They Say You Can't Go Home Again...

Pudong2
Originally uploaded by beccamozart.

Ah, yes, it's been ages since my last post. But Shanghai really is keeping me busy. Between studying and shopping and vegetarian restaurants, I can hardly keep my head on straight.

So I was talking to my language partner James today, who was telling me that during the cultural revolution his parents were displaced from Shanghai to a rural area in the Northeast. He said that after their "work study" people had difficulty returning to the city for much the same reason that Vietnam vets had trouble returning home: they simply weren't the same people.

So it makes me wonder if I didn't kind of catch the same bug after my last trip to China. Not that I have the unbearable audacity to compare myself to people who have experienced that level of suffering, but there is an element of feeling out of sorts in my own skin when I'm in the states now. And I've had nary a pang of homesickness since I've been here. I think my brain swelled in Beijing, and it wasn't until I got here to Shanghai that I found new clothes to fit it. Is it possible to have reverse-homesickness? I've heard that for people who live abroad for a year or two the process of returning home is infinitely more difficult than is the process of leaving in the first place, but I don't think I understood it until now.

I other less philosophical news, I've posted some of the pictures I've been taking. If you're interested, you can look at them at www.flickr.com/photos/chinabecca/. I'll continue to blog, but flickr is easier and doesn't take up as much space on my blog. Besides, now you can look at my pictures without having to read all my random miscellaneous ponderings.

Episode III: The Food in Shanghai

Well, I was going to impress you with pictures of every imaginiable kind of food, all of which is readily available in Shanghai and most of which I have personally sampled, but for some reason the blogger website is being stubborn. So what you get instead is my simple and inadequate description. If the site's mood suddenly decides to improve, maybe the pictures will come next time.

So I met another vegetarian, and she and I have been hitting the Shanghai vegetarian restaurant scene pretty hard. (Which makes it sound a little like we've been smoking pot, I know, but our version of the pursuit of enlightenment doesn't carry a mandatory 15-year sentence in China...). The Chinese can do amazing things with food, and thanks in part to the Buddhist side of their long heritage - lots of monks who don't eat meat and have enough free time to play around with wheat gluten - they can do amazing things with fake meat as well. Really, this stuff tastes just like the real thing. Vegetarianism has apparently been enjoying a recent trendiness in the East, and Shanghai has some amazing vegetarian restaurants. We usually have to wait for at least half an hour for a seat, even on weeknights, which might irritate us if we didn't find it such a big part of the experience. It's rare to have to wait for a seat in a vegetarian restaurant back home.

Somewhat more intimidating curiosities consist of the dog meat served in the Korean restaurant down the street, which I obviously didn't try, and which nobody who did try actually liked, toast served topped with nothing but chocolate syrup, and pigeons served with their heads still on, eyes in and all.

There are plenty of western-style restaurants here too. I've never seen so many KFC's in one place before. Of course, I've never seen a lotus-root salad served at a KFC either. McDonald's has kiosks on street corners and on the banks of the river, like little ATM's for ice cream cones and french fries. They also serve taro root pies alongside the apple ones, which for the record are delicious. And in Starbucks yesterday I had a green tea and red bean mousse cake, which was great but which I'm also guessing they would have a hard time selling in the states.

Oh, and of course my favorite food in the world...red bean baozi, little steamed buns filled with sweet read bean ground into a delicious paste. There's a little shop down the street that sells the best ones ever, which makes me absolutely ecstatic because, to be honest, red bean baozi are 80% of the reason I came back to China in the first place. You just can't get them in the states. And so cheap! Three buns costs me less than 20 cents U.S.

Last year I lost ten pounds when I came to China. Somehow I have a feeling I won't be experiencing the same problem this time...unless, of course, people keep ordering dog meat. Then I may never eat again.

Settling in in Shanghai....

Well, I'm finally at school and starting to get settled in. It's turning out that all my fears about a sudden drop in quality of life were ill-founded; the dorms are incredibly comfortable, in a brand new building, and we even have air conditioning and our own private bathroom with a western-style toilet. Which is truly a blessing, because try as I might I still can't for the life of me figure out how to use a squatter. I've tried. I really have. And I'm not a stupid person. I don't know how something so simple could escape me so completely.

I had my first day of class yesterday, which was quite an ordeal; I tested into too low a level, so I asked to be moved up a class. But they didn't have any space in the next level up, so they put me in the highest level. The textbook was do-able, but I couldn't understand the teacher at all. They finally found a spot for me in the appropriate level, which I'm grateful for, but all in all the experience was slightly exhausting. Over the course of the morning I had to argue with several people in Chinese, all of whom thought all of my problems could easily be fixed if I would just ask the teacher to please speak a little more slowly.

"You're talking to me now, aren't you?" one of them said. "So you must understand something."

So now I'm in the second-to-the-highest level, which is kind of alarming because I had no idea my Chinese was this good. Or at least I had no idea I could fake my Chinese being this good. I'm still finding it a little difficult, and I have to spend a lot of time studying every day, but it's definitely workable. I will say, though, that I'm going to be pretty darn fluent when I get home.



One other thing that seems interesting enough to mention: my roommate speaks no English. She's from Japan, and her parents are both from Beijing. So she speaks fluent Mandarin with a Beijing accent, but that's the only way we can communicate. It's been great for me, because the worst part of my Chinese is my listening comprehension. It's been great for her, because she keeps asking me how to say things in English. The only problem with that is that I'm finding more and more things that have no literal translations. But it really has been beneficial to both of us, I think. I spoke with a Chinese friend on the phone today who told me he simply couldn't believe how quickly my Chinese has improved. I have a feeling that the majority of what I learn on this trip won't be in the classroom.




We took a cruise on the Huangpu River tonight, which would have been beautiful had it not been for the pollution. Seriously, you have an amazing night view of the entire downtown area of Shanghai, old and new, but you can only see it for about ten minutes before it disappears behind a haze of smog. It's kind of ironic, really, because the price they've paid for all this modernization is that now that they have it, they can't see it.

So other than that I've just been hanging out a little. I bought a bike, which in a silly way makes me feel a little more Chinese. I've made a ton of new friends, all of us bonded by the camraderie of not knowing what the heck we're doing, which has been fun. I even went to a karaoke bar for the first time the other night. Shanghai feels weird because it doesn't feel weird. I feel like I already know this city, like it's already part of me. I must have lived here in a past life. I don't know how else to explain it.

The View from the Radisson

A couple of the pictures that I took this morning from the window of my hotel room. (And you thought road construction was chaotic in the U.S....)



...And a word about the signs of affluence in Shanghai. In Beijing, this street corner would be nothing but old bicycles. Here, though, scooters are really common. The rows of second-hand bikes have virtually disappeared from the city.




It's raining right now in Shanghai. [One of the consequences of studying a foreign language is that now I'm critical of everything in English, too: what, exactly, is the "it" that is raining?] I'm on the nineteenth floor of the Radisson SAS in Shanghai, and it really is a beautiful view, if a little smoggy. I spent the better part of the day wandering the streets trying to find a power adapter for my laptop (unsuccessfully), and I just got back in. I feel a little strange, because in a lot of ways I feel like I never really left China. Everything feels so familiar to me, like I've been here thousands of times. I'll admit, though, that Shanghai seems a little tamer than Beijing did. Beijing seemed like it was constantly in a state of flux and didn't know what to do about it. Shanghai is more like it's in a flux, it knows it, and now it's time to settle back with a beer and put its feet up and enjoy the ride. Taxi drivers are friendly and cooperative, the streets are (relatively) clean, and nobody really gawks when I walk by. They stare, sure, but at least they have the common courtesy to pretend that they aren't staring. I'm not nearly the rarity here that I was in Beijing.

Which on the one hand is a great thing, because I'm finding it a little more comfortable of a city for a long-term stay than I think Beijing would have been. On the other hand, though, I'm finding it was the little things that annoyed me most that burned Beijing into my memory the way it did. It was kind of amusing to feel like a walking tourist attraction, and the availability of western conveniences here makes it feel just a little less like China and a little more like everywhere else.

Of course, ask me after I've moved into the (a/c-free) dorms tomorrow, and I may have a very different opinion....

Next Year I'm Going to Japan (or) Where do They Put All the Japanese?

Well as of about an hour ago I'm finally in Shanghai, and I have to say that the flight was blessedly unremarkable. Absolutely nothing happened. Which, compared to last year, is a huge improvement. I have all my luggage, I got vegetarian meals on the flight, I managed to avoid getting completely ripped off...all in all, a pretty good trip. Not only that, but for some reason I now seem to be able to access my blog, which means that updates should be a little more frequent than they were last year.

So I had an hour and a half layover in the Tokyo airport today, and it gave me plenty of half-conscious pause to wonder two things: 1. why didn't I study Japanese instead? and 2. um...where are all the Japanese? The first question came because the airport was beautiful; even the bathrooms were perfect. They didn't have stalls, they had individual little private rooms. And even the kids' play area had a wall of computers so kids could connect to the internet. And here I go to a country that's absolutely notorious for its gross restrooms and it takes me half an hour to connect to the internet in my hotel room. The second question came because all of the signs were in English, and I could have sworn that there were at least as many white people as there were Japanese in the terminal. Add the Chinese where there, and the Japanese were probably outnumbered two to one. Granted I was in the international terminal waiting on a flight to mainland China, but still...is Japan just so great that the Japanese don't want to go anywhere?

In other news, Shanghai is murderously stuffy, I had a really strange meal on the flight today that tasted like sweet potatoes with mint chutney, and the bed in my room feels like I'm sleeping on a brick wall. And I love all of it. Well, maybe excepting the mint chutney.

More later...I'm going on my twenty-third hour awake, and I'm starting to drag.

The Cutest Baby in the World

John and I spent the afternoon today with our good friends Ryan and Jackie, who just bought a new house. Their son Charlie is getting so big. He turned a whole year old on the 14th of June. I remember visiting him in the hospital when he was born last year! Quite frankly, I'm not sure I was prepared for his first birthday. It just makes me feel too darn old.

Ryan and Jackie are two of my favorite people in the world, and I guess it's only fitting that they should have given birth to my favorite baby in the world. So now they're my favorite family in the world. And Charlie really is the cutest child ever.