dusk fire

I don't have to eat meals in Shanghai. I just walk down the street and grab something almost everywhere. Or a bowl of noddles or a little dish that I actually have to wait for in a small restaurant. But that's barely a meal. In any case, I wasn't necessarily confident this would work at fist; I just did it by accident and by default. But it all became clear that I was right to - maybe the second or third day I was in Shanghai.
I walked down some street in the relative vicinity of my hostel perhaps, or maybe it was somewhere else altogether. I can't remember. But when I saw this woman's eyes focused and lit onto her fire and wok and noodles, damned if I was going anywhere for the next five minutes or so. She added a dash of 5 or 6 things, and broke up the egg as she flipped the noodles over with a precision that was, frankly, shocking. Those lit eyes – I really don't see that too often. And certainly not from people cooking on the street.
As if it were any surprise, the food matched up. It really does work like that. Statistically speaking, passion leads to results. And that's something I'll believe unless you can grind it out of me over a period of long, painful, horrible years.

quicker

The same evening, off the same West Nanjing road, I turned my head and found us on a smaller street lined with dumpling shops and any other kind of little chinese restaurant you can imagine. Neon signs, two floors each, lines of people, a curved street that you can see about half of at a time. After eating 小龙包 (a type of dumpling) from a famous yellow-signed shop that I don't remember the name of, we walked around the corner back to Nanjing Road, only to decide the evening wasn't done. As we breezed past a dozen or so doors, my friend chose our blue, coconut, juice, and tea lounge, and she led me right past the three waiters hanging out in the front without a glance, owning the place up and into seats by a table three from the stairs. Silly waiters, good food, drink, and a damn nice time.

quick turn

We walked away from the park, down a part of Nanjing Road, the main tourist and shopping drag. I live near there. It's kind of the heart of Shanghai, actually. And I would never call Wangfujing the heart of Beijing or 5th avenue the heart of New York. But what else can I call it in Shanghai? That's my tiny limited experience talking, though. In any case,

She showed me down the west part of the road, which is a little quieter than the ridiculous section near my hostel (which, by the way, is on a pretty well insulated side-street). Trees lined the streets, and of course all the shops were open - they stay open until 10. Plenty of people with drinks and each other in each hand, smiling. Then all of a sudden the sounds I'd grown used to vanished, and we heard our footsteps step down an alley of old apartments. We could have been in Chengdu, Beijing, perhaps Great Barrington, maybe an old section of San Francisco, but definitely not the Shanghai I knew. As we walked down this little street and I gaped at its peace and warmth, my friend quickly informed me that 这个地方会快拆掉了。In other words, that place won't be in Shanghai for long.

finally finding words, albiet with typos

A city is really only a sum of its inhabitants. Sometimes a city can become more than it seems at first because people come in and they attract more and they attract more. But at the end of the day, the only reason people say on city is any better, weell the only way I can judge a city, anyway, is the sume of its inhabitents and their attitudes towards life. You can add up the people in New York you get along with, and subtract the ones that piss you off, and you’ll get a rating for new york. You can do this for any city, anywhere.
I thought Shanghai was soulless, because that’s what lonely planet said. Then I came, and I saw people having fun . I The first thing I thought was, “lonely planet isn’doesn’t want Chinese people to have fun.” But guess what – I don’t want to have that kind of fun, so the fun-havers can’t really go in my positive column.
I created this blog not knowing what I would find in Shanghai. But what I found were a few people with the powre to dominate a group of acquaintances and random-people-on-the-street and busnessmen and pretty girls and shiny taxies that weigh down my calculation. Man, it’s reall aboyut the people. So how am I supposed to express that in a blog? What am I supposed to do – say “we talked about this, and then about this, and wow boy didn’t we connect and wasn’t it great. Or I could put my new friends in a box and say this person is like this and this person is like this. It’s one thing to do that after someone dies, but with them still alive it just doen’s feel right. Well, certinly not on a freaking blog, or anything public.
So that said, Ill convey a few moments, focussing on the environment around us.

unexpected and damn confusing

What’s happening to me, when I walk down Shanghai for a few minutes and meet three people? When the first two are two halves of a well-dressed and good looking recently graduated couple, looking for jobs, and the third one talks with me for three hours about patterns of living and 社会 in Shanghai (and, for my part, in the US)? Am I breaking through some key barrier, or am I just finding new ones?

I’d met that third one in a Starbucks. My friend back at school told me that it was a place for good conversation. 我没想到。 I can’t explain it all here, because it wouldn’t be fair to her. I still don’t understand what happened, except that within one day I’d found someone who spoke of things that exactly fit what I’d been looking for in China. Someone who sees how Chinese society and institutions affect people every day and how people react to them.

I guess the bottom line is that my Chinese still isn’t good enough. I couldn’t access so much of what she explained to me. Reduced even to just following gestures, I plucked out sentences here and phrases there.

We walked outside together, among the status-driven and the towering centers of loyalty and lies. It felt good, being in Shanghai. Not because I hate it and knew we were better; because I saw its energy and had begun to understand it. My guess is she does hate her city, but maybe she won’t forever.

an almost good start

He looked a little rude. We bumped elbows and I held my ground. I’m sick of having to do that, and it’s not a China thing. I don’t quite relate to that guy in the hostel who is sick of Chinese people. I just deserve some space on the plane, and sometimes you have to push back to get it.

How did we start talking? It wasn’t like India, where he would have asked me if it was my first time and whether I wanted to stay at his house. In fact, he didn’t look back when he left, and he only gave me his card after I’d given him my email address. He’d seemed so excited about it before…

The guy spoke English to me and Shanghainese to the woman to my right – I doubt it was his wife because this woman probably doesn’t live in Canada. No English, and I’m sure no French either. She found out halfway through that I spoke Mandarin, and that made for conversation about vegetarianism and the right way to kill Chickens. I don’t deny that there is a right way, but should I have as readily agreed? The last thing I remember is her making fun of my forgetting how to say Subway (in Shanghainese to the guy – not sure whether she thought the tones on 地铁 would throw me off).

She’d found out I spoke 普通话 when I heard her entreating the stewardess, “牛肉没有了吗？？” - somehow these two women had arrived at the same page but didn’t’ know it. The stewardess said “sorry, we’re out of beef. Only chicken.” And the Chinese lady said “牛肉没有了吗？？” again. As the stewardess stared blankly, I explained to my neighbor that yeah, there was no beef left.

He works in real estate. [Speculation. It drives people out of their homes. But that’s Shanghai, so you can either get in on it or leave.] He did try leaving the business to go to school, and that didn’t work out for him. Not sure why. I’m not sure about a lot of things he said – he said them all in English but w/ heavy accent and confusingly.

He’s impressed by my major (especially the word “policy”). Everyone seems to be. He says that if I can spot the trends in China, then companies in the US will want me to work with them and find good partners/deals. He probably has a point, although I’m not sure I’ll live in China long enough to handle that duty. I can work in the US and travel to China from time to time, though.

Money doesn’t belong to the people who have it; those people are only stewards. In fact, what good is money besides getting you food to eat and a place to live? The real power isn’t in government, but in the people, whom the government is a servant to. The people care deeply about basic things like clean water and safe land. He tells me these things and I ask whether most people think this way. He says that they don’t, and it’s too bad. Because if you think only of making more money, you can only get this far in your mind (shows a certain level with hand). If you start thinking about things this way, you can get over here (a level much higher and off to the left).

Now he works in environmental clean-up. Chemical plants, when they pack up and move, often leave behind nasty polluted earth and groundwater. In real estate, this creates problems if not dealt with. So he gets teams together to find and clean the pollution. Not bad. He tells me that he’ll probably continue doing this environmental work for the rest of his life. He likes it. “It’s meaningful,” he says.

this blog

the title of this blog is 上海有什么空灵的，which to me means "what artistry/intangible aspects does Shanghai possess." It's kind of a rhetorical question, but I left out the question mark because I don't mean it to be sarcastic. I really don't know the answer yet, and I've heard a lot from Lonely Planet and others that Shanghai is soulless.

So, every post will be something in (perhaps small, but I hope never meek) opposition to the sentiment that nothing meaningful happens in Shanghai besides making lots of money.

I may come out of these two weeks never wanting to go back to the city, but I need to try to find something in it. I will, and this blog will be exclusively devoted to those times when I find:

expression
care
passion
honesty

in Shanghai.