Dewey's China Trip: Stories: Shanghai

Chatting Online in Shanxi

I spend a few weeks in Shanxi with Bi Sheng's family. They treat me really well, but I'm restless. I miss Xiujuan really bad.

I spend a lot of time at the computer chatting with girls in Shanghai, which is where I want to visit next. I'm somewhat worried that a hotel in Shanghai will be rather expensive, like Beijing. However, one girl I talk to in Shanghai says she has a friend that knows a hotel manager who will provide me with a free room if I help his employees with English for a few hours every day.

Going to Shanghai

I take a 23-hour train ride from Shanxi to Shanghai. On the train I sit with a couple of Chinese guys a few years younger than me. They are both over six feet tall. It surprises me to see Chinese guys that are so big. They're very friendly and speak to me in Mandarin quite a bit. They have stacks of cards with them that they use to practice English idioms. Looking through the cards I'm surprised by the vast number of idioms in the English language. What a difficult language to learn! It no longer seems so surprising that Xiujuan didn't know the meaning of the English phrases on her T-shirt.

Stepping off the train in Shanghai is like stepping into a furnace. The air is hot and sticky. I walk around for a while trying to get my bearings. I become drenched in sweat and my head swims, so I sit down on a park bench to cool off. Shanghai is experiencing the hottest weather it's had for the past 10 years. It's actually no hotter than Los Angeles in the summer, but because the humidity is so high it feels a lot hotter.

Finding a place to stay

I meet Orin and her friend who knows the hotel manager. They decide that I should spend the night at his place and go to the hotel in the morning. We take the subway to get there. He lives in a tiny apartment with his parents and works as a writer, writing stories for computer games. I sleep on the floor, on my Therm-a-Rest mattress. His room is air-conditioned, which gives me relief from the heat outside.

The next day I find my way to the hotel. I talk to the manager about helping his employees with English in exchange for a room. It turns out that he wants to give me a bed in a nearby hostel, and that bed only costs 55 RMB ($6.70 US) per night. I reject his offer and pay my own way to get a bed in the hostel.

Lili and Shushu

Over the next week and a half I call and meet all 12 of the Shanghai girls that I met online while in Shanxi. Then, bored of Shanghai, I decide to travel all the way down south to Yunnan province, a 44-hour train ride away. I ask my good friend Lili, a 19-year-old girl who majors in German, if she'd like to come with me. She agrees, so we buy two train tickets to Kunming, capital of Yunnan. However, when her parents find out they lock her in the house and won't let her leave.

I meet Lili's twin sister Shushu who has been sent to return to me Lili's train ticket so I can return it for a refund. Although Shushu looks just like Lili, I immediately notice a difference in her demeanor and personality. Lili's twin spends the afternoon wandering around Shanghai with me and I have a chance to get to know her better.

Crossing the River

Shushu and I walk alongside the river that separates the city of Shanghai into two parts. Our side of the river has older buildings, most of them European-style, dating from when Shanghai was controlled by European powers. The opposite side of the river has most of the big, modern buildings. These include Oriental Pearl, the fanciful soaring TV tower with many spheres of various sizes along its length, like a string of pearls; and Jinmao Tower, the tallest skyscraper in Shanghai.

We decide to cross the river and get a closer look at Jinmao Tower. Although I've seen the massive, ornate skyscraper every single day since arriving in Shanghai, I've never actually been up close to it.

I expect we'll have to take the subway under the river in order to get to the far side, as I've always done before. But Shushu says the subway is too expensive and takes too long. This sounds absurd to me; the subway only costs 3 RMB (36 cents US) and only takes a few minutes, so it hardly qualifies as expensive or slow. How does Shushu intend to get across more quickly and cheaply?

Shushu takes me to a ferry dock and buys us both tickets for only 1 RMB (12 cents US). The small ferry fills up with crowds of people and several moterbikes. Shushu buys Popsicle-like treats to help us cool down in the heat. They are made of sweetened, frozen beans. The beans are lentil-sized and greenish-brown, about the color of puke, but the cold deserts taste good anyway.

I'm still skeptical that this old tub of a boat is going to get us to the other side of the river faster than the subway. The ferry departs, shooting up black clouds of diesel exhaust, and we're on the other side of the river a few minutes later. It's not actually faster than the lightning-quick subway, but if you count the time it would have taken us to walk to the subway station, than Shushu was probably right about the ferry being the quickest option.

We walk to Jinmao Tower and get a good look at it from every possible angle. Today the air is unusually clear for Shanghai, so it's a good day for sightseeing and photographing Shanghai's unique, futuristic-looking architecture.

Shanghai Shipyard

My attention now turns to a herd of tall cranes in the distance. What are they doing, constructing more skyscrapers? And how are such giant machines able to glide from one place to another so effortlessly? We walk closer and see that the cranes are building giant ships. This is the famous Shanghai Shipyard.

We still don't know how the cranes are able to move around, because there's a wall all around the shipyard, which blocks our view. However, we finally find a man who lets us climb up a rusty metal stairway that leads to the roof of a building from which we can see over the wall into the shipyard. From this vantage point we can see that the shipyard cranes roll around on rails. I snap a quick picture before carefully climbing back down the rickety stairway.

Now that I've spent a few hours with Shushu I change my mind; she doesn't look much like Lili after all. Now that I've had the chance to learn her face in more detail I see only a superficial similarity with her twin's face.

Durian

Shushu takes me to a giant Thai mall. I've been here before, but that was at nighttime, so I don't notice until I enter. I ask Shushu if we can buy durians here, and she says probably. I've eaten durian many times before and love the creamy but foul-smelling fruit. Shushu says she's never tried it. We find a shop selling small pieces of fresh durian on paper plates, ready to eat—it's not what I had in mind.

I ask the girl behind the counter if they have any whole durians. She pulls out a durian the size of a small watermelon and weighs it. It costs me 30 RMB ($3.60 US) which is probably much more expensive than it would be in Beijing, but still less than half what I'd expect to pay in the US. Besides, the durian is almost surely fresher here than it would be in the US—and also stronger smelling.

We sit down in a McDonalds to eat our durian. People look at us funny seeing the big, spikey fruit on our table, but I don't mind. After all, in cities that see few foreigners, like Baotou, everyone looks at me funny, so I've gotton quite used it it. I manage to open the fruit up, but my hands smart afterward from the fruit's sharp spines. We find two plastic spoons and begin to eat the sections of creamy yellowish-white pulp inside.

Shushu doesn't get very far before the foul smell starts making her feel a bit sick. That's no problem; I love durian and can finish the whole thing myself. However, I'm not extremely hungry; I've just recently eaten a zongzi (a traditional Chinese food consisting of a pyramidal package of glutinous rice mixed with varying other ingredients, such as mushrooms and pork, and tightly wrapped in bamboo leaves). I finish the entire durian anyway, but by the time I'm finished I feel a bit sick myself.

The next day I take the subway to the railway station. I return Lili's ticket and get 80 percent of my money back. I then take the train by myself to Yunnan. Perhaps because the extreme heat has weakened my immune system, I have a bad cold.