Originally posted on Matador Blogs, March 2009

The first thing that hit me was the heat – an Orwellian heat - crushing and dominating, searing my skin and eyes, blasting my innards, and steaming my undercarriage like a Chinese dumpling house. Korea was hot, but Shanghai was hotter. The heat was a constant – it was always at the forefront of your thoughts. It was the prime source of conversation. It was a force.

As we sped in a cramped taxi towards Shanghai’s city center, we caught up with our old friend Lili, a cropped-hair sprite of a Chinese woman who now calls the massive metropolis home. We knew Lili from Korea, where, while attending university, she was the bartender at our local boozer for two years. She knew both of us well, having seen us at our best and worst.

Photo: jiazi

"It’s about time you came to China, you fu*king Americans. This is Shanghai! It’s an awesome city!"

Lili gestured out the window to the endless urban expanse that blurred past.

"You can do anything here." She leaned back and took a drag off of her cigarette, allowing us to digest the statement.

With Lili was "Sampson," her boss from the intellectual property law firm - as ironic as such a thing sounds in China - where she worked as an interpreter. Sampson was a squat Chinese guy with a crew cut and breath that could wilt swamp flowers, and twenty minutes into the taxi ride, he was berating the driver in rapid fire hissing Chinese. It seemed that the driver wasn’t familiar with the best route to the hotel, and Sampson was letting him have it in an endless barrage of verbal abuse, going up and down the tonal scales like a jazz trumpeter. The guy was a howitzer of chest-thumping bluster. It was like riding in a taxi with a crazed gorilla. Once we finally got back to the hotel, Sampson refused to pay the driver the full fare, shoving him several times and laughing when the man took out his phone and threatened to call the cops. In the end the driver backed down, and Sampson "saved face" in front of the two Western guests that, bound by duty, he chaperoned safely from the airport to their hotel.

Welcome to China. Welcome to Shanghai.

Photo: d’n’c

Like New York, London, or any great city, Shanghai hits you in the gut when you first arrive. From the airplane you can see its tentacles reach the ocean’s shore, in line after line of apartment blocks and houses and paved streets. From the train or taxi you stare out the window, trying to decipher the code of immensity, attempting to digest urbanization with a thyroid condition. And then you cross the river and come into the city center, with its spine-tingling collage of skyscrapers, borrowing the best from New York and Chicago and inventing some of its own, such as the China Tower. This is essentially a massive red ball made of glass and steel that’s mounted on a gargantuan rod, looking as if at any moment it may blast off into space to start a new "Middle Kingdom" in a galaxy far, far away.

Sam and I checked into the hyperbolically-named Magnificent Hotel, dropped off our bags, and promptly left. We were not to return for over 30 hours.

We gave Caf (our Irish friend and Shanghai resident) a call, and before we knew it, his towering orange-haired frame was sauntering out of a cab and guiding the four of us to a good hole-in-the-wall restaurant he knew. It was a Uighur-run place. They’re the Muslim-minority that lives in China’s far-western Xinjiang Province, the destination of our journey, so it only seemed fitting to start with their food. We dined on lamb, beef, chicken, rice, and vegetables, washing it down with cold bottles of Santori beer, which is everywhere in Shanghai. After the restaurant we headed to an expat sports bar for cheap bottles of Tsingtao (the national cerveza) and shots of Sambuca. At one point Lili and Sampson bowed out and it was just Caf, Sam, and me. We ended up walking to a 24-hour bar in the French Concession that offered chilled trance music, Belgian beers, and Amsterdam-like indulgences. Shanghai is a bubble of sorts. Foreigners have always been given a bit more room to have fun there. Like all huge cities, it’s an entity into itself. Once you leave the city and venture into the vast country beyond, then it feels like you’re in the REAL China, for all the good and bad that entails.

But we were still in Shangers and raising hell and it is here where the details get sketchy. Shot after shot and acres of beer bottles and something being passed my way… Let’s just say that at some point we made it back to Caf’s apartment (nice pad) and stayed for the next day and into the next night Sam and I finally slithered out at well after midnight, walking like zombies back to our hotel, past whole families of Chinese who elected to sleep out on the sidewalk rather than in the oven boxes that were their homes. Even at one in the morning, the heat was too much to bear. On such evenings faking homelessness beats the alternative.

Once we got to our hotel, we sheepishly sulked past the front desk and made it to our room, where we were eaten by our beds. We slept until noon the next day and uselessly tried to pretend to be real tourists, hoping that no one in a city of 20 million would catch on to the fact that we were, in fact, reptiles.

The rest of our time in Shanghai was spent wandering the streets and awaiting the arrival of Angry Steve, who was stuck in Korea until his new passport arrived from the States. Bureaucracy, bureaucracy. The heat caused us to seek the shady side of the street and constantly sip from frozen bottles of water, which also acted as neck and armpit coolers. We strolled along East Nanjing Road, dodging herds of shoppers and being hounded at ever step by touts with their endless mantra of "Watch! Bag! DVD!" At one point, while sweating out our very essence along The Bund (the city’s old river walk), two pretty girls with shade umbrellas approached us and started chatting us up in English. It’s an old scam in which they try to take you to a café to "practice English," only to stick you with a rapingly inflated bill at the end. When you object, the doors are locked and several goons pour out of the back and strong arm you into coughing up. I was up on it and told them to f*ck off after about five minutes of them following us. They were really cute, though – I can see how the scam can work. No man is immune to the charms of a pretty girl. Except a gay man.

Busan likes to call itself "dynamic," but it’s got nothing on Shanghai. Shanghai is a magnet for one and a half BILLION people, a place where the most humble come to raise themselves up and grasp at dreams. It is a city at once in love with its history and busy trying to erase it, as evidenced by several areas around our hotel that looked bombed out, like Europe in 1945, just rubble and rusted metal and wood bits, all being picked over by swarms of recyclers and other folks trying to scrounge out a day's wage. You see no recycling trucks in Shanghai, because the individual contractors have got the market covered. They wander through the tourist shopping strips, collecting all of the plastic drinking bottles, well before they hit the trashcan.

The culinary highlights were the famous dumplings I ate last time (stuffed with pork and crab meat), dumplings I could eat daily and vowed to hit on the tail end of the trip. We also had Hunan food two nights in a row. Hunan is Mao’s home province, and its cuisine has become quite popular in Shanghai. Like Sichuan food, it’s full of mouth-scorching chili peppers, though it lacks the numbing peppercorn that the former is famous for (to either your pleasure or chagrin). On the night that Angry Steve arrived, Sampson and Lili took us out to a Hunan restaurant located in the suburbs. his place was done up as "commie kitsch." Portraits of Mao hung on the walls, and all of the staff wore khaki-green Mao suits and caps, complete with little red stars. The place was slamming and Sampson proceeded to order seven or eight dishes, each of which was smothered in chili peppers and oil and garlic. When we thought we were full, Sampson would fill our plates and insist we gobble down the bits of deep fried duck or pork ribs or spicy fish head. I was stuffed enough to puke and still kept eating, unwilling to incur Sampson’s already-proven wrath. We washed the meal down with no less than ten big bottles of "Snow," which may be the vilest beer in China. This fact did not stop me from taking down about five on my own, but even so, I would advise you not to drink the "yellow Snow."

Photo: avlxyz

After the Mao restaurant, we headed back into the city center on wide pot-holed roads. An infinite succession of apartment towns revealed themselves through the grey smoggy-haze as we drove along. We took in dump trucks, cars, semis loaded with concrete and furniture, men hauling stacked air conditioning units on the back of huge tricycles, and one guy who had a huge refrigerator lashed to his rickety bicycle, which he was pushing and using as a wheel.

The old is being blasted away and towers are shooting up at an alarming pace. Just to walk by a Chinese worksite (which is half the f%cking city) and watch the action. What you hear is the sound of FRANTIC WORK - relentless clanging and machine gun riveting. On the street the workers run back and forth, ferrying supplies into the growing metal hulks. EVERYWHERE are the sights and sounds of construction. At one point, while rolling through the hazy half-built sprawl, Angry Steve turned to Lili and asked, "When will China be finished?"

She just laughed, rolled her eyes and said, "F*cking Americans."

To read Chris Tharp’s original blog post on matador blog.com

***

China Explorer> Airport Security Fun
China Explorer> How to Get a Drink Thrown in Your Face Over Panda Sex
China Explorer> Oh No You Didn't...Bitten by a Prostitute?!

Warning：The use of any news and articles published on eChinacities.com without written permission from eChinacities.com constitutes copyright infringement, and legal action can be taken.