The Woman of the Perfume Ad
The woman of the perfume ad is a complex construct. The advertisers who create her are geniuses of manufacturing desire, of finely chiselling models into shape with slogan and sign. Perfume ads come with tropes: her armpits are hairless; no blemish taints her skin; her hair is slicked back with seaw
Shanghainese
I’ll hear a string of sounds – slick fricatives, ballooning rounded vowels, shreds of distantly familiar tones. It’s a sequence of mismatched notes, sewn together by the timbre of my grandma’s voice. She’ll look at me as she speaks, as if trying to impart meaning, to imprint in the air the
