Shanghai Noons, Shanghai Nights

There is one thing you can’t miss in Shanghai.

It’s not the fact that the only red you see are located is the belt in the displays of the new summer collection at Guess, or that the only pictures of Mao displayed are locked in a case of 20th century art at the Shanghai museum. Nor is it that the only apparent remnants of the grand socialist society lie in signs promoting ‘’One child, one family,’’ posted along the fences of side streets, largely unnoticed by a family with three children strolling past who can more than afford to pay the nominal fine while baby girls born five hours northwest are either aborted or left on the side of the road.

It’s not the Goliath high rises lit up like the Vegas strip, complete with all it’s tacky revelry like the busty Shanghai ad girls of the 20s that drew many a white boy to the Orient. Only instead of having ‘’Little Lotus’’ or ‘’Fragrant Blossom’’ [why are the always associated with flowers?] promising cigarettes and a good time, the new ladies of the Far East fantasy are dubbed ‘’nikon’’, ‘’toshiba’’ or ‘’hsbc bank’’, enticing western grandsons with the new global-economic frontier and fortunes measured in RMBs.

It’s not the number of Laowais I literally run into on the side of the road, the ones jogging past the Shanghai Pearl glistening in all their sweaty glory while the true natives look on in wonder. They are everywhere, rooting every nook and cranny of the city, like a summer sandstorm sweeping over the continent from the Gobi desert or the equivalent of Euro-trash infesting New York City streets. I thank and curse them for the fact that I can get around the city fine subsisting on English, Cantonese, with maybe a bit of Spanish in between when I want to order a churro, and for seducing me to break my language vows to Mandarin with it’s oh-so-irresistible and understandable twists of the tongue.

It’s not the number of condos or high rises undergoing mitosis everyday, a new bacteria that molest the beautiful city skyline. With price tags to beat the national GDP, they are the essential definition of ‘’gu jin bing chun’’, or old and new coexisting together. Blame it on either a sub-par contractor with a depraved sense of humor or land disputes, but every single one of these new bourgeois habitats seem perfectly ill-suited for it’s location, usually right across the trafficked street from crumbling stone ghettos that miraculously survived the tumultuous attacks in the first half of the 20th century, the level of disparity between one neighbor to the other is hard to wrap my mind around—one is chauffeured around in a benz and sips on imported wine from the Napa Valley worth 100 kuai for half a glass, possibly barely what the neighbor can pull together from a month of selling watermelon on the corner of the road.

It’s not the little voice in your head which slowly turns up the volume dial as you stumble across the revelation—‘’Is this country developing too fast for it’s citizens to keep up to?’’
What you really can’t miss are the starbucks. I’ve been volleying between china and the states since the age of nine, but it was not till stumbling upon the green mermaid at every twist and bend that I finally realized—holy god in heaven, I have found the promised motherland, and it reeks of caffeine.

And that’s just the way I like it. After a entire week on our so-called ‘’social studies’’ trip with our teachers to better understand Chinese culture, I have, instead, developed a newfound appreciation for the states and the fact that I can get a decent stake there for a fraction of what they’re trying to rip me off with here. Instead of actually pay attention as the CEOs of affluent companies around the Yangtze River Delta, I slept and pondered on my growing disgust at the way in which success in the Chinese economy is dependent solely on money and connections and how I would never be able to and never want to fit into a society of false friendships for the sake of political strategy. At night, while the rest of the HBA members left to party it up in the infamous shanghai nightlife [better get your kicks now, folks, most of you won’t be able to hit up a club for a year after eternity when we return to the states], I, not completely willfully, spent most of my time in a less-than-spectacular dorm that brought on uncanny unpleasant flashbacks to my stays in the country, watching my Sex and the City collection, with American meals at tourist central to make up for it.

Walking down the very streets I had also graced almost exactly a year ago, I began to wonder what had changed in the interval since I was last in this city. A year ago, I had found my way to shanghai for the day with my father, two little cousins, and an uncle who I reluctantly claim familial ties to. In 2008, I had believed that it would be my first and only visit to the city for a long while. Little did I realize that I would be back so soon, but I found myself realizing [yet again] that, in actuality, a millennium had passed since I was last there. A year ago, shanghai would be exotic as it would get, a city of glitz and glamour I had never laid eyes on where I was a complete stranger with no means of communication with the locals. I had no clue then that I had stumbled into the same metropolis as people that I would soon cross paths with in a little more than a month, and that I would forge ties that would have me hopping around china to catch up with my new old friends. Asking myself a derivative of the same question I asked as I moved out of the freshman dorms, I wondered how the girl a year ago would react if she saw me walking down the street.

And finally, this is what I have to show for a week of living it up and down and all around Shanghai; the thesis of my term paper which is sure to skyrocket to the topof the Shanghai Time’s must read list and give the photocopied Bernanke novel being sold on the side of the street a run for its money—

Shanghai’s new economy is a blue kitty cat.

Yep.

Try to wrap your minds around that.