Artifacts
I’ve been thinking a lot about the past. China’s past, that is. I’m reading books that others have written about China and I’m watching the small buildings along my street quickly slip away in the daily rubble that represents Shanghai’s growth. I’m wondering, “What point is China missing in quickly destroying, as fast as it can build, the past and the history of its previous culture?” I’m also wondering what will become of China if no one remembers what came before?
I went to the Bibliotheca Zi-Ka-Wei Saturday afternoon. My guidebook, which has long been my bible these past several weeks, made mention of the Bibliotheca as if it were something not to be missed. I still think it to be something not to be missed, but I’m wondering why the caretakers of the library don’t understand its tourist-dollar potential?
I arrived to the Bibliotheca at 1:30pm. The guidebook mentioned that tours (in English) began promptly at 2pm and that reservations should be made ahead of time. I called on Friday to be told, “Please come at 2pm – no need for reservation!” I didn’t believe the woman I spoke with and so I cleared my calendar and arrived thirty minutes early, thinking I might be there until the last tour at 4pm. Quite the opposite: I arrived to an almost empty reading room. There was one other foreigner and when I walked up to the reception desk the woman said, “Of course you are here for the tour. We will start in thirty minutes. No need for register. It will not be a big group.”
From what I had read in the guidebook, Jesuit priests living in Shanghai built the Bibliotheca in the early 1800’s. Before the tour, I found a large photo album with photos of the priests and the Chinese orphans they were given charge of. The faces of these children still haunt me tonight, a good day after seeing them. I’m going to think that the person taking the photo asked them to look as unhappy as possible as the exposure would take a long time and smiling would be too difficult to maintain. But the looks weren’t just simple frowns; there was sorrow, hatred, contempt and anger in the faces of these young boys. They were made to wear the clothes of the Jesuits and the man in charge of them, to the side in the photo, looked absolutely horrendous. He had a huge, bristly beard, pinched cheeks, a sallow complexion and tired, evil eyes. Had I been his charge, I most likely, would have run away. I stopped looking at photos after coming to this one of the priest with his poor little flock of slave-sheep.
I sat down and started reading the book I had brought. Thirty minutes passed quickly and the woman tapped me on the shoulder to tell me the tour would begin. There was a French woman, an Australian man and two Taiwanese women on the tour with me. We walked outside of the second-story reading room French doors onto the upper balcony of the building and the tour guide told us that the building had once been the residence of the Jesuit priests who ran the Bibliotheca in the early 1800’s. We walked a few paces to the entrance of another building that butted up against the former residence. The guide opened the door onto a dimly lit room that smelled of history itself. Everything was gilded, shiny-brown wood. Stacks upon stacks of books were organized into rows upon rows. The subjects were called out in Latin and each book had a sticker on it with a number. I asked when the oldest book in the collection dated to. The guide said the 1550’s. I asked if I could see any of the books close up. The guide said, “Of course! But first you need a library card and to get a library card you have to go to the Shanghai Library and APPLY for one”. So, in other words, no, you can’t look at any of the books. We were allowed to walk in between the stacks but couldn’t touch anything and couldn’t take photos.
After about five minutes, we were ready for the rest of the tour and the guide said, “Are you through looking?” We said yes, and she replied, “Thank you for coming to the Bibliotheca Zi-Ka-Wei, have a nice day!” She turned and left the room waiting for us to file out. The Australian said, “I waited 45 minutes for a five minute tour with no information?” To me, this is what the biggest problem is with the past in China. They’ve caught on to the idea of tourism, but they’ve yet to figure out how to really present the past. Or, more importantly, they’re not really ready to deal with the past just yet and so they try not to offer too much of an explanation, lest it lead to other, more embarrassing questions.
As soon as I left the nearly deserted Bibliotheca, I had only to walk a few blocks to find out where everyone was on this particular Saturday afternoon. The malls.
The Bibliotheca happens to be in a part of town where the fastest thing growing are malls and their competition with each other. I came across a five-way intersection and at each two-way intersection, a huge mall stood staring down the competition on the other side. The amount of people was nauseating. Going from the extreme calm of the inner sanctum of the Bibliotheca with its 560,000 volumes from centuries past, to the fluorescent high-paced volume and decadence of the malls was really mind-boggling. I walked through one mall on my way back to the subway and found the ground floor full of options. There must have been twenty different sweets and pastries vendors – all selling the same thing! There were stalls upon stalls of glittery, shiny jewelry and hair accessories…all the same but displayed in different ways and depending on the fall of the light and the way it played off of the rhinestones in the baubles, girls were running up grabbing and demanding as if they had found the only hair clip in the world worth having. And yet, as soon as they ripped it out of the next customer’s hand, they were harshly bargaining the price down with the exhausted stall vendors. “2 kuai?!?! No WAY, this is worthless and YOU want 2 kuai! I won’t PAY that!!!” – “Well, then go somewhere else!” – “I will!” – “Then go!” – “I’m going…2 kuai…RIDICULOUS” – “Why haven’t you GONE then!?!?” – “2 kuai is RIDICULOUS, but if you INSIST, I suppose I HAVE to pay it, Ah! I’ll only give you 1.5 kuai!!” – “Okay”.
My head was swarming from the high-pitched shouting, laughter, and overall weekend enjoyment and I certainly couldn’t keep up. On my way to the subway I noticed that the malls have everything that an American mall has but to a much, much bigger scale. And what Chinese malls have that I’ve seen lacking in American malls is this: the customers. I’ve never seen so many people out on a Saturday afternoon, willing to spend their valuable free time fighting with perfect strangers for goods that aren’t really all that good. And then, when they’re exhausted, instead of going home, they stop for a bit in the movie theater or in one of dozens of “refreshment shops” – little oases that sell all kinds of extravagant alcohol-free drinks in environments much like the bars on the Bund. Then, they take the underground labyrinths to the mall next door and they don’t go home until they’ve hit all five malls, each of which sells different items than the mall before because even with twelve to fifteen floors each, in China, there’s no patience allowed for crossover.
And this is all fine and dandy, but what happens when this generation of spenders wakes up or spends unwisely? Where will they find sustenance? What will they draw confidence from? With no past, how can they possibly look to the future? I believe that those that suffered during the Cultural Revolution want nothing more than for their children to live worry-free lives, and who blames them? But these children are growing up naïve and they lack the knowledge that a people can learn from their mistakes or misfortunes.
As Shanghai grows up around me, I wonder when the children of Shanghai will grow up? The imbalance is already very visible. Foreigners already run most of the city and Beijing has too much to worry about with the 2008 Olympics to think carefully about China’s past and how to preserve it for generations to come. For now, China is unknowingly relying on outsiders to do this job. People like Peter Hessler and Ted Fishman are writing about the things that disappear daily in China – centuries-old neighborhoods in Beijing, relics and propaganda materials from the Cultural Revolution, cities and artifacts hidden under the flood waters created by the 3 Gorges Dam, and few Chinese care to record that which will be lost forever so soon.
In fifty years, there is so much about China, which threatens to be lost. And what will China have to differentiate itself from the Western megalopolises it denigrates if it doesn’t recognize this threat? Maybe I’ve found my own future: helping to record and save China’s past?
