Mr. Shirley Goes To Shanghai, by Paul Shirley

Day 1 – Chicago, Illinois, USA – O’Hare Airport, 5:30 p.m.

I’m one flight into a nine-flight itinerary that, over the next twenty-five days, will shepherd me to Shanghai, then Melbourne, then Sydney. As I sit at a high table a few paces from Barbara’s Bookstore At O’Hare, my thoughts are less on my upcoming adventure and more on my balls.

When it comes to flying, you would think that the chief concern of a man seventy-one inches tall would be legroom. You would be right, sort of. The part you would miss would be the why. Most people think that my main complaint about airplane seats is the uncomfortable proximity of the back of the seat in front of me. This closeness, which never fails to make me think of coffins and Medieval torture devices, is a problem, in large part because of my tendency toward claustrophobia, which I will revisit at some point in the trip, I’m sure. But the hidden danger of seats designed by ergonomical engineering dropouts is their height.

As I write this, I’m sitting at one of those tall, one-way-facing tables that airport cafes install in an effort (I think) to keep people moving. My legs don’t reach the floor. My jeans feel slightly bound up around the waist and crotch, but I sense no pain in my testicles. Contrast this with the seat on the American Airlines DC-something I deboarded twenty minutes ago. Its seats were fifteen inches off the ground and canted forward like a ski lift designed by a former thrill-ride architect. As a consequence of their dwarfism, I spent the one-hour flight alternating between hunched and splayed, shifting my weight every three minutes thanks to a nagging pain in the vicinity of my genitals. I don’t know why this setup, which features my body making contact with the seat in only one place on my body – I believe it’s called my ischium – makes my testicles hurt, but I suspect that it has something to do with weight dispersal, my back, and the principles of physics.

I don’t expect seats on airplanes to be like seats in airports. I don’t even expect them to change. What I do expect is that, after tomorrow’s fifteen-hour flight to Shanghai, I will be one step closer to sterility.

Sterility is a small price to pay for this trip, which came together rather suddenly and which, if I die sometime in the next year, will certainly be labeled as the trip of a lifetime. As I write this, I’m waiting for my girlfriend, Mandy, to arrive from New York. After six days together in Shanghai, we will separate; she will leave for two weeks in India. I will go on to Australia. We will meet up in Shanghai and fly home. Between now and then, I will visit two countries to which I’ve never been and will go to the Southern Hemisphere for the first time, which seems important to me, somehow.

I am, as a sixth-grader from Orange County might write, pretty stoked. Don’t let my complaints about airplane seats fool you.

I hope to write every night of my trip. These writings will probably be haphazard; I won’t address everything that happens to me in China and Australia and parts in between, and I will likely spend more time than is necessary on minutiae (see above) but I hope to paint a loose picture of the trip I have.

And with that, away we (I) go…

Day 2 – Shanghai, China – Citadines Jinquao Aparthotel, 9:20 p.m.

My fears of overheated testes and errant sperm were unfounded. Even though our flight was oversold and, therefore, “very full” as the stewardess put it, an angel at the United desk found for me an exit row seat, thus precluding my planned in-flight breakdown if and when I was relegated to the middle of a row of five. I shared my twosome not with Mandy but with Darryl Trooper (or maybe Tripper, except that that sounds too much like Three’s Company), who travels to Shanghai six times a year to check up on the makers of those “chairs in a bag you probably know,” who ply their wares in Shanghai.

After the fifteen-hour flight, Mandy and I stepped into an efficiency nerd’s wet dream. Immigration took four minutes. Directions to the MagLev train were clear and abundant. As advertised, said MagLev reached 420 km/hr, at which point I had to disappoint Mandy by explaining that she hadn’t caused the tent in my pants. From the MagLev’s last (and only) stop, the subway was well-marked. Even our hotel was easy to find.

Modern and well-run, all.

I don’t know what I thought Shanghai would be like. Maybe all glitz. Maybe all Chinese junks in scummy rivers. Maybe all that old guy who owns the shop where the father buys the Mogwais in Gremlins, even though that guy, I’m pretty sure, was Japanese.  What Shanghai is like, that is The Truth – at least, as much of The Truth as I can divine in five hours – sits somewhere in the middle of my preconceived notions. Shanghai looks, as Mandy so correctly put it, like something out of Blade Runner: all neon and skyscrapers and animated Nike ads. But Shanghai also looks like what I imagine old China to look like.

Shanghai has half again as many people as New York City. We are staying, as mentioned in the header of this section, at a hotel near People’s Square, which sits near Shanghai’s city center. Nonetheless, when we left the hotel in search of bottled water and a snack, we were able to wander into a semi-squalid residential area only one block from the hotel. It was like starting in midtown Manhattan and finishing in Queens, except if Midtown and Queens were one hundred paces apart.

Maybe it’s The Economist in my ear, or maybe it’s those months I spent in Russia, but I am suspicious that there is something strange about Shanghai. The streets (that we’ve seen) aren’t even as dirty as the streets of Athens. The people are friendlier than even in Spain. But unless it’s all my Westerner’s imagination, the faces of the old men on their rickety bicycles tell a story that is in conflict with the 30-story Marriott that is going up across the street.

Day 3 – Shanghai, China – Citadines Jinquao Aparthotel, 2:00 a.m.

We emailed a friend of a friend of Mandy’s, and arranged to meet her at Glamour Bar, where this friend of a friend sometimes works, and where, tonight, the kickoff to the 9^th Annual Shanghai Literary Festival would be. This friend of the friend, whose name is Annabella, arrived twenty minutes after we did, which, coincidentally, I’m sure, is when the night got going.

After two hours at the Glamour, which included a talk with an older French lady and her Slovenian assistant about the possibilities of my working with their company, we – where “we” includes Annabella the half-Portuguese girl, our Shanghai-ian friend Jimmy (“our” used loosely, of course), Milan, a half-Chinese, half-New Guinean who was raised in Amsterdam, and two Spanish dudes with questionable facial hair – left for a restaurant called New Barbarians. Or maybe Southern Barbarians. At any rate, Barbarians was in the name. We ate the best Chinese food I’ve ever had; it included potato pancakes that we topped with fried goat cheese, tomatoes, and mint salad. (Note to self: learn how to make mint salad. Your colon will thank you.)

We were joined at the Barbarian joint by at least one German (maybe two) and a Greek, making our party the United Nations of fun-lovers.

I quickly bonded with the Greek because Greeks love to argue and, three hours later, when I was desperate for cash because I didn’t want the night to end, he accompanied me down from Lune’s third story location to the street below where, after two hundred meters of walking, we found a Chinese bank. He told me that his wife had come to China with him, but that she was only willing to stay in China without him.

Back at Lune, we danced, and I marveled at the multicultural crew I had picked up, at their enthusiasm, at the price for a pint of Tiger.

Day 4 – Shanghai, China – The Grand Mercure Hotel, 9:30 p.m.

There might be mold in the air, or it might be dirt. We moved today, from the Citadines Aparthotels to the Grand Mercure. (Credit to Mandy for the push; I was content with the Citadines.) For $75 a night (thanks Hotels.com!) we’ve ensconced ourselves in a near-five star hotel that can only be described as Lost In Translation-esque, minus that sweet pool and, sadly, Scarlett Johansson. In other words, it’s really, really nice. Except for the pervading smell of…something dirty, or maybe moldy.

Last night, our friend Jimmy told us that the Chinese are freer than we understand. He told us stories of people smoking pot in front of the police. I see what he means. Shanghai, at least, is a festive place. In People’s Park, there are bumper cars. Tonight, we had hot chocolate from a chain called Coco. We spent an hour inside a toy store. We watched a Chinese opera that was nothing if not whimsical.

Yet, that strange smell remains.

It’s possible that I’m searching too hard for a metaphor, and it’s possible that my conceptions of China are influencing my opinions. There’s all sorts of shininess here – TVs on the side of buildings and enough neon to light the route to the moon.

But still, the police presence is jarring. The old men gathering trash are weathered and beaten. Inside a grocery store tonight, I watched a supervisor browbeat a dozen security guards. The people here are free and exuberant and happy. Yet, today, on our walk through People’s Park, we came upon a marriage market. Old men and women had set out signs describing their children. There were dates of birth, heights, weights, and among the most proud (or desperate?), pictures. We’d been told about the market by Annabella; she said that the old men and women still made arrangements to marry off their grown children. Most of the birth dates were 77, 78, 82 – the far end of marriable age, I suppose.

Their children are free, but not really.

Everywhere we look, it is the same. People waffle between two expressions: toothy smiles and I-Wish-You’d-Die-White-Devil. When we talk to them – in furious hand expressions, mostly – they are polite but rarely what anyone would call helpful.

Maybe this experiment, of discipline and slow growth, will work. But I don’t know how. China seems – and again, I should probably write “Shanghai seems” – like a bulging disc. Too much pressure, and shit starts to moosh out the sides.

Then again, that could be the mold talking.

Day 5 – Shanghai, China – The Grand Mercure Hotel, 10:36 p.m.

The word for the day is “drear” which, when defined, would be the gray that, as far as I know, can only be found on a rainy day in Shanghai.

Mandy and I tried ever so hard to make a day of it. We got onto the metro (and what a fine metro it is) and rode to the Jade Buddha Temple, which was dull and uninspiring, especially in the drizzle. Then it was on to the French Concession, a part of Shanghai that was once dominated by, well, the French. There, we walked around in the gray mush, thinking that perhaps we could find a place to get a cheap massage. As the raindrops got closer together, both in time and in space, we gave up and stormed the gates of Oscar’s Pub, where we drank Scotch and listened to expats talk about life in Shanghai.

We recharged at the Grand Mercure for several hours before venturing back into the Seattle for the best Shanghainese in Shanghai (according to my Frommer’s Guide) at Crystal Jade. The food – pork buns, steamed dumplings, roast duck, and a scallion pancake that neared perfection – was fine enough, but the cab ride home was even better; we were as sleepy as two humans have ever been, and the cushioned softness of the Mercure’s king-sized bed beckoned. We blame the weather and the jet lag for our weariness; it turns out that it does take some time to get used to being halfway around the world.

With two days left in China, we have learned about Shanghai what I’ve learned about every city in the world: leave the attractions to the old ladies with fanny packs. I will remember more vividly the walk from the metro station to the Jade Temple – we saw a woman doing tai chi in the trees, next to a hen on a leash – than I will the Jade Temple. Seeing a city is seeing its people, eating its food and drinking its drink. That means the grocery store over the museum, the bar over the picturesque garden, the sidewalk over the sights.

To be continued…

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