I usually like to keep a journal when I’m travelling. Failing that, I try to write down my thoughts immediately upon my return from a trip, hoping to capture them before they make the inevitable transition from vivid reality to hazy recollection. Unfortunately, with this latest sojourn through China I managed neither of these options. I suspect the culprits are two major essays that were due Monday and Wednesday last, and which occupied my mind for the better part of the past five weeks. When I could have been writing in my journal, I was instead reading an academic one. When I could have been staring out the window of a bus lost in thought, I was instead constructing how to best argue that modernist urban planning was alive and well in the developing world.
Upon my return to London a week and a half ago, I had things to say and stories to tell. Lots of things. Lots of stories. A day spent in China has that kind of effect on me, let alone three weeks. I was excited about my latest experiences, but had no time to think about them: I plunged directly into my essays and a constant diet of early mornings, long days, strong coffees, study rooms and laptop screens. Thankfully, my life as an essay machine came to an end this past Wednesday. I now have a bit of breathing room to kick back and take stock of the past few months of my life, and to get down to the serious business of talking about latest experiences in China. This blog, as usual, has been horribly neglected, and I can hardly promise that it won’t soon return to obscurity; for now, however, it is the space where a jumble of thoughts will hopefully become semi-coherent prose.
China is all about relativity. Relative to some cities, others feel rich. Relative to some places, others feel clean. Relative to some provinces, others feel vibrant. Relative to some regions, others feel like collapse is imminent. My three week sojourn has once again reminded me of the dangers of conceptualizing China as one coherent unit, its parts all moving in the same direction. This is in no way a political statement; rather, just a reflection of my increasing difficulty in conceptualizing the place as a unitary whole. It is, I think, rather pointless at this time to make any firm statements about what ‘China’ is like beyond superficial similarities that can be found throughout the land (Santanas, white tiles, bad music, yang rou chuanrs and so on). I find it baffling that places which are so similar in many respects (blame it on cookie-cutter urban planning, a fundamental lack of design creativity, or what you will) can still feel so different. The relaxed, lush green hills of Xiamen are a world away from the dusty, battered Shandong countryside, and both are a world away from the oppressive urban crush of Shanghai, or even the rapidly overcrowding Hangzhou.
And yet, coming from London they are so completely and utterly Chinese.
China met me at Pudong international airport, where I arrived early in the morning of March 29th. In many ways I could hardly believe I was back, but my bewilderment was tempered by an onrush of familiarity: the clothes, the noise, the faint smell of petrol in the dusty air, the shrill honking of various badly-driven buses. I made my way through the sketchy men in leather jackets yelping about taxis and found the bus terminal to await my coach to Hangzhou. Sitting in the rather decrepid waiting room, and enjoying an onslaught of overloud karaoke videos, I took stock of my situation: I was back. In China. Again.
With a smile on my face, I soaked in the scene. Outside in the parking lot, various people were being packed into various vans for various purposes. Belching tours bus screeched to sudden halts in front of the toll booth as they got regularly cut off by smaller shuttle vans in a symphony of honking. The famed blue lorries got in on the action as well, blowing by every once in a while with cigarette-smoking arms hanging carelessly out the window. Vehicles in China are, almost by definition, LOUD. They squeel, screech, rumble, grind and belch. Especially the blue lorries. God, how had I forgotten about those?
As I looked around, I started to get the feeling that Pudong international was built in the late 1970s. The concrete of the parking lot was grimy and cracking, and the TV in my waiting room looked like it had been dangling from the ceiling for the better part of twenty years. Of course, by Chinese standards, that means it was instead no earlier than 1999.
As I looked around, I also noticed that this particular corner of China was just not a very colourful place. Everything was either black, white or grey: clothes, cars, grime, sky, you name it. Everything was also covered in a layer of dust. I was thinking that London had spoiled me.
As my coach set out for Hangzhou, we were treated to an immense traffic snarl not ten minutes out of the airport. It was a veritable who’s who of the Chang Jiang delta highway circuit; sleek yet unwashed black sedans slowly snaked around filthy, rumbling industrial lorries. Old Santanas, complete with curtains and rear view mirror pendants, revealed only enough of their occupants that I knew they smoked. A lot. Flatbed trucks sat idle yet honking, their migrant workers lying around in the backs. I never found out what the source of the jam was, but it was enough to divert all lanes off the highway. I’m still amazed no one hit the traffic police trying so desperately to instill order where it didn’t really belong.
The driver of our bus apparently knew a shortcut. Well, I don’t know if it was shorter but there was definitely a lot of cutting. We bumped down a narrow dirt road that had become a thoroughfare for vehicles barely able to fit it, let alone manage the oncoming traffic. My introduction to Shanghai this time was rather different than for most coming in from Pudong airport, I would think. This scene easily rivalled the best the interior provinces have on offer: old villages had merged into a giant, crowded sprawl of junkyard workshops, slum dwellings and jumbled infrastructure that we elitists in the know so coldly define as the ‘informal’ sector. Shacks of all sorts were filled with people labouring away at their particular specialities: one group was busy putting together a billiards table, while next door an old man was busy taking on discarded (and very visibly fouled) urinals with his sledgehammer. It was a vivid reminder that, in Pudong, behind every bank tower there is a migrant shack.
Eventually gaining higher ground on the highways and one big bridge, the urban impossibility of Shanghai spread before us. While before the city had seemed to be one of the more orderly in China, coming at it from London I could see neither planning nor order. Covered in a filthy white haze, an endless sea of highrises jumbled over streets bursting with people, cars and carts. I could barely make out the Las Vegas skyline of Lujiazui, but I knew it was in there somewhere, lording over its chaotic kingdom of smokestacks and buildings pockmarked with air conditioning units. Had Shanghai always been this ugly and out of control? I’m not sure, but compared to London it was Calcutta. Like I said, China is all about relativity.
But goddamn was I excited to be back.