Chen and I - One for the books

Trip has come to an end. I’m not a blogger and I’m a bit out of steam. Not to mention that I couldn’t blog from China since the government blocks blogger.com. So here are some fast notes I took while in Shanghai.

Where Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam (and probably most of China) are the past, this is the future, in steroids. A million communist banners flying over town cannot conceal the gusto with which this city has embraced capitalism. The signs are everywhere (the luxury stores, the fashionable people, the high rises, the cars, the rush), but nowhere more than in the extraordinary skyline of Pudong. Loved it. Period.

very slow Manhattan while watching night fall over Pudong

Loved it more because of how much I knew about it from the fabulous mystery series by Qiu Xiaolong that centers around the poetry-quoting Inspector Chen. I can’t tell you how good it feels to land in a place for the first time and know it. From the impoverished and crowded shikumen (poor people’s dwellings) that Big Bucks (fast rich cats), with their frantic building and land speculation, have not managed to completely eradicate. To cruel foods (monkey’s brains, snake blood, and a number of other ‘delicacies’ extracted from a live animal that the diners enjoy among the animal’s screams) which (fortunately) are either not offered anymore, or perhaps you have to know somebody… To just weird foods (I couldn’t find a place that offered ginger steamed fish lips, though I could have eaten a pig’s snout.) To stalls that offer amazing and strange things for nothing (still around, I think I ate a rat one day.) To the lost prestige of Shanghai’s No. 1 Department Store (you could call it Macy’s today). To hot water shops, which surprised a young local when I asked about them (though I think I saw steaming giant vats at a shikumen that might have been it). To thinking of the refrain of one of Chen’s helpers (“there are things a man will do, and there are things a man will not do”) and realizing that in Shanghai there are no things a man will not do, or eat, or wear.

There were also groups of Chinese tourists who seemed to be coming from very far away, both in space and time. Old, with faces burned and carved as leather, they looked up and around in admiration, and laughed nervously in the presence of foreigners. The twenty first century has left them behind. A few wore Mao jackets or some version of it. Some were attired in clothes cheaper than the cheaper goods we import from their country. Because of the many historical references in Mr. Xiaolong's novels, I also could pretend I knew a little bit about them. Did you lose people in the great famine, I wondered? Were you an intellectual once, sent to the country for reeducation during the cultural revolution? Did your fortunes fall and soar and fall again according to the party’s whims? Was anyone in your family branded a ‘bad element’? Did your fish-stall-owning uncle (a capitalist according to Mao) killed your chances at a better future?

I haven’t read anything more substantial about Shanghai or China than Qiu Xiaolong’s books. Yet I had a higher enjoyment of Shanghai for having read them. If I have to close, for now, with some parting words, I’d say that nothing gives you a truer flavor of a place than its fiction. So here’s to the books, from a satisfied costumer.