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.

Only The Onion can adequately capture how I felt. Ironically, they’re jokingly describing a man’s accidental sojourn into New York’s Chinatown:

Unsure of whether I had mistakenly traveled halfway across the world or walked through some sort of mystic gate into another time and space, I found myself wandering without aim or purpose. For how long, I do not know, as the Rolex watch I had purchased during my ordeal stopped working almost immediately.

I do not know where this mysterious “Chinese Zone” came from, but there it was, in the middle of the city, like some bizarre “Asian Center for Commerce and Trade.” What it was called—this “Localized Community of Residents Originally from the Far East”—I haven’t the slightest idea, though no mere label seems capable of describing it.

And there it was. The Yuyuan Bazaar, full of Chinese snacks and knick-knacks and pretty Chinese-looking buildings, was like Shanghai’s Chinatown.

I don’t know why, but this odd revelation rounded out my experience of Shanghai. This is what Shanghai was missing. Over the next few days I eased into a rhythm here that in some ways echoed my five months in Taipei — free of obligations and full of food and companionship.

When Leslie wasn’t cooking, we’d eat out, or order in. Or I’d bring home pot stickers and Taiwanese root beer and pop in a pirated DVD I bought on the street. Every other night was movie night. And then one day I looked at the calendar and saw that I had a week left in China. My ambitions to travel to more remote parts of the country were dashed, and now here I am, two more nights in the city that I don’t want to let go of.

Funny, how things can turn around like that.