Shanghai Somnolence

A Character: Cha (Tea)

Underground Entrepreneurship

On a torrid summer’s day in Shanghai, the subway offers respite from both the humidity and pollution draped over the city. The subway is modern, efficient, clean, and a cheering contrast from New York’s system.

I noticed a young man sitting on a subway station floor, back to a structural support. In front of him was a large, clear plastic bag into which passing passengers sporadically dropped their empty water bottles. I watched for a while. He made no gestures of thanks, nor did he cajole anyone for contributions.

Several stations away, I witnessed a similar scene, albeit with marked differences. This time the bottle collector was older, 60 perhaps. His palpable optimism reminded me of a knife salesman, and he wheedled passengers into giving him their bottles. And unlike the young man, he took each bottle and crushed it, leaving room in his bag for even more.

Not Shopping Here

Careless Driving

 A week ago a foreign correspondent acquaintance asked if I would be taking my driving test in Shanghai.  My first response was to wonder why any relatively sane individual would subject themselves to the terrors and vicissitudes of driving in the city.  Anyway, I asked what the road test involved. “There wasn’t one,” she replied. Based on a sampling of about 130 taxi journeys, it appears no one else has taken one either.

A few of the joys:

1)   Taxis have seat belts in the back. Just nothing to buckle them into.  

2)   There are functioning seat belts in the front of taxis. But drivers get all quizzical when you try to put them on. 

3)   There is a centre lane marker. It performs no obvious function other than marking the middle (approximately) of the road.

4)   The opposing traffic lane is great for overtaking (or for just driving along).

5)   Pedestrians exist. They are also targets.  

6)   Accidents soon become festive public gatherings, even when the motorcyclist is on the ground and motionless.   

7)   Rain allows for faster, frictionless driving.

Room with a View

A Man in his Pyjamas

I ride the subway almost every day, and normally there’s nothing out of the ordinary. Most of the passengers are young or middle-aged, travel with their heads in books, play on mobile devices, or stare anonymously into space like underground riders the world over. But the other day I saw a man in his pyjamas.

In China, there’s nothing extraordinary about someone in his pyjamas. Men stand on the street, walk to the market, and banter in public in their nightclothes.  I have seen them do so in Beijing, in Hong Kong, and in several other cities. But this was my first sighting of sleepwear on a subway. The man was stood on the escalator, carrying a plastic bag filled with vegetables, and unaffectedly nonchalant as he rode the escalator upward and away from line number 6. 

Sebastian Flyte had nothing on him.  

Scrambled Musings on Returning to China

I first travelled into China in 1992. Those were the days when Cantonese businessmen mixed cognac with Coke, made telephone calls to each other while sat at the same restaurant dinner table, and kept the labels on their suit sleeves because it was the only outward marker of their commercial success.  Today some of the semaphores of financial acumen or social rank are a little more subtle but equally evident. People buy one drink a week at Starbucks but retain the cup for several days, carrying their homemade tea to the office.

Higher up the social (money) strata are those who shop at the International Financial Centre. In the bowels of this landmark skyscraper is a mall that shouldn’t be called a mall because the term is too pedestrian, too déclassé to describe the display of wealth-signalling accessories and clothing. French and Italian uber-luxury brands sit side by side and yet, despite the no-expense spared instruction surely given to their architects and designers, merge into a whole. It reminds me of a long-ago visit to the Vatican. Instead of appreciating its history, architecture and decoration, I drowned in the unbridled ostentation. Similarly, the IFC is a visual cacophony of bling.

Emerging from places like these, I wonder where the ‘old’ China has gone. Bicycles are few, people scream into phones or tap furiously at I-somethings. Only when a solitary man cycles past, a mountain of used Styrofoam perched impossibly behind him, do I sense that not all has changed.  

It’s building site workers who most remind me of an earlier time. Their clothes, teeth and demeanours point to origins both geographically and - increasingly - culturally distant from the waifs picking through Versace or Prada accessories at IFC.  Just as they did 20 years ago, these workers stop and stare as I walk past, temporarily relinquishing their tasks as they behold me with the curiosity as westerners do them. When I look back some 50 yards later, they are still looking. I wonder if their notions about me are as fixed as mine are of them.

On clear days, I can see the stacks of the power stations that feed the city’s electric grid. Some, no doubt, were constructed on the periphery but have now been swallowed by the city’s outward surge. Others are perhaps relics of a time when power stations were built in the city, close to demand.

The immensity of Shanghai is hard to comprehend. It’s home to 23 million people, stretches immeasurably in all directions, and in many parts is disconcertingly new.

It’s as if someone bent down with a bucket load of urbanisation, started pouring, and the spill somehow ended up in something akin to orderliness.