Not to overstate this, since stark contrasts can be seen in just about any major city you visit, but the surrealness of this place lies in the scale of those contrasts. And it’s a scale that is just hard to put words to.
Shanghai is city split by a river. On one side is the old part of town where, in pockets at least, the architecture is a mix of European and what you would traditionally think of as Chinese. During our walks and rides around this absolutely massive city (Jeff tells me the ride to find green rolling hills takes two and a half hours), we’ve been referring to this as the “real China”. On the other side of the river is the Western face of China, a place where literally just more than a decade ago there was little more than rice paddies as far as the eye could see. (We bought photo books yesterday where the photographer found old photos from various parts of the city and then went back and took new pictures in the same spot…the contrast is breathtaking.) Now, tall, neon-lit buildings and concrete have replaced all of that rural history. Two of the five tallest buildings in the world stand right next to one another. A third, “The Pearl” is something right out of the Jetsons, a tall spire that holds a strand of three pinkish orbs, the smallest and highest being a revolving restaurant where you can take in the sights. (If you want to skip the textual attempts at describing it all, just see the picture I posted a couple of days ago.) And make no mistake; it is Western. There’s a Hooters along the river, all of the major chains of hotels are here, and you know where to go if you want coffee, right? (Apparently, the big buzz around town is the first Cold Stone Creamery that just opened.) At night, the buildings themselves become billboards, and ships cruise down the river carrying these huge LCD screens that must be like 50 feet wide and 30 feet tall, flashing one advertisement after another for designer clothing or local restaurants and health clubs. Cars and bicycles and scooters and people are everywhere, and there is just a constant blur of activity and motion.
When you first see it, you have this “Grand Canyon Moment” where it just takes your brain a few minutes (or hours, or days) to fully comprehend what it’s looking at. And even then, as opposed to a quiet scene of natural, awe-inspiring beauty, the scene is just overloaded by noises and smells and colors and that just makes it hard to focus on any one aspect, on really “seeing” any one piece of the whole. I found myself just staring at it, blinking. It’s cliche, I know, but it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
And then there is the old part of Shanghai, the “real” China, the part where a restaurant may be a couple of chairs and a table on a street corner where people can sit after buying some type of meat or fish on a stick that’s been barbecued on a makeshift grill built on to the back of a 30-year-old bicycle. A place where people dry their clothes and their linens on lines or fences or poles…anything that works. A place where you can buy these large, loud crickets housed in clay pots or small, bamboo cages and then enter them into some type of insect cage match for sport. A place where in almost every dimly lit storefront or window you can see people selling and bartering during the day, and lazing about, smoking cigarettes, playing cards or board games at night. A place where elderly couples stroll slowly along the sidewalks while half-crazed scooter drivers and cyclists weave in and out among them. A place where, according to Jeff, blocks of people may be “removed” overnight, their homes razed with amazing speed to make room for new big, Western buildings. A place where you can fill yourself up on really good dumplings for a dollar or less.
From the balcony at Jeff’s apartment where I’m staying these last two nights in Shanghai, these two different worlds are easy to take in. Almost straight down lies the old city, while not far in the distance to the East, the towering glass buildings literally nip at the clouds, the two separated only by a winding river and what seems like 1,000 years. It’s wild.
For myself, I can’t decide whether I like this place. Without question, this visit has changed my frame of thinking in a lot of ways, some of which I tried to articulate a couple of days ago and more of which I hope I can capture more of the coming days. The people here, both Western and Eastern, have been kind and gracious and helpful. And I’ve had a slew of new experiences, my first foot massage (an hour long), bartering (though with little energy) at the knockoff markets for 32 Gig flashdrives ($15), eating the abolute best fake lemon Chicken at this very cool vegetarian restaurant Jeff led us to. (Combine that foot massage and the tofu chicken and I might have had to start smoking again, something, btw, that a vast majority of men in this country are addicted to.) And even though there is a typhoon approaching and it’s pretty stormy outside, we’re going to go after some of the more cultural aspects of the city today.
But by and large, the city is almost too much to take, too polluted, too inconsistent, too sensuous, too much in motion. There is just too much that changes in too short a time that it’s hard to get your feet under you, massage or not. And there is something else, a reality that creeps slowly into your brain to scratch this can’t-put-your-finger on it itch that you feel after a few days here. At some point you realize this: there are no birds in this city. No squirrels. No rabbits. Nothing, and I mean nothing wild save the bats that swoop around your head as you walk through the parks at night or the occasional feral cat whose eventual destiny is almost surely sealed from it’s birth. When it dawns on you, that you’ve seen no living animal in the wild for five days, it kinda creeps you out.
Yes, China is growing, and you can’t help but feel it’s force when you scan the horizon from Jeff’s balcony. But the unsettling irony of this view of China at least is that for the most part, what we see here is ourselves. It’s a mirror of our own industriousness, entrepreneurship and hard work, and our own waste and greed and avarice as well. An article in the Shanghai Daily yesterday noted that the gap between rich and poor in China is growing, that a lake in one of the nearby provinces is almost “dead” from the pollution, stories that aren’t all that different from the headlines we read every day at home. While you might argue that the priorities in this country have always been misplaced, the Shanghai face of China seems to be bent on following our worst lead. New is old. The dissonance is acute.
Last night, after we had toured much of the city, we got dropped off a few blocks from where Sheryl and Wes are staying near Jeff’s place, and we strolled slowly home, stopping for a glass of wine, watching couples in the park dance to the sounds of old men plucking ornate stringed instruments, passing thousands of people in the process. At one point, Jeff, Sheryl’s son Noah and I turned down one of the back alleys in the old town and quietly walked past dimly lit apartments and navigated lines of drying clothes strung in our way. We peered into the darkness and made out the outlines of a family sitting on folding chairs in the middle of the walk, taking in the warm night. Not wanting to intrude, we turned back, and as we did, I looked into an alcove where, almost imperceptibly in the darkness I saw an old Chinese woman standing in a doorway. In the soft fluorescence of a streelight, I could just barely see her face, wrinkled, gentle eyes, staring back at me. She leaned against the door jamb, her hands clapsed in front of her, what I thought to be a shallow smile on her face. In that instant, in the muted blues and grays of the shadows, in the hushed corners of that cluttered side street, after a day filled with color and sound and chaos, something about Shanghai finally came into focus.
I spent a week in Shanghai in 2001 & my reactions were much the same as yours now. I was coming from the polite, ceremonious & utterly Confucian city of Hanoi, where I was living at the time, to meet a group of students. The contrast knocked me off my pins. The only part of Confucianism that remains is the demand that one respect authority. That whole business of reciprocal responsibility between rulers & the ruled? That was so 8th century! The Chinese will be the Americans of the 21st century: rapacious, jingoistic & environmentally short-sighted. American corporate socialism is handing off the torch of Progress to Chinese state capitalism.
Surely this is one of the best posts I will read all year.
I can feel the emotional complexity of the city reflected in every sentence and image that you paint.
What worlds we create, we humans.
Great post Will. Your wonderment at what lay beyond the city made me think of this. http://www.waterbuffalomovie.com/
I’m sure you’ve seen it. I use it during presentations to talk about the power of video and being able to share it so quickly and easily these days. Your description and photos of the city contrasts interestingly with the story here.
Brian
Your journey into descriptive writing was a nice change of pace from my aggregator’s usual narratives. Not that you’re not typically descriptive, you just kicked it up a notch here….your Skype call earlier today told a different story but certainly your experiences appear to have been very broad.
Wow.
The bar has been raised to write better on my blog.
Wonderfully written, Will.
(and so it begins with a little alliteration on my part)
Your sessions were inspiring. Thanks.
Beautifully put, Will. My own return to Shanghai, where I taught with Jeff for 6 year, after a year’s absence in Seoul brought home to me a similar swirl.
You hit many of the things that disturb me about China: the pollution, the exploding consumerism and Westernization (we are the virus, regardless of our desire not to be), and so forth.
But I taught Asian history for several years while living in China, and that background colors my feelings about today’s China by making me sadly happy for the Chinese people. In broad strokes, it does so in these ways:
First, when we realize that China has suffered pretty unparalleled misery for the last 200 years, when this 5,000-year-old civilization (one unbroken by any Dark Age, which Europe cannot boast) was:
1) poisoned by British-encouraged opium addiction between 1800 and 1840 – the emperor’s own son died of an overdose, and the “moral” Queen Victoria, in one of the great ironies of history, officially supported and oversaw this largest international drug cartel in history – and then
2) was devastated by a European invasion in 1838 (the Opium Wars and subsequent carving up of China by European and American imperial powers), followed by
3) a 15-year civil war between 1850 and 1865 (the Taiping Rebellion), caused in part by the influence of Christian missionaries and public anger at the Qing humiliation under the “white devils” – and this war caused more deaths than WW II), after which
4) the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, fueled by more popular anti-imperialistic anger, led to US Army occupation of the sacred Forbidden City, which even the Chinese were not allowed to enter, which led to
5) the fall of the 2,000 year old Dynastic system (surely not a bad thing for the general happiness of the populace) and establishment of the Republic, which soon devolved into another civil war – Nationalists and Communists versus warlords, then versus each other once the warlords were defeated, then again in tandem against the invading (Westernized) Japanese empire, then against each other again once America nuked Japan, until Mao took over this humiliated, devastated, broken country in 1950 and
6) tried to modernize it in the necessary (the Capitalist West’s wolves were at the door) Great Leap Forward and Three Bitter Years of the ’50s (millions more died), followed by the madness of
7) the Cultural Revolution in the 60’s and 70’s…
…that history colors my view, as I say, of these old Shanghainese silhouetted in their hutong doorways, ballroom dancing in their parks, smiling at the bamboo-caged crickets they take from their shirt pockets, and yes, even stepping out of their Jaguars to shop at Gucci. It colors it with a feeling of happiness that these people, for the first time in 200 years, are back on their feet, growing too strong to be pushed around any longer, and playing a very important (and ironically enlightened) counterpart to the American Empire on the global political and economic stage.
China has returned to its feet without waging wars, invading other countries, occupying them, causing anything like the misery our single Bush adminstration has caused (Iraqi death toll since the US invasion now over 1 million people).
I know they have warts, but even their prison population, per capita, is smaller than that of the US.
Sorry for the length of this. I know it’s also guilty of omission of some of China’s more troubling traits. But I’m just glad to see these people finally, after 200 years, able to enjoy more stability and hope than they probably dreamt was possible 30 years ago.
Afterthoughts you might enjoy:
I learned enough Mandarin to talk like a politically-conscious 4-year-old in Shanghai. Without exaggerating, cab drivers I chatted with replied to my confession that I was American by saying these two lines on at least 20 occasions in my years in Shanghai:
1: “We’re 5,000 years old. You’re 200.”
2: “We’re peaceful.”
They’re both true. In the 1400’s 50 years before European explorers raided and colonized the world with the sword and the cross, the Chinese, under Admiral Zheng He, sent naval expeditions of boats and warships dozens of times larger than those Columbus would sail in. They explored SE Asia, India, the Arabian Peninsula, the African East Coast, and possibly even America. And they didn’t conquer or colonize them; instead, they established diplomatic and trade relations (yes, they occasionally engineered a coup here or there). Then the emperor decided to cease these expeditions once and for all in 1450 or so, opening up the high seas for European adventurers.
One can only wonder how history had been different had China sustained these expeditions. And why Europe took such a comparatively aggressive and barbaric approach to the lands it “discovered.” _Guns, Germs and Steel_ explains it from a different angle – China had no scarcity like Europe did, etc – but still the fact remains: It _was_ “peaceful,” as any Shanghai cabdriver will tell you 🙂
Makes me want to go out and read some William Gibson again.
so, I read this to my middle schoolers today… the abridged version and as I started into the last paragraph the room went silent, a rare moment in a middle school classroom. I repeated that five times throughout the day and everytime the same reaction. Thank you for enriching the learning environment today in Flagstaff, AZ.
Very appreciative of the comments: opening new prospect to the mind of a Shanghai-born-Shanghai-bred Chinese teaching US history and culture at college in Shanghai and is teaching, for a short while, Mandarin and Chinese culture in Mexico. A new horizon might come into sight when we look at history from a slightly different angle. That’s the way I feel browsing the posting.
This post was one of your best — and the last paragraph was unbelievable. You were an artist with words!! Thank you!!
Thank you also for sharing your trip with us. Many of us have never crossed the ocean (and probably will not)…….the visons you saw and shared on your blog, allowed us to participate in the journey with you.
You have an amazing way with words — thank you for this post.
Jennifer
Our 8th grade teacher just made this post required reading. This particular class had a skype call with Jeff’s school last year so this post will have special meaning for them.
Hey Will you didn’t know you were writing curriculum did you! Thanks for the great post!
Like Diana I am planning on reading this to my 7th graders when we study China. Thanks for the insights and the photo.
How cool is that? Blog post as required reading! Thanks so much to all for the kind feedback. There are times when the moment requires only, as Walter Smith famously said, sitting down to write and “opening up a vein.” It’s such an amazing place…
More pictures, btw, at http://flickr.com/photos/wrichard/sets/72157602067108131/
I join the others in praise of this post. Great descriptions and personal, emotive content.
Your reactions to Shanghai remind me a bit of my own sentiments when living in Australia for four months…which leads me to wonder whether being in a foreign environment engenders a certain degree objectivity not as easily accessible on one’s home turf.
In Australia, I spent time in western, modern cities like Sydney, and also hiked through the Outback in the Red Center and the tropical rainforests up North. I was struck by the juxtaposition of ancient cave drawings and remnants of Aboriginal culture 40,000 years old with bustling, polluted cities. Of course, this dichotomy is present in nearly all industrial and industrializing nations–including the U.S. But something about seeing it elsewhere, as an outsider, makes it all the more salient.
Again, thanks for bringing this issues–that impact us all–to light so colorfully. It seems to me that our greatest resource to engage and confront these realities is our shared humanity…as you seem to conclude in your final paragraph.
Will, Thanks for taking us on your trip. The words were sheer poetry.
Cheryl
This piece is why we read your work. I was anxious to learn what reactions you would have to the city I have called home for 4 years. I laughed out loud, I nodded in agreement, and I read parts to my office mates. Your last paragraph brought it all together for me. Looking forward to the book that must be in process.
You have captured this so beautifully. It gives wings to the experiences we had – a trip not soon forgotten.