SPINNING MY WHEELS IN SHANGHAI

The fact that I've spent almost two and a half years in China doesn't make me any more immune to the glamorous connotations of certain names and places. I may lament that I am stuck in Shanghai, having been unable to get tickets out of here until several days after I had planned to leave, and I may really mean it, but even writing the words out makes me shiver a little at the exoticism of it.

The thwarting of many my initial travel plans led me here and the insanity of getting train tickets during the October 1st National Day holiday has kept me here for 8 long un-exotic days. While I did manage to meet and interview a new contact I've haven't done much else and that has been quite frustrating. Tomorrow I head to Guangzhou to deal with another fiasco: in its eternal wisdom the Chinese consulate only gave me a 30-day visa so I have to leave the country to renew it. It was either Hong Kong or Mongolia and the former won out because I have a lovely friend I can visit in Guangzhou just over the border.

I came here mostly because my friend Dan (of panda suit fame) moved to Shanghai a few months ago for his fancy new job. He lives on the top floor of this charming old building in the former French Concession, a part of the city still characterized by wide tree-shaded boulevards, cafes, and profoundly European residential architecture.

There are still pretty art deco stylistic elements on many of the buildings in this part of the city, though from a survey I've conducted from the back of Dan's scooter I believe the composition of the Concession is roughly 65% high-end ladies boutiques, 15% high-end children's boutiques, 10% high-end home furnishings, 8% cafes/restaurants, and 2% practical goods and services for the common folks. I find most of it incredibly vulgar. About 100 feet from the gate of Dan's building one can have a custom Ermenegildo Zegna suit made then cross the street, genuflecting to the luxury vehicles speeding past, to purchase a gilded table and real fur throw blankets for your parlor.

Walk a block in the other direction and you will come upon these obscenities. Yes, those door handles are made of beveled violet glass, and yes, those chairs with red velvet cushions have glass backs etched with swans.

It isn't too much of an exaggeration to say that the whole city looks like this, or at least that it wants to.

Some of the cafes are nice, and I can't complain about the fresh fruit crepe I had my first morning here but I can and will complain that a single normal cup of coffee typically costs about $6. And I wouldn't be so bitter about that but for the fact that this cafe in particular attracted a stream of tourists, both foreign and Chinese, who wandered around taking pictures or sat down and ordered beverages and then took pictures of each other "enjoying a cafe in Shanghai" taking from the place a product rather than an experience.

I am not innocent of the fact that my assessment of this city has something to do with my own cultural preference for a certain authentic experience but that does little to dampen my disdain. Last Sunday afternoon I went for a long walk in Dan's neighborhood, telling him when I returned that "I just walked until I found China," meaning that I went searching for my image of China, not posh boutiques and Sephora but bright noisy chaos: people riding bikes with tiny dogs in their baskets and haggling over vegetables in their pajamas.

I'm also biased against this city for the simple fact that I've never believed that having lots of money is worthy of admiration in and of itself; I hold quite the opposite view. As Dan said over dinner last night, this city aspires to the lowest possible shared aspirations: wealth and status. There are surely exceptions hiding out somewhere: artists, intellectuals, and other trouble-makers, but the general feeling of the place, its present geist, is the desire for money and the things it can buy and so like all the other places dominated by consumer capitalism it feels hollowed out by the homogenizing power of perpetual want.

Of course there is plenty of wealth in my beloved Beijing but it is still relatively contained in certain parts of the city (ahem, Sanlitun). I'm always happiest roaming around the older parts of the city, the places that are human-scaled and bursting with life, and I worry about the hutongs being demolished not only because of my desire for a "real China" where everyone does Tai Chi and plays checkers on the sidewalks but because their disappearance will mark the total ascendance of the belief that if a place is not profitable it has no value.

Dan and I also prefer the Beijing expat community, full of students, journalists, and various do-gooders genuinely interested in the country and its culture; Shanghai expats have a reputation for enjoying the city precisely because many parts of it don't feel like China. It may feel so familiar to foreigners because so much of it was built by and for them. The history of 20th century Shanghai is fascinating but frequently ugly - the division and settling of the city by foreign powers in the treaty port era, the Japanese occupation, the persecution of Communists when it was a Nationalist stronghold... my glancing knowledge of that history was why I was so bowled over the first time I came here and was treated to views like this.

I still find those views stunning. Standing on the bank of the Huangpu river you can look to one side at the beautiful limestone buildings of The Bund, the site of foreign banks and hotels from the 20s and 30s, as well as clubs that infamously refused to admit Chinese nationals as members.

The Bund formed a celebrated 20th century cityscape and represented to a large extent European hopes for colonial expansion. But now it is dwarfed by the skyscrapers of Pudong across the river, ambitious, absurd, and all built over the last two decades on what was farmland 50 years ago. It's two kinds of hubris facing off and it's fantastic.

I am also an unabashed fan of all the other batshit crazy buildings and skyscrapers scattered across the city. It's not enough to make a building tall and shiny in Shanghai, you have to make it weird. Unfortunately you can't see most of the detail in this pictures, but trust me, it's worth the risk to walk around town with your eyes facing skyward.

This one (detail from above) is one of my favorites. Let Gandalf out of there Sauron!!!

And finally, here is proof that Shanghai has at least one feature of the "real China" I know and love: its residents will sleep anywhere, anytime. Bless.

SEAGULLS AND OTHER SIGNS OF RIGHTNESS

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

- T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets (Little Gidding)

Though I'm heading back to China in nine days and won't be settling down here in Seattle until November this return already feels different. It's never mattered how long I've been away -- the beauty here has always astonished me -- but this time I feel it more deeply. My skin and bones seem to have their own memory of home: the angle of the light at this familiar latitude, the cool mornings and long sunsets, trees tall or stout with leaves coarse or pliant whose names I never learned but to whom something in me turns in happy recognition.

It feels like all of the accumulated wrongnesses of the past few months, all those times I felt hounded by unnameable anxieties and fears (rather like what Holly Golightly so memorably referred to as the mean reds) that only multiplied as I reflected on the oppressive heat, the smallness of a small town, my own considerable limitations as a scholar and a human being; it seems those wrongnesses melt away in the face of mountains and water or when a seagull squawks overhead and I think yes! this is right! there should be seagulls flying overhead! that's what was missing!

Of course it's not just seagulls that I've needed. I've needed my friends close, close enough that we can take for granted mundane moments together, without the pressure of squeezing a year of triumphs and catastrophes, lessons and mistakes, old memories and new dreams, into a few hours of "catching up". I've needed to stop living out of suitcases and learning new kitchens (at least for awhile) and not be forever planning the next move. And most recently, I've needed to accept that trying to write one's dissertation can make you entirely too aware of your own shortcomings but that is no excuse for not getting the mother done. I've needed to accept that if most people were confronted with the prospect of writing something worthy of ~6 years of intellectual labor, capable of meeting the expectations of a respected council of academic elders, and completed on self-determined schedules and deadlines, than most people too would wake semi-optimistically then watch the day dissolve into errands, e-mail, and endless tiny projects, and give way to a night of angry self-recriminations, nameless fears, and troubled dreams.

By which I mean to say I think I've realized that my slow progress at writing does not indicate moral turpitude, but merely shows that I, like most people, need structure and support to face this beastly challenge. And that's a nice mental vista to make a fresh start with as I enjoy the view from home.

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo to you all. 十一月见！