The things we carry, and the places in which we carry them

Can a city, or a place, be defined by a single object that a person carries in his arms — conspicuously, if not ostentatiously? Or at least, can you name an object like that that would tell you something unique about the city?

In Paris, it has to be the baguette. Zac was making garlic bread out of one today, which brought me back to some night not too long ago in Paris when someone chuckled that it was so like the stereotypical French person to be carrying around a baguette — on your way somewhere with a piece of bread. Because you have to be on your way somewhere, and because having a baguette under your arm while walking inevitably conveys the notion that you are going somewhere to do something with a very large piece of bread. And so we did it too, and we did something with the bread. I’m fairly certain we ate it. And for one evening, we were stereotypically, wonderfully, faux French.

In Shanghai, it was oversized plush animals. Not that it occurred at a rate anywhere approaching stereotypical, or characteristic of Shanghainese. But it happened enough that it seemed like a trend, if a weird one. The burden of a man-sized plushie on Shanghai’s crowded transit system just seemed too great — and yet there they were. Young to middle-aged women going somewhere to do something with a large, pink bear.

That was the point, I think. To show everyone on the bus how much you cared for someone. Enough to get them a large, pink bear at least. And enough to shoulder the burden of knowing everyone’s watching you. But you kind of want them to. Because in the poor but upwardly mobile world of Shanghai, it had to be a kind of exhibitionism. I can afford something useless and ostentatious like a large pink bear. Can you?

So what about us, Americans? Angelenos, or New Yorkers, or San Franciscans? It occurs to me that in this country, where the car isn’t just a vehicle that promotes individuality but is just as often a proxy for our individual identities, that we’re not going to find many arm-toted objects that could say something illuminating about ourselves. Instead, we’ll find them — bigger and better — secured to the back of a car on a trailer. Like a monstrous Eddie Murphy head on a roadshow, for example. The more disturbing question is: But what does something like that say about us?

Besides the fact that we’re going somewhere, to do something with an Eddie Murphy head.

Back from China: the cheat sheet

If you’re still reading this blog, I’ll have to count you among my true friends. Or I should be thankful you haven’t cleaned out your RSS reader.

A few weeks after I returned to L.A., for the purpose of applying to an internship I furnished When in Roam as proof that I have a blog, but I qualified the attachment as languishing — the “plight of travel blogs whose authors return home.”

That’s what I did, and that’s what explains the silence. I returned home.

I’ll be honest. You missed out on quite a bit — an entire city or two, in fact. Blame it on burnout.

Beijing-bound
After several weeks bumming around in Shanghai, I realized with a start one characteristically lazy afternoon in Leslie’s apartment that I had less than a week remaining in China. With that, I grabbed my bags (and dutiful friend Karen) and hopped the fast train to Beijing. The fast train taking 10 hours and the slow train taking 12.

Little did Karen and I know, our farewell Papa John’s the night before in Leslie’s living room left us all with a little parting gift: some throat bug that spent a day or two sprouting tentacles in our systems.

After reaching Beijing, I touched base with Leslie, who with an appropriate amount of misery complained of a sore throat. What a coincidence; I had one too. Oh, and for that matter, so did Karen.

And so I spent my last few days in China trying to make the best of Beijing, a city I had never before been to. I had a choice: party hardy, or sleep well and get myself right. Turns out I mostly chose the latter. In fact, I was mostly better by the time I spent a day climbing the steep inclines of the Great Wall at Mutianyu — but that’s what did me in, again. I spent another day bedridden after that, swilling Gatorade and popping Tylenol capsules like Flintstone’s chewables.

Spitting like a local, or what comes around

Part Two: What Comes Around (Read part one)
Right by Leslie’s apartment building is a small supermarket that sells basic goods and vegetables that look like they’ve been run over by cars. In this supermarket works a short, weathered-looking security guard who loves to make conversation.

Leslie gave me some backstory soon after I got to Shanghai: Once the guard learned that Leslie was Taiwanese (“I KNEW you were Taiwanese!!”), he began to regularly prod her about Taiwan. Things like, “I don’t get it — what’s so great about Taiwan?” and “Does Taiwan have (insert something inane here)? … See, China’s better!”

So I had been warned. Chinese people sometimes have a chip on their shoulder about China’s supposed superiority, even if no one else is making any claims to the contrary.

Well, I guess I was. One day down in the supermarket, the security guard, who at this point knew me as an American, interrupted my shopping to ask me how their supermarket compared to those of the United States. Annoyed by where I knew he was going with this line of questioning — and at that very moment sighing at the market’s lack of selection — I decided to see how far brutal honesty would go with this man. After all, he asked.

“Uh … American ones are … better,” I said before strolling away.

He found me again: “They’re more or less the same, aren’t they?” he offered by way of unilateral declaration.

“American ones are bigger,” I said, for one thing, but not wanting to encourage him, I said nothing more. I strolled away again. (See? Casual.)

“We have big ones too!” he protested, raising his voice in my direction as I shrugged him off and left.

This last image is a good one to hold on to as you next picture me grasping the rim of a toilet bowl at 2 a.m. coughing and sputtering pink. This, and the puking granny of Louis Vuitton. Karma has a great way of teaching humility, or at least reminding you that what goes around does come around, or in this case, up.

I can offer some color on how it happened: I’d gotten sick like that only three times (knock wood) in my adult life. The two previous times were both in Taiwan, just last year. And viral gastroenteritis is contagious. Did you know? I didn’t. Leslie had become acutely ill the day before. The morning of the day after she got sick, I happily popped a piece of toast she had been too ill to finish into my mouth — by night I was foaming like a carsick dog.

Walking home with Karen, I spat into every other bush I saw. This is how, after seven days in Shanghai, I became Chinese and began spitting in public.

~

A few days ago I finally set foot in Shanghai’s Old City, which is oddly confined to an apple-shaped district in the city’s southeast corner. After accidentally wandering through a half-inhabited, half-torn-down street, I abruptly found Shanghai’s quintessential tourist trap: suddenly every building had curved roofs and curved tiles, and was painted a pleasant Chinese maroon.

After about two weeks on Shanghai’s alternating streets of relentless modernity and ramshackle 20th century poverty, it was like, I don’t know, walking into a time warp.

Two faces of Shanghai, or what goes around …

A story about karma should be structured like this: Part One, What Goes Around; and Part Two, What Comes Around. Let’s see how well I hew to this complex formula.

Part One: What Goes Around
I go back with Leslie four years, and with Karen a whopping 12 now. Leslie I met abroad when we both studied in Tokyo, Karen I met in high school English. Coincidentally, both of them moved to Shanghai within two weeks of each other, then ended up living on the same street, two blocks apart — this just a couple months before I was to visit Shanghai, so I anticipated a lot of fun exploring the city that was new to all of us.

Shanghai has long had a reputation for being the most cosmopolitan city in China — even more so than the capital, Beijing. In my mind it lived as a city equal parts Chinese and Western, a place modern and continuously morphing. The book I just finished, “When We Were Orphans,” by Kazuo Ishiguro, trades on the image of 1930s Shanghai as simultaneously sultry and crime-ridden. It’s a place where high rollers clink wine glasses in elegant halls while rickshaws drag by on the streets below, where the opium trade sinks Chinese society into a sick torpor while enriching the lives of the English. It’s a place where anything and everything happens.

With the above in mind, I was ready for modern Shanghai to be a dizzying, sensuous delight. With two good friends in tow, I was ready to explore the most outward-looking Chinese city. Having shaken off the events of the last century, Shanghai was eager to reclaim its place in Asia as the most diverse, bustling, wealthy, and sophisticated; it was where busy and sexy people would push past each other on the sidewalk between appointments, where the blaze of skyscrapers at night would rival Hong Kong’s. I was ready to hit the town with my friends to see China’s Tokyo, or London, or New York.

And then I got a bit of a rude awakening.

Our first day on the streets was educational. The Shanghainese, as Christopher Banks in “Orphans” also observes, feel no compunctions in shoving you aside in crowds, or on the metro. This wasn’t too different from my experience in Seoul, but there was something more gruff and insensitive in the shoving here, if that makes any sense. OK, China has a billion and a half people; I gave them the benefit of the doubt. But then every other guy on the street was shooting snot rockets onto the pavement, if not hocking loogies. Underwear hung on clotheslines in the public park. This wouldn’t have fazed me anywhere else in China, but in the country’s most reputedly cosmopolitan city?

There was a lot to be confused about. Neither my friends Leslie nor Karen could explain some of the wenhua chayi (“cultural differences”), as Karen calls them, but having had a couple of months head start, they could be slightly more blase about some jarring, if amusing, things.

Leslie related the mystery of the puking grannies. Why, she asked a colleague one day, does she see so many old people throwing up on the streets of Shanghai at 10 in the morning? Isn’t it a little early to be drinking? she pondered tentatively. She was walking on West Nanjing Road one morning and saw an old lady hurling prodigiously on the pavement outside a Louis Vuitton. (At hearing this anecdote, I burst out laughing, maybe too hard, too long — and subsequently, every time it was referenced again, I laughed again as if it was the first time I had heard it.)

Leslie’s colleague explained: they’re not drunk, they’re from small villages and they’ve never ridden in cars before. That’s where the bus stops, so that’s where they get off to throw up. “Sometimes you can see traces of vomit on the sidewalk,” Leslie said.

On Schmap

I didn’t know about this website until they asked me if they could use one of my Flickr photos in their L.A. guide, but it’s pretty cool. Schmap is an online city guide that includes interactive maps of cities and suggested sights. I found the Kafka Museum in their Prague guide when my Rough Guide didn’t have it.

But more importantly, they use photos taken by amateurs in their guides, and they’re using two of mine now in their fourth edition: one of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles and the other of Giordano’s in Chicago.

Hong Kong, my reintroduction to Asia

Five months ago, when I first set foot in Europe, I wished I had a friend with me around every corner to share every new thing I saw. I’ve pretty much gotten over that now; every new thing I see, I see alone. Everything takes on a romantic haze, like I’m wandering alone in the wild, in a “Crouching Tiger”-like jianghu world.

But when I landed in Hong Kong three days ago, I wished again I had someone with me to witness the jarring discontinuity that Hong Kong represented against five months in Europe. How medieval and Gothic and Art Nouveau buildings hundreds of years old were replaced by towering skyscrapers, how languages that were impenetrable to me were replaced by another language similarly impenetrable but at the same time familiar and reassuring. Then also how there was a surreal, comforting continuity from London to Hong Kong in the place names — Salisbury, Victoria, Edinburgh — and in the zebra crossings, and in the electric plugs that I didn’t have to change. Sometimes, talking to fellow travelers from Canada and England, I forgot, as I often did in Europe, where I was and that I am in fact an entire continent away now.

The first night here, off to meet my Cousin Lindy, I hopped a ferry across the harbor and it was Venice all over again — water all around, the hum of the ferry, and across, the seduction of lights. Only this time, instead of Giudecca, it was Kowloon, and instead of the warm glow of the Santa Maria church dome, it was an undulating rectangular mass of blinking skyscrapers. I was entranced all the same.

~

It’s the city of the future. You walk around without ever touching the ground, footbridge to lobby to footbridge, escalator to escalator, walkway to walkway, in a sort of air-conditioned shopper’s paradise. It’s like Hong Kongers are a futuristic metropolitan race of people, elevated permanently above the normal plane of existence, beeping from one place to another with their Octopus cards.

~

And yet there are places like Chungking Mansions, a chaotic hulk of a building where African and South Asian entrepreneurs congregate, and also, incidentally, where some of the cheapest accommodation is in the city. It’s got a certain notoriety among Hong Kongers who see it as a shady market of drug dealing and who knows what else. This makes it all the more exciting.

My hostel is run by Taiwanese expats. The bed is too short, so my feet dangle over the edge while I sleep. It’s also abnormally narrow; I haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep in the last three days partly, I think, because of a constant fear that I might roll over the edge in middle of the night. Attached to the room, quite unexpectedly, is a tiny, unused kitchen. It doesn’t belong there. Or maybe the room doesn’t belong next to the kitchen. There isn’t so much a shower in this place as there is a shower nozzle attached unthinkingly above a toilet, in a bathroom that looks like it’s not meant to house anything other than a toilet. Living in this place is an exercise in patience and flexibility, but it’s also, as my guidebook calls it, one of the most “atmospheric” places I’ve ever lived in.

But let me just add this by way of afterthought: as fun as Hong Kong has been, I’m off now to Shanghai, for what might be an even better time.