Travelogue, day one
I can't imagine what it must be like living in Shanghai, although I suspect it's the polar opposite of living in New York; and not just because no one speaks a bare word of English. This city is a act. Like New York, Shanghai is more than the sum of its parts: the ghost of modernity and post-modernity animate her like talented puppetmasters, and her name has a honeyed scent. Shanghai is a book cover. She is a place you go to. If dreams have poles, like the Earth's magnetic field, then New York is their Western pole, and Shanghai their Eastern. Newer than you could possibly imagine - she was first named a city after World War I - she wears her dusty, opium-flavored myths like veils and makeup. Her reputation both precedes and belies her. Shanghai, like New York, exists only while your eyes are wide with wonder; a trick of the light. But New Yorkers, when you pass them on the street with their city-savvy step, natives of concrete, seem pumped up by the reputation of their native soil: conscious of the city's self-image, they buzz in tandem with it. While in Shanghai, the city clanks on in spite of her people; they drag her down to earth from her flights of fancy, and in a sense, make her realer for themselves and for any visitor than New York can ever hope to be.
I should get a tape recorder. A nice little one. Words come to you on the streets that don't seem to even have any semantic meaning when you're back indoors.
The Shanghainese, from what very little I've seen of them so far, have a fantastic talent for something that at least smells like community. Groups sit everywhere: inside a beautiful ceramics shop, I saw a group sit around and chat for what must have been hours. Rooms in the hotel stand open and people peer in the doorways. People gather around food carts and talk loudly, quickly, something Chinese seems to be made for. I'm near a university, and there's a bubbling young happiness to the people around here. I can't measure or judge it. China is more complex than the human brain.
Hungry to the point of confusion, I wandered around the streets for the better part of an hour. Half the food is unrecognizable; the other half I'd rather not have recognized. But everything smells amazing, bringing you to that point where you can't resign yourself to a venue because who knows what fabulous next one might be hiding just around the corner, In the end, I stumbled back into a little hole in the wall that I recalled boasted an English menu. Ordering was painfully awkward, and I'm afraid I made a joke of myself with my incompetence at eating something as simple as dumplings, but I ate a full, filling two-course-and-drink meal for a little over two dollars. I have no idea how such a thing is possible. Now I feel vaguely guilty: have I paid them what they really deserve?
Coke and sponge cake come for a dollar and a bit in a chain store. China is strange. Sponge cake had a nylon covering on top: virtually invisible but distinctly inedible.
I'll be starting in the Expo tomorrow, so I don't know if I'll have time to explore the city any more. I'm resolved to have at least one dinner in the French Concession, and to visit at least one enormous department store where you can buy anything from yak tails to Go boards for less than you'd pay for a Happy Meal. I should also find a bookstore and get a copy of Water Margin (in a moment of profound despair, had passed by a cart selling books on the street. All were in Chinese. Perhaps that's a good thing: my suitcase is not very large). I also have to find those little stands selling noodles across from the Bund. If I could, I'd have stayed two weeks. A month. Until I can pronounce any of the street names.
I am truly away now.