Pearl of the Orient
Sep 18th, 2006 by Michael Max
Hong Kong’s airport feels like a German operating room. Clean and efficient. It’s impossible to fly directly from Taiwan to Mainland China. Hong Kong is the hub that turns so much of the commerce and connections from the outside world into China. It’s two hours from there to Shanghai.
Pudong airport is also a surprising model of quiet efficiency. Then you walk out the doors of Customs and into China.
Snake through the metal railed corridor full of hand held signs written in the world’s languages. The people there to meet those with pre-arranged transportation. It reminds me of landing in Taipei six years ago, and grateful to find my name on a card. Now, I squeeze through the throng and head to the Number 3 bus. It will get me within a 20 minute walk through old city alleyways to my friend Zachi’s apartment in the French Concession.
Shanghai has a horizon filled with apartment buildings. Palaces that float in the sky, towers of commerce, traffic crawls along highways congested as an old man’s arteries.
Entire blocks are within days razed and rumble strewn. Whole neighborhoods with their ghosts and history vanish like sunlight dispersing shadows. The New China is exploding into being at a speed that must be fantastically dizzying to those who live here.
Traditional markets with their basins of live fish, carts piled with green fresh vegetables, and cages of dinner destined chickens are still easily found. As are the cantilevered bamboo racks that dry clothes in the coal scented alleyways. Old and new Shanghai live a tedious existence together. There are wide shopping streets that sprout marble trimmed stores filled with genuine imported name brand goods, along with their imported prices. Other districts it is impossible to escape the hawkers who know a half a dozen English words “Rolex, hand bag, DVD, cheapoo cheapoo, looka looka”.
Shanghai traffic moves fast and feels mean. There is an ever-present crosfire of horns. It’s full of one way streets, but with bicycle lanes that move in the opposite direction. Crossing the street requires that special kind of dimensional awareness and concentration. I used to have the knack for it, now I am having to remember those dance steps.
In the States, we dream terror and fear. Shanghai, it dreams possibilities, and a tomorrow of increasing prosperity.