East meets West

After a week in Shanghai, the really odd jumble between Eastern and Western culture has interested me the most. Rapidly transformed from a remnant of old-world China to a booming metropolis in less than twenty years, Shanghai is left with fascinating results of the cultural meet-up.

A few days ago, I was sitting with Bill in a KFC enjoying a chicken sandwich, mashed potatoes and a Coke. The walls were filled with pictures of Colonel Sanders, Chumbawamba’s Tubthumping played on the stereo, and there was not a single other westerner in sight. Chinese teens and twenty-somethings all around had dyed-red hair and t-shirts adorned with nonsensical English phrases like much love, model airplane kit as they text-messaged each other on tiny cell phones and listened to their iPods. Starbucks is on almost every corner, and pirated DVDs from the United States are cheap and readily available in retail stores (which means I’ve been watching a ridiculous amount of The West Wing). Even Pizza hut has made it across the Pacific, except in a much more upscale form:



Exports from the west appear to be everywhere, but seem to be mostly embraced by young people. The generation gap that has emerged throughout China doesn’t seem like it is strictly due to influence from the West, however. In the US, there is a gap between those who grew up using computers and those who didn’t. In China, that same generation of young people is also the first to experience open communication with the outside world, and the first to be subjected to China’s one-child policy. It will be really interesting to see how that generation grows up as they become leaders of the world’s next superpower.

A hundred years ago, the British colonists who occupied Shanghai built big buildings along the waterfront in order to present the façade that the Brits had more presence in the city than they actually did. In a lot of ways, the Chinese are doing the same thing in Shanghai today. The city is being built at an absolutely staggering pace, sometimes with the Field of Dreams mentality of If you build it, they will come. After a trip to the government-run Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition, the urban future of Shanghai seemed a little bit backward. To me, the exhibit seemed more concerned with putting on an impressive show than it did with providing ideas and goals behind the plan – nowhere in the museum did they ever mention the impact on the lives of regular people. Much of the new development consists of enormous groups of ten or fifteen identical skyscrapers which rise around a central park for residents, similar to the failed communist blocks and the now-demolished crime-ridden housing projects in cities like Chicago. Instead of discussing why they chose this route, they made some cool 3D flyover animations and a model of the city. To their credit, it was a freaking huge model:



Despite my nerdy concerns about urban planning (which I’m sure you all find engrossing), I have really enjoyed my time in Shanghai. I’ve visited a Confucius museum and temple, a Ming dynasty pagoda, and the multifaceted Shanghai Art Museum. I’ve eaten meals from many different parts of China, including the straightforward Shanghai dishes, the famously fantastic Beijing duck, and the spice of the dishes from the Muslim western province Xinjiang. Tonight we ate in a fancy teahouse in Bill and Vivien’s suburb Jaiding, where we were presented with a few different types of flavorful green teas alongside a series of small food dishes:



On the more Western side of things, I made my first visit to a Prada store at super-swank mall in a really expensive part of the city. I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt, which was pretty embarrassing once I was actually inside: imagine walking into a normal store in your underwear. I also visited IKEA again, which was about thirty times more crowded than the one in San Francisco. A scene at the checkout counter:



I’m finally starting to get used to the crazy traffic – looking both ways repeatedly while crossing a street during a walk light takes a little bit to mentally overcome. I shot a video of a fairly typical street scene so you could get the gist for the wackiness. China’s accident fatality rate is through the roof, and it’s no wonder why:



Another of the chaos of Nanjing road, the main tourist pedestrian street:



Tomorrow morning, I’m headed on a 24-hour train to Hong Kong, where I’ll stay for a four or five days before making by way back north into mainland China for a few weeks as I make my way toward Tibet.

Ryan!

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Photos updated: Shanghai