
Second dream, begins at a temple in Taiwan where the rain is falling and I see a tall, slim mixed young woman and end up having a “passionate encounter” with her in the woods. She turns out to be a prostitute. My character is actually a cop from the FBI or some American agency sent to Taiwan for a cybersecurity/smuggling etc. investigation, so he asks if the payment of ten thousand is in Taiwan dollars or USD, to which the prostitute scoffs.
Ok, not quite Taiwan, but yes woods
The next scene is him comparing slides with the Taiwanese cops as he is sent to investigate gangsters involved. They brainstorm criminal involvement, discuss informants, etc. But the character continues to see the prostitute, sometimes at her own apartment, where she covers (turns down) a picture of her from college with some of her friends, and we find out from the shot that she went to Georgetown as she’s wearing a college hoodie in the picture. Then the agent is in an aquarium by himself, with creatures all around and even some Merfolk-inspired creatures about him; it’s a dream-like scene. The prostitute is actually an informant for the gangsters, but she has feelings for the agent too so the gangsters eventually kill her.
He is alone in the aquarium
The agent sees her as his guardian angel and at times even wonders if he was/is imagining her or not. There is somehow a banquet that both law enforcement and the gangsters attend, and of course a fight breaks out. Eventually there is an “awards ceremony” (this is all in a fantastical sense) where the agent is outed as having been with this prostitute with all the pictures of them together, but he doesn’t deny it as he says he was in love with her.
Analysis: Ummm…use your imagination. I will say this though, there was an attractive young woman at Georgetown, mixed as well, whose claim to fame is that she had previously starred in a pornographic film of an abusive nature. She ended up being kicked out of Georgetown for dealing marijuana. Anyway maybe this prostitute character is vaguely based off of her.
