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.
This was real cultural anthropology, I thought, and I had a chance to see the artifacts with my own eyes. I insisted Leslie point out traces of any pavement puke she saw. Meanwhile, the three of us went to Xintiandi, a reclaimed complex of shikumen, traditional brick houses that have been transformed with pitch-perfect yuppie sensibility into — what else? — an outdoor shopping mall.
Suddenly, we went from granny pants hanging in the park to a French bakery, overly expensive restaurants, and lots and lots of (I’ll say it) white people. The next day we visited Taikang Road Art Center, a tiny warren of alleys that has undergone a transformation from poor and rundown into cutting edge and hipster (sort of like New York’s Meatpacking District). Taikang, like Xintiandi, was bustling with an abnormal concentration of white yuppies trolling for exotic things like Western brunch, while a stroll 30 seconds out the edge of the main alley would have had you find a woman squatting on a corner cutting vegetables.
This sort of begged the question: has Shanghai changed between 1930 and now? Then too there was the International Settlement, and a divide between the well-to-do Europeans and the lower-class Chinese in the Chinese city. Has Shanghai reawakened to its cosmopolitan potential, only to invite back into its borders the International Settlement, but this time divided among little districts like Xintiandi and arty (and equally expatty) enclaves like Taikang Road Art Center?
In Shanghai, on the streets of the haves, expats and other relatively well-off Chinese mill to and fro between glittering high rises and Starbucks cafes. Pedestrian and bike traffic is strictly enforced on every corner. On the streets of the have-nots, poorer Shanghainese denizens peddle pirated DVDs, drag car-sized loads of styrofoam on their bikes, and negotiate traffic intersections like warzone crossfire in slow motion. Expats seem to be seldom found on the streets of the have-nots.
I think it’s partly this bizarre juxtaposition that had me laughing so uncontrollably at Leslie’s puking granny story. There’s Louis Vuitton, the staple of coveted luxury goods in one of Shanghai’s most exclusive shopping complexes — all the proof anyone needs that Shanghai can do it like the best of cities. And then there is the helpless old woman throwing up in front of the LV — all the proof anyone needs that Shanghai, or China even, has another face that the hype can’t hide. And when you need to puke, you need to puke, right? Louis Vuitton himself couldn’t convince you not to.
But after a few days here, despite the rough-and-tumble atmosphere on Shanghai’s streets, I had to agree that it is an incredibly vibrant and cosmopolitan city, indeed in some ways more so than Taipei. (It’s one of the reasons people like Leslie come to Shanghai from Taipei.) But Shanghai’s reputation as cosmopolitan, again, comes from only certain, shinier parts of the city, and access to that side, it seems to me, is afforded to precious few people here, many or most of whom are not even Shanghainese.
Coming soon — Part Two: What Comes Around
Nice tease! Entering into this post fully expecting a well-rounded tale of karma, your cliff hanger ending is enough to keep me wondering, “what will happen to you in the conclusion of your narrative?” Are you going to throw up in the streets (my personal hope)? Or is there some small-town payback coming your way?
Quite the compelling yarn you weave. I’ll miss your stories probably less than you’ll miss remembering your adventures to write about them.
What a pal. Sadly, I didn’t throw up on the designated sidewalk in front of Louis Vuitton. But telling the various stories has made me a collector of good vomit stories.
One, in which Leslie suddenly and violently needs to throw up in a Taiwanese department store. Her sister, who has just bought a dress there, pulls it out to let her vomit in the bag. She does, only the vomit flies unimpeded through the bottom of the bag and onto the floor. That’s when they dart their eyes around and make their hasty getaway.
Two, in which a friend has a strange complex about letting people see him drunk. He sequesters himself on an apartment balcony and hurls over the edge onto the sidewalk below, pausing and holding it down in between passing pedestrians out of consideration for innocent strangers.