Xi'an

I came to Xi’an five years ago as a side trip on my way to Mongolia. I came to see the Terracotta warriors, do some laundry and move on. I have a bad memory for images and I have only two strong memories of the place. The first was a dingy little restaurant where dog was an option on the menu and another customer teased me for how I hold my chop-sticks. The other was the long line of shops along my hotel’s street; little one room beauty salons lit by pink lights, all with solitary women sitting at the front doors, calling out to me as I went by.

Xi’an was not a place I gave much thought to returning to. I decided to try it again because a friend in Istanbul recommended it. He pointed out that it was a beautiful city with a lot of universities which lent it a college-town vibe. These good words, plus the knowledge that it was neither a big industrial town nor a sleepy backwater made me gravitate toward it. It would be good, I imagined, to be in a place that was both Chinese and yet full of western amenities when necessary.

Well, Xi’an was a far cry from what I remembered. Five years had done a number on the city. When I’d stayed here before, the Lonely Planet had recommended a clean, but boring little hotel near the train station—which goes some way to explaining the concentration of brothels. Now there were swanky youth hostels with fancy expat bars lighted like Wan Kar Wai movies.

So what is Xi’an? Well, with around 7 million people, it probably qualifies as a second tier Chinese city. But that doesn’t convey much. What matters is that it’s the original capital of the country—the Qin, Han and Tang all had their palaces here—and, history aside, it’s the largest city in the northwest of the country. If you look at a map of the country, the population (marked in shades of red) is all concentrated on the coast. Outside the Great wall, the intensity fades except for a flame of color flaring out westwards to include Xi’an before petering out. Think of Xi’an like Chicago—a mecca of commerce amid vast expanses of nothing.

Living in a place, the layout and the points of interest only slowly come clear. A travel guide will tell you to visit the Big Goose Pagoda and the Bell Tower, perhaps a visit to the history museum and a few other cultural sights, but this isn’t how daily life plays out. In practice, most of my time is spent within a radius of only a few blocks.

Both my job and apartment are located only two blocks from the Bell Tower and, from this six hundred year old structure, the four main city boulevards radiate off toward the old city walls. Along the west road are numerous fancy restaurants. Along the north, shopping malls. South, more shopping malls. East? Individual clothing stores, banks, and a few hotels. Behind the Bell Tower, in the northwest section, is the “Muslim Quarter,” a recently refurbished drag of little stores selling dried fruit, noodle shops, and vendors hawking knick-knacks like wood-carved frogs.

My house is in the southeast section of the old city near the gargantuan Taiyuan Shopping center and the surrounding clothing and accessory stores. To get to it you take a few turns off the main streets. You quickly find yourself walking along a scruffy alleyway. There’s a flop motel, a few legitimate hair salons and an open air shack selling stale crackers and water before you come to my apartment block.

If you pass by my apartment, you emerge back on a small road running parallel to the main eastern thoroughfare, lined with a mixture of middle, low and basement range restaurants. Scattered along the way are a range of different shops—internet cafes, corner-groceries, bakeries, pirated electronics boutiques and sign-makers.

Not too far from all this is my school, located on the fifth floor of a building shared with a business hotel and a large bookstore. Directly next to it is an empty lot of property. Hidden from the street by a concrete wall, it has become home to a small shanty town of beat-down-looking men. Using scavenged bricks, plastic, wood and other materials, they’ve constructed little huts. There are meeting places with tables and chairs at which they play cards. The men gather together throughout the day around trash bin bonfires.

In the past month, I’ve made it east and south of the city walls repeatedly, but never penetrated in the other directions. The south of the city is chock-a-block with universities and concentrations of clothing stores and restaurants. There is also a financial district with big clean roads, but not much in the way of vitality.

The main southern draw is the Goose Pagoda. Any potential awe the view of this thirteen hundred year old temple might have stirred on my first visit was undercut by the surrounding tourist infrastructure. In my first glimpse of it on a foggy morning, the pagoda seemed dwarfed by a massive KFC built on the edge of the surrounding square. In all directions, new restaurants are going up. All along the westerly running Yanta Street are model foreign restaurants serving Korean, Maylay, Japanese and Indian cuisines. Everything is newly built and, like so much of the development, its existence seems more aspirational than anything else. On the day I visited, every restaurant was empty and the staffs sat at window tables playing cards or gazing.

Such details aside, the whole area seemed promising. There was a cute little park that I could imagine visiting in the summertime and at night the fountains around the pagoda were turned on to provide audiences with the largest light and water show in China.

One particular disappointment to me was that the university district of the city was largely devoid of interest. Nothing distinguished it from other parts of city. There was nothing special in the way of bookstores, restaurants or cafes . . .

And, really, this was the biggest problem with the city as a whole—the undifferentiated sameness of it all. Aside from the landmarks, there was little beauty on display. Life centered around shopping, work, restaurants and home—and nothing would be wrong with this except that the shopping all seemed so repetitive. On a typical day, waking up to cold weather, there was little motivating me to explore and, when I did, the explorations tended to reveal large swaths of sameness. There might be a particularly good restaurant in a given neighborhood, but the surrounding area offered little of interest.

Again and again what saves China from boring me with its alternatively drab, soulless city vistas, is the people. This isn’t to say that Chinese are more interesting than folks in other countries—that the opposite is true is a gripe of a different sort—but they are more friendly and the flow of life around them hums at some higher frequency.

Certain things that grate on one at first—the constant stares and murmurs of laowai and waiguoren—lose their annoyance when their lack of malice becomes clear. Chinese stare because they’re interested and involved. If you have a problem, people will help you. If you are in trouble, you never feel utterly alone.

Moreover, to my eye, daily life in China gives lie to the stereotype (repeated by Chinese themselves), that they are meek and easily herded. I am constantly watching shouting matches break out. Getting on a bus in a free-for-all. And traffic! There are no rules; buses don’t’ stop for pedestrians on red lights, pedestrians don’t wait for green lights (instead you just wander out into the road, lane by lane). All this—and far better examples of such collective madness—are pluses in my way of thinking. When you start considering your own life, back in the states, you realize how regimented everything is. you go when you’re told, stop when you’re told, line up here, queue there. You don’t spit on the street or drive down the sidewalk. You also don’t fall easily into friendship with strangers.

It’s all of a piece; neither good nor bad but thinking makes it so. Xi’an is lacking in a great many departments that matter to me, but it brims with life in a host of other ways.

New Year’s Eve was a perfect example. In the days leading up to the event, streets are peppered with vendors selling fire-crackers. For several days in advance, people set off sporadic blasts with no rhyme of reason. As the midnight hour approaches, the frequency rises until midnight when fireworks start shooting off in every direction. The entire sky becomes full of explosions, lights and smoke.

More quietly, along the streets, outside businesses and—occasionally—in the middle of the highway, Chinese gather in twos and threes to light small devotional fires of money and joss paper.

Amid all this activity, groups of Chinese head to and fro to restaurants or each other’s houses. Everyone out and about is in high spirits. As I walked along with a few other teachers, packs of kids called out new years greetings.

Finding ourselves shunted onto the street when the expat bar finally showed us the door at five in the morning, we teachers made our way onto the streets and began to part ways. Another teacher and I were waylaid by a group of Chinese in their late twenties: Three very drunk men and a pair of slightly tipsy women. Seasons greetings were exchanged and, after some discussion in various broken languages, we all agreed to get food together. Our new Chinese friends had no particular idea of where to go, but an hour of peripatetic wandering brought us to a busy noodle place near the Muslim Quarter.

Around seven in the morning we all said our goodbyes and started to head home. Light was flooding the city’s perpetually gray sky and fireworks were starting up again.

Photos: Xi'an, First Month

Click HERE for photos.

First Impressions

On the evening of my fourth and final day in Shanghai, I was sitting in a busy little hole-in-the-wall restaurant off Nanjing Street, working my way through a plate of mixed entrees—green beans, noodles, a forgettably flavored tofu, and equally non-descript meat—when a man began speaking at me from a nearby table. He was dressed in a zhongshan suit and cap; pinned to his chest were a number of red ribbons and a picture of Mao. He was middle aged and comfortably filled out his uniform.

“Good food here, yes?” he called out to me. The various other customers—all of us being closely packed together—glanced up upon hearing English. A few guys flashed grins at their girlfriends.

“Yeah, it’s good.”

“You like Chinese food?”

“Sure.”

“Do you like China?”

“Yes,” I answered a little more hesitantly, wondering how all this was tending, “I think it’s a very exciting place.”

“Exciting,” he rolled the word around in his mouth a moment, “Yes, exciting. I’m from Taiwan, you know.”

“Oh . . .so you prefer it here, I imagine.” The thought of his outfit going over well in Taipei didn’t seem likely.

“Yes, I moved here in 2000. Taiwan is in decline. China is on the rise. May I sit?” he indicated at the seat across from me.

“Sure,” I was curious to see where this went and, anyway, it seemed ridiculous to be shouting at each other across the room.

“You see Taiwan’s manufacturing base is disappearing. No one makes things there anymore. All the factories are moving to China.”

“I suppose I don’t see as many “Made in Taiwan” labels anymore . . .”

“No.”

“And what is your job?”

“I’m retired. But I was an importer-exporter. Now I teach Chinese to foreigners. Here’s my card.” He handed me a business card with a great deal of Chinese on it that I could make nothing of. The name on the card said “Nelson Mandela,” but this was crossed out and, written above it, was the name Nelson Chu.

“You know who Nelson Mandela is, yes?” he said, eyeing me.

“Sure.”

“He’s my hero. Do you like my card? Why do you come to China?”

“I’m going to teach English in Xian.”

“And why China?”

“It seems like a very interesting place. It has a unique culture . . .”

“Yes very ancient. Do you think China is overtaking America? Is America in decline?”

“People say America is declining, but I don’t know. Twenty years ago they said the same things about Japan. Japan was going to overtake America . . .well, that didn’t happen. I think China is developing, yes, but I don’t think it has to be a competition. There’s room for both . . .”

These thoughts clearly didn’t please him greatly—a dyspeptic shadow had fallen across his face. Yet, momentarily, he roused himself and resumed his odd good humor. As I casually hurried to finish my meal, he quizzed me about my education and whether I was interested in Marxism. I recommended that he read A People’s History of the United States and, my food finally finished, said my goodbyes.

Although this man was clearly unbalanced in some regards, his basic points were sound enough. In some form or another this idea of American decline had been bouncing around my head during the whole of my time in the city. Now, of course, I wouldn’t have phrased it that was at the time. In the moment, what I felt was a more generalized sense of unease and displacement. The difference between the China I had expected and that which I encountered was startling.

During my first few days, I had been to neighborhoods as nice as any I had encountered in Seattle or New York. Actually, nicer. I had wended my way down one major street that was lined with designer jewelry and fashion boutiques which gave way to mammoth shopping malls and hotels. Walking down this street were Chinese dressed in the most chic of clothes. (There were also large numbers of wealthy westerners here—mostly well-heeled-looking men, lock-armed with Chinese women.)

And undergirding all of this was a vast army of laborers. As I came to the end of this particular street (that is to say the point where any destinations accessible by foot fell away and were replaced by the sort of massive landmarks one only pulls up to in a car) I found myself alone, walking down an endless boulevard lined with trees, all lit up with white Christmas lights. The sky was now pitch black and this lifeless luminescence—lifeless because there was not a soul but me to appreciate it—was almost painfully beautiful. Standing, considering all this, I heard a clanking noise and turned my head upwards to see a man, perched in one of the trees, slowly curling lights around the branches. Here it was seven o’clock at night and this man was still toiling away, manufacturing the beauty.

Shanghai was a beautiful city, but it was a very particular sort of beauty and not one I cared for. Istanbul had been unbearably beautiful. Lining the Bosphorus were the most luxurious of houses and enclaves. All of these places had radiated a sense of wealth, but it had been a wealth in repose; the way one pictures the old plantation south. The money was there, but it was tied to a life of leisure and beauty, of fine architecture and the smell salt water.

Shanghai had the feeling of new money. The wealth was all there on display—you were always being bludgeoned by it. Every building eagerly screamed at you: This cost money! There was no subtlety and, surely, that was the point. Here was a city on the rise, on the make, eager to remind all of what it had become. This was highly effective. I was never unconscious of how robust an act of creation the city was and how pale and anemic the world I came from was in comparison. Civilization in Shanghai had the sense of passing through an heroic age where great things were possible whereas America had passed such a point. It was impossible to conceive of American cities every again experiencing the degree of change Shanghai was undergoing. The America I knew no longer had the will for such concerted displays of greatness.

But—and this is the crucial point—I would not want to live in Shanghai. The city was a wasteland. All the beauty was artificial. The closest one could come to nature was a walk along the banks of the Huangpu River. Here one could sit on benches and view the city skyline, but even from this vantage the only beauty was that of constructed things.

And away from the city center things were worse. My hostel’s neighborhood, on account of its numerous markets and small restaurants, had a more down-to-earth vibe that appealed to me, but it was also an endless sprawl of gray building and omnipresent dust. The most pleasant discovery I had while there was to wander into Lu Xun Park on Sunday and find the whole place alive with activity. In one section there was martial arts practice, in another yoga, in another salsa dancing, patriotic singing, kite flying and ballroom swing dance. Most of the crowd was older and all seemed to be thoroughly enjoying this time out and about. Yet the whole park was drab and dusty. The waterways were brown and stagnant. The only thing that redeemed it all was the humanity and the high spirits of all involved.

On my last day in the city, heading to the train station, I got off the subway a stop too early and found myself in a part of the city that looked as though it had been dreamed up by Cormac MacCarthy. All was brown and hazy with dust. No green was to be glimpsed and the various storefronts all seemed to be in the process of decay. The train out of the city revealed endless swaths of ugly apartment blocks, often pressed up again shanty-houses.

That it was no worse than what I had seen in other cities was a fact which I tried to keep at the forefront of my mind. I might have seen better vistas than Shanghai had to offer, but many residents of this city doubtlessly had not. What I viewed as depressing could easily be given a different construction: What people living in China at this particular historical moment were witnessing was a vast act of self-creation. The city was surging to life in every direction one looked. It was the speed and the scale that were amazing—not necessarily the aesthetics. To be a Chinese at this moment was to see a profound change underway of which all the dust and gray and the ugliness was a symbol. To them it might well be reason for soul swelling optimism. Someone like myself coming from a cushy background, where the dirtiness of progress had been long ago swept under the rug, perhaps lacked the requisite perspective.

It was this sense that divided my mind much of the time I was in Shanghai: Distaste for what I was personally experiencing balanced by a deep awe in the face of it all. As I made one last pass up and down Nanjing Street, beneath blaring neon signs, through surging crowds and past touts who, somewhere around ten at night, switched from hissing “watches and bags” to “girls,” I tried to ditch my qualms. It was easy to do. In the face of such vitality, such light and energy, how could one think about the downside of things. Walking down the street, the world felt young and all seemed possible.