Snippets from Shanghai

A little girl on the high-speed train from Beijing to Nanjing.

So what is interesting? Is it the idea that a person is wandering through a strange place that perhaps only a handful of people in the greater world community really understand? Or is it the metaphor that perhaps China represents the inner workings of my own mind that until now were trapped in the deluge of familiarity, too common to investigate but hiding some vital secret? After all, only kids who don’t know any better dig in their own backyard for treasure and truly think they’ll find something. In a place like this, everything inspires awe, and the map is marked with a thousand Xs.

So far, me and Tryg have not once called ahead to see if a hostel is available ahead of time. There is not a whole lot of forethought involved in this, nor a crazy thirst for adventure at the possibility that we will not have a place to stay. It is more just an unconscious trust that things will work out. This may change soon, though, as more and more travelers look at us like we’re crazy when we tell them that we’ve made no reservations anywhere.

The hostel that we find in Shanghai is as beautiful and perfect a place as I can imagine. There are two other Americans here who we will get to know in the back-alley porch, where many bottles of weak beer will be drunk, cheap cigarettes smoked, and tell long stories told. We are right on the river, across from which we will find the local street food.

But this first day, as we arrive haggard from a day of bus, train, and never-ending foot travel, cute friendly reception girls greet us, and we are happy to just sit for a moment. A group has gathered on the porch to go drink and sing in the KTV bar. We’re invited but we decline. It’s been a very long day, and we’re sick of each other and the world. It’s time to eat, shower, and sleep.

Nanjing train station.

Shanghai is one of the busiest cities in the world, and one of China's top commerce cities. The streets are packed with people selling, buying, and moving. They move like water in a well-worn riverbed, without inherent order, except for that afforded by the banks of the city. People move en masse into intersections. Crossing the street, one feels like a card in a deck that is being shuffled. No one has the right-of-way, the pedestrians do not yield to the semi-trucks nor vice versa—one simply moves and finds their way past a thousand other people in various vehicles also taking care of only themselves. This is the Chinese prerogative: take care of yourself, because no one else is going to. It’s interesting that Mao’s socialist ideal never died—it simply disappeared and was slowly replaced by this polar opposite. Most Americans would be troubled by the rampant capitalism here.

Chelsea is a white girl from Wisconsin, and Matt is a black guy from California. Meeting these other Americans has been a major release for me and Tryg. Of course, as we go we make do with the Europeans we meet, and can even feel relieved when out of the billion Chinese we meet someone from Africa or South America. You can relate to foreigners here like nowhere else. They allow you to step back and see all those crazy aspects of China that you start to take for granted on a daily basis. But to be surrounded by your fellow countrymen—people who talk like you, understand the same slang; people you don’t have to explain your culture to, who laugh at the same jokes and remember the same things (like cheese, and real beer)—it is a wonderful thing.

The Chinese cliché. Shanghai's skyline is photographed thousands of times a day.

In China, to be white can be a wonderful thing. People want to take you out, the want to talk with you, they want to get to know you. But at the same time, it can be entirely overwhelming. You get paranoid as a hundred stone-cold eyes follow you down the street every time you go outside. Vendors are constantly trying to take as much of your money as they possibly can. Everything is a hassle because everyone wants a piece of you.

Matt has it even worse, though, as Chinese people are often blatantly racist without pretense. The will tell you to your face that they like white people more than black people. In Chinese culture, to have dark skin usually means that you are a farmer working in the sun all day. That means that, for thousands of years, to have dark skin meant that you were poor and lower-class. And with no historical impetus for tolerance of those different from you, the Chinese never developed a wide sweeping cultural sensitivity.

A local tends his net from atop a 15-foot wall. Downtown Shanghai.

That disregard for farmers is something that I’ve never understood. China gets the vast majority of its food from its own farms. The entire country 1.5 billion people would starve to death (as in the past it has) if the farmers were not working as hard as they are for their horrifically-low wages. Farmers can’t afford to educate their children or buy clothes, so most middle-class Chinese look down on them and offer them no respect.

China is a place of hard-lined cultural classes, and all this is confounded by the new modern age hitting China hard between the eyes. In some ways it has become even harder for farmers, as the modern Chinese see them as a reminder of a past they’d like to forget. They want the world to forget their poor meager past. The farms, though, reflect that past, and so they are not simply shunned, but at times vilified by some of the “evolved” Chinese I’ve spoken with. But this opinion is not universal. Nothing is universal in China.



A day's catch on the Yangtze, bound for the dinner table.



I wish dearly that I could speak Mandarin better. I want to ask the old man who glares at me in the park if he still believes the vicious anti-Western propaganda that was ubiquitous when he was my age. Does he mourn the new Chinese obsession with Western cultures and see me, with my heavy pack resting on his bench, as a sign of Mao’s failed ideal society?

What is the old man on the train of the same generation thinking, the one who proudly brought our attention to the Italian leather “Leonardo da Vinci” shoes that he wore below his green plaid pants—the same man who had invited us to stay with him in Shanghai after knowing us for ten minutes? A crowd had gathered to watch us as we’d somehow been booked on an impromptu late-night talk show. This old man tried on my “cowboy” hat, asked endless questions about America, and gave us bags and bags of old-man food, like dried prunes and peanuts.

On the slow train between Nanjing and Shanghai.

There are no absolutes in China, no universal ways of describing the Chinese mentality. There are just a billion people discovering their own individual lives.

It’s raining in Shanghai, and the humidity is so high that clothes refuse to dry on the line. I’m talking with Chengdude in the hostel lobby. Chengdude is a guy from Chungdu, and one of the most unique Chinese people I’ve met in China so far. He came to Shanghai for a job, but now he’s just hanging out for a while. I suspect he’s sticking around primarily to flirt with the attractive girls working behind the counter at the hostel. But there’s no way of knowing for sure, and I’m pretty sure Chengdude himself doesn’t know why he’s here or what he’s doing, which makes him a perfect guy to chat with about life.

“My parents want me to work for the government like them. But I don’t want that—I mean, after that then I guess I’d meet a girl I didn’t love, get married, and have one kid. That’s my parents’ life, and it’s fucking tragedy. I don’t want to copy and paste their life onto mine. I want to do what makes me happy. I want to travel in Europe, learn about different cultures, and then I think I want to go live in India—maybe forever—and be surrounded by people who really believe in something. You know?”

Chengdude

I consider this shift between generations in China to be one of the most interesting phenomenons in the history of the world. I wonder about the troubles faced by a nation that holds the next generation up as the new hope for a modern Chinese society, while those young adults are developing within that environment a newfound sense of individual identity. They are confronted by existential questions that have never been a part of the mass Chinese culture. These questions developed in the West slowly over generations with the industrial revolution, but they have collided with these young adults all at once. The majority of those in the previous generation survived starvation, got their water from wells, and lived most of their early life without electricity, while these kids surf the internet and mourn the loss of Steve Jobs by writing Tang Dynasty poems that are published in the newspaper.

Screw the landlord. A ubiquitous Chinese street game.

Before now, the question was how to feed one’s family, and how to survive yourself, during times when survival was impossible for many. But as the question changes from “how can I live” to “how do I want to live,” what effect does that have on the expectations of the parent generation, a generation that cannot understand the spiritual necessity of discovering what makes one feel fulfilled?

After all, to be fulfilled in one’s life when food is scarce is itself a simple thing. When you are not sure if you will have food this winter, then each day that you live is a day earned through hard work. When you no longer need to earn your life, and so instead must discover what lives are good for, it can feel like there is no road map. Nowhere is this more true than in China, where the generation asking these questions cannot look to their ancestors for a model of what they should do.

I, of course, can relate to this aspect of Chinese culture, because I am facing a similar conflict, though on a vastly smaller scale. I feel I have passed though the survivalist period of my life. The year I spent in China, and all those years that followed, in my mind proved that I can live through anything. In surviving, I felt I had earned my life. The question is, now that I feel in possession of my life, what will I do with it? The question of how to live presses at every tearing seam.

I’ve found I am not a fan of leaving places. I don’t want to say goodbye to the people I’ve met in this little corner of China. My mom says I’m just a homebody, and I think that’s probably true. But I’ve long held the belief that if it’s painful, it’s probably good for you. Even though nothing particularly amazing happened here, I still feel like it was an important piece of the journey.

Then next step is a three-day train ride to Chongqing, the mountains, and the Yangtze River. Every couple days finds me once again stepping into unknown waters. I don’t understand how every step keeps bringing such amazing experiences. There is magic in travel.

Copper and other raw materials are in high demand.