Chengdu: deuxième partie.

Term is over but the young and amorous linger with an edifying nonchalance. Indeed, Chinese provincial students have a way of carrying themselves with an understated grace I can scarcely define: sweet and bespectacled, they stroll in pairs with careless poise, monotonously innocent yet ineffably urbane. I marvel at the ease with which they browse – content to peruse back-issues of Agrarian Reader’s Digest whilst sipping tins of saccharine iced tea.

To my left a bicycle rickshaw paddles along the dusty, tree-lined pedestrian thoroughfare with the only plumpkin I’ve seen in days. The air smells of pollen and petrol yet hums with an elusive virility.  As in most Chinese metropolises, the sun’s not wont to show its face – but today, for some reason, she’s cast a sheet-like spell of monolithic fulgor over all of campus. Amber flashes shoot through ancient oaks like bullets through water; one is hard pressed to spot a placidly adorable pupil without parasol in hand.

A favorite writer of mine once castigated the Japanese for absorbing but the most desultory aspects of Western culture – imperialism, hedonism, consumerism – while rejecting its countervailing qualities – creative expression, reason, romanticism, redemption – to name but a few. While I cannot verify his statement (just yet), the inverse might be said of the Chinese Provincial University, namely that it’s absorbed the better surface aspects of the Western Research University – academic rigor, scholarship, socio-economic leveling and a seeming modicum of communal socialization – whilst rejecting the less noble virtues of American Higher Education – debauchery, misogyny, (intellectual) apathy – to name but a few. Of course, for all I know their stoically studious countenance collapses behind closed doors, leaving them prostrate before an altar of Angry Birds; I’ve no way to say. On the momentary surface, however, one is left with the sweetest image of a cheerful, timeless academic piety.

It is Sunday so we head for brunch at the only American joint in town. Immediately we’re amongst 40% of the expat scene, a typical mélange of teachers, NGO workers, oil consultants and consular diplomats. When word of the Wang Lijun incident had first been leaked to the New York Times – leading to China’s largest political maelstrom since Tiananmen – it was reckoned to have been leaked in this very establishment. In a city of 14m, Western journalists only convene at two locales. One of my lovely hosts, a Fulbrighter poking through the world of Great Unknown Chinese Fracking, had been evading a Times reporter lurking about the diner all that week: all too often our window on the world is but a window.

To my great dismay Paddy and Vermont Dan get cocktails – but stick with drip I must. We tip the friendly, heavy-set Chicagoan and set off for the tea gardens, Chengdu’s most illustrious attraction.

Whereas People’s Square in Shanghai is an acclamation of Chinese modernism with an eye for historical flare, its equivalent in Chengdu is an unadulterated ode to the imperial past. The Red Guards may have taken down the great walls of the city with a whimsical nod from Mao, but the gardens within the Square retain all the cultural splendor of ere.

The entrance to the park was somewhat insignificant but once inside a world of subdued splendor meets the eye. Stands selling brightly woven demi-gods float from cracked-wooden hangers in the afternoon heat, while skewers of barbecued lamb scatter mouth-watering aromas into the air. In each opening, elderly tai-chisters bob and weave to the remembrance of things past. Beyond the opening, where the willows resume, the 40- and 50-somethings congregate to peruse the public marriage proposals posted along a wooden fence like inquiries from American doctoral students in every épicerie on the Left Bank. I could make out nothing of the Chinese characters, but was told that below the unassuming photo of each young, procreationally-aspiring man was an all-too-unambiguous listing of his age, profession, salary, education and, finally, name. For all our touted American pragmatism I suppose they’re better at cutting to the chase than we.  

Bride-grooms aside, we made for the Mahjong tables, where the real magic occurs. In a shaded piazza of low-flung tables, endless clusters of Chinese men and women – always separated by gender – sip tea, banter and strategize the afternoon away with the Chinese predecessor to Rummikub – often in wildly varying stages of mirth and ire, and always for money. We take a table of our own and begin the draw. Within a match, we’ve three lookers-on, each keen to gauge whitey’s strategic acumen – and each scheming to hold the balance of power amongst us like Lord Liverpool in the age of Napoleon. The moment one of us pulled ahead, they’d seize upon a neighboring apprentice, whispering, quite literally, sweet nothings into his ear to effect a change of course. In the end, we roughly split games – though not before several hearts, dare I say reputations, were mildly tarnished along the way.

The proceeding nights and days unfold with delicious uniformity. Upon awakening, one saunters down the lazily bustling avenue bordering campus. Motley local delicacies await: Uighur spicy noodles; piping-fresh Tibetan samosas; Sichuan-peppered delights of every sizzling variety. First, however, we must make for the art-house café on the other edge of the Kingdom. What appears an old military canteen is in fact a massive, kaleidoscopic collection of cultural artifacts, both Chinese and Western, gathered in arguably the best café I’ve been to. Red bicycles, broken clocks, statues of Mao and Marylyn grace the flower-laden, daisy-cloth donning tables at every turn. The waitresses don unassuming bangs (as most good Chinese girls currently do) and don’t let off they understand English. The Americano is giant, strong and expensive – the ash tray overflowing.

There is far more character in Chengdu than immediately hits the eye. Granted, a new downtown development is named and partially modeled after my own very raucous, crudely Western and, how to say, culturally unforthcoming, neighborhood in Hong Kong – but that did not prevent the city from constructing a gorgeous Yuan-era temple-cum-restaurant over the pedestrian-bridge leading to said development. Down the street lies the city’s most renowned hotel, the Shangrila. Descending the floors below the lobby – usually reserved to staff or those attending private group-oriented entertainment chambers (you guessed it) – is one particularly enticing gem, arguably the world’s most amusing portrait. In a stoutly 8-by-5 foot painting tucked into a small, unlit, auxiliary hallway is President Bill Clinton, flanked by Monica behind him and a screaming Hillary, a la Munch, in the distance to his left. The catch? He’s a minotaur and Monica’s topless:

We only know of the aforementioned because an old friend was until recently on duty at the American Consulate. Mining the hotel in the days before a Biden state visit, Secret Service had stumbled upon the quasi-hidden painting. Whilst they could hardly reveal it to a democratic VP (which I no doubt hope and trust they did), it became something of a legend in the hearts and minds of those lucky enough to stumble upon it via word of mouth. According to legend, it was a personal gift the hotel’s proprietor simply could not refuse: hence the clandestine location where he hung it. An incredibly subversive political gesture or merely poor taste? I suspect the distinction is less stark than many are loath to admit.

The days amble by, then, with a carefully measured insouciance. One strolls the boulevard and the back-way, nibbling on street-food and stopping off for tea. We make several trips to varying ‘urban reconstructions,’ zones of ‘ancient renewal’ where Han Chinese tourists go to unload their wallets and feel at home in both the contemporary architectural wasteland that is most of urban China and simultaneously relish their own historical legacy. Of what do I speak, you must surely be asking yourself. Imagine, as it were, the Bavarian castle at Disneyworld, the neo-Gothic spires of recent American universities: we New Worlders haven’t a monopoly on historical-architectural appropriation. Nay, the Chinese, despite their no doubt recurrent taste for reconstructing Bruges along the Yangtze, have an even deeper reverence for their own architectural past. And all over Sichuan they’re building living, breathing replicas of entire ancient neighborhoods – and then filling them with merchants of caffeine and corn-on-the-cob. A tragedy? Not quite. These recreations are deeply attractive and seem architecturally sound. Given New Money’s urge to dwell upon a cultural achievement of its own, these commercial communities are also likely to have been built with far higher standards than many of the make-shift schools that imploded without resistance in the earthquake that ravaged Sichuan province in 2008.

What, then, to conclude of this town? Peaceful, booming, graceful and bustling, a mouthwatering delight of culinary charm, Chengdu is a wistfully enchanting giant too lazy to disappoint. Like the miraculous panda bears who half-slumberingly hang from the trees in the National Research Center outside of town, Chengdu indolently clings to its laurels of good grub and even better culture. Despite the economic wave that’s swept the entire province, in five days I saw one tie, much less a suit or, Lord forbid, a briefcase. Nay, Chengdidians are content to ramble along with history at their own pace – with tea, beer, noodles and Mahjong along the way, preferably in the shade – though not because they’re solipsistic or simply don’t get it. Rather, I suspect that we do not get them – and, if so, only to our detriment. As Vermont Dan said when his lady rang from Indonesia: “I’m with Pheiff – we’re sittin’ on a bench!” Where abouts? She asks. “Overlooking the lotus pond.”

Chengdu: première partie.

Chengdu is the industrious if curiously lackadaisical capital of Sichuan province, China’s most populous before Chongqing succeeded in the 1990s to form its own administrative district. Integrated into the Empire in the period of the Warring States some two thousand years ago, this Southwestern frontier is at both the heart and periphery of modern China. There is a saying, Vermont Dan tells me, that one mustn’t let young men of otherwise respectable character discover this urban oasis, lest they fall prey to its enchantingly lazy and almost ahistorical demeanor.  Rather than sit for your civil servant exams, you’ll waste your afternoons away along the soporific banks of the Fu Nan River, sipping tea and playing Mahjong, a Chinese variant of Rummikub. With whom I concur it’s increasingly hard to say.

I arrived at Chengdu International Airport in something of a state – but good it was to be on the kaleidoscopic fringe of the Middle Kingdom. If manically booming Chongqing is the Chicago of China, then Chengdu is Denver: rough on the edges but understatedly prosperous – the site of great wealth, development and innovation without pretension to boot (if we’re to believe David Brooks – forgive me). Whilst failing to recall certain minor details, the overweening confidence of its airport advertisements was enough to convince even the laziest and most unobservant of gaze: the escalator-moonwalk to baggage was lined with nothing but bobble-eyed honkies in watches, sweaters and residential kingdoms designed by someone’s alcoholic nephew in Milan. A good day to be alive, my grandfather once said; an even better one to be white and mediocre with an ounce of ambition, one might add.

Chengdu has a beautiful, thunderously low center of gravity, rather like a sweet, slumberous, if strangely attractive ogre too scared to stand erect and relive itself upon the architectural horizon. I head to Dan’s environs and wait for him and Paddy to show. Behind me sits a semi-functional post office, its doors stubbornly ajar on a Sunday morning.  A trickle of crumpled mopeds simmer by: just because we’ve nowhere to go needn’t mean we won’t arrive.

We hop a cab and head to Dan’s, a humbly charming set of old-folk/grad-school towers bound on one end by the city’s wonderfully languid river, on the other by the province’s flagship university, where he and co. were taking a semester-long semi-intensive Chinese language course. In the courtyard below his flat a squadron of septuagenarians Qigong the morning smog away, a complementary snuff to the Cultural Revolution and all our misconceptions thereof. We pop off at the community’s sole commercial outlet on the way upstairs, a giant vegetable stand proffering dried noodles, water and ample stocks of lukewarm beer: it’s barely 10am and my companions have decided to set the day upon an even keel. Though effortlessly tempted, one must decline. Shenzhen was still flogging about the bowels, and we’d need some modicum of chemical equilibrium before setting off to conquer campus, Yankee brunch and the town’s most illustrious teahouses.

Dan’s twelfth-floor apartment overlooks a sad but glorious sprawl of dilapidated communal housing shrouded in Chinese willows. Just beyond them, within the same walled principality, lies the catatonically perfect campus of Sichuan University, a kingdom of 1970s post-Revolutionary sensibility more succinctly agreeable than all of Bauhaus’ Scandinavian offspring put together. As the educational kingdom recedes into the distance, the city’s faux-financial center emerges in ecru sweeps of understatement, the perfect capstone to a gradually mounting urban horizon (residential, educational, professional: each endemic to ideologically sparing decades). We lap it up, burn a boag, drop our bags and descend.

Once past the ever-amicably toothless guard, we traverse the University Gate, a cement opening just beyond the dancing courtyard elders. We’ve entered the kingdom, and I’m in love. We waltz down a battered path, a stonewall to one side, aforementioned PJs to the other. A shirtless pot-bellied man cycles past us in slow motion, a schizophrenic hen waxes lyrical. The weeds give man a lazy, if casually unrelenting, run for his money; the old folk saunter forth. I cannot remember being happier.   

We chance upon an opening and all my dreams come true. Its Sunday noon and the young and thoughtful – bespectacled and calmly contented – mosey down the sidewalk hand in hand. Lining the periphery of a dusty, disused soccer pitch are retro-tinged Ping-Pong tables. They’re only half full. Lining both sides of the road is an almost deliriously magical (academic) flea market hawking everything from pre-Newtonian textbooks to Maoist badminton paddles. Next to a mangled faux-leather cardigan rests a bright green fly-swatter denouncing Krushchevian revisionism. The studious couple aside me considers the neon lampshade before sauntering off.  

Mainland Miscreance, Part I: Shenzhen.

Shenzhen is said to be China’s wealthiest city. I will not bore you with economic data or financial flashpoints – no one likes an ignorant pedant – though perhaps a word about its material base should be stated for the record. First ‘liberated’ as a Special Economic Zone in 1979, it has since then grown to be one of China’s most flagrantly successful megapoli, not to mention its second largest port. A shipping, manufacturing and software hub of global proportions, Shenzhen boasts its own stock exchange, software parks and IT villages, while producing the vast majority of Apple products worldwide (while candlelight vigils were held for Jobs’ premature passing in Hong Kong, workers across the border angrily toasted his demise – so I’m told). Its residents enjoy the highest GDP per capita in China, albeit along callously inequitable lines.

Indeed, the southern megacity perfectly encapsulates all that is new, bustling and ‘creatively destructive’ about contemporary China. It boasts of overwhelming wealth and development – far more than a Hongkongian snob such as we’re taught to be across the border could have known. That said, whilst new American money and its endless cache of sunglasses, velour, McMansions and four-by-fours provide ample comedic value, witnessing that of China throws one into mirthful paroxysms of manic proportion. I shit you not.

I’d decided to go to Sichuan province to see an old friend. He was studying Mandarin at the flagship university in Chengdu and had marvelous things to say about the provincial capital. Rather than fly from Hong Kong, the world’s sexiest and most accessible airport, I decided to head from Shenzhen, an ‘internal’ flight and hence a portion of the price. To get there is easier than swiping cigarettes from a Medicaid patient: an $8, 40-minute bus from the heart of Kowloon and you’re at the wonderfully light-and-industry-engulfed border. Why we don’t make the leap more often is a mystery.       

I frolic toward customs with my two small, albeit sinfully heavy shoulder bags, rushing to beat the hordes of day-shoppers returning to their concrete castles in the sky in the land of $4 trillion worth of vacant property. Little do I remember I’m a card-carrying Hong Kong resident with privileges to the express customs line. (With such favored treatment one needn’t wonder why we assume such airs: tisn’t long before public tokens of privilege become subliminal). As always, there’s an optional metal-detector separating customs from freedom, which women and foreigners for some reason are encouraged to utilize whilst Chinese men locate their smokes. Since you haven’t technically left the country, there isn’t duty free – but that doesn’t stop the only shop at this particular crossing from issuing nothing but cartons of magnesium-laced jacks.[1] Naturally, then, you light up to mitigate the fear and mutual excitement brewing in your tea-baked stomach as you enter the great swashbuckling Middle Kingdom. From here on out you’ll be in good, if bewildering, company.

It’s humid but not sweltering, the air surprisingly mild given the residual chemical candies you’d imagined could be plucked from the sky like cherries from a tree. I got into an old crumbling minivan with a cantankerously toothless man of middling age. He chatted me up a storm, cursing the skies and praising the pits as he sped about the immaculately manicured highways, ramps and mega-lanes of this surprisingly pleasant megapolis in good, senseless fashion. I did my best to nod, smile and reiterate my utter delight at not being able to make out a word.

My host was waiting as we pulled up to the curb. The rate was 25 so I handed the driver a hundred kwai note; he returned me fifty and grinned. I repaid the gesture and gave him a wink – another ten emerged from his festering wad. Still fifteen short, I politely smiled, followed by the mildest clinching of the jaws. Another ten made its way into my palm. Now comes the difficult part: the pressure’s highest when the stakes are lowest. Do I resist his demonic clutch for an extra five? But of course. I go for the crazy eye, the Lincoln unveils itself. I smile and thank him for the ride; he utters a growl of disdain and sputters into the distance.

If you’ve made it this far – I pity and thank you; now we’re on to the good part. My host is a very vague friend of a friend, a young man called ______ from Oregon. Tales of Reed College afresh in my mind, I consider myself fortunate. At first encounter, however, I’m somewhat taken aback – chin-strap beards and sideways MLB caps continue to bode poorly for white men living in modern times – especially those who’ve fled to China from Eugene.

We enter the compound 80m from the boulevard – a series of vaulted steel corridors something akin to Paris VI lead us through a darkened passageway to the promised land of courtyards and cascading high-rise abodes characteristic of most new developments in China. The atrium of his particular building is impressive, if tackily so, not to mention suffocatingly warm. The elevator shaft is of a B-rate horror flick – unfinished cement splattered by red stains and advertisements for powdered milk. We go to the 15^th floor. A giveaway subway map of lower Manhattan is clumsily pinned to the wall. A massive bong and a pile of DVDs lay idly below the plasma screen. The rest of the spacious apartment is barren.

Settled in, he offers me a delicious bowl of freshly made stew and a cold Tsingtao. A thoughtful man, he’s somewhat simple – the wigger son of career missionaries in Asia, reputedly on personal terms with many of Hong Kong’s great tycoons (many of whom are God-fearing Methodist friends of his parents). He quotes me his salary thrice over dinner, doing his best to simultaneously embarrass and assure us both. Expats in Hong Kong are generally obsessed with earnings and social status and will reveal their monthly income quicker than a New Yorker will with rent; on the other hand the castaways in less desirable parts of the mainland are generally content to chuckle about their economic marginalization, solidaire with the Chinese proletariat though they’re not. A self-styled former financer, he says he’s taking time off to teach English. He reiterates how excited he is to be a trendsetter, the first of many expat cadres to abandon Hong Kong for Shenzhen.

I’d slept seven hours the previous two nights combined and was keen on hitting the sack, though my host insisted I see the sites. A mad one on the town before the morrow’s tragically early departure didn’t appear a good idea, but turn down my gracious host I could not. I thank him for the beer and we descend into the stifling summer air to meet his South African friend.

The commercial outskirts of great American cities are often monotonously sad: the same sorry, half-neon, staggering-letter billboards stumbling along a horizon of downcast, one-story mattress outlets and burger joints as far as the eye can see. Occasionally there’s a new Italian eatery that caters to recently moneyed suburbanites, but even the sparkling white slacker of its freshly minted parking lines doesn’t offset its aural malaise. Characteristically underwhelming seems to be our suburban lot – even those of privileged pedigree.

Of the Chinese equivalent the same cannot be said. Devastating, yes, though never passively so. The outskirts of Shenzhen throb with cast-iron consistency, its perpendicular avenues charging blindly through nocturnal wastelands of totalitarian virility. No, there’s nothing even remotely sensitive about Chinese urban development – though the emotional dearth of its great 21^st century expansion may be one of its few redeeming characteristics. Modernity à la chinoise leaves no room for sentimentality. Nor perhaps should it.

We’re sitting on the corner of two sweeping boulevards, waiting for the South African to arrive. The publicly manicured floral arrangements spell out things like “Glory to Powerful Statehood,” “Don’t Spit in Public” - or so I would imagine. I glance upward and spot the first foreigner I’ve seen in town, a bonafide specimen of absurdity. High-top sneaks, baggy cargo jean shorts well below the buttocks, black tank-top underscored by a motley collection of flame-and-skull tattoos – all of which is topped off by a massive, throbbing lock-knotted chain of golden hue: the single most ridiculous man I’ve seen in some time. Die Antwoord to a tee with no inkling of irony. Of course, this was the sir we’d been waiting for.

He catches glimpse of my host and begins to saunter over. “Ahhhhh naw dawg! Yeah, yeah, YEAH! What my mans is?! When we getting’ fucked UP?!” Of course, I’m paraphrasing both speech and intonations – both of which were patently more absurd than anything I can recall a month after the fact (procrastination weighs heavy upon the pen) – though one mustn’t miss the point. Here is a tall, muscular, young (Caucasian) man who, despite the perfectly ridiculous appearance, is also rather-good-looking. Yet he’s also got the most jarring of racist South African accents and can speak of nothing but money, bitches, gold, hash, gems and ginger girls with whom he’s yet to sleep. More than a caricature of himself, he’s a caricature of all things petty, racist, hedonistic, consumerist, untruthful and bigoted: precisely the type you both do and don’t expect to find abroad – though rather than fresh off the boat he’s been moping around China in the neighborhood of five years.

“What are you mate?! Reckon you’re not from here, hahahahaha!” he muses before careening into a monologue on the idiocy of Chinese. I tell him I’m passing through on my way to Chengdu and western Sichuan, the mainly Tibetan bits of said province. “You should see the dirty, earthy bastards!” he cries in delight. “Looks like they ran around in mud before rolling down the mountain into town – dirtiest creatures you’ll ever meet! Yeah they’re mucky wanks alright, but real spiritual, you know – they love the earth man, roll around in it every chance they get. Real spiritual wanks!”

He continues along this vein the entire walk to the club – fully 2 or 3 miles along nameless boulevards of forgotten dreams. He rants with a bewildering, dystopian enthusiasm; for him the world’s but a splendid mound of shit and indecency. “Oh but China’s amazing!” The endless supply of hash in Dali; the desperate single women who flock to Lijiang in the hopes of prostituting themselves out for human affection; the impenetrable stupidity of the Tibetan people – each outburst a more egregious insult to every person he’s encountered this side of the Capricorn. Yet beyond the racism (at one point he complains his native Africa is far too African), misogyny and general pigheadedness lies a remarkably buoyant naivety, a Nietzschean will to ignorance – nay, a manifesto of blissful stupidity for stupidity’s sake.

Indeed, despite his civilization-dismantling crassness, there’s something disarmingly innocent about him. He’s not in the least mean-spirited or remotely conniving – or in the slightest way judgmental, despite his mind-numbing vulgarity. Like a moth to the light, he automatically and delightfully seizes upon all that is crass, ugly, base and unjust in the world – whether it be social, economic or sexual in nature. A figure for the end times, he revels in the beauty of carnage and abuse – without, however, the intention of taking a leading role therein. A terrifyingly un-cynical member of misery’s peanut gallery, he’d purchased his 3-D glasses and has every intention of watching the world implode from the front row. Global misery but cause for our enjoyment; the world an oyster of wailing entertainment.

We arrive at our gold-and-dragon-studded destination and Die Antvoord cozies up to the bouncer under that most remarkable of spells, blind and unrepentant confidence. The bouncer, unimpressed, gives in, and we cut the line and forgo the entrance fee. This is China and you bear the genetic stamp of past superiority.

Once inside, a row of 12-15 eighteen-year old girls feign to greet us with a nauseous smile. They are waiting to escort you – not into some sinister champagne room – but merely into the dance hall, where they’ll accompany you through a game of dice and possibly drink an ice tea. It was difficult to say if they came with the entrance fee. We pass, though not before Die Antwoord studiously inspects the lot of them, smacking his lips and squealing in delight. He’s a perfectly noxious character, almost Pavlovianly so. One gets the impression he simply cannot help himself.

Inside, the club is more ridiculous than one could have imagined: a veritable freak-show of new and frivolous money-gone-wild. The main hall is at least 20,000 square feet and centers around a 360-degree bar staffed by giant women with supernaturally white dresses, heels and make-up. It looks out on a stage where a washed-up wedding singer moans into a microphone, extolling the evils of men in a distinctly Filipino accent. There are three stunning European girls to my right, each sporting spandex bodysuits and fabulous fops of hair. They are accompanied by a motley of self-assured Eurasian men in sport jackets, unabashedly bored though pretending otherwise. I have no idea where I am. 

All around us are elevated stands where men in suits furiously slam wooden cups upon the table: they’re playing Chinese dice with unparalleled vigor. Our South African has negotiated a free round of drinks so stick around we must. Whilst he begins his techno-trance I-have-an-invisible-crystal-ball-from-middle-school routine (someone must’ve coined a proper verb by now), the Oregonian and I take to the dice. If nothing else I learn to signal to ten in Chinese – though was too entranced by what came next to give the di their due.  

Then came the deluge. The lights go dim and an army of stiletto-strafing doxies storm our ballroom of deranged bemusement with enormous champagne bottles, each of which sprouting 12-inch sparklers to announce their arrival. The ceiling retracts and a cloud of oversized balloons falls upon the audience. The speakers launch their final assault – a techno remix of “Happy Birthday” gone mad. Projector screens descend from every corner playing double-time sequences from Alvin and the Chipmunks; Russian go-go dancers – male and female alike – emerge from the darkness in hot-leather pants to spur us closer to desire. The girls beside me giggle and bop their heads; the men take protracted pulls on their Double Happiness ciggs while nonchalantly surveying the spoils of economic growth on meth. The song continues, unabated, for fully twenty minutes. It was the most surreal experience I've had in years. 

Culture shock occurs when the totality of something utterly foreign fully sinks in. You’re gasping for air in an ocean of great, white, unabashed and unforgiving Otherness. But this wasn’t necessarily cultural as much as aesthetic overdose, sensory overkill, a bludgeon rather than a bullet to all things considered. That said, it was still a triumph of sorts – an ode to unbridled wealth and wanton confidence, to youth and flagrant indiscretion.

I popped by the bathroom on my way out. As I approached the communal urinal, a little man appeared behind me. To my great, if not unwanted, surprise, he immediately placed a hot towel upon my neck and began massaging my shoulders as I relieved myself: a perfect melée of shame and satisfaction. Herein was my first and only Shenzhen massage, received whilst peeing next to three inebriated locals, Happy Birthday still blasting in the background. I jam a bill into the tip jar and abscond into the slothful summer smog.

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[1] It shall be repeated on a great many occasions that the Chinese smoke more than any other human specimen in history (and having spent considerable time in Paris, Missouri and Egypt I say this with no hint of irony).

Shanghai: Part IV.

We got back to Dylan’s flat around 8am, exhausted but bemused. He lived above the 37^th floor – cannot recall precisely which – in a spacious abode of white vaulted ceilings, black leather couches and gingko-etched amenities: a markedly modern enclave. He shared a two-story flat with three other shomrads – gentlemen of varying provenance and pedigree who’d gone camping for the weekend. Rush and I each had entirely real mattresses all to ourselves: a boon to say the least. We dozed ‘til early afternoon, slumberous paupers in the sky.

We awoke several hours later with curiously unmerited energy – the kind that only comes in periods of fear or infatuation. Dylan’s two-story apartment had only four balconies – each a separate window onto a terrifyingly expansive world. Below, an endless armory of concrete and cast iron thrust their nave into the sunless heavens; only with great discretion can you spot the now ancient, ground level arteries that predate the Third Industrial Revolution.

We have a coffee on the terrace before heading down for lunch. Almost instantly, the elevator dispatches us into an empty lobby, the only sign of life a placard for panacean-powdered milk (depicting the Olympian feats of Chinese infancy). In the parking lot, a string of hatchbacks, mainly Audis, line the entrance. Outside the compound, a series of decrepit, abandoned bicycles besprinkle the sidewalk. We make for the place on the corner.

It’s a National Holiday and Dylan’s girlfriend comes along for the meal. Slender but striking, blasé and unabashedly Shanghainese, at first glance she’s mildly unforthcoming. That said, once you’ve gotten over the lethal regard and beguiling, cigarette-beholden rouge, she’s quite the open book – nay, wonderfully and devastatingly frank. Before long we’ve chanced upon the Chinese Civil War. Somewhat tactlessly, I inquire about her family’s involvement. “Granddad start with the Nationalists but become Communist halfway through the war,” she begins. “A great fighter, he kill many, many enemy.” An illiterate peasant from the South, he was rewarded by the nascent government with a handsome salaried position and a Shanghainese wife: the equivalent to Depression-era Dustbowlers returning from the Battle of the Bulge to find they’ve a girl from Park Avenue and a gig at HUD awaiting them in Westchester. I suppose chaos and modernization have their perks.

She seems happy to answer our questions, so press ahead I must. How did your grandfather come to join the Communists? “If you must know, China have two classes and he from most glorious class: he is worker – most glorious class in China.” To mitigate my furious delight, I bite deeply into my tongue. A trickle of blood? Not quite. I hold my breath, pinch my stomach and glance out the window, desperate for some modicum of distraction. Alas, I’ve got nothing. To suppress a violent eruption of joy, I press ahead. “Are you a member of the Communist Party?” “No, but I madly want to be. I try some time – they don’t let me,” she coyly notes, taking another elusive drag of her Double Happiness, the closest thing China has to cowboy killers. I cannot tell if she is being serious or not. “Many friends in Party – many, many,” she continues. “But also many hard to enter. They only want certain type of person.”

We settle our bill and make for the door. It’s mid-afternoon and the spacious establishment has completely emptied out. The lights have been shut off and an elderly woman dozes off to the side, momentary respite from a slavish routine. Atop the counter are two enormous jars, each containing a tawny, viscid liquid absorbing the essence of unidentifiable objects. They are regional liquors, I am told, kept on display by the door for customers on the go; each had a plastic tap. Only closer inspection would reveal the objects in which our sap fermented. The first contained a motley of pint-sized leggy sea monsters, frozen in time and substance. The second, it shall be noted, a giant reindeer penis. We hasten for the door.

Outside, I ask Dylan’s girl if the restaurateurs were from Shanghai (evidence suggests they were not). “They are from ______, some places northwest of Beijing,” she says with subtle condescension. “Oh, they are from Manchuria?” I foolishly inquire. “What is Manchuria?” she scoffs, “there is no Manchuria.” “What do you mean no Manchuria,” I protest, “I reference it all the time.” “No such thing as Manchuria,” she reiterates, “Han have taken over entire Nation.”

We hop in a cab and head back to Ambra’s. Late afternoon was upon us and we’d plans to head to Suzhou, city of imperial gardens where retired dynasts would contemplate the human condition amongst their harem. We were meant to go early that morning – if cross-town shenanigans hadn’t beckoned – but if we waited ‘til afternoon we could hitch a ride with Anna and her sister who were already heading that way. They’d been invited to an (exclusive?) yacht party – and there was a slight possibility we could join (she said would ask).

If we couldn’t crash the boat party, we’d resolved to simply wander the streets that night. True, it was a holiday weekend and every room in town was booked; it was also scheduled to rain. We had neither money, sufficient clothing nor the faintest sense of direction, though somehow we’d find our inner dragon. The air was sweet, the breeze unbridled. Another adventure was nigh.  

Shanghai: Part III.

On a local friend’s recommendation, we dine at Lost Heaven, a three-story fortress dispensing Yunnanese delicacies downtown. Something of a tourist haven, it’s still a site to behold: laid in bold stone relief and built to withstand the vagaries of most architectural trends, the outside drapes are drawn in blood-red, lit by candlelight to augment the religious experience many Canadians no doubt encounter as the peppered fare meets their virgin palate.

We enter the culinary temple through an imperial oak portal and into an open atrium.  A well-manicured photo exhibit reveals the vast and variegated beauties of Yunnan province. Two young women, no doubt unimpressed by our casual, unshaven demeanor, crudely smile from the reception desk. I go straight for the inspirational images of Yunnan village life (in but a moment’s time we shall eat the rice she’s plucking from the earth!), relishing my next voyage rather than debate the terms on which we’ll be allowed to dine. Ambra begins negotiations with the hostesses. She speaks lovely Putongua, from what I can gather, though often runs into trouble making herself understood with Chinese women. A great many of them resent her confident, if marginally flawed, efforts to speak their tongue; rightfully proud though roughly five-foot-nothing, she then openly resents their resentment, demanding they understand what they’re perfectly content not to.  An entertaining – and somewhat educative – state of affairs, though one that accrues few material benefits; alas, we’re told there’s an hour’s wait even though half the second floor is empty.

Sit we eventually do and the fare is impeccable. Our attitudinally inclined server takes a liking to Ambra’s communicative abilities, so things go our way. Rush muses over Trotsky or the Tulips and we leave contented, though not without the single most glorious sight these eyes have beheld in some time. At first there’s only one – a lone, gangly-faced adolescent with about as much sense as an unbridled Catholic in Londonderry – until the deluge.

I was on my way back from the boys’ room when I first spotted him, moseying about the top of the stairs, unsure of his demeanor though with arguably no intention of turning back. There he was, a typically pimply 15-year old European male, prancing about Shanghai in a traditional Chinese button-up tunic and topping it off with a rice-paddy hat fully atop his head. Hardly had I contained my glee when a further flood of happiness soon flowed up the stairs. An entire Caucasian tour group of middle-aged balding men, their wives and awkward adolescent offspring was decked out in faux-traditional Chinese garb – replete with dragon-patterned shiny tunic and rice-paddy hats. More than a few were sporting the straw-laced buffoonery atop their heads, though others let them rest upon their shoulders, much in the fashion of many a Saint Louis gangster in the summer of 2002 (someone tell me they recall said trend).  

More than sixty-deep, the sight of them was cause for more mirth than I’m comfortable admitting. Nonetheless, there was something utterly dystopian at play. Consider an equivalent charade in different climes. At the end of the day, it wasn’t that dissimilar from a group of Japanese tourists showing up blackface at the Apollo. As my grandfather once said, only so many spiritually deprived Frenchmen can rock the swastika-studded Hindu hippie garb before individual ridicule becomes overwhelming collective murder (Here’s to you, Herzog).

Next stop, Tianzifang, the old pedestrian Chinese quarter tucked away in the French Concession. Another (paradoxically) Western haven of sorts, the neighborhood is rightly touted for its bohemian buzz. To enter, you must pass through one of two informal archways, each a simple portal carved out of a larger European stone-and-stucco building. Once inside, you’re in a maze of red-exposed brick alleyways dotted with cafes, bars and mildly kitschy, albeit catchy, boutiques. The edifices are suddenly only 2-3 stories high, the entrance to each dwelling brimming with bamboo and other variegated verdure – not unlike the quainter quarters of Taipei. A pint in a crumbling avant-garde third-floor crawl-up and we wander the midnight streets, divining ancient from modern at every hidden dead-end. Since one can only enter this pedestrian kingdom in the midst of China’s great megapolis on bicycle or foot, you wonder whether permanent village life is as appealing as this momentary respite.

We’re next to meet Dylan at Bounty, a locale for Western privateers modeled upon their 16^th century antecedents (truth be told, Shanghai has a far more ‘diverse’ set of expats than does Hong Kong. They can even make pretense to having hipster, alternative, skater, gothic chic scenes, etc., whereas Hong Kong, lovely though it is, caters to roughly three foreign aesthetics: bankers, teachers and stroller-popping housewives). Herein flows blackcurrant rum by the bottle – and order accordingly we feel obliged. True to underground form, one must be suitably prepared before heading next door to Shelter, a former bomb-shelter from the Sino-Japanese War.

By this point people are suitably merry to make the underground descent – though the winding, cavernous and quite slippery path leading to Chinese Prentzlauerburg was not without its challenges. The dance floor is literally a bombed-out bunker, hotter and grimier than anything Westerners are willing to put up with at sea level, mais tant pis. On the floor, Dylan becomes a miraculous caricature of himself, bopping about without a care in the century, consumed by rhythmic insouciance. Throw in his magical manga-hair and blazer, and it was the happiest I’d been to see a fellow Louisian abroad in quite some time. Rush, on the hand, had chanced upon a giant Floridian belle (in the literal, not Balkan, sense) – and was rapidly making the rhetorical rounds. Only partially successful – forgive my crudity, mother – the boys were forced to finish amongst themselves, so up into the pale night we ascended.

A weather-beaten Uighur donning a dancing monkey atop his shoulder greeted us as we reemerged into the streetlight. A moment later a shirtless mensch came peddling Tibetan tea of dubious texture: we kindly declined. We hopped in a cab and made for what would be the trip’s most epic meal. Thirty meters off the moonlit intersection of a non-descript block of tower flats lay the eve’s most enticing event. A makeshift tent straddles the curb of the boulevard, giving shelter to the sweltering grills below. A neighboring stand bulged with delectable veg, raw fish and meat of every imaginable hue. You grab a basket, load it to the brim and pawn it off upon the gentleman operating the fire pit before taking your plastic seat on the refuse-ridden sidewalk. The early morning air smells of sweet injustice, an ode to acts unrequited. Scooters simmer past as the sun unfolds, revealing an endless urbanity. We’re now penniless, but Dylan negotiates an assortment of pastries from the baker just emerging down the sidewalk; it was good. We pay the bill at the sit-in street vendor, fully five US dollars for food and beer alike. The morning's fully upon us, and we amble down the road to Dylan’s bachelor abode, a singularly daunting edifice in the sky.

Shanghai: Part II.

Emerging on the other end line 10, I finally arrive in “China.” The air is sweet with ambition and monoxide, and it’s only 10pm. My friend cannot be found so I set out to locate a Chinese SIM card, perhaps a pack of smokes. To my left is a frantic construction site, to my right a major thoroughfare. Is this is a road or a sidewalk, I muse, as scooters, bikes and portable carnivals lunge toward the immediate and myself with equal enthusiasm. I glimpse a pedestrian in the distance; perhaps his name is also Evan.

Eventually I locate a legitimate sidewalk, and it was good. Altogether, the scene is manically amusing. Women sell undergarments, men skewer chicken and gizzards. Go no further than the street, young man – the West no longer beckons. I find a small cell-phone shop and inquire about the selection. Not surprisingly, the good sir and I sharen’t the same tongue, though we’re more than happy to go through the physical motions for a joyful few minutes. (We mastered charades with Jeremy on Easter in Taipei). I must admit having a very soft spot for Chinese men who smoke indoors and chatter relentlessly without removing their cigarette. Eventually we reach an agreement – that is, I consent to the first given price. Baby gotta eat, as another sage once said, and I don’t mind playing my part in seeing the circle of life take its monetary toll. 

I go next door to find cigarettes and they’ve a mint edition of 1985 Camels – the year of my birth and, incidentally, the Uighur camel. A match made in heaven. Of course, they were tealeaves spruced with tobacco shavings, though I quite enjoyed the box they came in, so continued to huff and puff, relishing le néant in all her Eastern splendor. 

After dinner we head to the French Concession, a most curious part of China. We meet an old Saint Louis friend outside the building to have a local beer on the street before mounting the guarded elevator to Sugar, our first Shanghai destination. I have not seen this particular childhood acquaintance in very many years, so the excitement is palpable. Rocking the black blazer and Manga-hairdo, he’s accompanied by his beautiful, if comically blasé, Shanghanese belle. It was at this point I understood that (early) adulthood would never fail to amaze.

We mount the elevator and emerge onto a rooftop enveloped in House-und-Trans and Moroccan divans. To my immediate displeasure there are suddenly giant Caucasians everywhere – an expectedly disconcerting sight. That said, we were coming to meet Rowdy Anna, a friend from Hong Kong currently residing in the People’s Republic and an all-around bundle of joy. Overlooking the brick-and-Oak-tree oasis of the French Concession below, we smoke, chat and chipper about the life and times of Charlie Wilson. The view is excellent, the company even better. Anna’s army of ABCs emigrates en masse to the next establishment whilst the immediate crew lingers behind. Eventually, we set sail for Geisha, our next inoffensively named locale, and wander the long, London-plane-lined streets that look more like Mendoza or Sceaux than any of the sprawling madness that is Shanghai along the way. 

The following morning we meander the elegantly wide and Westernized tree-lined boulevard along which Ambra lives. Catering to the international students of Fudan University (one of three Chinese grande écoles), it is replete with everything a young bobo in paradise could hope to hope to encounter: cafés, wine merchants, hand-crafted artisanal beer merchants, Mexican restaurants and croc depots: en gros, a Truman Show charade I’m more than happy to embrace, for the time being. (There’s also a reified Reebok outlet store, but we wouldn’t want to sully your image of Chinese consumerism that much, would we?).  Rush (my roommate) and I sit down for a latte across the way. The young men beside us discuss video games and air travel to and fro California with a feigned American accent. This is what the future sounds like!

We lunch at the Mexican café along the boulevard – a perpetual meeting ground for the American-born Chinese at Fudan who seem to work out, eat burritos and prod at their Ipads considerably more than learning Mandarin (if that’s not cultural diffusion I’m no longer sure what is). The gentleman who runs the joint speaks flawless American English but is Cantonese from Hong Kong. We discuss his array of light beers and I suggest he try a panaché (half beer, half lemonade). He enthusiastically concurs, declaring it the menu’s newest specialty cocktail.

We settle our bill and set off toward Jiangwan Stadium, merely a stone’s throw away from the manicured ménage of our airy, tree-lined avenue that reminds one more of Northwest DC than the Middle Kingdom. Bear in mind, however, its Potemkian qualities: a wayward block in any direction and you’re back in the suburban outskirts of China’s greatest commercial boomtown in history, brimming with rusted bicycles, Laundromats and disamused young men. To get to the stadium you must traverse the shit-filled canals that precede the boulevard. Whereas our waste bends its subterranean way to the sea (if not merely East St. Louis), Shanghai’s proceeds via open air. Not that there’s anything strange or historically anamolous about that: we’re all familiar with the nitrogen-filled festivities of New York City in the age of horse-and-cabby.

We’re going to the stadium to check out the Asian X-Games (you read that correctly), where Oprah Winfrey’s godson awaits us with free entry tickets (you also read that correctly). A friend of my roommate’s from college, his ‘social media’ company is working the event to generate buzz around town. Tall, dashing and terribly friendly, he proved an excellent host for exploring the city’s cluster of washed-up Californian roller-bladers.

The crowd, it should go without saying, was a fascinating bunch. On the one hand, a strange melee of 20-and-30-something Vancouverian hipsters and young, blue eyed- -blond haired-LL Bean-bearing families. What brings the former or the latter to Shanghai (much less the Asian X-Games), I’ll never know. On the other hand, you’ve your usual gamut of Chinese adolescents sporting enthusiastically ambitious trucker-hats, pink Adidas and whatever else it is the men on Madison Avenue have intemperately suggested. By far the most interesting, however, is the army of guards posted to protect the afternoon’s activities from the various human elements. For the 2,000 or so ‘spectators’ present around 2pm, there must have been 400 ageing sentinels carelessly roaming the stadium or lounging at various entry points thereto. Some of them were quite friendly – as you can witness below – though others were less inclined to see the athletic light of day as anything illuminating. Then again, as Rush was apt to note, such is the face of low employment in rapidly modernizing, albeit (theoretically) Communist, societies.

Games ingested, we catch a cab and head downtown. This is the first I’ve seen of Shanghai by day, and the 30m ride is nothing short of mind-boggling. I’m not so foolish as to think my literary powers of expression capable of describing the insanity of its scope, though try I must. Imagine a field of lilies in southern France – rolling, expansive, numberless, without aim, direction or self-awareness – and replace them with towering slabs of concrete, rubber, glass, steel, plastic, drywall, sweat, mud and metal – and you’ve an idea of what the megapolis resembles. Not that there aren’t a daring number of architectural delights that dot the bullet-ridden prairie – there are plenty. But emerge they must from an unforgiving expanse of indentured gravity, a weight so onerous as to surge as forcefully into the ground as it does into the blackened sky.

We get off at People’s Square, an oasis in an otherwise unrelenting morass of urban mayhem. It’s 4pm on Sunday, though we’re still a tad too early for the connubial conniving to begin. Come 6pm, the People’s matrons emerge, promising to match the young and restless of every stripe that come bearing a photo and something resembling a cover letter/statement of purpose/five-year plan. It’s said to be a veritable fair of sorts, everyone in their Sunday best, perusing the make shift tables set up by Madam X and Mother Y to put forth their finer traits in writing and rudimentary introductions. I do not their (potential) female companions take part in the festivities.  Nor do I know whence they emerge – only that they’ve more than their fair choice in today’s demographic conditions (need I remind you the gendercide underway since the 1980s?) Afterward, I wonder if we might’ve brought along our own CV to test the matrimonial waters: how does one line up against 110m bachelors roaming the darkened alleys of the Internet in pursuit of companionship?

We head in the direction of Nanjing Road East, the principle pedestrian thoroughfare that runs through the heart of city. Toward the edge of the park – just in front of the café where I’d thought to indulge a mild craving – I spot for the first time what every foreign observer’s witnessed without fail: the ubiquitous defecating Chinese baby – only this time they were twins (or at least dressed as such). Has their gang of guardians any intention of picking it up? It wouldn’t appear as such. In which case, shall they mosey over to the grass? Of course not; whoever think they shit don’t stink needn’t frequent the People’s Parkside Café. Indeed, most Chinese infants’ pants are reputed to come equipped with rapid-action poo-holes – at times the only solution for Bolivian street-food or Sunday afternoon saunters through the city’s public thoroughfares.

After taming my amusement, I nonetheless pop in to the same establishment to practice my Putongua. “Wo yao caafee,” I embarrassingly crow. “Sure thing,” she smiles back at me, “with sugar, milk, honey or nutmeg? Hot, cold or tepid? Perhaps I’ll splash a dash of coriander in there just to see what happens!” I coolly admit defeat and call Ambra over. Within moments, I’m handed a piping hot coffee in a massive, plastic Slurpee cup, replete with lamination lining over the top and a giant pink bubble-tea straw poking through. You can order it and we’ll serve it, but that doesn’t make you any less of a fool for doing so.

Nanjing Road East is another overwhelming delight. Tens of thousands of intrepid finger-fooding photo-snappers (ourselves included) mosey about the resplendent pedestrian avenue, musing at the caprices of somewhat-bridled Chinese capitalism. The buildings date to the concessionary period and resemble the less considerate of the Grands Boulevards department stores, whilst the side streets all give way to a heart of commercial darkness not dissimilar in sight to the night markets in Mongkok (Hong Kong). The jubilee of unrelenting neon signs peddling beauty and fried chicken offset the barrage of red-star PRC flags that slice their way down the avenue with a vengeance. Rather than stray from the path, we continue to head for the Bund, the epicenter of all that is grand and cross-generationally glorious in Shanghai.

The Bund is a series of Belle Epoque and Art Deco hotels and ambassadorial edifices that line the waterway of west Shanghai along the Yangtze River. At night, they’re lit with an imperial grandeur resembling Deauville-cum-Budapest on crack; a mystery it emerged unscathed from the Cultural Revolution (though aesthetically mirror the Qing it doesn’t). Across the river in Pudong, however, is a sight even more astounding. From the marshes of the Yangtze Delta has risen one of the world’s most impressive concentrations of phallic exuberance. What took New York in its heyday forty years (1890-1930) has taken Shanghai fifteen – a fact they seem to recognize perfectly well (it’s only 1905, bitches! Just you wait ‘til the roaring twenties). As its May Day weekend, there’s an inexplicably voracious crowd of people soaking it all in – hundreds of thousands ambling about the mile-long boardwalk, if my powers of quantifiable observation do not deceive. As you ascend the steps to the esplanade, a giant Mao emerges from the sea of humanity, smiling wistfully as if to say: I’ve survived all this, and then some (when, just when, will he cease to adorn the $1, $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100 renminbi-note alike?) In any case, no one seems to pay him any heed, looming and impeccably well lit though he is. A giant pirate ship advertising pedicures was just then sailing past. The people had more pressing matters upon their mind. 

Shanghai: Part I.

Foggy recollection fades with merciless speed, so eke this out we shall before another dose of mnemonic drift. It was a radiant, mid-Saturday afternoon in Lan Kwai Fong, Hong Kong – the colony’s maddest corner – and the streets were slowly reacquainting themselves with Apollo’s gaze (as were we I suppose). It was a curious state to be in: at this point in the week I’m usually feigning to explain the benefits of the first five-year-plan to my Cantonese students. Not so today. It’s Buddha’s babymamma’s birthday – or some other politicorrestival we kongians are wont to observe – and an extended weekend is upon us.  So out we were ‘til the wee hours of the morn, gallivanting with a regal Rhodesian and his dashing Madonna, none other than the city’s premier meteorologist (say, it’s a small town).

For once, however, we’ve decided to jettison the chichi teahouse and expat beaches that dot the southern stretches of the bizarrely serendipitous island we inhabit and head for stranger climes. When the Middle Kingdom beckons, a sage once said, you ride that dodie-train all the way to Chattanooga. So stumble to the airport we did – Coetzee, coffee and calamitous-state-of-mind-in-hand – whilst relishing another weekend of illumination.

The flight was suitably strange – as most chemically altered air-sailing is wont to be – but descend upon Shanghlandia we finally did. Not, it will be said, without more turbulence than a Menshevik in Minsk (circa 1919). For starters, the city lights spread beneath you for the entire span of Tristan und Isolde: a mass of electricity – not to mention humanity – entirely incomprehensible to the virgin soul who’s yet to traverse San Paulo on foot (if you must know, I haven’t). But wobble we did with an Armenian vengeance as we lowered our tepid wings and made for the tarmac. Below, the proletarian edifice flickered with light and menace from every angle, tempting our bird into its concrete and rubber entrails. For once I reconsidered my eerie Fight Club fascination with downwardly mobile planes: so this is what it feels like? I suppose I would have liked my final supper (or at least cigarette).

Land we do, as we must, and into the kingdom I prod. My lovely host, Ambra, lives on the same metro line as the old provincial airport – merely 30 odd stops away. The airport is barren but clean, customs merely for show (leading one to believe they’re less concerned with what gets in than what gets out; not unlike Tel Aviv, I suppose). Bag in hand, I levitate from the plane to the sidewalk in less than three minutes. Once outside, taint a cab in site, though the Metro’s meant to be around the corner. Men in short-sleeved shirts and ties smoke bogies atop bicycles outside the immaculate McDonalds to the right of Arrivals. A wayward sign for the Metro beckons around the corner, luring you into a poorly lit, cordoned-off passageway, somewhat deeper into the airy Shanghai night than you’re prepared to go. Loop after loop, the walk is endless – a series of tapered arteries leading one further down a disinfected vault of industrial indolence. Manicured shrubs on one side, parking lots replete with unmarked sedans on the other; the endless open-air tunnel continues without a soul in sight.  

In all, the maze to the Metro must be 500 meters. Once outside, a couple in matching pink polos lingers at each side of the entrance – a man to the left, his sweetheart to the right. I pause to let him finish his instagram, but he urges me to proceed – grinning as though to say, “Fret not – we’ll be at this a while.”  A lone bicyclist peddles by - otherwise not a person to be seen in this metropolis of 23 million. It was a strange, if fleeting, predicament. I take the spotless escalator deep into the trenches of the Shanghanese earth, pass my manbag through the mandatory x-ray, set off the alarm without being patted down, and proceed. I am running 45m late, so I ask the young man next to me if I can borrow his phone to alert my awaiting host. He consents. Upon finishing my brief but buoyant conversation with my host I haven’t seen since Paris, he turns to me and smiles. “You name is Evan?” “Why yes,” I reply, somewhat taken aback. “I am also Evan,” he confesses. We exchange a heartfelt (visual) embrace and return to our respective book and smartphone. I pretend to read whilst he pretends to text. The train arrives; we board at separate doors.