Michelle continues her journal entries from her initial arrival in Beijing...Check out her first thoughts HERE

October, 2003

It's been about three weeks since I landed in Shanghai, and I think I'm settled. I am situated in Yangpu, an outlying district that is an inconvenient distance from the city's center. I enjoy it's relative calm compared to the bustling, overcrowded downtown neighborhoods. That's not to say it's a peaceful district. The daytime is often ravaged by the sound of blasting construction tools and diesel fumes. The landscape is similarly punctured by huge craters, dug by raggedly clothed, sun-baked migrant workers from other provinces; these holes will presumably form the foundations for new buildings born of Shanghai's real estate frenzy, or for renovations to aging college campuses. It is difficult to encounter a city block that does not contain at least one huge demolition site replete with refuse. But from these many fields of bone-colored rubble peek hand-painted signs advertising the remnants of life in bulldozed areas: bicycle repair, apartments for rent, a public telephone. It's not unusual to find a tiny stall set up in a nearly abandoned cement building amidst piles of crushed bricks, where you can buy a surge protector or iced tea. Since China opened the floodgates of capitalism in the early 1980s; its citizens have been quick to seize any opportunity to sell anything.

In a typically schizophrenic move, the government recently cracked down on street vendors in an effort to polish the city's facade. Shanghai wants to become the preeminent commercial center of the country, and the sight of hunchbacked old men hawking figs from straw baskets might detract from the sheen of Western-style shopping malls. Now vendors have been herded into designated marketplaces or "shi chang." A shi chang is typically a street reserved for commerce that includes shops for steamed buns, roasted chestnuts, and French-style baked goods, as well as a cavernous concrete enclosures filled with fruit stalls, cages with live chickens, counters displaying every type of pickled vegetable imaginable, and gaggles of shoppers ranging from pubescent to ancient, all haggling for the cheapest price.

The streets are ridiculously broad, with bicycle lanes almost as wide as the main road, enabling the city's populace, still largely carless, to mobilize via legions of spoked metal wheels during rush hour. Traffic lights don't seem to mean all that much for bicyclists; the general rule is to go when your chances of being mowed down by a truck or a cabbie are most slim. I encountered a former cab driver once who gave up the taxi business after he accidentally crippled a man on a bicycle; unnerved by the hazards of Shanghai traffic, he has since resigned himself to selling fish at a Yangpu grocery market.

Locals refer to Yangpu as somewhat "luo hou," or backward, compared to the more developed commercial districts downtown. The most prominent commercial district is the Bund, a former foreign enclave that helped transform the city from a fishing town to a major harbor metropolis in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is rife with prostitution, organized crime and China's wealthiest and destitute. Today, after several revolutions, it is an society enclave of a different sort. Giant billboards advertise the latest in Western fashions and technology. No bicycles are allowed down the main pedestrian walkway, so consumers can amble about in the Eden of neon and Disney characters. Yet reminders that one is indeed still in China abound: a neat crimson column of yellow-starred flags line the streets, and upon exit, you are greeted by begging children from the countryside still clothed in dirty school uniforms.

At night, expats and local hipsters hit the bar scene, which caters to businessmen, singles, tourists, college students, lesbians, and other youth-oriented demographics with substantial disposable income. But in Yangpu, nighttime provides a respite from the noise and pollution. Cool, damp October sweeps the sprawling streets and both decrepit housing compounds and luxury high rises seem to hover on the brisk air, in flux. Tomorrow will bring more destruction, more construction, more buying, selling and confusion. And Shanghai, at the helm of China's ascent to the world stage, looks both east and west before crossing.

Hangzhou Bound

I just got back from Hangzhou after two days spent with my parents in the company of their good friends and business partners, Xiao Song and Zhang Da Ge. Hangzhou seems nothing like Shanghai. Shanghai is a twenty-something salesman working overtime: neon, fast, mercurial and fast-talking. Hangzhou is a maiden city, unmarred by Shanghai's ambition but blessed with good looks and talent. Its two main industries are garment manufacturing and tourism. As a garment center, Hangzhou sits at the center of major international and national trade axes. But a visit to a major trading street in China revealed that Hangzhou's commercial character is still muted by its mellow personality. The entire strip wa s lined with open storefronts with rolls of brocade cloth on display, but streets were blocked off to control traffic, and the salespeople inside didn't display the quiet desperate ion of typical Chinese street hawkers who yell at you to draw attention to their good deals. Tourism is a natural outgrowth of its historical relics--temples bearing the inscripted tablets of emperors, restored pagodas pregnant with spiritual and mythological tales, and a large lake, Xihu, that has been the subject of poetry and prose across dynasties.

The Urban Elite

Song and Zhang are a young couple who probably embody, in my view, the new elite of China's rising generation. They're intelligent, shrewd, stylish, perceptive, and have a genuine appreciation for Chinese culture while at the same time remaining extremely receptive and flexible toward the West. Song works in garment trading, and Zhang used to work with her, but he recently decided to launch his own business specializing in landscaping and interior design. His work, as well as the very chic office compound, reflects the synthesis of Chinese and Western art and design concepts. They use gray brick to mimic the ancient and antique traditional architecture of th e great imperial cities (a style that has really caught on in Shanghai, it seems, judging from the revitalized hutong architecture of Xintiandi). The rounded windows mimicked old courtyards and there was an air of zen about the tranquil, stately two-story structure. It was divided into two parts, like a yin yang--one was Song's small office and showroom, where she displayed modern Chinese fashions, and the other was the more industrious Hizen design firm space, which displayed all the elements of form, function and mystique characteristics of the worldview of China's most progressive entrepreneurs.

Zhang Da Ge is a brusque, cynical northerner with a sharp wit and a buzz cut. Song is a Hangzhou native with a mild radiance and a syrupy voice that evoked the sleepy charm of her native provincial city. They were soft-spoken and warm hosts, and I noted they lacked the somewhat phony excessive generosity that I see in relatives and friends of the family who fight over restaurant tabs and bring tacky gifts to every gathering.

They seemed protective of us as we toured Hangzhou's scenic spots. We contemplated buying some candied haw fruit on skewers as we ambled down the scenic promenade along the famous Xihu Lake. But Song warned that it wasn't sanitary. She also only took us to the best restaurants and ordered for us. Dinner the second night was at a small tea house that was exquisitely decorated in the same cross-cultural and trans-historical style of her workplace, with delicately carved wood, lovingly crafted tea sets and ceramic dishware, and intimate lighting that seemed half a globe away from the intrusive fluorescent bulbs I often experienced at more utilitarian canteens and even upper crust eateries in Shanghai.

It seemed that Song and her family had cultivated a kind of cultural outlook that most ordinary Chinese have not yet attained: one that prioritized subtlety and sophistication, not aggressive commercialism or the flashy imitation of Western ideas. I see in them the deeper dimension of the definition of wen ming, which translates literally and awkwardly to "civilized." They are wen ming in the sense that they seem to have come as close as one can to a universal definition of "cool" in this age of cultural clash and relativism. They are moving forward yet extending into the past, eyes straight ahead and only looking back to make sure they're not missing anything.

Shanghai at a Glance

I see why my parents have bonded with this young couple. My mother and father, middle-aged Chinese immigrants to the US, have a curious perspective on their homeland. Returning to the mainland after a long detour (they grew up in Taiwan and have lived in the States for three decades), they seemed bewildered walking down the streets of Shanghai: My mother flinches and scowls at oncoming traffic as my father, with his careless, perpetual smile, nearly gets run over by a speeding scooter on a busy market street. "Has Shanghai changed a lot?" he asks a taxi driver with the naive tone of an aging academic-cum-businessman. My mother says she feels at home in China, but she would never want to live here for a long period of time. "So basically, you feel Chinese when you're in America, and American when you're in China," jokes my father. My mother concedes. Having lived here for a month, I sometimes feel that I'm more sui ted to this society, being young and more culturally flexible, than my parents, who are middle-aged intellectuals, whose concept of China has been fattened on overseas nationalism and telescoped through the safe distance of the hyphen in "Chinese-American."

We toured a small oasis of chic cafes and bars near the city center called Xintiandi, "a new heaven". My mother felt at home here. Yet she also noted that in China, such a place could only be created "from the top-down." A place of culture, of the artistic melding of ancient and modern, would originated from the bottom in the West--if not exactly the "common folk," at least from the grassroots literati. I think of a parallel urban enclave in New York, the bohemia of Greenwich Village. But in China, most people either lacked the means or the vision (or both) required to launch such a venture, which fused commercialism with cultural preservation. So a place like Xintiandi can only be produced self-consciously, deliberately, and somewhat unnaturally, as part of urban renewal policy. So does this mean the Chinese masses cannot yet be trusted to push forth Chinese culture, that the government must take the lead? I feel like agreeing with this opinion would be strengthening the ratio nale behind authoritarian government: the masses can't be trusted with the welfare of their own country. But perhaps it could be perceived as follows: the more power divested to people, the more responsible they will become.

Whither the Laobaixing?

As the planned economy has rapidly eroded in the Reform Era as the country has rushed head-first into the market economy, people seem to be fixated on making money--fazhan. The development has brought wealth as well as instability, and disorder percolates in the form of crime and corruption. Yet when a society reaches a certain level of prosperity, it also begins to contemplate the luxuries of civil society: art, culture, what we in the West might ethnocentrically deem the "finer things." China is being tugged back and forth between the uncertainty and the bliss of prosperity. The Communist Party has clung to its paternalistic role as the keeper of common people by taking the lead in major public works projects, public environmental campaigns, museums and state-owned media, but this draconian monopoly on culture is swiftly being outstripped by private interests who have their own ideas, for better or worse, of what constitutes good taste in the public interest. In the near future, we will see the government and private citizens vying for control over the sphere of culture, each side trying to promulgate its own ideas of which traditions and symbols to preserve, which to get rid of, and how to shape the ideology of the future. The masses are surmounting a crucial learning curve--a period of adaptation, structural adjustment and perhaps chaos--that the Party sees as threatening. In reality, the government can only hope to delay this process by comromising its power or co-opting the social forces that are challenging the regime. In general, China's laobaixing, the common people, are moving ahead full throttle on both the economic and cultural fronts, and politics is certain to follow.

The cultural process is what interests me most, though. Has China reached the level of civilization where it can cross over to a post-modern view of itself and step outside of time to appreciate itself in all its irony and complexity? When I walk down the old streets as a foreigner, observing the oozing trash piles, laundry lines and loogey-spitting, rusty, crackling racket just a few yards away from towering high-rises with flashing billboards, I wonder if I'm the only one who gets the joke. I feel like it's too easy for me, as an American lao wai, to laugh about it, or to shake my head in pity. I'm not rooted here, so unlike China's population, I can take China or leave it. Yet I'm waiting to catch the glimpse of a balding old man looking out of a second-story window of a soon-to-be-demolished lao fangzi or classic house, smirking with bitter pride at the cultural maelstrom he has settled into after decades of Communist sloganeering and anarchy. I sense his ga ze as I step through the rumbling streets, avoiding the crowd while yielding to its smothering embrace.

2004 1-42 Online