Shanghai, A Long Beginning

January 21st 2009

It's Wednesday afternoon in Shanghai, raining, so I'm taking the opportunity to take a break from the hustle and bustle to recount the goings-on of the past couple days. Plenty to talk about.

I walked off the ship Sunday morning and filed through a surprisingly casual Chinese immigration checkpoint. I didn't have any checked luggage to pick up so I ambled up the garage exit onto the street and – voila – Kevin was in China. Success! This victory was short-lived, however, because I realized I hadn't properly prepared for arriving in China. I needed to contact Cornell, but to do this I needed a phone. If I could find a phone, I needed money to pay for it. I was carrying plenty of money – USD and JPY – but no CNY. At most airports there are moneychangers in every corner, but having arrived by boat I was let off in a still-developing much-deserted corner of town. I started walking in concentric circles looking for a bank, contemplating the whole time that I was looking for an open bank on a Sunday morning. Just before panic and despair set in I did finally find an open bank and managed to change some of my JPY to local currency, though not without the requisite questioning by foreign authorities over my last name as printed in my passport (White III). This has happened to me in just about every country in the world and after a few futile attempts at explaining the peculiar naming traditions of my native culture I've decided to let the world's bureaucracies come to know me simply as “Whitey”. At any rate I'll need a new passport in 2010 so I'll take care of it then.

Now that I had plenty of cash, I had to find a phone. Unhelpfully, all the phone booths I found had the phones ripped out. Made me feel right at home, actually, because the same usually happens back in the states. I wandered in to a convenient store and attempted to express my predicament in sign language. When the women behind the counter figured me out but could not help I was saved by my first friendly stranger. The guy in line in front of me had stuck around to observe my act and, after his own gestured performance, led me around the corner to an inconspicuous kiosk. I wouldn't have guessed the two people chilling on lawn chairs were actually selling anything, but they had big white boards with long strings of numbers and two phones on a desk. The numbers were apparently SIMM cards and the phones were replacement public services. Sure. I made contact with Cornell and everything was good again. My new mime friend went back about his day and I hopped in a taxi.

Although Cornell was having lunch with his grandmother, I was let in to the pad by one of his roommates. Cornell lives in Shanghai with two lovely French expats, Yannick and Caroline. As for how I know Cornell, when I originally lived in Japan in 2005 we lived across the street from one another in Iwade. Yannick let me in to the apartment to drop off my stuff and then I headed to People's Square one metro stop away on Cornell's advice. People's Square is the very center of Shanghai and on Sunday afternoon was covered with the milling crowds one would expect from one of China's three largest cities. Walking down the pedestrian streets absorbing the vibe was a good first-contact with the city. I turned one corner and came face to face with a Howard Johnson's set into a an 1920s style building. A HoJos in downtown Shanghai? Call me crazy but I thought I remembered this hotel string going out of business when I was a kid. Well HoJo is alive and well in contemporary China and even constitutes an upper-middle class experience. Weird.

I probably don't give myself enough credit with my Japanese because when you come to a place where you really can't communicate it becomes very apparent very quickly. Ordering food or buying anything anywhere has degenerated to pointing at products and punching numbers into a calculator. So when I had lunch as a busy noodle shop on the pedestrian strip at People's Square it was quite a scene for everyone around. Even in metropolitan Shanghai the fascination with foreigners is more robust than it was in Japan and kids especially seem curious with a white man that can use his chopsticks skillfully. The aged woman next to me unobtrusively appraised my dexterous fingering and, I think (hope?), nodded approvingly.

When I related my lunchtime adventures to Cornell he quipped that my restaurant, Ajisen, was actually a localized Japanese noodle franchise. Oh well, so much for branching out. We met back at his place around 2:30 and reminisced about Wakayama for a while. I hadn't seen the guy in three years but rest assured he's still the same good old Cornell. He's an intelligent, professional, thoughtful sort of guy that you'd be lucky enough to meet two or three of these sorts people in your lifetime. Aside from granting me the gracious hospitality of his home and showing me the better parts of the city, his combined knowledge and experience of the place offers an insight into Shanghai that you couldn't get from a guide book and would be supremely lucky to get from even a good professional tour guide. I'd be fortunate if a fraction of what he's told me will be transmitted to you, and I'm sure it will end up significantly less eloquent. At any rate, I'm lucky to have met him this early in my trip as his advice will be useful throughout all of China and elsewhere. On with the good times.

We made our way to a local fake-market to test my bargaining skills. I got a Billabong t-shirt and Lacoste polo shit for a combined 100 CNY (I should note here I'm not sure exactly the best way to refer to Chinese money. I've heard it called “RNB”, “kwai”, “Chinese dollars”, “yuan” and the official international market abbreviation is “CNY”. For simplicity I'll stick with CNY). The current exchange is about 6.8 CNY to the USD, so I usually just divide by 7. Not a bad price, I thought, but now that I've been back a few times and having seen others haggle, I'm sure I could have gotten down to 50 CNY. Note, as well, that my opponent started somewhere around an absurd 480 CNY. As Cornell has explained its just a game to them and they're always going to be better at it than you. I'm sure they receive these shirts for less than a dollar apiece anyway so anything over 10 CNY is probably pure profit. Anyway, if you don't take it too seriously its great fun.

For dinner we went to restaurant that specializes in a Shanghai original, cold boiled chicken. The chicken is sliced with a butchers knife and so comes served bones and all. You gnaw the flesh away from the bones and then spit out on to the table. Yup, on to the table. Soon I had a morbid hill of delicious death growing beside my rice bowl. Considering the long history of bone-spitters before me, you can imagine that the 3-second-rule certainly doesn't apply here. We also had a boiled spinach dish and a mushroom beef dish. Cornell noted that 1) in Shanghai its traditional to eat rice last (as opposed to everywhere else in Asia where rice is ubiquitous with your meal) because its a sign of wealth not to have to serve such a cheap commodity as filler with your meal, and 2) the Western tradition of serving cold drinks with meals flies in the face of Chinese traditions of yin-yang, and so in China you'll find that the “drink” with you meal is typically the hot soup which accompanies it. Foreign infidels that we are, we ordered to Wong Lo Kats (totally not sure of the accuracy of this name), sweetened tea served by the can. All in all a good meal and a great introduction to proper Chinese cuisine.

After dinner we went to an area called Xin Tian Di which is being developed by Cornell's firm, Shui On. The firm was granted master planning rights to a huge swath of land south of People's Square and in stead of knocking everything down and starting from scratch there was a modest effort made to preserve the traditional Shikumen structures, a Euro-Asian fusion style developed when foreign powers exacted concessions from a weak Chinese governement back in the 1800s. Except for the unfortunately prominent placement of a Starbucks the place has a very good vibe. The developement's theme is “Where the past meets tomorrow, today.” and while this may sound cheesy it is actually a pretty apt description. Xin Tian Di has a museum on Shikumen architecture which I later visited, but coolest of all is that on one out-of-the-way street corner is the site of the First National Congress of the Communist Party of China, back when it was just thirteen guys in a room doing their best not be discovered by the KMT. The museum has short biographies with back-then photos of each of the thirteen delegates, including a 20-something Mao. Curiously, based on the biographies about half the original thirteen ended up being arrested, if not executed, at some point in the future by the very party they founded.

The last thing we did that night was to visit the west side of the Bund, the strip along the water that is home to Shanghai's famous skyline. I've seen many a skyline throughout the world, but Shanghai is blessed with one of the best. The west side is lined with roaring-20s style regal buildings that used to house European banks and now house Chinese banks. If any of you appreciate the old WB Batman cartoons, these buildings come straight out of that old-school Gotham City. On the east bank are more modern skyscrapers, all of which are impressively tall but have less personality. The exception to this rule is one building which fuses the two styles and is now my favorite. Not sure what it's called but it's a modern skyscraper, with the sleek glass and steel look, done in the 1920s tiered style that makes it look like something a cyborg King Kong might climb.

At the end of that day it was hard to imagine that I had woken up on a boat, but the next day was shaping up to be just as action-packed. And not in the good way. I had arrived the week before Chinese New Year's, arguably one of the most heavily and densely celebrated holidays in the world. My plan to travel the following weekend to Hong Kong started to seem laughably naive. On top of that, I had to get my visa for Vietnam and the consulates were sure to be closed in China over the holidays. As happy as I was to be in China at last, these problems were both large and pressing. No rest for the weary.