Shanghai

I should probably say a word about domestic flights within China. First of all, the airports are absolutely massive—our gates were usually over a mile from the security checkpoint. Dad insisted on carrying the bigger bags. None of our carry-ons were particularly heavy, but since I hadn't checked anything, mine was the heaviest. Several times I offered to take it myself.

Mom: You could carry your own bag, you know. He did have a hernia.
A., to dad: Would you like me to take that bag?
Dad: Not at all.
Mom: Your dad is like the Pere Goriot.
A.: Will he make me fresh pasta?
Mom: What?
Pause
Mom: Have you read the Pere Goriot? He worked himself crazy so that his daughters would have a comfortable life.

Mom, incidentally, never ended up carrying anything. If she did bring a bag, one of us would end up taking it. This wasn't an issue, until one day in Hong Kong when she balked when I wanted to bring my water bottle (and didn't want to bring my jacket, in the pocket of which I usually carried the water bottle).

Mom: I'm not carrying that!
A.: That's fine, I'll carry it.
Mom: You won't need water.
A.: Maybe I will.

Anyway, near the gate in the Beijing airport was a Subway. We would go straight from the airport to the acrobatics show, and were offered the opportunity to pre-order Big Macs that the local guide in Shanghai would pick up for us ahead of time. This didn’t interest me, for obvious reasons, or my mother, because admitting she would be hungry was beneath her. She decided dad wouldn’t be interested, either, before he had a chance to realize what he being asked. He and I both felt like we would want food at some point, so we went to Subway and got some subs for the road. My mother chewed us out for “wasting” the cash ($3.50 total) and just couldn’t understand how we would be hungry. Which we were by the time we arrived, and they really hit the spot.

Our small flight had seven attendants. They kowtowed upon arrival. All of the flights served some type of food—in some cases, a whole meal. I kept looking out for orange soda, but times have apparently changed and nary a cup of it was to be seen. My favorite souvenir is a packaged towelette labeled “Wet Turban Needless Wash.” I LOVE it.

Even the road to Shanghai from the airport was pleasant. I don’t mean to dump on Beijing, and in all honesty, some of the things that made the trip easier were incidental to the city itself. The guide, Tom, spoke better English, and while he may have had a few pro-Mao and/or pro-CCP things to say, he wasn’t as out-there with them; the weather was better—actually, it was beautiful; and the city was smaller, so less time was spent on the bus (although just as much was spent getting on and off the bus). Perhaps people were more used to foreigners, and there was less gawking (perhaps there were just fewer tourists from rural China, since I’m sure Beijing natives see their fair share of Westerners).

Tom told us about the "dragon holes," i.e. the open spaces built into buildings to allow dragons a clear way back to the mountains. The Chinese are very superstitious-- you don't want to anger the dragon.

The acrobatics show was an auspicious start to our visit, and we were in a good mood. Until my mother threw a fit over my decision to hand-wash some clothes in the sink.

Mom: What possessed you? These will never dry! Where will you hang them? It’s indecent- what will you do when the cleaning people come?
A.: The cleaning people don’t care. It doesn’t matter. It will all dry.
Mom: No, it won’t dry. You can’t just leave this stuff here!

For at least the next hour, we had various versions of the following conversation:

Mom: Idiocy! It’s idiocy!
A.: Could you just let it go?
Mom: No, no I can’t. What were you thinking?

A couple of times she even woke me up to make sure I understood that it was idiocy. She wouldn’t let me hang the clothes anywhere near the window, even though we were on a high floor (and nobody cared), insisting instead that we hang them in the closet with the door shut, where they would never dry but would be sure to grow some mildew. She only calmed down when, riding through the city in the daylight, she saw laundry hanging from just about every balcony. There was actually a certain year after which buildings were built without a laundry-hanging apparatus—apparently a government official had traveled to a part of Europe where he saw no laundry hanging and wanted Shanghai to keep up.

Oh- before going to the acrobatics show, Tom said that there would be an announcement forbidding picture-taking, but we should go ahead and take them anyway. Sure enough, there was an announcement saying, "out of respect for intellectual property rights, please do not take any pictures," and flashes went off throughout the show. Someone even had a tripod out.

Our visit to Shanghai corresponded to a long-weekend holiday that honored ancestors and deceased relatives. Don’t ask me what it’s called, I don’t recall anyone ever naming it. Largely because of this holiday, the Jade Buddha temple was abuzz with worshippers and smoky with burning incense and origami.

A.: Do you have a small screwdriver?
Dad: No, why?
A.: I think some ash from the incense has landed on the inside of my camera lens.
Dad: Just wipe it off.

Thank you, that’s helpful. Why didn’t I think of that myself instead of asking for a screwdriver?

Mark told us that the Temple survived the Cultural Revolution thanks to good Feng Shui, and an abbot that had his wits about him—he covered the doors of the temple with pictures of Mao, knowing that the Red Guard wouldn’t dare destroy them. Later, Mark told us a little bit about Buddhism. Mom decided to correct him about something, but luckily it was after we’d started moving to the next room, so nobody really heard (except dad and I, who shook our heads but weren’t all that surprised). Later she would argue with an investment banker that in our tour group over the wisdom of investing in wind power.

That afternoon we visited the Bund and were given entirely too little time to walk around. I really wanted ice cream.

Dad: No street food!
A.: It’s ice cream!
Dad: It’s still street food.
A.: I don’t think it counts.

But we’d passed the ice cream I wanted and were herded back on the bus for a trip to the museum. About ten minutes before we’d been told to meet in the lobby, mom started having a fit because dad wasn’t around.

A.: He’s an adult.
Mom: What if he got lost?
A.: ??
Mom: This worries me.
A.: He still has time.

Repeat above conversation several times.

Dad’s roommate (randomly assigned—he could have gotten his own room for another $500, but both he and the roommate opted to share) came by, didn’t really understand why she was panicking, said he’d keep an eye out. A few minutes later we decided to check on the bus, as some people had already gone back. We saw dad walking toward us—he had been on the bus (had thought we were already there) but was sent back by his roommate, who had reported mom’s state of mind.

That evening we went for a walk and looked around for a place to eat, ending up at a supermarket. You may wonder why we didn’t go to any restaurants—partly because the included meals were so large that we generally weren’t hungry enough for a big meal; partly because we were very tired at the end of each day; and on top of all that, we weren’t all that interested in guessing at menus in Chinese. If I weren’t a vegetarian, I would have been bolder, but I didn’t want to deal with it. Our walk to the restaurant was prolonged by mom’s lunging at every ATM (and there were many). She accepted the theory of the symbols about as much as the theory of evolution. I was getting tired. Finally, we found Carrefour (think French Walmart), which pleasantly surprised us with an HSBC in its lobby. We got what we thought would be enough cash for the rest of the trip.

Carrefour’s prepared food section was not as impressive as Walmart’s but much more mysterious. I had a hard time figuring out what was vegetarian (and one of the things I eventually bought had meat in it, so I turned it over to mom, who ate it in spite of her previous objections of not being the least bit hungry).

Mom: What’s that?
A.: I don’t know.
Mom: What’s that?
A.: I don’t know.
Mom: What’s that?
A.: I don’t know.
Mom: What’s that?
A.: I don’t know.
Mom: What’s that?
A.: I don’t know.
Mom: What’s that?
A.: I still don’t know.
Mom: What’s that?
A.: I don’t know.
Mom: What’s that?
A.: I don’t know.
Mom: What’s that?
A.: I don’t know.
Mom: What’s that?
A.: I don’t know.
Mom: What’s that?
A.: I don’t know.

We took our food back to the hotel and had a nice meal. Dad broke into one of his more annoying recurring behaviors—arguing with me over whether there was meat in the food.

A.: This has meat in it—does anyone else want it?
Dad: There’s no meat in that.
A.: Yes, there is.
Dad: I don’t think there is.

I’ve been a vegetarian for over sixteen years. I have figured out how to determine whether meat is present. Now, I’m not an especially anal vegetarian—I won’t order meat or otherwise eat it if I know it’s there, but I feel no need to stick my finger down my throat if I’ve consumed some unintentionally. Still, I won’t keep eating it, and trying to convince me it’s not there is about as constructive as trying to convince me that I’m not cold. Nonetheless, dad and I would have this conversation every few days or so, often after a waiter would set a plate down on the ubiquitous lazy susan and announce that it was pork.

Dad: This is good, you should try it.
A.: It’s pork.
Dad: No, there’s no meat in this, I can tell.
A.: He said it was pork.
Dad: Oh, he did?
***

Much of the group had left for an optional tour to Sozhou and I couldn’t wait to explore the city without a tour bus. One of the other things I would come to appreciate about our guide in Hong Kong—in addition to the absence of a political agenda or requirement to push a political agenda—was that he treated us like adults. He actually encouraged us to take public transportation and figure out the city for ourselves. Now, it’s true that taxis in the rest of China are so ridiculously cheap that it’s hard to see how public transportation would be worth it, but I wanted to try Shanghai’s metro. I asked Mark and later the concierge, and they had a hard time providing directions to the metro without adding that we should really just take a cab. I’m glad we didn’t, because it was an interesting walk, at the end of which was an interesting temple. I’m not sure why the Jing’An temple was empty of other tourists, but it was especially amazing to see the worshippers and the architecture without more people like us getting in our way.

From there, mom insisted that we stop in the tourist information office. We did, but the people in it didn’t speak English. My mom likes asking questions. I’m more of a figure-it-out-yourself-first kind of person. The walk to the metro was characterized by an extended version of the following conversation:

Mom: Ask that person.
A.: I know where we are.
Mom: Do you know where we’re going?
A.: Yes.
Mom: You keep looking at the map.
A.: I want to check the street we’re on.

A few minutes later:

Mom: Ask that person…
A.: I don’t have a question!

[this would continue throughout the day.]

We passed a railway ticket office.

Mom: Ask in there—maybe we have to buy tickets in there.
A.: There is no way we have to stand in that kind of line to by metro tickets. That’s for trains.
Mom: How do you know?
A.: I just know. Besides, we’re not there yet… we still have a few minutes to the metro.
Mom: You just know. You just know. Remember when we were driving to Lyon when we should have been driving to Paris?
A.: No… but that must have been… twelve years ago. That’s your point of reference?

I’m not saying I have the best sense of direction in the world, but there’s a difference between walking according to a map and driving according to a map, and walking along a street and driving on a highway. I mean, if she wanted to make a point, I could have offered her plenty of incidents, fewer than twelve years in the past, of getting on the wrong highway.

The thing is, I realized on this trip that my sense of direction isn’t bad at all, and I don’t think it’s just gotten better. I think it’s that I’m easily disoriented when I’m following someone else, but when I’m following a path can see, I’m actually fine.

Anyway, outside the tourist office there was a sculpture. Mom wanted me to take a picture of it.

A.: I’ve already put my camera away. Dad just took a picture of it. Can we go, please?
Mom: Why can’t you take a picture of it?
A.: This is not what I would choose to spend memory and naming/editing time on.
Mom: Just take a picture.
A.: No.
Dad: I just took a picture.
Mom: I want her to take a picture.
A.: No.

It was getting hot. I wanted to get moving. A temper tantrum later, we were on the metro, where an attendant helped us buy the right tickets. A few minutes later, we were near the waterfront.

It’s not that we got lost on the way to the old city—it’s that mom kept walking the wrong way and I had to keep checking the map… and she kept telling me to ask for directions. On our path to the old city, we ended up in a really interesting, for lack of a better word, slum. I have a strong sense of danger—I remember visiting the old city of Panama City and at a certain point, my ghetto meter unmistakably went off. I just got this feeling that we had to get out of there, at that moment. I felt no danger whatsoever in Istanbul, and in China it only went off very slightly in a part of Xian and then in Guilin. In this slum, I felt completely safe.

It was a fascinating walk. I’ll direct you to the pictures.

From there we came to the old city, which was enjoyable until the crowds and artifice of Yuyuan. I can’t definitively say where one ended and the other began, but there was a point where it went from interesting to absurd. Yuyuan struck me as Shanghai’s Chinatown. Later I read in a Chinese English-language magazine—I can’t remember what movie they were talking about but it was adapted from a book by a Chinese-Australian—that Chinatown was a very foreign concept in China, that it was very difficult to convey to the Chinese director and producers the concept of an area of concentrated Chinese diaspora with architecture, shopping, etc.

Shanghai’s subway was sparkling, well organized, user-friendly. The drivers and cyclists were still nuts.

It was around noon. We’d had breakfast at 7:30. I asked if anyone else was hungry at all.

Mom: When I was your age I was hungry all the time, too.
A.: Dad?
Dad: I could have a snack.
Mom: Snacking is the worst thing for you.
A.: It’s not, actually.


Later:
A.: I’m so glad we’re here and not on that bus. I just need a day off from being chaperoned. The city’s not hard to figure out.
Mom: Why do you need to feel superior? I’ve always taught you that you were capable of anything, unlike my mother, who always put me down no matter what I did. But I always encouraged you. Why do you have this complex?

***
We walked on both sides of the river, but made the mistake of thinking that during rush hour the subway would get us to the Martyrs’ Memorial Park faster than a taxi. We arrived there only after it closed, getting only a glimpse of the park from the outside. From there we cabbed it back to the hotel and called it a day. We were thrilled with what we had seen and shocked that the tour didn’t show any of it. The next morning, the tour took us to a senior center, followed by a walk through a local market and lunch with a local family. The senior center was vaguely interesting—it was very glitzy, and very much an orchestrated attempt to show how good China’s seniors have it (and to sell their arts and crafts to help them keep up their lifestyle). This was the third such visit (after the Cloisonné and the Jade factories). The former had been the most interesting—we got a chance to paint small enamelware dishes.

Factory guide: You all are good at this! I’ll see if I can get you hired here.
Terry: Could I bring my dog to work? Or would you eat my dog?

I have to admit, the senior center visit was pretty interesting. It included a dance performance, a fashion show, and a grandma chorus. When the grandma chorus was announced, my mother didn’t quite hear it. I translated it into Russian for her.

Mom: Grandma what?
A.: khor.
Dad: khor.
Mom: What?
A.: khor.
Dad: khor.
Mom: Khor?
A.: khor.
Dad: khor.
Mom: What?
A.: khor.
Dad: khor. They sing.
Mom: khors? You mean, prostitutes?
Dad: Prostitutes that sing.
Mom finally got it, laughed. Not one of us could stop laughing, even though we tried so as not to be rude to the singing grandmas. I don’t think any of them noticed.

After that, a woman from our tour group led the grandma chorus in a song, and another taught them a line dance. It was a good time.

On to the market, where mom yelled at me for spending eighty cents on some cherry tomatoes and felt bad for the chained-down poultry. I did too, and that’s why I don’t eat them. This trip has actually made me question my seafood consumption—it really isn’t justifiable (but it is so much healthier than pretty much every other source of protein). We bought some flowers for the family we would have lunch with, but the guide confiscated them—apparently they were the kind of flowers designated for the memorial holiday. We were upset—they were nice, we would have taken them onto the cruise with us or given them to someone else—but we had no choice but to get over it.

The vegetables at the market were mouth-wateringly fresh. I wished I could buy and cook the eggplant and asparagus. Later another local guide would tell us that more and more Chinese are turning to supermarkets over traditional markets, with less time to shop and cook due to more work outside the home. They were even buying frozen foods.

The home-cooked lunch was the best food I had in China—it was amazing. The hostess had invited a young family friend to translate and practice his English. There were about ten of us per family that took turns asking questions. Someone asked whether the apartment had any sort of courtyard, to which the response was, “no, too many Chinese.” This was the second time but not last time we heard this self-deprecating auto-response (I no longer remember the question that Zhen Jun answered with “too many Chinese”). I wondered whether it was something frequently said or just offered to tourists.

Outside the apartment was a jungle-gym-like complex with an elliptical. I tried it, it worked. I want one of those—who needs electricity? It just adds noise.

***
I’d mentioned in my dispatch from Beijing that my dad can be slow on the uptake. An alternative manifestation of this pains me even more, because I’m not sure how to deal with it: he’s always trying to help, but he doesn’t always realize what’s going on and often ends up making things worse. Sometimes it’s even more aggravating because it’s something we’ve gone over.

This really is tricky, because you don’t want to smack down someone who’s trying to help. After a while, though, being nice about it gets increasingly difficult.

Mom and I intentionally left the water bottles at the hotel this morning, as we knew we wouldn’t be able to carry them on the plane and we didn’t want to consume too much liquid before the flight. Neither of us would want to pour out bottled water (well, unless it’s to recycle the bottle, I suppose). The day before, my nalgene bottle had ended up in dad’s messenger bag. I requested it as we arrived at the airport so I could stick it in my backpack. To my surprise, it was full.

A.: You filled my water bottle?
Dad: Why not?
A.: Because I can’t bring a full bottle on the plane.
Dad: We had water in the room.

We’d had this discussion before, we’d learned our lesson in Beijing. I drank the water.

***
The ride from the airport to Wuhan was actually beautiful—lush, colorful, which I wasn’t expecting. It was dark by the time we got to Wuhan. That’s not really accurate—it was night and it would have been dark if it hadn’t been for all that neon, of which I’d never seen so much in my life. Wuhan was large and bustling. On the way, Kathy told us about Chinese drinking games. Eventually, we arrived at an incredibly tacky building that looked like a theme park. This was, apparently, the cruise ship terminal. We boarded, passing a line of uniformed trumpet players/greeters. So began our cruise on the Yangtze.