City: shanghai
Author: Parker Woltz
Location: DVD store on Huashan at Zhaojiabang

She looked like a Chinese Cyndi Lauper: her hair was permed, frizzing out every which way, and bright-colored bangles climbed up her arms. It was January and she wore a black wool dress with hot pink and black striped tights. A thick scarf coiled around her neck. Her hand, slender and pale, like a doll’s hand, gripped the dirty metal pole of the metro car. She leaned back, talking and laughing with her two male friends while the train rushed out of Xujiahui^[1] and into the guts of Shanghai.

I couldn’t look away from her smile. Her teeth were beautiful, white like fresh milk, and her eyes crinkled when she laughed. She laughed a lot, little giggles that bubbled out of her like sputtering water.

I clutched my Lonely Planet guidebook and stared at the girl, wishing I knew her, wishing that she was my friend, wishing that, at the very least, I knew how to speak her language. A few stops later, she exited the train. I strained to keep my eyes on that crazy perm but the automatic doors hissed shut and she was gone.

I stood in the crowded train and felt suddenly, overwhelmingly, conscious of all the hundreds and thousands and millions of people living and daydreaming and losing and praying and wondering and sleeping and hoping and aching and loving and eating and laughing and wishing and doing all of the things that humans do, all around me. And even in the midst of all that life, I felt alone.

A month later, I was walking along Huashan Lu^[2] the day before I was to leave Shanghai. It was a chilly afternoon but it was bright; I looked down at the sun-dappled sidewalk as I walked, dodging globs of spit. And then something made me look up.

There she was, still smiling. Her hands – those tiny, porcelain doll hands – were in her coat pockets and she walked briskly with her friends, her perm bouncing in the winter breeze.

And then the most amazing thing happened. Our eyes met and I swear, I swear, she smiled at me.

Maybe it’s not such a lonely planet after all. 

City: shanghai
Author: Matt Diehl
Location: Logo Bar

As a Shanghai newbie (not ”niu bi”^[1], which my trip turned out to be – see “cow’s bollocks” for a close translation), I was dazzled by the ride into the city from the airport. Having never been to Asia, I was not prepared for the sheer, undiluted futurism of the Shanghai skyline; while locals may be over it, its shamelessness and commitment to progress stunned my retinas.

After a quick, post-airport drop-off, I was rushed by my entourage to a restaurant in the back of an office building. Despite the odd location, it was a clean, minimalist, humming place; the beautiful quirk was that it only served delicious tuna sashimi and a tofu broth with vegetables^[2] – not what I expected for my first meal on the Chinese mainland. At dinner, I met brilliant, amazing people who were as creative as the visionaries that first drew me to move to New York City, an auspicious sign. Then, fully stuffed on tuna belly, we walked down the street to Logo^[3].

The second I walked in, my mind reeled. Not because it was the greatest bar in the world (Logo itself was familiar: dark, dank, smoky), or because the greatest music was playing (electronic music floated in the air like the haze of smoke), or because I met the love of my life (who knows? maybe I did…), but because it was so authentic and familiar, and clashed so brilliantly with my ride in from the airport. It was full of writers, artists, fashion illustrators, DJs and dancers – in other words, it was like the bars that drew me to move to NYC. (See a pattern here?)

How could this scene co-exist with the man-made sci-fi skyline I’d seen just hours earlier? How could these seemingly disparate worlds co-exist? Wouldn’t they come together and explode like anti-matter?

Within a couple of hours, I realized that on the one hand, Shanghai spoke in the lingua franca of young, creative urban bohemia. The people I was meeting had the energy, will and inspiration of those that initially made NYC exciting, which it no longer is (cf. “New York I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down,” LCD Soundsystem). But even though this was all familiar, there was a movement and aesthetic that couldn’t have happened everywhere else; in this short time, I viscerally experienced the paradigm shift that hysterical headlines in the Western media about the “New Asia” couldn’t capture.

I knew this was largely an expat experience, and not the quote-unquote “real China”. But I felt that the “real China” infused the whole experience – it wouldn’t have been the same anywhere else. It was clear that the real China experience isn’t something that can be forced or diluted; it will find you, and that night in Shanghai, it was finding me in its own special way…

City: shanghai
Author: Casey Whale
Location: the fruit stall beside her house

Wavy Girl is waving to me from across the street. She does that, hence the nickname. I don’t know her real name, or how old she is, but she looks about three. It’s hard to tell with Chinese girls though; maybe she’s really 30, but I doubt it.

The fruit shop^[1] next to my building is where I buy my fruit. I buy fruit every morning on my way to work, so I’m there quite a bit. That’s where Wavy Girl lives, with her mum who sells me the fruit. They live in a small room/large cupboard in the back of the shop.

Sometimes I think Wavy Girl has quite a nice life. Her days are filled, as far as I can tell, with playtime, trips to the public toilets in the nearby laneway, and, of course, waving to customers. She is safe to walk around on the street, as all the vendors take it upon themselves to keep an eye out for her. The cramped living space would bother me, but for a little one who hasn’t known anything else, it is probably nothing. I just hope that she’s not too cold in the winter.

Wavy Girl’s hair makes me smile; her mum always ties it up into small fountains on top of her head that sway madly as she waves. It’s strange how her hair seemingly reacts to her mood – her fountains wilt and slump when she is tired and grumpy.

I’m about to move house and a part of me is sad because my life will soon lack Wavy Girl. I wonder if she will even notice I’m gone.

It’s strange – I never noticed how much she made me smile until now (cue Joni Mitchell: “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone…”).

City: shanghai
Author: Anita Hawkins
Location: the lane outside her house

It’s often too easy to slip into ‘small’ in Shanghai. The city heaves, flails and flourishes around you constantly and steadily, irregardless of you and your current state of mind.

I was feeling the ‘small’ one day early autumn, but picking myself up around me, I decidedly tried to heave myself out of the apartment and into the day ahead.

Slipping down the stairs of my little low-rise^[1], I ramshackled myself onto the back lane on Yongfu Lu upon which the apartment lies. Upon hitting the cold, I was met by a little dust and a well-padded elderly lady.

She seized my arm. “Why are you wearing that?”

“What?”, I shortened, fallen leaves crackling at me.

“Your skirt.”

“What’s wrong with my skirt?”

“Your bones are cold.”

My memory-of-moments flash back to adolescent negotiations with my dear Mother over hem-lengths. Suddenly, I’m liking this new argument.

I clamour back to my apartment, return to the lane re-clothed, and there’s smiles, not small.

City: shanghai
Author: Jack Sidders
Location: the top of the escalator at Exit 7, Jing’an Temple metro station

I had only been in Shanghai but a few days when, walking back from work along Nanjing Xi Lu^[1], I came across my first city busker. Happily high on Constant Discovery as is generally the case with fresh arrivals, I stopped to listen. The melody was alien but more curious was the attention the minstrel drew. In London, I was used to buskers, no matter how talented, being determinedly ignored.

Here, passers-by not only stopped to watch, they did so wearing polished smiles and toothless grins. Eyes were closed deep in meditation. Perusing the watching faces, I, too, began to drift off in reverie. Suddenly, the crowd’s attention grew fervent. A disturbance rippled through the back of the group, eventually bursting through the assembly to the musical oasis at its core.

Police.

Quickly and quietly, policemen handcuffed the musician. As they turned to leave, the crowd began shouting, words indecipherable to my ear but clearly in protest. Soon, cars had stopped on the street and bicycles had been abandoned as their owners gathered to have their say. Then, seemingly in an attempt to fend off the hostile onlookers, the policemen unbuckled the musician’s trousers. My amusement dissipated, and was replaced by disgust.

Until this point, the experience, while odd, had at least made sense to me. Upon seeing the delinquent busker dragged from the scene, with his trousers at his ankles, I felt lost.

A monk, no doubt drawn to the throng from Jing’an Temple^[2] just around the corner, studied me. Reading my confusion, he spoke: “He has lost face. Now he will never commit this crime again.”

I stared. My first encounter with a Buddhist monk and I was speechless. But no sooner had he begun to impart his wisdom on me, he turned, pulled out his state-of-the-art mobile phone and walked off, destroying my quaint, half-formed illusion of simple monk life just as the policemen had destroyed the beauty of a stranger’s music with an act of violence and humiliation. 

City: shanghai
Author: Rose Longhurst
Location: the Family Mart on Zhangyang Lu

It’s the early hours of the morning and we’re outside the Family Mart^[1] in Pudong. In the moments before light breaks the enormous streets are empty, parallel lines running into the distance mirroring the sharp silhouettes of the buildings shooting off into the sky. Apart from the occasional tai-chi practitioner, our group are the only people breaking the silence, as the city is on the brink of stirring.

We’re in limbo also. Neither happily drunk nor queasily remorseful, we’re unwilling to let go of the night we’ve just shared, but wary of being present when the city wakes. We can sense the clocks uniformly ticking toward alarms, but for now our peace is only disturbed by the repetitive tinny jingle emanating from the Family Mart entrance as we sit on the cool marble steps outside, eating unidentifiable fried food with our hands. The street cooking is what brings us here, and I’m in the process of negotiating a meal.

There are two types of food-vendor^[2] outside Family Mart: the lady with the things speared on sticks, and a woman with a large table covered in bowls of raw meat, vegetables and rice.

Tonight I’m eschewing my usual order of ‘miscellaneous green root on a stick’ for the more substantial offers of the fried-rice vendor. I’m looking at a bowl of what appears to be bamboo shoots, but I’m wary, having recently been given chicken as a vegetarian option in a restaurant. Despite my best efforts, the stall owner is unable to comprehend my basic Mandarin, and after several attempts at “Is this vegetarian?” and “Is this meat?” I resorted to just naming animals while pointing at the bowl desperately. She stares at me blankly.

My Italian friend, who speaks no Chinese and yet seems to have fared well during her time here, comes over to see if progress can be made utilising her significant sign-language skills. As physically expressive as the Italians often are, none of our group are expecting the elaborate mime that then follows. Like a parody of a street-performer, she begins to silently portray a tree growing, starting as a seed emerging from the earth, twisting upwards. As we all stare at her open-mouthed, she then starts to beg like a dog, barking and licking my hand.

We’re all entranced, street-food vendors and European students alike, as she furiously mimes various animals and plants. The vendor doesn’t have the slightest hint of recognition in her eyes; she looks confused, nervous almost, and this charade continues until a Chinese-speaking friend arrives.

“What’s Elena doing?” she asks me.

“Trying to ascertain whether it’s bamboo shoots in that bowl”, I respond.

Everyone holds their breath. Finally, someone who can break the stalemate. This futile exchange can come to an end, and the catharsis of a question answered will buoy the dying embers of our evening.

Words are exchanged with the vendor.

“She says it’s pig intestine.”

City: shanghai
Author: Paul Hartnett
Location: the Raffles department store at People’s Square

14.02
I hope this is going to work. Feels kind of weird.

14.03
Rodney said this would be a good place to get pictures. Raffles^[1]. Hm, Don’t know. Will have to wait and see.

14.05
Feel kind of wonky. What time is it back in London? Jet lag, a curse.

14.07
Not sunny, not dark. Light’s kind of OK.

14.10
People think this kind of photography^[2] is so easy, that you just go out and there are stunners every five minutes.

14.20
Maybe I should have applied for a journalist’s visa. What happens if I get stopped and questioned?

14.40
Nothing yet. This is how a fisherman feels, waiting for the bait to get taken. Maybe I’m getting too old for this. I kind of feel like a dirty old man, stalking the streets. For ‘street-style’? Yeah, right. Oh, I’m getting paranoid.

14.41
Oh, here’s one. Nice bit of customising on the collar.

14.46
That was easy enough. Giving a card always helps.

14.48
And here’s another. Cool hair. Six hairstyles all on the same head. And, yep, some piece of crazy MADE IN HONG KONG plastic toy crap to accessorise. Coolio.

14.55
Nearly an hour, and that’s all I’ve got. There’s just so much black cotton about, black denim. Just black. Just nothing. Where are all the individuals?

13.01
It’s like… one long catwalk of H&M zombies. Where are all the individuals?

14.02
Oh, here’s one. Fabulous. Those shoes are just…

City: shanghai
Author: Nick Barham
Location: the Grand Hyatt Hotel, Jin Mao Tower

Like many aimless thirtysomethings, I balance violent fantasies of self-destruction with monthly pension payments. The Jin Mao Tower^[1], until recently Shanghai’s tallest building, provides an architectural correlative to my dreams of suicide and security.

The first time I visited, the serene environment, the hushed tones of the staff, the muted woosh of the high-speed elevators all reassured me that I was at a suitable distance from the pain and obstacles that modern life serves up.

I was seized by a monstrous urge to kill myself quickly and take a few smug guests with me.

The third time I took the lift to the 85th floor, I was on my way to the bar. But I never made it. Instead, I kept going, past the door to the lift that climbs the final three floors, until I was overlooking the shining white atrium. A clear drop of 30 floors.

It is impossible to stare at this magnificent space without wanting to hurl yourself over. That night, I stood tiptoe, testing my weight, thinking how easy it would be to lift and flip, spiraling down effortlessly to take out the pianist and a few tables of cocktails.

This must be the thought that greets so many guests as they exit their rooms with breakfast on their minds and are tricked into contemplating their mortality.

The Grand Hyatt^[2] is not a hotel. Or, at best, its hotelness is secondary to a far grander purpose. Looking at the rooms curving away below me, at the glittering atrium, resembling a launch pad for a luxury breed of star cruisers, it became clear that Jin Mao is a half-kilometer tall memento mori, built to tease, tempt and terrify high-flying bizness travelers, five-star whores and plump tourists. To remind them it can’t last forever. To suggest that, perhaps, today is their day.

In the lift up, a voice had appeared in my head, saying quite clearly, “You’re not taking this baby back down”. After flexing and wondering some more, I knew I wasn’t jumping. So I let myself out through the fire escape doors to the stairs. It took half an hour to walk down, and I had to call reception to let me back in.

City: shanghai
Author: Mark David Elliott
Location: the empty field behind the middle school just south of Zhongshan Nan Er Lu, across from Damuqiao Lu.

My German friend and I were trying to think of a place we could ride to on our bikes. A place in Shanghai centre yet hidden from its relentless fury, a place to sit down without anyone bugging us, a place where we could open a bottle of wine, smoke a funky cigarette and relax.

I knew of this empty field down by the river. I’d seen it from the school where I taught on Thursdays. It was only a 10-minute bike ride from city centre, but 10 minutes in the wrong direction. Down there, everyone is poor. Road surfaces are coated with years of cooking oil. Fans extract the scents of ginger, soy sauce and chilli – odours strong enough to choke – from numerous kitchens into the street. The rumble of shuffled mahjong^[1] blocks echo out from behind closed doors.

When we arrived, I noticed that something was out of place. Lined up along the road were a series of cars – cars far too expensive to belong in this neighbourhood. The bustling street was, perhaps wisely, not showing any concern to these visitors. As we walked into the field, we saw a young Chinese guy hanging by the gate. He was mostly minding his own business, but he had a two-way radio in his hand. 

As we got further in, we saw two or three small groups of Chinese people walking towards the back of the school. Seeking seclusion, we went the other way, towards the river. At the other end of the field, however, was another guy with a radio. I felt like we were trespassing. The chances of this being a place to relax were diminishing proportionally with my will to remain. We turned and started to walk back out.

Heading towards our bikes, I saw through the trees a small hut, thrown together from broken pieces of wood and metal strips. Light seeped through its cracks. It was positioned directly behind the school, completely out of the line of sight from the field entrance. A few people were gathered outside. We walked closer and, upon approach, I asked what they were doing. “Playing Dou Di Zhu^[2]”, replied a guy standing around, seemingly waiting his turn. 

My friend took my arm. “This isn’t right, we should go.”

“Can I play?” I asked. In recent months, I’d invested whole weekends perfecting my skill at Dou Di Zhu and was interested to hone my talent in the field. True to form, the guy asked if I was betting.

“I only have 100 RMB,” I said.

Upon my reply, his expression changed, going from curiosity in us laowai to something akin to fear.

“You’ve got to leave,” he urged. “You must go”. 

We left.

That was a Wednesday night. The next day, from school, I looked out onto the field. The hut was gone.

I wondered what exactly I nearly saw. Why go to such trouble to hide a game of cards? Who was it that the radio sentries were positioned to detect? Inside the hut they were gambling, but what were the stakes?

City: shanghai
Author: Jay Mark Caplan
Location: the supermarket on Zhenning Lu, on the corner of Huashan Lu.

I had forgotten to buy meat.

I ran down the bare concrete stairs of our apartment building, unlocked my bicycle, and rode through the dark courtyard to the rusted gates of the lane^[1]. A block later, I was at the glowing orange supermarket.

Of the two supermarkets near my house, this one sold cereal and pasta and was more expensive – I thus considered it more foreign, and so a better place to buy meat. Outside, the ubiquitous Chinese workers in dusty, baggy clothes were hauling boxes from a van. Deliveries.

When I entered, the cashiers stared at me. I went directly to the butcher’s counter in the back. There, lying prone over a black metal shopping trolley, was half a slaughtered pig. Freshly hauled from the back of a van, it lay naked, back arched, ribs flayed, hooves skyward. Its headless front-end grazed the meat display counter. The butcher must not be in to collect it.

I thought of the mutilated pig lying atop cardboard boxes of cereal and pasta, seeping trichinosis as the van bounced along.

I looked at the shining packs of minced pork – ribbons of meat pressing suggestively against tight cellophane wrappers – sitting here suffocated for days, dressed up to match the shelves of Pringles and Kraft. How long would this grotesque corpse glaze under the halogens before being chopped and offered for sale?

I doubted the meat was spoiled or diseased – that wasn’t what bothered me; it was the sloppiness, the indifference. How could someone sling a side-section of pig onto a shopping cart and leave it blocking the aisle? Didn’t anyone care enough to put it away?

But I wasn’t disgusted or angry; I was amused, because I didn’t care either. Despite the macabre point-of-sale display, I was still hungry, and still wanted pork. After all, T.I.C. (This Is China).

I bought 10 kuai^[2] worth and rode home. I cooked the meat with mushrooms and garlic, then added sauce from a can, and penne. It was delicious.