Shanghai

Since returning to my home/prison of Fuzhou/Linchuan, I've struggled with how to start writing about the myriad of thoughts and experiences I had during my barnstorming three day trip to Shanghai, and I think that the best way for me to do it is simply to say this: Going to Shanghai will probably go down as the best decision I'll make in China. I had an absolutely wonderful time, and I came away from it happier than I've been since coming here, if not longer. I met wonderful people, and I found validation for a lot of my suspicions about my experiences here. The thing is, up until two days before I was supposed to leave, I didn't know I was going to get to.

The one standard piece of ex-pat travel advice for the time around National Day (Oct. 1^st) is simply don't. It's the busiest time for travel in a country of 1.2 billion people, and so anywhere that you go, things will either be crowded, or downright impossible. For a while, I thought that getting train tickets was going to fall into the second category. In fact, Margo told me that it was impossible, and so I had resigned myself to spending a boring few days mostly in my room. Then, one night last week I got word that the headmaster had pulled some strings, and that I was going. Awesome. I had two night trains: one to Shanghai on September 30^th, and one back to Nanchang on the 3^rd. I had a hostel for the 1^st and 2^nd, and I was going alone. I knew next to nothing about Shanghai, and didn't really have much time to research, but the beauty of traveling alone is that you can just do whatever you want, so the lack of plans wasn't a problem.

I left Fuzhou on a bus at 2:10 PM on September 30^th. My plan was to have enough time to explore Nanchang a bit before my train out at 9PM. I had the bus line I needed to get to the train station from the bus station, and I thought that would be enough. I was wrong. The bus didn't drop us off anywhere near the station, which left me in a bit of a spot, as I had no map, and free WiFi isn't really a thing here. I also desperately needed to find a bathroom, so I started walking. I eventually found a fast food place, and bee-lined to the back. Sweet relief. I then continued down the main road, looking for a landmark or something to orient myself by on the hazy map I had in my mind. It quickly became obvious that I was not going to find one, so I took out my notebook for Chinese class, and found the word for train station, and tried to flag a cab. I failed for a while, until a nice old lady in a rickshaw indicated that she had no passengers. I told her “Huǒchē zhàn” she responded with “Shí yuán”, and I was off. (Side note: I wildly dislike people who pepper Chinese characters in with their English writing, so I will always use Pinyin for Chinese. Try to speak along at home!)

My arrival at the train station gave me my first taste of just how crowded of a time I was in for. The army was doing crowd control, and getting anywhere was a pretty difficult time, so I ducked into a McDonald's, and recalled that Jimmy Backes always called the only McDonald's in the town in Ireland he studied abroad as “The American Embassy”. That was about how it felt. I got the first hamburger I've had in what felt like forever, and assessed my situation. I wasn't sure when my train left exactly, and I was going to risk missing it, so I finished my burger and just strolled down the road for a bit. I had a conversation with a Chinese student about the Chinese school system, the school I'm teaching at, and music. I discovered that I'm a teacher at one of the most famous schools in the area, if not all of China, and I told him to listen to more Led Zeppelin. I gave him my e-mail address, and headed into the station. As it turns out, I was early, so I listened to the new Ryan Adams album and read for a while, and then made it onto my train. I was bunked next to a snoring middle-aged man, so sleeping was a bit tough, but I got some sleep, and awoke about 45 minutes away from Shanghai, did my morning business, and was off the train without difficulty.

However, getting to the hostel proved to be a bit harder. The directions that I got were simply “Take the #1 line to People's Square, then the #2 to Nanjing Rd. (E). Take a cab to 450 Jiangxi Road.” Like a moron, I only read the first part, and hopped onto the metro. As it turns out, the Shanghai metro is way nicer than the one in Beijing, and I had a really pleasant trip. Once I got off, I checked my directions and mumbled damnit. Fortunately for me, one of four Apple stores in China was just a block down the road, so I hopped onto their WiFi, fired up Maps, and soon discovered I just needed to be a street over. That would have been helpful in the directions.

The hostel its self was actually really nice. My room was two bunk beds and a table, and I got a mattress for the first time since WuDan. My sheets were new every day, and I didn't ever have problems with my neighbors. Plus, it had a really nice bar/cafe where I could get real coffee, breakfast, and beer for super cheap. It also functioned as a rallying point for nightlife and a damn good place to meet people. More on that later. I dropped my backpack in a locker, took a quick shower to wash that train feeling off of me, and decided to go out and see what I could see.

My monkey brain automatically took me back to the subway station that I got off at, which sits at the end of the biggest shopping street in Shanghai, East Nanjing Road. With a general stance of “Eh, why not?” I started walking, going in and out of shops as I saw fit. However, it was also 9 AM, so there wasn't a whole lot open. The other end of the road is a park called People's Park, and I wandered into a Starbucks on the edge of it to get more coffee into my sleep deprived brain. Realizing that things wouldn't be going in the park until significantly later in the day, I decided to walk all the way back down East Nanjing Road to the Bund and walk down the river.

The Bund is a really interesting place. Back in the days of old Shanghai, the Bund was the international area, where the traders and European banks were, and the architecture there reflects this. It's right on the river, and directly faces the Pudong, which is the area of Shanghai that everyone associates with the Shanghai skyline. It's a really cool place to visit, and much like a majority of Shanghai, if you're not really paying attention, you can really easily forget you're in China at all. It felt quite a bit like Chicago, actually. It was interesting to realize this, because it brought back something that my old adviser, Anthony Ndungu, once said to me: “The thing about cities is that if you can live in one city, you can live in any of them. All of them have the same general culture and the same feeling. You can get whatever things you're used to, and meet people that speak your language no matter what.” After this last weekend, I can't help but get the feeling that he might have been right.

I walked down the river until the nice old buildings were replaced with modern glass towers, and I soon found myself standing at an escalator that led down to an underground mall. The sign said they had a Burger King, and if you haven't noticed, I was more than willing to enjoy western food without the standard guilt that travelers feel walking into a place they could just as easily go to at home. The thing is, there wasn't a Burger King, or at least there wasn't one that was open yet. So I got a bowl of noodles and a big slab of pork for lunch, and washed it down with a surprisingly large Heineken. Realizing that I had nowhere else to go along the river, I turned back and decided to check out the park.

A funny thing happened while I decided to go walk down the river – everyone in China decided to go out for a stroll. I seriously have never seen so many people in my life, and being in that sea of people was a completely disorienting experience, and I was really glad to get out of it and into the slightly less crowded park. The park was a park, and as such is much better with photos than words, so I'll just say that it was a very nice park and leave it at that. I walked back to the hostel and decided that a nap was in order.

I awoke an hour later feeling refreshed, which after the train ride and walking for five hours, felt really good. Realizing that I had no plans for the night, I decided to head to the cafe/bar and see what was going on. I brought my copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and probably read about three pages before I challenged a guy who was playing pool by himself to a match. He introduced himself as Darren, and said he was from Liverpool, but was teaching in Inner Mongolia. He found it hard to believe that my parents had gone to Liverpool for a part of their honeymoon. I got my ass kicked, but I met someone, damnit! Just as we started our second game, the two other guys he was with showed up, Ben and Andrew. Ben was from outside of Manchester, and we had a large overlap in terms of media interests, and we got along really well. Andrew was from St. Louis, and it was great to run into another American. Most of the people that I met were from places other than the States, and it made me wonder why. As far as I can tell, America needs a global boogeyman for its population. Something to fear, someone to compete against. It the past, it was the USSR. Further back, it might have been Britain or the broader concept of Europe. Now, it's China, and granted, China isn't scary the same way that the USSR was, but it's just scary enough to deter people from traveling and living here. Either way, Darren, Ben, and Andrew would become my nightlife companions for the rest of the trip.

We sat around for a bit, chatting and drinking coffee. I ordered a club sandwich, which was delicious and featured real, not super sweet bread. Beer was ordered, laughs were had. We met a couple from the Netherlands that were traveling around the world. China was their first stop, then they were heading down Asia to Australia and New Zealand. Then they were going to go from LA to New York in a RV, hitting up all of the music spots in the south. They didn't know about Austin, TX as a big music tow, so I filled them in and told them about SXSW, which they should be in the area for. I hope they have a good time. More beer was ordered, more laughs were had. We were invited over to the table of a bunch of other young teachers that were in Shanghai for the holiday and talked about our experiences and the difficulties that we have had/are having. Eventually, one of Darren's old friends from Liverpool showed up from a different hostel, and we decided, after figuring out that we didn't have a curfew, to head off to a club.

When I say a club, I actually mean a bomb shelter. It was cool as hell. We nearly missed the place when we were walking down the road to find it . It was just a sign and a door, and a staircase leading down to a tunnel. Passing through the tunnel, you arrive at more or less what you'd expect a bomb shelter to look like. It's dark, the ceilings are low, and you can't help but think that you expected it to be bigger, but then you wonder exactly why you expected it to be that way. It's also loud and smokey, but that's really just par for the course for any bar/club in China. It was drum and bass night, and we got there around 11PM, which is apparently pretty early by Chinese club standards, so we all got drinks and headed for the back. All of the couches were occupied, so we just kind of hung around hoping something would open up. Soon after, we were approached by a man I can only describe as being the archetypal New Jersey male.

His name was Kai, and he was short, muscular and had no hair anywhere on his body. He was an engineering professor at a university in Shanghai, and he spoke aggressively, confirming that he agreed with what I was saying by exclaiming “Bin-go!” when I finished a statement. We talked at length about the Chinese real estate bubble and the Chinese education system. I'm not going to try to tell our conversation, as we agreed about everything we talked about, instead I'm going to state the observations I've had that he confirmed.

For one, the Chinese real estate bubble is huge, and if/when it pops it's going to make the US bubble look like soap suds. Everywhere I look around the town I'm in, there are giant high rise apartment buildings going up, and at prices that are way out of the league of most Chinese buyers. This seems almost paradoxical, no? It gets worse. If you go out at night and look at the lights that are on in these buildings, it becomes obvious that there aren't that many people living in them. Instead of being used as actual homes, these places are being used as investments by wealthy Chinese from other places. After all, the Chinese bond market is crap, and the stock market is far too risky. So people keep building them, because people keep buying them, because they assume that real estate values will keep going up. It leads to weird empty cities like Ordos City in Inner Mongolia. Now, this seems like the kind of thing that the Chinese government would be taking steps to stop, but they aren't. Land sales are a huge source of revenue for local governments, and construction in China is a leading source of GDP growth. GDP growth is the leading metric of success for local governments, and if it leads to an increase in revenue, even better. So the whole thing keeps growing, people buy because prices go up, and the local governments look good because of it. This is hugely alarming, and it gets worse. Construction is a huge chunk of total employment here, and so if/when it pops (I'm way more on the when side), there's probably going to be widespread unemployment amongst people that are uneducated and lack any sort of other skills. That's bad. I don't know why people aren't talking about it more.

But for as broken as that is, I'd wager the Chinese education system is even more broken, although that might be because I am an active participant in it. The entire point of the Chinese system isn't to create thinkers, it's to create information regurgitatiors. This is because the Chinese education system is pointed firmly at getting people to pass a test, the college admissions test. This test doesn't exist to find out how well you can thing, it exists to see how much information you have in your head, and so instead of having discussions in class, teachers try to cram as much stuff as they can into students heads. This leads to a kind of educational arms race, wherein students are forced to sit in classrooms for more and more time to study and memorize. The school I'm at is a perfect example of this. Kids go to school from 7AM till 10PM, and they do it nearly constantly. Sure, they might get a morning or evening off here or there, but a lot of the time that time is spent studying or doing homework. This educational culture has some dramatic ramifications.

For one, it creates an economy that doesn't seem to make much of anything new. I know I've talked about this before, but it really bears repeating: I have not run into a domestically produced Chinese product that is better than its western counterpart. Kai agreed with me on this, and he said it's reflected in the engineering students that he teaches. They can regurgitate things like nobody's business, but the moment that they have to develop anything new, they're struck dumb. Generally, it takes four times as long for them to answer compared to the American students he's taught before. I've seen the same thing in the students I teach, and I thought it might have been a kind of fluke, but no, it's a fairly standard problem.

The other thing is something that I've seen here, but didn't really run into in Shanghai, so I'm putting it here for the hell of it. These kids are going to school for 15 hours a day, and they're not really allowed to do anything else, and it really affects their ability to socialize. You can see it in the young teachers here, and it's not just them talking to me, it's in the way that they interact with each other. Even though they're in their mid to late twenties, they act like they're sixteen, and I think that's a product of the education system, because I can see it in the students, too. It's in the repetitive questions and the giggles and pushing. However I could be completely wrong about all of this. It's one of the observations I'm the least confident about.

We also discussed intellectual property rights, or the lack thereof, and the many reasons why you shouldn't do business in China, but I've ranted/dorked out enough. Strangely, this was the exact thought that I had when I realized that I had been talking to Kai for an hour and a half in a dance club, so I excused myself and went to dance. I kind of wish I hadn't decided to leave the conversation, because it was way more fun than the dance floor. The DJ was mediocre and wasn't even spinning vinyl, and the crowd wasn't dancing in the least, they were just standing about, trying to look cool. I quickly tired of it, and caught a cab back to the hostel for 32 RMB ($5). We went to the 24 hour store, bought some chips and water, and ate them while talking to a very jetlagged French Swiss girl that had just gotten to the hostel. I crawled into bed around 3:15.

I awoke the next day no worse for the wear, showered, and went downstairs to get breakfast. Man, have I ever missed bacon. Bacon and real coffee sitting outside reading the news on my phone. Darren, Ben and Andrew came down a bit later and we chatted for a bit about the events of the night before. I was planning on going out to wander around for a while, and so I excused myself around noon and went to the metro station. Along the way I discovered that the throng of people on East Nanjing Road had become so big that they had to call in the Army to direct things. It was actually kind of cute to see them blocking traffic in perfect formation, as though it was some kind of drill. It also made me realize that I have never seen a policeman or soldier here that I have felt intimidated by in the least. They almost look comical in their uniforms that make them look to be about sixteen years old, like boys pretending to be real soldiers. That probably says something about how I view Chinese masculinity, but that's a discussion for another time.

I was planning on going to the Pudong, and as the crow flies, it's near enough to walk to, but unfortunately for me, there's a river in the way, so I had to pay the fifty cents for a two minute train ride, which is alright because if there's one public good that China does properly, it's public transportation. Trains and buses are numerous, and are surprisingly easy to navigate. I guess that in a country where car ownership is prohibitively expensive, you have to have a good way of getting people around. The only problem is, the necessity of the system also leads to really high demand, and so I had to cram into a train that was more full than anything I've ever been in. Thanks, national holiday!

I got off the train with the ceremonial air that only comes from accidentally elbowing a kid in the face on your way out. Nobody seemed to mind, especially the kid. I took the escalator up, and soon discovered that I had taken an elevator to what seemed like the future. The Pudong is incredible from an architecture standpoint, all tall glass buildings and clean streets. The Oriental Pearl TV Tower probably helps with the future feeling. It's that crazy orby spire that inevitably shows up when anyone talks about modern China and Shanghai. More about it later. I decided to move away from where all of the people were, and I ended up finding a peaceful little park in the middle of all of the glass and steel. I walked around it, took some photos, and enjoyed not being around people for a while. I managed to find the classiest mall I've ever been in, and felt completely out of place in a western shirt and band t-shirt. I quickly exited.

With no other place to go, I entered the crowd. I walked to the TV tower, and somewhere along the way, I realized something: Nobody was gawking at me, nobody even cared that I was there. It was an amazing feeling, and it might actually have been the best part of my trip. The ability to be ignored is something that we don't really think about, largely because it's something that we can take for granted when we're around a bunch of people that look like us. But it's also something I haven't had for three months, and to have it return even for a little bit was great. Armed with this knowledge, I went to the only place with food I could find, McDonald's. I wound up sharing a wordless table with a middle aged guy, which was way less awkward that it sounds, and headed off to the TV Tower.

The TV Tower is just a huge tourist trap. I know that I should have seen it coming, but I didn't until I got there. To even get close to is you have to pay $20, and that just wasn't worth it to me. I got a peek in from the elevated sidewalk outside. There was a stage show going on with guys in top hats singing and dancing, and that's just not my scene, so I waked down by the river, and stared at the Bund for a bit. I went to a mall to try to find something worth buying as a souvenir, and failed miserably. I did find an MLB store, but it was all Yankees stuff. Boo. I caught the train back to the hostel and took a power nap to prepare for the evening.

I walked downstairs to find Darren, Ben and Andrew plying pool. After a few games, the question of what to do for dinner came up, and a plan was crafted. We were going to find the only TGIFridays in China, and eat at it. Unfortunately, this plan was crafted without a time that we were going to go out, and drinks were ordered. As you could guess, we never actually made it to TGIFridays. However, this did lead to us meeting up with one of the more colorful characters, Eleanor.

El was a South African woman that was in Shanghai for vacation, just like the rest of us. She comes from a rather interesting background. For example, she's on Youtube engaging in police brutality. This threw up a red flag in my head too. As it turns out, in South Africa you aren't paid to be a police officer, you just get to protect your family. There was a guy who was giving her trouble, so she roughed him up and threw him in a paddy wagon. This is apparently how the law works there, at least in some fashion. She also told us about her mother, who goes out every Sunday afternoon and fires her shotgun in the air three times, just to prove she still has ammunition. I see this two ways. One, it's possible that things actually are that bad in South Africa, and that's just kind of the reality of the situation. It's also possible she's a right-winger, and would be considered crazy in her country. I don't know enough to pass any sort of judgment, but I do know the whole thing kind of creeps me out. She was a riot, though, and she wound up joining our group for the night. We also met a couple of German travelers, a woman who's name I've forgotten, as she left town at 9PM that night, and a guy named Andy that I spoke conversational German with. And here I thought I wouldn't use German here. They had spent some time in the hostel we went to in Qufu, and were equally flabbergasted by the lack of things to do there. The Swiss woman also joined up with us, despite her jet lag. As it turns out, she's in the country to apprentice for ceramics. I name dropped Richard Bresnahan, but to no avail. At least I tried.

The night went on, and we decided to go to a bar on the roof of a building in the Bund. The view was fantastic. It looked out on the lights of the Pudong, and was exactly what I wanted from the visit. Granted, it was $10 for a drink, but we went with the understanding that we'd just have one, and then head back to the hostel. The bar was way out of our league, and with the way we were dressed, we'd have been laughed out in most other countries, but the nice thing about China is that if you're willing to pay, they're more than willing to have you around for a while. We stayed around and generally enjoyed feeling posh with our hooded sweatshirts and dirty pants, which is the point of the situation we had created, I suppose. When we got back to the hostel, the bar was about to close, and we joined up with another group of expats and headed to an all night club in the French Concession. We spent the night dancing and carrying on, and around 4:30, I decided to grab a couple of the guys and get a cab.

Living in China has made me distrust cabbies, and this experience is the cherry on top. We got in the cab, gave him the address, and off we went. Except he didn't turn his meter on. I noticed this, and tried miming that he needs to turn the damn meter on. Several fuckwords were exchanged, and eventually I got the point across, and a crisis was adverted. The rest of the ride was completely uneventful, and I crawled into bed as soon as I got to the hostel.

I woke up the next morning, showered, and went downstairs for some much needed coffee. Slowly, everyone that went out the night before filed down into the cafe, and some were doing better than others. We spent a few hours sitting around and joking, trying to work up the motivation to do something with our days. Some of us were leaving town that day, and others were just going to move to a different hostel. At some point, the TV caught all of our eyes, and for good reason. Chinese game shows are super weird.

The Japanese have a reputation for having cruel and unusual competitions, but it would seem that China's giving them a run for their money. The show we watched was a kind of international competition, with each team coming from a different country. The standard rounds were pretty weird, with the contestants wearing different top-heavy animal costumes racing the wrong way around a circular track, or climbing on top of each other to reach a goal. But the real gem was the final round. I'm not exactly sure what was going on, but I do know that it involved several contestants being knocked about by a real bull in a replica of a bullfighting ring. There was some sort of goal that involved crossing the ring, but it didn't really make sense.

When the show was over, I gathered my things and said goodbye to everyone. I had one goal for the day: find a payphone and call Mr. Wang, a friend of the headmaster here who had my return ticket to Nanchang. This task proved to be much harder than I thought it would be. I walked around for two hours trying to find a pay phone I could use, and had no luck. Were there payphones? Absolutely, but you needed a China Telecom card to use them, and that was something I definitely didn't have. I found two payphones that accepted money, and both were broken in their own special ways. One had a jammed coin slot, and the other refused to actually make a call. After making a large circle around Shanghai, I returned to the hostel, and did what I should have done in the first place – used their phone. I spoke with Mr. Wang's son, and arranged for him to meet me at the hostel. I spent the next three hours divided between going to Subway for dinner and reading.

Then at 7PM, Mr. Wang arrived with his son, and I was off to the train station. As it turns out, Mr. Wang speaks very little English, but we did manage to make connections over the Minnesota Timberwolves and the little Chinese I knew how to speak. His son was far more talkative, and in the relatively short time I talked with him, I learned a lot about him. His father runs a power plant, and he's in school for electrical engineering. He's kind of inheriting the family business, and he's not very happy about it. We chatted for a while about other things, and he was a pretty interesting guy. They dropped me off at the train station, refused my payment for the tickets, and said goodbye. They were great.

Speaking of great, the Shanghai South train station is pretty great. It's like a giant circus tent that trains come out of. There's shops around the outside, and in the middle are the gates to the platforms, which is way better than the elephant poop you'd probably find at the middle of a real circus tent. I did a lap around the perimeter, and found a mobile phone charging station. Having two hours until my train, I decided to use it. It was here I met the oddest person of my trip.

You see, there was a woman that was already waiting for her phone to charge, and as soon as she saw me, she started to laugh. She laughed so hard that she nearly fell over in her crouching position, and every time she'd look at me, she's laugh more. This laughing continued for the 10 minutes that I charged my phone, and then when I left, it stopped. I never did find out why she was laughing, but everyone else was creeped out by it, so I think she was just an odd duck. The rest of my stay in the train station was uneventful.

I got on the train okay, and continued to read. When I travel, I've come to hate finding out who I'm bunking with, as they're generally over 40, and in China, that means you're probably a huge pain in the ass. However, this time I got lucky, and wound up with two 20-somethings that were traveling to Fuzhou. One of them actually went to the school I'm working at. We talked until the lights went off about my experiences here in China, and I never saw them again. Sleeping on trains always is awful, and this trip was no exception. I woke up the next morning kinda bleary and drenched in sweat I could do nothing about, and walked out into Nanchang.

Margo told me the bus station was 100 meters from the train station, and she was dead wrong. I wandered for a couple hours, got pretty lost, and hailed a cab, if only to get some direction. A dollar later I was at the bus station, ticket in my hand. I spent most of the bus ride watching the Chinese equivalent of the Earnest Goes to series, and soon found myself home. I showered, and realized that I had an odd kind of optimism about my next three months here. However, that optimism has faded completely by this point, and has been replaced with the same crushing loneliness that I went to Shanghai to get away from. The circle is complete.

I would like to close with one major point that I got from my trip. It's not that I dislike this country, or that I'm going through some kind of crazy, prolonged culture shock, it's the place I'm in. If I was in some place other than rural China, I'm sure I'd be having a blast. As it stands, I haven't had a decent conversation in over a week, and each day I'm greeted by the fact that there isn't a thing to do to keep me occupied here. See you all in three months!

-Cooper