LaimaVince:Essays About Place: A Tree Cut at Its Roots Always Grows Back New Branches: Discovering the Old China and the New in Shanghai

I find my window seat on the two-hour flight from Hong Kong to Shanghai and sit down with just a tad of trepidation. This is the first time that I will be traveling to mainland China alone. My Chinese colleagues from the American school where I teach have written out copious instructions for me both in English and Chinese and have armed me with metro maps and print-outs. Now I am on my own.

An older Chinese man takes his seat beside me.

“Hello foreign person!” my travel companion sings out cheerfully as he buckles his seat belt.

I test out my Cantonese: “Ngo giu Laima. Ngo giu me meng?”

The man puzzles over my phrase a moment and then responds in English, “My name is Peter.”

Peter is traveling together with a Buddhist monk who sits down in the aisle seat. The monk is clad in traditional long brown robes; his head shaven, and his round face impassive. He clutches a string of wooden prayer beads wrapped tightly around his palms and worries them the entire flight. After the recent disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines MH370 flight, I am grateful for his silent prayers, spoken for us all without respite until the plane lands safely.

Peter tells me that the monk seated beside him has been his friend and spiritual leader for thirty years. He and his spiritual guide are travelling to his father and grandfather’s home town in the Shanghai region to honor his family’s ancestor spirits for the Ching Ming holiday. This is a holiday when Chinese people sweep and tidy up their ancestors’ graves and make offerings by burning paper money.

“When we return to our ancestral towns,” Peter explains, “we reconnect with the spirits who we have been connected with for thousands of years.”

We talk about how these important Chinese rituals were interrupted by the Cultural Revolution, which lasted ten years from 1966 to 1976, and which sought to eradicate the ancient culture of China, thousands of years old, and replace it with a Soviet style of soulless communism.

“But the culture is coming back,” Peter states firmly. “Our culture is inside all of us Chinese whether we are aware of it or not. A tree cut at its roots will always grow back its branches. It is only a matter of time.”

Peter talks about the three great religions of China: Buddhism, Taoism, and the teachings of Confucius. At the root of all of these teachings is obedience to the most important social structures: parents respect their children; a wife respects a husband; an employee respects a boss; friends respect each other.

“We Chinese don’t like politics,” Peter explains. “We like to work hard and to do business.”

I laugh to myself recalling the classroom debate I’d had with my twelfth grade students the day before. We were discussing the scene in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities when the revolutionary Defarge takes a simple-minded peasant to admire the king and the queen at a procession in Versailles. He does this so that the man would see the opulence of the aristocracy and reflect on his own poverty and therefore be inspired to join the revolution. To help the students understand the image, I made a comparison to how people in the United States will gawk at celebrities who are paid millions to entertain us either in Hollywood films or in sports, but require them to give little back to society. My students refused to accept the analogy and rushed to argue with me. “But celebrities deserve to earn millions,” they said emphatically, explaining, “because they worked hard to be where they are!” Another student stated with confidence: “All societies maintain a class that is paid well to entertain them and rise them up out of their misery.” This debate went on, with me arguing that professions that give to society should be compensated fairly and that celebrities should pay their fair share in taxes to society. One clever student pointed out that no athletes wanted to play for France because they had to pay 70% of their exorbitant salaries back in taxes, bringing us back to our discussion of the French revolution. Finally, one mainland Chinese student blurted out in frustration: “We are capitalists here! Not communists!” His classmates clapped enthusiastically, backing him up.

“Wait a minute,” I said, half joking, “Did I take a wrong turn somewhere? I thought I was in China?”
“But no Chinese ever was a communist for real!” my students shouted in unison.

Communism must have hurt here. According to what I’d heard from Chinese people who lived it, communism went against the grain of the Chinese character.

Peter told me about his experience visiting Shanghai in 1975 during the height of the Cultural Revolution.

“I walked into a department store in the main square and all the shelves were empty. There was one glass display case and inside it there were a few pairs of gray trousers, a few white dress shirts, a bar of soap and some sort of powder. Out on the streets everyone was dressed identically in those gray trousers and white shirts.”

Today I was travelling from Hong Kong, the island of mega malls and sky scrapers, to Shanghai to find and see the relics of the old China, the temples, the hutongs, the narrow winding streets and tea shops. I only hoped that I could still find them. With a population of 24 million Shanghai is the most populous and most rapidly growing city in China. In fact, it is the most populated city in the world. Contemporary Chinese associate Shanghai with its impressive skyscrapers and malls packed with designer labels. It’s only weird romantics like me who try to seek out something left that is akin to what Marco Polo might have seen in the thirteenth century.

Our plane begins its descent into desultory clouds hanging above a smog-filled Shanghai. There is no longer a horizon line here. The space between sky and ground is cluttered with skyscrapers.

The plane lands and Peter and the Buddhist monk and I say our good-byes and disappear into the crowds that are China. On this populous planet of ours, it is not likely that our paths will ever cross again, and yet my conversation with Peter has left me with a lot to think about as I discover Shanghai. Peter has taught me to view Chinese culture and Chinese mega-cities in layers. The tree of the ancient culture may have been chopped down, but somewhere beneath the rumbling ten-lane highways and the slick marble floors of the shopping malls, those roots are down there.

Once through immigration I followed my colleague’s directions to the Shanghai Transrapid magnetic levitation train that speeds from the airport to the center at a speed of 267 miles per hour (430 kilometers). In nine minutes this train covers a distance that would need almost an hour on the city metro line. From the train I descend into the metro. In the outer rings of the metro, before I approach the center, Chinese people stare openly at me. They stare at my blond hair at my greenish-bluish eyes. They gaze at me slack-jawed, unabashedly, the way I imagine a nineteenth century crowd would observe a circus freak. Until I reach the touristic center, I am the only Caucasian amid the crowds. However, I am not alone. I notice that the plastic handrails on the metro are decorated with a cartoon character of a girl with long flowing blond hair. I look up and all the advertisements posted inside the train feature blond women selling this product or that. It is the same story in Hong Kong—ads featuring blond Caucasians dominate. Besides the handful of us westerners, the only other blonds you will ever see in Hong Kong are Canto Pop stars on the local television channels.

I wondered: Do I appear to the gawking people on the train as though I’d stepped out of an ad just because of my hair color and eye color? I have often wondered why so few ads feature Asian models in Asia. When my students took a Harvard University self-test on racial preference to complement our study of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, all of them were horrified to find out that their own answers indicated that they were racist against Asians, even though they were all Asians, born and raised in Hong Kong, Singapore, or mainland China.

“I blame it on all those ads for skin whiteners in the MTR,” one dynamic young Chinese girl pointed out. The others concurred.

The stares eventually wore me down. I resolved that the next time I venture out of Hong Kong into the mainland, I will dye my hair brown.

I arrive after nearly another two hours of travel to my modest ten dollar a night hotel located in one of the outer rings of Shanghai. When I pull back the curtains on the wall beside my bed I am surprised to find that the room has no window. Oh well, I suppose windows are a luxury in a city this crowded. A massive wall to ceiling black and white poster of a woman’s face tossing a sidelong glance is the only visual stimulation the room provides, albeit one that would make anyone feel a little paranoid, as though they were being watched.

I have plans on my first evening in Shanghai to meet with members of the Shanghai Lithuanian community. They are a group of young people in their twenties and thirties who have come from Lithuania to live and work and study in Shanghai. It has been the custom since a third of Lithuania’s population fled Stalin’s deportations in 1944 and the subsequent Soviet occupation of Lithuania, and now the economic emigration, that Lithuanians, scattered all over the world, find each other and meet when traveling to a new city. My contact person is a young woman in her twenties named Lina. She has organized a dinner party at an old-style wooden family house in the shadows of some of Shanghai’s most luxurious sky scrapers in the Jing’an Temple neighborhood.

As I board the metro, Lina texts me that she missed her train from a neighboring city and will be late, as will the rest of the group. I have to laugh: even in China Lithuanians operate on Lithuanian time, which means being at least half an hour late. The dinner is pushed up an hour, but this gives me time to wander the Jing’an temple neighborhood.

As I ride the train, I am excited by the prospect of seeing my first temple in Shanghai. I imagine myself inside the temple, burning incense offerings, admiring the jade stillness enveloping me. However, when I emerge from the Jing’an temple stop, I am in for a shock. The metro stop is the temple! In other words, the temple has been converted into a metro station. I gaze up at the shocking juxtaposition between ultra-modern skyscrapers and the contours of this traditional Chinese temple.

Later I learn that the temple actually is a working temple during the day whilst also serving as the train station. The temple was first built in 247 AD and located beside the Suzhou Creek. It was relocated to its current site in 1216 during the Song Dynasty. During the Cultural Revolution the temple was converted into a plastic factory. In 1983 it was reconverted to a temple.

As I wander the streets on my first evening in Shanghai, I find nothing of the old Shanghai except for fragments of architecture blended into super modern buildings. Perhaps this would be interesting for an architect, but not for a sentimentalist like me. I enter a department store and wander through ten floors of designer goods displayed boutique style in individual shops. I pick up a silk scarf and look at the price tag: 3,500 yuan ($563). Ha, ha… I glance around me, shoppers are few, and those who do shop are exquisitely dressed. For a moment I long for the democratic shopping experience of a Macy’s fifty percent off sale. This is not shopping, I scoff. I suspect that this is not shopping for most Shanghainese either.

I leave the shopping center and locate the street where the restaurant is located, but I cannot find it. I spot a blond woman standing near where the restaurant ought to be and consider for a moment approaching her and addressing her in Lithuanian. In just that moment, she calls out in Lithuanian, asking if I am Laima. We laugh at the absurdity of the situation: two blondes in a sea of black-haired Asians of necessity assume they speak the same language, and they do!

Greta leads me down a dark alley in the shadow of giant LCD screens and skyscrapers to where a family runs a family-style restaurant out of their old wooden house. We step inside and immediately I feel as though I were stepping back into the nineteenth century. We pass through a narrow hallway. To our left there is a narrow kitchen where family members stir free vegetables on iron woks over leaping flames. We enter the restaurant, a living room with high ceilings and floral decorations, crowded with round tables where people sit and eat from communal plates of steaming vegetables and chopped chicken. Greta confers in rapid Mandarin with the owner, a tall man in jeans who weaves between the tables with an eternally lit cigarette hanging out of his mouth despite the no-smoking sign.

“You speak fluent Mandarin?” I ask.

“Not as well as the others. They are all fluent.”

That evening I meet Lina, Agne, Algis, Adomas, Irmantas, and Algis. Algis is in his forties and is in Shanghai representing a Lithuanian company that sells lasers. The others came to Shanghai originally in various years as students in the Vilnius University Asian language program. They all came to Shanghai having learned the Chinese characters and with an intermediate knowledge of the language as their base. Within a year all of them were fluent. Most amazing is Adomas. A pianist by training and a graduate of the Čiurlionis National School for the Arts, Adomas is fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese, and five major Chinese dialects. He also speaks Russian, English, Spanish, and Arabic. He has learned all these languages by listening carefully, like a musician is trained to listen. Once he absorbs a language, he follows up by making a formal study of the grammar and writing system. Adomas explains that it is important to perceive language as a tool of communication and to learn language in a stress free environment. He teaches languages in Shanghai and implements his theories with his students.

Adomas patiently writes out our order in Chinese characters and hands it to the owner. As our food comes, plate after delicious plate of either chicken or vegetables, we praise him for his choices and Lina for finding the restaurant. To be honest, it is the most delicious Chinese food I’ve ever tasted.

“It’s a place where locals go,” Lina explains. “My colleagues brought me here.”

As we eat women hurry from the kitchen through the restaurant in rubber boots carrying empty basins exiting into the back yard, then returning from the back yard with those bins laden with fresh vegetables or stacks of eggs. I joke that they might just be chopping the heads off of the chickens out in that yard and plucking them.

“Don’t laugh,” Lina says in a serious tone, “this is China. That could be true.”

I am impressed with this warm and friendly group of Lithuanian ex-pats. They treat me with genuine kindness and ply me with questions about my books, about writing. In turn, I am curious about their lives in Shanghai where they live and work. They all love Shanghai and give me suggestions as to what I should see and do.

“Definitely go to the Confucius temple on a Sunday morning when there is a used book sale,” Agne tells me. “Just to see local people pouring over the collections of old books is an experience.”

“If you ever feel down, you should go to the park and watch people do their tai chi exercises,” says Lina, who is leaving Shanghai in two days to spend a month in an ashram in India.

“You must get up at six tomorrow and be at the Shanghai stadium by seven to catch a shuttle bus to the Tongli town on the canal,” Agne advises. “Then when it rains on Saturday, you must spend the entire day in the Shanghai Art Museum.”

Agne tells me what it felt like to come from Lithuania as a student in 2002 and to see in person for the first time a Ming dynasty vase that she had only seen in faded photographs in her textbooks.

“It was amazing,” Agne says, “there it is, this beautiful ancient relic, right in front of you.”

“You learn to appreciate the small things in life when you see simple people who spend their lives on the streets selling fried foods, and yet they are smiling and they are happy,” Adomas says. “When you compare that with when you are back in Europe and people have so much and yet there are always complaining, you realize a lot about what is important in life.”

I decide to take their advice and the next morning I am up early and head by metro to the Shanghai Inner Stadium to look for the tourist bus to Tongli. I ride the yellow line with the commuter crowd and exit at the Stadium. However, this is where I wish I had asked for more specific directions. I search in vain for the touristic bus. Without any knowledge of Chinese it is difficult to ask for directions. China, like Russia, like the United States, shares the mentality of populous countries—they assume visitors will speak their language. If you ask in English, people will respond in Chinese. I muddle my way into an abandoned concrete plaza that reminds me of the Intourist plaza of the old days of the Soviet Union, when I was surprised that I could buy a train ticket to a real place, like Frankfurt, Germany, with unreal money, the ruble. I wander into a touristic booth and somehow manage to buy the very last ticket on the very last bus to Tongli just four minutes before bus’s departure. I enter the bus, which is packed with Chinese tourists. I scan the bus looking for an empty seat. In the far back of the bus there is one narrow place left beside an elderly man, the one and only other Caucasian on the bus. I take this seat as the driver enthusiastically launches into a lecture in Chinese on what I assume must be about the history of the canal towns.

The man seated beside me introduces himself as Don. He is in his seventies and is a retired plumber from Vancouver. He and his wife now run a local pumpkin patch—the pumpkin patch money has allowed him to travel.

“My wife doesn’t like to travel,” Don explains. “I just get on a plane and I go.”

Don became interested in traveling to Asia after working with Chinese immigrants in Vancouver. He is simply curious and if there’s no one around to travel with him, he goes by himself. He had already spent two weeks in Shanghai the previous year. While exploring the city at one point he got lost and a Chinese girl on a moped pulled up and offered him a lift. “Why not,” Don said, and off he went, fitting his six foot two frame onto the back of the small moped. I smiled to myself imagining this gray-haired gentleman balancing himself on the back seat of a tiny moped with a Chinese girl maneuvering through the crowded five lane streets of Shanghai.

“It was great, except when it occurred to me that if I fell off I’d have a hard time explaining that one.”

As we drive through the dense concrete jungle that is Shanghai Don muses: “I wonder about the sanitation for 24 million people… There must be a lot of illegal sewage dumping going on.” Only a plumber would consider that while on vacation, I think.

The bus lets me out at Tongli along with two very nice Taiwanese ladies who show me the way to the touristic center. The rest of the travelers, including Don, continue on to the next destination, another canal town.

Tongli, nicknamed Venice of the East, is a canal town in the Suzhou region. Here I feel the power of China. I meander through narrow stone streets along a canal crisscrossed with stone arching bridges built during the Ming dynasty and still used today. Older women do their washing in the canal off the stone steps into the water. Chinese “gondoliers” convey tourists through the canals in beautiful hand-crafted flat bottomed wooden boats. I visit the gardens and the Chinese Sex Museum, curious to learn about the Chinese attitude towards sex. The museum turns out to be another lovely residence surrounded by landscaped gardens filled with erotic sculptures. One hall is dedicated to homosexual sex, which seems like quite a departure from the repressive Chinese attitudes towards homosexuals of the recent past.

At three o’clock my day of lovely wanderings draws to a close and I must return to the tourist information in order to catch the bus to Shanghai at 3:30. Everywhere men on bicycles attached to small carts offer rides. My feet are aching. I hop in. The older man pulling the cart gives me his price 10 yuan ($1.50). But as he struggles to pedal, and as I sit there, taking nibbles out of one of the green dumplings Tongli is known for, I resolve to voluntarily double his fare to appease my guilt. When we pull up to tourist information, I hand the driver 20 yuan.

Back in Shanghai I follow Don’s suggestion and visit the Shanghai circus. I am caught in rush hour traffic trying to get there and must let several over-packed trains pass before I dare cram myself inside. I begin to question whether I should just give up on the circus and head back to my hotel for a much needed rest. But, I push on and I don’t regret it. The Shanghai Circus performance turns out to be truly breathtaking. I had seen the Chinese circus in 1996 in Vilnius, Lithuania. At the time the circus consisted of a troupe of young teenage girls doing unimaginable acrobatics without any safety devices or nets to protect them. The setting was a gym mat. I watched with a sense of unease and worry for the young girls, who seemed to be driven beyond reason. Today the Shanghai Circus involves beautifully composed live music, a spectacular light show, amazing flowing silk costumes, and stunts and acrobatics blended with hip hop and other contemporary tunes. At one point a gigantic globe is wheeled out on stage and a motorcyclist drives in circles inside the globe. If this is not awe inspiring enough, soon a second motorcycle enters, then a third, a fourth, a fifth and finally a sixth. As they crisscross up and down and across the globe at high speed with precise climbing, I find myself praying for the safety of the drivers. They honk their horns in rhythm and the honks blend with the incessant honking of horns in the never-ending stream of traffic outside on the Shanghai streets.

As the circus ends with a lyric performance of a man and woman propelled high above the audience and intertwined, I think to myself, China has arrived. Watching the power and precision of this performance, I feel the power and the magnitude of the ancient Chinese civilization. I remember Peter’s words, “A tree cut at its roots always grows back its branches.”

The next morning I venture out in search of breakfast and find myself in a park in the middle of this urban jungle. Bamboo and blossoming cherry trees hunch in over narrow footpaths lined with rocks and bamboo fences, a recreation of the ancient palace parks right in the middle of the city. The park is filled with retired Chinese, some practicing Tai Chi, some dancing with swords, some with fans, some flying kites. The very oldest retire behind a set of bushes and smoke. These are the retired people, the generation that must have felt the very brunt of the Cultural Revolution, but here they are, practicing the ancient Chinese arts. They are preparing for their deaths, I think, they are preparing themselves for passing out of the physical world into the spiritual, and they are taking the time for that.

The next day I set off to see the Jade Buddha Temple. This temple, established in 1882, is an urban temple that follows the Pure Land and Chan traditions of Mahayana Buddhism. The main attraction of the temple are two solid jade Buddha brought from Burma. However, from the moment I step inside the temple complex I feel that I am targeted as a potential consumer while the Chinese visitors are left alone to meditate and worship in peace. As I walk over to see the temple a “helpful” young temple attendant steers me into a souvenir shop and launches into a long description of the symbolic significance of the statues for sale. Having spent enough time in Asia as a white person, I know that this instant need to share one’s cultural insights is never genuine. There is always a price tag attached. I avoid these tactics, side stepping one helpful temple attendant after another, in an attempt to see the jade Buddha. Ironically, after the sacrosanct viewing of the reclining jade Buddha, when I am sternly warned not to take any photographs, I pass into another hall, which turns out to be another gift shop where life sized copies of jade Buddha are for sale, positioned in corners next to stacks of shrink-wrapped cases of bottled water.

To rest my weary feet, I agree to sit down for a cup of tea—herbs picked by the monks in the countryside. I forget to ask how much the tea costs before it is served. When I do ask, I learn that my cup of tea will cost me 50 yuan ($8) which of course is a donation to the temple.

From the Jade Buddha Temple I travel to People’s Square, where I wander among the gardens of cherry blossoms amid a backdrop of beautifully sculpted skyscrapers. I witness the grandeur of the communist-era squares in the People’s Square. I visit the Shanghai Museum and commune with the lovely Ming dynasty vases Agne told me about.

That evening I am invited to dinner at a hip organic vegetarian hot pot cafe with Yuki and Sam, acquaintances of an acquaintance from Hong Kong. Sam is American, fluent in Mandarin, earning his MBA at a university in Shanghai. Yuki is a first grade teacher at the best elementary school in Shanghai. She has a lot of pride in her work, in her city. Her family has lived in Shanghai for as many generations as they can remember, which makes her a “real Shanghai person.” I ask her about the staring people on the train when I first arrived in Shanghai.

“They must have been people from the provinces,” Yuki says. “Shanghai people are used to foreigners. Millions of unregistered people flow into Shanghai from the rural provinces looking for work. They have never seen a foreigner before. Usually they come in on that train line from the airport. That was why they were staring.”

I ask Yuki and Sam about the many handicapped homeless I see begging in the city parks. Yuki explains that they are purposely crippled or picked up already crippled by mafia and are put out on the street to earn money by begging. In the evenings the mafia comes and takes away all the money from the beggars and leaves them with barely enough to feed themselves.

We say good night and I head back to my hotel for an early evening. Up until this point I was pleased with my ten dollar a night two-star hotel. It was clean. The staff spoke English. The location was not in the center, but not that far either. But that Friday night every changed. As I’m resting in my room someone slips two cards under my door. I pick them up. On the cards there are photographs of pretty Chinese girls, heavily made up, and a phone number. I cannot read the Chinese characters. Soon the party begins. All night long I hear loud music, women cackling in high falsettos, and smell cigarette smoke. When I head out at six to catch the bus to Suzhou the next morning they are still at it, partying in the hallways.

That day I find myself in a tour bus filled with mainland Chinese tourists. I have become one of the flag following crowd. I swore I would never be one of those people, but there I was. Our guide is a tough short lady with bangs cut across her forehead in a straight line and a raspy voice that carries. We often hear her before we see her. She shouts into her microphone with the intensity of a general leading her troops on a siege and then takes off at a clipped pace with the rest of us struggling to keep up in the pouring rain. At ticket counters she screams it out with every ticket taker, who screams right back at her. Brandishing her umbrella as a weapon, our guide would pick our way into touristic sites, conquering a small space for all of us to congregate in as the other tours groups crammed their way around us. We would proceed through narrow passage ways slipping on slick stones in torrential rain, wielding our umbrellas like swords at members of other tour groups who hesitated before letting us pass.

We see stone bridges built 500 years ago during the Ming dynasty and still in use today. We take a river boat tour in which we see 500-year-old stone houses built during the Ming dynasty and which are still occupied by the descendants of the original inhabitants. We see two ladies sing Chinese opera up on a wooden veranda.

In the evening Agne and I meet up and have dinner at a Turkish restaurant in the train station mall, then wander through the narrow alleyways of trendy shops that have opened up in recent years in the French concession. Agne is a beautiful young woman with pale green eyes and long brown hair. She tells me that Chinese people will approach her and ask her if she can see alright through her “broken” eyes. She tells me that when Chinese people arrive from the provinces they go to a street where there are a few French-owned bars to stare at white people partying. “It is an attraction for them,” she says.

Agne came to China from Lithuania twelve years ago as a student of Mandarin and since then has made China her home. She lived and worked in Taiwan for three years. She has been in Shanghai for eight years. She works for a real estate development company.

“When I first came to Shanghai,” Agne says, “there were two metro lines. Now there are sixteen. There are no democratic negotiations to get in the way of getting things done here. The boss tells the people to get the job done and they do it.”

“Don’t you miss your family, being so far away?” I ask.

“When I first came here I had to travel a long distance to a special office on campus and pay a lot of money to make a phone call to my parents in Lithuania. Now I call my mother on Skype whenever I like from my cell phone. Technology has brought us closer together. The global era allows me to live like this.”

The next morning, my last morning in Shanghai, at Agne’s suggestion, I go to see the Confucius Temple. This turns out to be the perfect way to end my trip to Shanghai. Tucked away inside a narrow street, the Confucius Temple is an oasis within the chaos of the city. A large statue of Confucius gazes over the temple yard where vendors sell old books, engaging in leisurely conversations with buyers. Watching people leafing through the old books, I remember Peter’s words again, “A tree cut at its roots always grows back new branches.” I buy two old folios of Chinese paintings for 20 yuan ($3.20) and the book seller laughs openly at my foolishness.