For the past two weeks, all I've heard in my apartment is "Jia you! Jia you!" During every free moment outside of classes, all of HeDa was prepping for its annual sports festival with departmental sports scrimmages and cheerleading contests. And since the field is directly behind our apartments with their paper thin walls, we had a crash course in Chinese cheering. Jia you is apparently the only fighting cheer in Chinese. And we heard it non-stop. On repeat. Every day.
The Sports Festival is an annual event that hosts such testosterone-fueled sporting events like sack races, 21-legged races, and jump roping. Sack racing - it's kind of a big a deal. One of Max's students told him that their department has won the sack race for the last fifteen years and they were feeling the pressure last week to live up to their title. And unlike Beloit, where the big, ok, only, notable sporting event of the year is the somewhat irreputable intramural ultimate Frisbee championship, HeDa has their more legitimate soccer championship. Sadly, the IM teams here don't have names like G-Spot Tornado, Fresh Undies or Alma, Michigan. Rather, their teams are called Mingsheng Foreign Language College Team, Chemistry Department Team, and the HeDa Foreign Language Team.
This year, the Sports Festival has become a bigger deal than in the past because it's the school's only break this semester. Because of a change in national law this last November, there is no longer a week-long May Day holiday, leaving our students without a break in their second semester. So HeDa improvised and gave the students Thursday and Friday off for their Sports Festival. And since I was having dreams at night where the only thing people said was Jia You, I decided that it was time to truck it out to China's original city of sin - Shanghai.
Buying my ticket at the last minute, the only hard sleeper I could get was a train that arrived in Shanghai at 5 in the morning. After navigating around China's Grand Central, I arrived in Shanghai's still asleep downtown as the sun started to rise after a rainy night. I took advantage of the barren streets in China's most populous city and made my way to the Bund. Logic and previous experiences with Chinese tourists told me that in a few short hours this stretch along the Huangpu River would be claustrophobic hell.
Before the start of "New China," the Bund was the first glimpse of the city as foreign passengers and people entered the city on boats from the Yellow Sea. Now, with the advent of planes and trains, the Bund is no longer the glitzy gate into the Shanghai for visitors. Its larger purpose now is to serve as a stark contrast as Shanghai's 'shameful' foreign concession history against the ultra-modern, ultra-metal and ultra-grimy skyline of the Pudong Special Economic Zone across the Huangpu.
Walking along the Bund's river promenade, buildings that defined Shanghai and modern Chinese history through the 1920s and 1960s flanked my right. I walked past the old Customs house with its Big Ben-inspired belltower. Red Guards removed the face of the clock during the Cultural Revolution and installed giant speakers to broadcast Communist propaganda. The clock's face was only restored in the 1980s when Queen Elizabeth II visited Shanghai, but the speakers still remain. There is the Peace Hotel, the Ritz Carlton of pre-Communist China and the site where the Gang of Four staked out their operations and implemented the Cultural Revolution after the Communist takeover.
In front of it all, Shanghai was waking up. The river promenade was full of old Shanghairen exercising and flying kites as street cleaners hosed down the dust and dirt that settled during the night. Groups of elderly Shanghairen would run in a quick shuffle across the promenade, greeting and waving to a busy friend or two flying kites. Running from one end of the promenade to the other, the groups shuffled pass ballroom dance and taiji (tai chi) groups or old men taking their caged birds out for some fresh Shanghai air.
A small group of men, with hand-rolled cigarettes and sitting stools in tow, converged from all sides of the promenade into the middle, grabbing and shaking each other's arms in greeting. They were laughing and smiling these big, goofy wrinkled smiles at each other, showing off their missing teeth or exchanging cigarettes. These two men on the side looked at each other and before one greeted his friend with a hearty "Hullllllo!" and a slap on the back. The other man doubled over in laughter and it was such a genuinely happy moment, I couldn't help but smile.
Separated from the Bund by waters of questionable content and coal barges is the Pudong Special Economic Zone. Pudong is one of China's first experiments in capitalism with 'Chinese characteristics' (ie, dog eat dog) and has transformed from a swampy collection of peasant houses to a miasma of concrete and metal. Until very recently, Pudong was home to the world's highest concentration of construction cranes. It's such a sharp contrast and clear divide - the Bund vs. Pudong. On one side you have a dirty, twisted, history of foreigners exploiting Chinese. On the other side is where you come to make it or break it in the New China with an ample amount of Chinese on Chinese exploitation.
Then I wandered into the Shanghai Museum and thought that I was being stealthy or just damn lucky for not paying for an entrance ticket, but later I found out that earlier in the month it became national practice to remove museum entrance fees. Which I think is necessary because most Chinese museums aren't worth the ticket gauging.
But the Shanghai Museum is a different story. Everything that is written about this museum is true; it's the most comprehensive collection of ancient Chinese culture I've ever seen. Most museums I've been to boast and say, "Oh, look at our pretty shard of Tang Dynasty pottery." But the Shanghai museum is says "Look at our entire pot of Tang Dynasty pottery and then look at these other pots from 13th century BC, bitch." Generally I would say that you can only look at so many pots, statues, paintings, and carvings before you start to think "yeah yeah, big deal." But what's impressive about the Shanghai Museum is a) how well-marked everything is. The museum is impressively devoid of Chinglish, b) the depth of the exhibitions and c) how well preserved everything is. There isn't a single piece in the museum that only warrants a shoulder shrug of recognition. The display cases are full of creations where every little swish, line and swoop can be seen. There are things that I made last week and they're already looking more weathered than the displays at the Shanghai Museum.
After the SM, I met up with my couchsurfing host, and his curious elderly neighbors, at his apartment complex in the French Concession. His friend across the alley was gone that weekend, so I had the keys to her entire apartment. Their apartments are traditional shikumen houses, housing units built by the French in the early 1900s. After the Cultural Revolution the giant houses were divided up between families, turning each floor into a single family apartment. The families share the staircase and the kitchen while keeping the original structural integrity of the apartment. In the several rows of houses that make up his apartment complex, Ben and his friend are the only two laowai. The rest of the apartments are inhabitated by elderly Chinese that have lived in the apartments since they were divided up. Plus, his apartment complex was right off of Huaihai Zong Lu, Shanghai's answer to the Champs-Elysees in Paris or Avenue Louise in Brussels. Basically, it was like I was staying at an apartment near Central Park and Fifth Avenue in New York City for free. It was the perfect spot to explore Shanghai.
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