Where am I?
The past three days has provided strong proof that I am in a city, if not a country, strongly divided on which direction in which it wants to go – culturally speaking, that is. I’m not talking experiences that are mildly amusing for their cultural differences. I’m talking serious confusion when it comes to cultural heritage and the passive or often grudging acquisition of a Western mentality.
Walking home late Friday night, a group of us catches what we believe to be a man in the act of trapping his next meal. A small cage holds a stray cat (or an unfortunate pet on the prowl). The man has the cage door angled down towards the opening of a canvas bag. We walk quickly by, trying to forget the scene. Today, I read in a weekly Shanghai mag that a couple of men have been seen around the city trapping cats late at night and have even been seen strangling or killing the cats on the spot. Quoting the article, “the men are catching the strays with the aim of harvesting their meat…” Are people really so hungry in this city that this is necessary? Am I so naïve?
A little girl was standing on the other side of the security door of my apartment this evening when I walked out to buy dinner. She couldn’t have been more than seven or eight years old. In the girl’s arms were three large bottles of beer. A couple of explanations for this scene: the girl’s parents own a convenience store and when the store received a call for a beer delivery, they sent their daughter or the little girl’s parents sent her out for refills when they found they were too lazy to do it themselves. What does this laxity say about the informal relationship between the Chinese and alcohol? What does it say about my own American values that I was disturbed by the scene?
Every morning and afternoon, I walk by a small plot that appears to have been a shack at one point and which is now a grassy courtyard between two remaining shacks on Shanxi Lu. The other day, as I approached the courtyard on my way to school, I found a boy of maybe seventeen years, legs spread, facing a corner of building, closest to the sidewalk, urinating. As I walked by, I wasn’t more than two or three feet from him and he turned to stare me down with a sneer as if I had chosen to take a shortcut through the sanctity of his bathroom. Returning from school this afternoon, I was again approaching the courtyard and this time, on the opposite corner of building, again, as close to the sidewalk as a person could get, while still being IN the courtyard, a man of forty or fifty years was standing, legs spread, urinating. I stared at my shoes and scooted by, but couldn’t help noticing the spray as it bounced off the wall and landed dangerously close to my shoes. I hopped into the street to avoid further contact. It isn’t as if I’m on a little, winding side street where I don’t belong. I’m walking on a MAJOR street during the BUSIEST time of day. These people certainly aren’t homeless. I think it simply has to do with the fact that they have to go to the bathroom, they don’t want to wait, here’s a courtyard, might as well water the grass while also relieving oneself. I couldn’t help but wonder what people would do if a woman decided to use the restroom in the same spot.
Yesterday, on my way to school, I heard a loud plastic crunch and pop coming from the street to my right. I looked to see what had made the noise. Traffic was bumper to bumper and on first glance, nothing looked unusual. Each car was sitting perfectly still with several inches of space in between. Then I saw a man get out of his taxi and come to the back of the car. That’s when I noticed that the bumper of his taxi had been smashed in. The bumper wasn’t the only damaged part either. Part of the body of the car looked badly mangled as well. The culprit stepped out of a shiny black Mercedes, cell phone in one hand, half-eaten Baozi in the other. He came running to the front of his car to see what damage he had inflicted on his own vehicle. It looked spotless. He then casually glanced at the damage done to the already beat-up VW Jetta taxi, shrugged and started to walk back to the driver’s side of his Benz. The taxi driver looked as if he were going to complain for a minute, then he too walked back to the door of his car, got in and drove on. By this time the horns were deafening and he must have known nothing would come of arguing with the obviously wealthy destroyer of his bumper.
Last Friday, I had my first gag-reflex from the garbage on the street in the morning on the way to school. Fish-heads sat rotting in the already hot morning sun. All kinds of garbage in various states of decomposition lined the street and it took me a block to get away from the stench. As if to confirm that the day was unusually putrid, a man stood, hand on tree, vomiting into the decorative rocks at the foot of the tree. People walked past, making sure to look everywhere but at the man and I almost asked if he was alright but realized I didn’t really care, and just wanted to move on past him. Soon after passing, I heard him clearing his throat, hawking up phlegm and spitting it into the pretty rocks that someone had been paid to lay out in an appealing pattern beneath the shade of the tree.
I play chicken with mopeds and bicyclists, but it has gotten out of hand as I’ve started playing chicken with buses bearing down on me. I become triumphant when a bus driver runs a red light while I’m crossing the street legally and I manage to step right in its path so that it has to slam on its breaks. Most pedestrians do the same as me, but sometimes, even the Chinese wait for the crazy bus to pass. I’ve found that navigating traffic in Shanghai has literally knocked a screw loose in my head. I gave myself the chills today when I imagined the bus not being able to stop or the breaks giving out and me being a pancake with no one to care to scrape me up off the road. I’ve got a new lease on life and plan to be extra careful when crossing the streets from now on.
I feel like things are happening too fast in Shanghai. I feel like the Chinese want to be Western and the Westerners that come to Shanghai want the Chinese to be Chinese. Everyone manages to disappoint. Tourists come to SH (even Chinese from other parts of the country) expecting to see what all the hubbub is about. They expect to see glimmers of SH from when it was considered the “whore of China” or the “Paris of the Orient”. What they see instead is a cosmopolitan city growing quickly on the backs of migrants who don’t understand the new SH or the old SH. The migrants are here to make some fast cash to send home. They don’t have permanent homes. They sleep in their stores or on the streets or at the SH railway station. They wear dirty clothes and don’t have the privilege of a shower. Then you have the wealthy Shanghainese women who use skin-whitening makeup and wear evening dresses and stiletto heels to work every day. The Chinese I’ve met are fiercely proud of their “heritage” and “culture” and country, but when you ask them to explain certain customs or rituals or to discuss leaders, both past and present, they have little explanation. On the other hand, they can list American presidents, know foreign cities and major landmarks and seem to know every television show from the US from LOST to SEX AND THE CITY. When I tell people where I’m from (Seattle AND Alabama), the first words off lips are, “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Sweet Home Alabama”.
The best example of the confusion I’m speaking of that I can give is this: each morning, I pass a small business that appears to be a soldering/welding machine shop. Usually, by the time I’m walking by, the wife is sitting in a wooden reclining chair with her big baby boy, lazily watching as her husband and other works squat in the middle of the sidewalk cutting metal, welding, grinding parts, etc. with no protective gear whatsoever. Wearing only flip flops on their feet, usually shirtless, these men manage to work all day without inflicting major injuries on themselves or each other. Meanwhile, a block away, as I wait for the light to change, a woman flies by on a moped. She’s got black spandex gloves running the length of her arms, a blanket over her legs, a white shawl over her shoulders which flaps in the breeze, a sun hat, a full-face visor (the kind you’d imagine a welder wearing) and in one hand, an open umbrella. The women around her are similarly protected from the sun.
