Confessions of China Living

I wish someone had told me, before I moved to Shanghai last year, to be careful to not let China make me a meaner person. I had thought that I had adjusted well. I had learned the width of the narrowest opening between two people that I could weave through on a crowded city street. I learned to accept the smaller dimensions of personal space here, but not give it up for the obnoxious, privileged young Shanghainese women who will cut you in line. I learned not to cross at crosswalks and how to judge the likelihood of a car hitting me by its distance from and the speed at which it is going. I accepted the fact that horns were going to blare at 3am, and have even begun to be able to sleep without earplugs.

I learned to survive, but I mistook my accumulated survival skills as signs of my emerging cosmopolitanism. This is what it is to be an urbanite! I thought. I am tough-skinned, competent, and worldly!

But in actuality, I was slammed by the thrice-as-forceful wave of post-graduate life, city life, and Chinese life all at once. I can't separate the three, can't ever figure out whether my feelings and frustrations are the natural reactions of a newly minted independent adult, those of a space-and-quiet-loving girl whose prior contact with cities up till now had been day trips into New York and Philly, or the result of coming to a Chinese city.

I no longer want to deny it, no longer want to cover it up with euphemisms. China is impatient and judgmental and unforgiving, and in my struggle to survive here, I've absorbed a lot of that into myself.

It's easy to internalize a lot of frustration in China. That's what happens to a society led by a government that doesn't allow freedom of speech. It only takes one bus ride in Shanghai to get a pretty thorough gist of what makes me angry here. As the bus pulls to the curb, middle-aged men and single-minded young mothers push shuffling old women out of the way to be the first onto the bus. The bus drivers slams the doors shut as soon as you step on board, barely avoiding catching the back of your shirt in its wheezy path. Slouching young men with artfully arranged bangs sit in the courtesy seats and bury their heads in their iPhones or iPads, determinedly ignoring the thin-wristed, white-haired little old ladies who cling to the side of their seats and struggle to stand upright as the bus driver lurches in and out of traffic with his hand permanently pressed against the horn. The man desperately missing his sixteenth cigarette of the day on his short bus journey groans and shudders and jerks his head and hacks up a thick gob of spit into the single, tiny, overflowing trash can. Oh, traffic lights? A mere suggestion. The thing that counts down the seconds until your light turns green? Obviously an indication that traffic is supposed to go when there are still 4 seconds left of the red light to go. If you get to your stop and the bus is crowded, which is often, it becomes a game of push and shove, see how many people you can bang with your overstuffed purse on your way to reach the door. The concept of letting people off the public transport vehicle before new passengers board? A mere concept, rarely put into practice.

A trip on Shanghai's public transportation illustrates the selfishness and inconsideration of a nation that adopted capitalism while still held in the thrall of communism. Knowing this, everything in China becomes suspect. The smiling, well-made-up waitress who serves you at dinner may be secretly resenting your white-collar job and accompanying salary. You buy a cheap watery beer for 40RMB at a pub that tries to evoke European legacies and feel guilty that your one beer could feed for one whole day one of the many beggars, often deformed or missing limbs from factory accidents, who sit in the streets. You become suspicious of every price given to you at the local market, wondering if the seller isn't trying to gyp you out of a few more yuan despite his already reasonably low price. Silence does not indicate contentment, but rather decades of pent-up frustration at inequality and corruption.

No community is perfect, but I never thought that I'd lose so many of the things I used to like about myself--listening skills, objectivity, concentrated kindness--so quickly, in this environment. It took almost a year's worth of unhappiness and regretful meanness on my part for me to realize that I don't like much of who I've become. So, starting now, I will strive to be more aware of when I'm being mean, and to resist the easy temptation of sliding into meanness. I will also write more about China, my travels, and my thoughts here. I haven't written as much about my life abroad as I had expected to mostly because I'm really unhappy with many things about it. But if writing about it will be my catharsis, then I'm going to. I'm going to put the truth out there, because I'm still an American citizen, I'm still a reluctant leader of humanity, and the truth cannot be denied.

How To Deal With Thieves

Yesterday morning, on my way from the bus stop to the train station, a thief attempted to unzip my backpack and steal whatever he could get his hands on. Fortunately, he didn't succeed, but last summer, when I had been in China only about a month, I had my wallet stolen from my backpack as I was walking from the train station to the taxi line. (Tangentially, I hate Chinese train stations now; my heartrate gets elevated every time I go near it.)

When my wallet was stolen, what followed was a world of inconvenience, as I scrambled to cancel debit cards and report them as stolen, make new copies of the keys and keycard to my apartment, and basically just inconvenience the hell out of my apartment-mates with my keylessness. This time, of course, all ended well. I even got a look at (the back of) the would-be thief: short, skinny, male, dressed all in black, head down as he watched passersby out of the corner of his eyes. I was in too much of a shock at the moment to do anything except rezip my backpack, but then I spent the rest of the day dreaming up possible things I could have done to him.

Things That Steph Wishes She Could Have Done to the Thief:

• Trip him as he ran past me up the stairs after I foiled his attempt at theft.
• Make a sign along the lines of "KICK ME," except this one says "I'M A THIEF," and surreptitiously attach it onto his back.
• Same thing, except on his forehead, and accompanied by a punch in the face.
• Making him supremely nervous by stalking him (making sure he knows he's being stalked) and grinning maniacally at him whenever he looks at me.
• Making a scene on the pedestrian overpass by following him and shouting after him, "HEY, THIEF! WANT ME TO MAKE YOU A SIGN, MAKE YOUR JOB EASIER? HEY EVERYONE, HE'S A THIEF! YEAH, THAT'S RIGHT, THIEF, YOU BETTER NOT SHOW YOURSELF AROUND HERE ANYMORE. YOUR HUNTING GROUND IS RUINED FOREVER!"

Vengeance: it feels so good.

Alas, consult the title of that list. Therefore, I will channel my unspent anger into giving (probably unnecessary, for you urbanites) advice on how not to let yourself be a target for thieves in China, which really boils down to one thing:

Avoid using backpacks as much as possible.

1933 Shanghai

The architecture of Shanghai is fascinating. You have modern glass-laden high-rises overlooking the red-shingled rooftops and laundry-draped balconies of older housing. Scattered throughout this city are remnants of Shanghai's earlier industrial days, now turned into art galleries, museums, and touristy places.

On Friday, I went to a building that's basically just called 1933. It's a slaughterhouse turned boutique shopping area / performance space / photographer's heaven. Late afternoon was an INCREDIBLE time to go, because there was all this warm golden sunlight splashing on stone, filtering through the nooks and crannies and bends of 1933:

I was particularly fascinated by the way they so artistically illustrated the toilets:

And, like I said, the light, the light!

1933 had these "cow paths" (left side) for--what else?--the cattle (the humans walked up tight staircases that were just wide enough for two skinny people, so that the cattle can't go there) that wound up four stories:

The view from the fifth-floor rooftop. See what I mean about high-rises/older housing? Oh, and that perpetual haze was actually on the light side that day. As in, I could see a relatively blue sky!

There was this empty ballroom-esque space that could fuel a month's worth of fictional imaginings:

This is the circular room in the center at the top, with a see-through glass floor, that could also be transformed into a performance space. It just takes my breath away:

Cool graffiti in the basement:

Next step: return when I buy a DSLR and have people willing to model for me. Can't you just taste the possibilities?

Shanghai During the Holidays

I just love the sight of poinsettias. It's like I see them and immediately think, CHRISTMAS! The sight of them is inextricably linked to the rich scent of a whole day's worth of cooking in my great-aunt's apartment, the sweet stickiness of pine sap on my fingers, and the soft tearing of wrapping paper with family.

 Lovely Christmas tree inside a shopping center near my apartment. I particularly like the luscious BOOKS that are piled on top of the presents. 

 I have no idea who this character is, nor if it has anything to do with Christmas or the holidays (I suspect not), but isn't he so... adorably protective? I wanted to take a picture with it, but it was being bombarded by a three-year-old girl, and I thought it'd be mean of me to ruin her moment.

 Nighttime lights near my apartment. *happy sigh*

Plaza 889 near my apartment. 

 It made me feel a little like I'm home, near New York City, with the trees drenched in Christmas lights. Not a bad way to end up spending the holiday season, considering how I had been working 12-hour days by the end of December. :)

Yu Garden: A Tourist Necessity

Oh, hi there, from your favorite neglectful book/travel blogger. I just checked my archives and it's been over two months since I posted about my new life here in Shanghai. Heh. I'm telling you, I'd much rather talk about the fictional worlds I travel to in books, rather than the actual worlds I live in. October has also been a craaaaaaaaazy month for work, what with the November 1st ED/EA deadline. Work six days a week, work from home in the evenings, work work work... like, I love my job, but I'm not at my most efficient when it comes to constant exposure to the same elements...

Anyway, Shanghai. Back in August, my grandfather and one of my brothers hopped the Strait (from Taiwan) and paid me a visit, yay! Too bad they brought with them a sort-of typhoon. We checked out Yu Garden (豫园), a supremely touristy food-and-shopping place:

It was PACKED. I dislike crowds.

But it is gorgeous and interesting. Peddlars hawk all different sorts of wares: my favorite was a kind of glass artwork in which artists take small glass bottles and draw intricate designs or pictures on the inside of the bottles using the tiniest sliver of a brush. Visitors line up for half an hour to get their hands on the food at a famous Shanghainese tourist snack place.

We also entered Yu Garden proper, a stone garden that required an admission fee to enter. But it was so worth the 30rmb, because the insides were lovely, all stone walls, classical architecture, and water that flowed from one area into another.

The fish were freakishly aggressive! Visitors would sometimes toss crumbs to the fish, whipping them into such a frenzy that they would swim over one another and out of the water in order to get closer to the source of food.

The wonderful thing about Yu Garden proper was that, within its walls, the madness of the city seemed to fade away, replaced by an utterly lovely sense of tranquility, even despite all the tourists wandering around. I could totally see why the Chinese of the past would want such private gardens. It's a place that I would definitely consider revisiting for its calming sights, that's for sure.

Pretty pretty, even in spite of the gloomy skies, no?

Fuxing Park: A Sight for Nature-Starved Eyes

If you've talked to me in the month since I've moved to China you will probably know that one of the main things I gripe about regarding my life here is the unfortunate lack of vegetation. Born and raised in the Northeast United States, I miss my towering trees, rolling hills, and lawns of green. Therefore, one of my unofficial projects here has become finding and hanging out in the green spaces that Shanghai has to offer. And I started out at probably one of the nicest parks in Shanghai.

Fuxing Park (复兴公园) is a modestly sized park located near Xintiandi (新天地), a former European occupied neighborhood renovated into high-end shopping and clubbing. European influence is abundant throughout Shanghai, and so are high-end shopping areas. However, I walked down streets that looked like this:

A tree-lined avenue! I must've been a sight, strolling down this street with a bounce in my step and a huge grin on my face, the camera planted firmly in my hand.

One of the entrances to Fuxing Park.

Fuxing Park contains a variety of "landscapes," from wide-open grass to avenues guarded by leafy trees with smooth white trunks. I rather ignorantly chose one of the hottest days of the summer so far to visit the park, and thus was very appreciative of the ample shade and seating.

But the reason I ended up enjoying my time at Fuxing so much had little to do with nature: it was, in fact, the people in the park that completed the experience for me.  This is Shanghai, so there are people people people everywhere, and everyone is trying to get to where they need to go as quickly as they can. However, the people at Fuxing were not in a rush. Things seemed to run about three times slower than the city beyond the park's boundaries, and maybe it is the absence of this need to be somewhere else that makes everyone more easy-going, and I more interested in watching them.

Clusters of old men and women sat together on benches or in circles of scooters, gossiping. Young parents patiently played ball in the middle of the street with their toddler children. Men dressed in loose cotton clothing practiced taichi with their eyes closed while listening to a Chinese opera singer's warbling over their boombox. Tourist families ambled slowly by, enjoying the view and not rushing to visit a hundred other places. An artist unhurriedly set up shop on a bench, one by one leaning his portraits on the bench to attract customers. European students sat two by two on the benches and read. And me, sitting there in the middle of all that, wrote everything down with a lightness of spirit that I closely associate with special places.

I didn't stay long because it was so broiling hot, but I'd like to go back one day, maybe with some friends, and throw a frisbee around on the lawn or something before chilling out on the benches. Fuxing Park is definitely my kind of park, and I'm happy to know that there's a Steph-place in the middle of all this concrete. :)

Coffeeshops and Art Galleries: Tianzifang

The area of Shanghai known as Tianzifang, off of Taikang Lu, is several of my friends' favorite place in Shanghai. It was described to me as a neighborhood containing unique art galleries, shops, and little cafes where you can sit for an entire afternoon doing work. Sounds like my kind of place, no? Therefore, I decided that it would be the first place in Shanghai I'd check out on my first day off of work since arriving here.

Two Saturdays ago, I set off for Tianzifang. It involved taking one bus and three metros and a little over an hour of time. In New York terms this is pretty ridiculous (how far can you go in an hour?) but this is pretty much the way things go in Shanghai. Fortunately I got out at the right metro stop and immediately saw this sign:

Success! Right across the street was an entrance:

Tianzifang turned out to be a tourist-happy collection of small little lanes tucked in between two larger and more modern streets. There are art galleries and souvenir shops and lots and lots of bars, cafes, and restaurants.

After wandering for a bit amongst the waiguoren with their fanny packs, white sneakers, and DSLRs slung around their necks (tourists do look the same anywhere in the world), I had lunch at a cafe that cost slightly more than I had wanted it to, which solidified my suspicions of Tianzifang as a tourist site catering to foreigners.

Not a big deal. There's bound to be places like that in all the cities in the world. But it did mean that I didn't stay as long as I had thought I would, nor did I buy anything, nor did I have any fun adventures. It's a pretty and quaint little place, but I think I will content myself with imagining it set in a small town full of friendly locals and friends. More to come as I go off in search of Steph-happy places in my new city!

Getting Around Shanghai--Or, Why You're Only Out of Mortal Danger If You Stay at Home

In a city of 20 million, there's bound to be a teeny tiny bit of traffic congestion on the streets. The roads are a conglomeration of different transportation vehicles: cars, of course; public buses with antenna-like side mirrors that reach down from the roof and thus remind me of antennae; waves of people on scooters (which are mini-motorcycles, or Vespas, I guess) with a silver container strapped on the back that I thought was either the gas tank or a super-sized lunchbox, but is actually just a general carry-all; countless people on rickety cheap bikes (if you have a nice bike, it WILL get stolen); and pedestrians and taxis weaving through them all. It makes a lot of sense to take public transportation or ride something smaller and more nimble in Asian cities, where a whole bunch of people live in the same space and are moving in all different directions.

The super-busy intersection outside my apartment!

But what amuses--and partially terrifies--me is how traffic laws in Shanghai are taken as kind of suggestions instead of, well, laws. It's common to have cars zooming through intersections 5, 7, or even 10 seconds after the light has turned red. Shocking if you're on foot and three steps out onto the road before you see that five cars are bearing down on you. Scooterists in particular are fond of driving the wrong direction in the unofficial two-wheeled vehicle lane.

All these various vehicles and people do an astonishing sort of dance around one another on the streets and even sidewalks. A bus will barrel down a street, taking the place on the road where taxis, bikers, and pedestrians seem to have been just milliseconds before. And then, a few seconds later, the bus will make a seemingly impossible dodge around three taxis and 5 two-wheeled vehicles approaching and weaving through the intersection from all different directions. I'd be impressed at the deft way in which the bus drivers handle their large vehicles and the almost total nonexistence of accidents if I weren't on the bus and being thrown back and forth by its jerky motion.

The intersection near my office (also busy, of course).

The Shanghainese also LOVE to honk. They honk at people before them at intersections who don't get moving approximately a quarter of a second after the light turns green. They honk at drivers in the lane next to them who they think are going to try and merge. They honk at pedestrians crossing the road 20 meters before them. They honk at you if they're trying to turn left and you're crossing the street and technically have the right of way. They honk when other people are honking, which leads to a whole gaggle of honks that go on and on for about 20 seconds.

(Incidentally, as I'm getting used to the metric system here, I'm quite grateful that at least the numeric and time measurement systems are universalized. Can you imagine if time is measured differently depending on which country you go to?)

The other thing about honking is that it can occur at any time of night or day. There is a bit of a lull between 2-5am (thank God), but all bets are off as soon as the sun rises at 5am, which in Shanghai means that the sky gets lighter but you don't typically actually see the sun, due to the perpetual smog. Whenever I'm awakened at 5:30 in the morning by the sound of people blaring their horns outside, I think about how in New York you get fined for honking, and whether or not it'd be possible to institute something similar here.

From what I can see, there is no such thing as "right of way" or "yield" in Shanghai. If you try to yield at every opportunity in which the Western world would consider it appropriate to yield, it'll take you three times as long to get to your destination. So no one yields, and the journey is a little more chaotic and life-threatening than it has to be, and everyone gets to their destinations in the relatively same amount of time.

The JC Mandarin, a high-end hotel, on Nanjing West Road, the street near my office.

Shanghai Centre on Nanjing West Road. Super high-end and classy hotel/shops. Some Hong Kong actor apparently arrived there when I was getting my lunch there the other day.

On the Eve of the Beginning of my Travel Blogging

I am gearing up to begin writing about my new life in Shanghai sometime this week. This is actually something that I've been putting off because, first of all, much of my life is consumed by work, and second of all, because... well, the second half might be better explained in a list, so here goes:

1. I like to take pictures of nature.
2. I find it much harder to take pictures of manmade things.
3. I find it much harder to take pictures of manmade things, particularly when other people are around.
4. I don't really take many pictures of people
5. unless I am comfortable taking pictures of them,
6. which requires me to feel comfortable with them,
7. and I don't know many of those people yet here in Shanghai
8. because I am weird and solitary and would ideally live in a cave by myself if our personalities were personified in our living situations.

On top of that,

9. Shanghai is a city of, like, 20 million people.
10. Ergo, it is an urban jungle and a nature wasteland.
11. The most greenery I typically see in a day is the plastic little bobbly plant-figure in the office. Y'know, the one that has leaves that gently bob up and down, up and down, up and down all day long.

My difficulties in writing a travel blog are further typified in the fact that

12. I don't actually, uh, do much.
13. Work takes up a significant portion of my time, and at the end of the day there's nothing I'd rather do than to sit and bed and zone out with a book or movie.
14. Plus, the sun sets at, like, 7 here in Shanghai due to various reasons both environmental and political that I am too out of my mind to get into at the moment.
15. This is particularly bad for my energy because, well, my energy goes up and down with the sun, and therefore on overcast days I am pretty much all but comatose and useless.

I would do more if

16. I had someone to do things with.
17. And by "someone," I don't mean just a friend or a family member or whatnot. I'm talking about soul-mate, best-friend, significant-other kinds of "someone."
18. Again, this is due to the fact that I have finite sources of energy when spending time with 99% of the people I know, which is nothing against them, it's just that I also need a crap-ton of alone time to recharge, whereas with the soul-mate best-friend significant-other kind of "someone" the recharging can be done in their company, mostly, oftentimes, for the most part. (See #4-8.)

Therefore,

19. the type of travel blogging you can expect here will be extensive commentary on the cultural differences between China and the US, in a variety of manners, on a variety of topics.
20. The pictures will be bland and generic and totally unworthy of National Geographic, because I am too much of a pansy to get up close and personal to take pictures of interesting strangers alongside interesting sites, and there are no natural things for me to take endless pictures of here.
21. But! I do have plans to explore a different part of Shanghai on each one of my free days, so there WILL be stuff to write about, in addition to the commentary on cultural differences.
22. And, if you'd like to help me increase my travel-blogging productivity, you can find me a boyfriend. And then we can have many fun adventures and pictures with actual people in them.

The end! First Shanghai post up soon. :)