City: shanghai
Author: Denis Wong
Location: the bus stop on Baise Lu, in front of the brothel, next to the Kedi

At the intersection of Baise Lu and Longchuan Lu, a line of yesterday’s noodle water ebbs away from an overturned vat, leaving an oily sheen on the sidewalk. Bits of food-like particles ride the thin skin of the opaque surface. I step aside to avoid the snaking, encroaching fluid and accidentally bump into an old grandma.

“Duibuqi,”^[1] I offer with a raised hand. She doesn’t look up. 

I am waiting for the 824 bus to Xujiahui^[2], or maybe a cab to Taikang Lu^[3] – it depends on which arrives first. I wave at yet another taxi, this one a rusted maroon, a three-star cab if the lights are real.^[4] It passes by.

I have a break-up with my Mandarin tutor waiting for me in Xujiahui. It really isn’t her, it’s me. My slow, awkward tongue refuses to make progress. She’s too nice to say how awful I sound, but I can tell by the crinkle above her nose when my tones fall flat. 

A 973 bus approaches, kicking up dust along the way. People get off, others replace them in a jumble. Grandma stays alongside me. 

On Taikang Lu, on the second floor of the Japanese café, Evelyn is probably sipping a cup of green tea. She’ll refuse offers for a second cup, her Midwestern politeness taking hold. Instead, she’ll order edamame, which she’ll carefully peel, taking care not to damage the beans. She is fresh, smiling maybe. By now, three days into her visit, the jetlag will have been left behind, lost somewhere between continents in the Pacific. 

I haven’t seen her yet. Obligations. Work. Mandarin lessons that need to be cancelled. 

It has been almost a year. Seven months longer than I promised. In fall, her internship at Tufts will begin, followed by residency.

I run my thumb along the folded corner of my new contract: two years.

A wailing screech interrupts my thoughts. It’s the 824. As the bus exhales, the center door slides open, revealing a wall of compressed bodies. Two men jostle past me and sidle into cracks within the foundation. I balance one foot on the edge, my toes curling inside my shoe. The ticket collector screams in Shanghainese and the shoving intensifies. With elbows angled inward, I dig for my metro card. There’s a nudge near my right kidney. Slight at first, then harder, insistent. It’s grandma, burrowing. 

“Hey, wait,” I say, in English, and this time, she does look up. Her dark, sunken eyes regard me for two long seconds, and then, with a firm thrust, she pushes me out the door and back onto the street. 

The bus pulls away, trailing exhaust. 

As I dust off, I see my contract lying on the sidewalk. The pages are half-soaked in noodle water, the edges of the letters blurred. 

I rest my index finger on the first page, and give it a gentle pull. The pages wrinkle, and a small tear appears.

City: shanghai
Author: Panthea Lee
Location: the Arrivals area, Terminal A, Hongqiao Airport

His skin reminded me of those sweet potatoes I bought from street vendors, sandpapery and coarse-brown. A juicy mole dangled from his chin, and from that spot of soot sprouted one solitary hair. White. Wiry. Posture proud, it arched its back just so. Just suggestively so.

I ogled the come-hither curl, unable to turn away. Suddenly, it launched into a spirited jig. Up and down it heaved. And then, as if on cue, the soundtrack: a warbling ditty of phlegm-fired barks.

I shrank deeper into my seat and nuzzled the window.

The flight attendants began the emergency procedure demonstrations and I returned to my book. My neighbour, however, was spellbound. Brows furrowed, mouth ajar, he tried to memorize their every move. He tugged at his seatbelt. He unbuckled and rebuckled it. He looked for his lifejacket, seemingly unconvinced that it was indeed under the seat in front of him. He squirmed. He shed his coat. He fidgeted with the buttons on the armrest.

“Ni zai du yingyu.”

I looked up. Eh?

“Ni zai du yingyu.”

You are reading English.

“My daughter also knows how to read English,” he continued, his Putonghua^[1] gingered by a provincial pulse. “She spent six years in America!” The sprig of hair wagged emphatically.

“Oh,” I smiled, “that’s, uh, great.”

“Six years! She went to work there, to make a new life. And she worked very hard but, you know, it’s too hard in America. Everything is difficult. So now she’s come back to China. That’s why I’m going to Shanghai – she won’t come back to our village, but she’s sent for me. She wants me to be with her.” His back straightened six inches.

For the rest of the flight, I was treated to The Yu Family Saga (unedited, unabridged, 2001-08). The betrayal of filial duty as the rogue daughter set out for foreign lands. The radio silence. The heartache. The now-imminent reunion, only 1 hour and 43…42…41… minutes away.

We hit the tarmac.

“Well, it was very nice to meet –”

“Are we here? Great! You can meet Xiao Bai^[2].”

I started fumbling for excuses but it was no use. The decision had been made: we were in this together. And so, together, we entered the terminal. Resisting the dash for cabs, I inched along stiffly with my new friend, silently cursing our glacial pace as he, eyes wide, drank in every detail of Hongqiao^[3]. Seeing the automatic doors that marked the threshold of Arrivals, I halted. Mid-stride. I was inexplicably tense.

And then we were before them – a mob of placards and waiting, doting loved ones – exposed and ready to be claimed.

Hugging his bulging rucksack, Mr. Yu strained his neck and combed the crowd. I pretended that I, too, had someone to look for. Someone who would be waiting for me. (It wasn’t so improbable?) I tugged at my skirt. I fixed my hair. Did it again. Eyes ran over me, and moved on. I wished one set would stop, even for a second. Hell, would mistake me for someone else, for someone they wanted.

Just one person, just one second.

I locked eyes with a young, clean-cut man. He smiled, I brightened. I then noticed his sign (“Not you, love.”). Flustered, my eyes shot down, my heart deflated. Hundreds of eyes continued to dart around me, hundreds of eyes continued to pass me over.

“Ba!”

It was her! She charged at us, all outstretched arms and tears. And then she embraced my companion, and together they stood, wrapped up as one.

I turned, walked to the end of the taxi queue, and waited my turn.

City: shanghai
Author: Cam Rimington
Location: a rooftop whose location he’d rather you not know about

Phone calls home always leave me pensive – what am I doing here?

Well “here” on the crumbling roof is easy enough to answer. I’ve literally risen above the heat and mosquitoes of the manic streets below to get some perspective. Putuo^[1] is sweating today.

Seven floors up and I’m still dwarfed by the anonymous apartment towers behind me. I like being one of the myriad vignettes tenants see when they look out their greasy windows: here a solitary foreigner, there a yapping dog, a tired housewife gingerly bringing in her washing from the 18th floor or an old man limbering up by his basin in an off-white singlet that makes me think he lives alone.

I will love these grimy towers and the grubby little tiles that cover them, simply because I will imbue their charmless facades with affinity…

What am I doing here?

When I tire of that fruitless question, I distract myself by examining the neighbourhood skyline, scanning for telltale reminders of the new city in which I now find myself. There are a handful of unfamiliar characters scattered across high-rise billboards, but nothing conclusive. I could be anywhere, really. There are no landmarks here.

And so I have singled out my own: a dented glass edifice and the set of pockmarked triplets next to it. There is a chalet-style building with a garish cobalt roof and an ornate turret of some faux-European apartments, both framed perfectly by the green-clothed construction sites in front.

I’m selfish with this skyline of mine. I want to take a photo and smugly show it to others. I want to challenge them to find the exact spot where it was taken, confident that they would be unable to arrange all the elements in the right formation, at the correct angles, convinced that they could never experience this scene as I am experiencing it now. 

But what am I doing here?

The late afternoon throws amber and shadows across my broken rooftop. An idle zephyr glides lazily through me nudges something into place. I relinquish an easy sigh.

And, all at once, things become manageable. That nagging question ceases to matter. Here, suspended between the heights of the apartments and the heat of the street, my hesitation clears, my apprehension ebbs and nostalgia from cross-continental voices slips away. All at once, my doubts and second guesses give way to a pragmatic clarity. All at once, the simple fact of being here eclipses the reasons for it.

I smile at the simplicity of my newfound state of mind and hope that it lasts.

City: shanghai
Author: Parker Woltz
Location: DVD store on Huashan at Zhaojiabang

She looked like a Chinese Cyndi Lauper: her hair was permed, frizzing out every which way, and bright-colored bangles climbed up her arms. It was January and she wore a black wool dress with hot pink and black striped tights. A thick scarf coiled around her neck. Her hand, slender and pale, like a doll’s hand, gripped the dirty metal pole of the metro car. She leaned back, talking and laughing with her two male friends while the train rushed out of Xujiahui^[1] and into the guts of Shanghai.

I couldn’t look away from her smile. Her teeth were beautiful, white like fresh milk, and her eyes crinkled when she laughed. She laughed a lot, little giggles that bubbled out of her like sputtering water.

I clutched my Lonely Planet guidebook and stared at the girl, wishing I knew her, wishing that she was my friend, wishing that, at the very least, I knew how to speak her language. A few stops later, she exited the train. I strained to keep my eyes on that crazy perm but the automatic doors hissed shut and she was gone.

I stood in the crowded train and felt suddenly, overwhelmingly, conscious of all the hundreds and thousands and millions of people living and daydreaming and losing and praying and wondering and sleeping and hoping and aching and loving and eating and laughing and wishing and doing all of the things that humans do, all around me. And even in the midst of all that life, I felt alone.

A month later, I was walking along Huashan Lu^[2] the day before I was to leave Shanghai. It was a chilly afternoon but it was bright; I looked down at the sun-dappled sidewalk as I walked, dodging globs of spit. And then something made me look up.

There she was, still smiling. Her hands – those tiny, porcelain doll hands – were in her coat pockets and she walked briskly with her friends, her perm bouncing in the winter breeze.

And then the most amazing thing happened. Our eyes met and I swear, I swear, she smiled at me.

Maybe it’s not such a lonely planet after all. 

City: shanghai
Author: Matt Diehl
Location: Logo Bar

As a Shanghai newbie (not ”niu bi”^[1], which my trip turned out to be – see “cow’s bollocks” for a close translation), I was dazzled by the ride into the city from the airport. Having never been to Asia, I was not prepared for the sheer, undiluted futurism of the Shanghai skyline; while locals may be over it, its shamelessness and commitment to progress stunned my retinas.

After a quick, post-airport drop-off, I was rushed by my entourage to a restaurant in the back of an office building. Despite the odd location, it was a clean, minimalist, humming place; the beautiful quirk was that it only served delicious tuna sashimi and a tofu broth with vegetables^[2] – not what I expected for my first meal on the Chinese mainland. At dinner, I met brilliant, amazing people who were as creative as the visionaries that first drew me to move to New York City, an auspicious sign. Then, fully stuffed on tuna belly, we walked down the street to Logo^[3].

The second I walked in, my mind reeled. Not because it was the greatest bar in the world (Logo itself was familiar: dark, dank, smoky), or because the greatest music was playing (electronic music floated in the air like the haze of smoke), or because I met the love of my life (who knows? maybe I did…), but because it was so authentic and familiar, and clashed so brilliantly with my ride in from the airport. It was full of writers, artists, fashion illustrators, DJs and dancers – in other words, it was like the bars that drew me to move to NYC. (See a pattern here?)

How could this scene co-exist with the man-made sci-fi skyline I’d seen just hours earlier? How could these seemingly disparate worlds co-exist? Wouldn’t they come together and explode like anti-matter?

Within a couple of hours, I realized that on the one hand, Shanghai spoke in the lingua franca of young, creative urban bohemia. The people I was meeting had the energy, will and inspiration of those that initially made NYC exciting, which it no longer is (cf. “New York I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down,” LCD Soundsystem). But even though this was all familiar, there was a movement and aesthetic that couldn’t have happened everywhere else; in this short time, I viscerally experienced the paradigm shift that hysterical headlines in the Western media about the “New Asia” couldn’t capture.

I knew this was largely an expat experience, and not the quote-unquote “real China”. But I felt that the “real China” infused the whole experience – it wouldn’t have been the same anywhere else. It was clear that the real China experience isn’t something that can be forced or diluted; it will find you, and that night in Shanghai, it was finding me in its own special way…

City: shanghai
Author: Casey Whale
Location: the fruit stall beside her house

Wavy Girl is waving to me from across the street. She does that, hence the nickname. I don’t know her real name, or how old she is, but she looks about three. It’s hard to tell with Chinese girls though; maybe she’s really 30, but I doubt it.

The fruit shop^[1] next to my building is where I buy my fruit. I buy fruit every morning on my way to work, so I’m there quite a bit. That’s where Wavy Girl lives, with her mum who sells me the fruit. They live in a small room/large cupboard in the back of the shop.

Sometimes I think Wavy Girl has quite a nice life. Her days are filled, as far as I can tell, with playtime, trips to the public toilets in the nearby laneway, and, of course, waving to customers. She is safe to walk around on the street, as all the vendors take it upon themselves to keep an eye out for her. The cramped living space would bother me, but for a little one who hasn’t known anything else, it is probably nothing. I just hope that she’s not too cold in the winter.

Wavy Girl’s hair makes me smile; her mum always ties it up into small fountains on top of her head that sway madly as she waves. It’s strange how her hair seemingly reacts to her mood – her fountains wilt and slump when she is tired and grumpy.

I’m about to move house and a part of me is sad because my life will soon lack Wavy Girl. I wonder if she will even notice I’m gone.

It’s strange – I never noticed how much she made me smile until now (cue Joni Mitchell: “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone…”).

City: shanghai
Author: Anita Hawkins
Location: the lane outside her house

It’s often too easy to slip into ‘small’ in Shanghai. The city heaves, flails and flourishes around you constantly and steadily, irregardless of you and your current state of mind.

I was feeling the ‘small’ one day early autumn, but picking myself up around me, I decidedly tried to heave myself out of the apartment and into the day ahead.

Slipping down the stairs of my little low-rise^[1], I ramshackled myself onto the back lane on Yongfu Lu upon which the apartment lies. Upon hitting the cold, I was met by a little dust and a well-padded elderly lady.

She seized my arm. “Why are you wearing that?”

“What?”, I shortened, fallen leaves crackling at me.

“Your skirt.”

“What’s wrong with my skirt?”

“Your bones are cold.”

My memory-of-moments flash back to adolescent negotiations with my dear Mother over hem-lengths. Suddenly, I’m liking this new argument.

I clamour back to my apartment, return to the lane re-clothed, and there’s smiles, not small.

City: shanghai
Author: Jack Sidders
Location: the top of the escalator at Exit 7, Jing’an Temple metro station

I had only been in Shanghai but a few days when, walking back from work along Nanjing Xi Lu^[1], I came across my first city busker. Happily high on Constant Discovery as is generally the case with fresh arrivals, I stopped to listen. The melody was alien but more curious was the attention the minstrel drew. In London, I was used to buskers, no matter how talented, being determinedly ignored.

Here, passers-by not only stopped to watch, they did so wearing polished smiles and toothless grins. Eyes were closed deep in meditation. Perusing the watching faces, I, too, began to drift off in reverie. Suddenly, the crowd’s attention grew fervent. A disturbance rippled through the back of the group, eventually bursting through the assembly to the musical oasis at its core.

Police.

Quickly and quietly, policemen handcuffed the musician. As they turned to leave, the crowd began shouting, words indecipherable to my ear but clearly in protest. Soon, cars had stopped on the street and bicycles had been abandoned as their owners gathered to have their say. Then, seemingly in an attempt to fend off the hostile onlookers, the policemen unbuckled the musician’s trousers. My amusement dissipated, and was replaced by disgust.

Until this point, the experience, while odd, had at least made sense to me. Upon seeing the delinquent busker dragged from the scene, with his trousers at his ankles, I felt lost.

A monk, no doubt drawn to the throng from Jing’an Temple^[2] just around the corner, studied me. Reading my confusion, he spoke: “He has lost face. Now he will never commit this crime again.”

I stared. My first encounter with a Buddhist monk and I was speechless. But no sooner had he begun to impart his wisdom on me, he turned, pulled out his state-of-the-art mobile phone and walked off, destroying my quaint, half-formed illusion of simple monk life just as the policemen had destroyed the beauty of a stranger’s music with an act of violence and humiliation. 

City: shanghai
Author: Rose Longhurst
Location: the Family Mart on Zhangyang Lu

It’s the early hours of the morning and we’re outside the Family Mart^[1] in Pudong. In the moments before light breaks the enormous streets are empty, parallel lines running into the distance mirroring the sharp silhouettes of the buildings shooting off into the sky. Apart from the occasional tai-chi practitioner, our group are the only people breaking the silence, as the city is on the brink of stirring.

We’re in limbo also. Neither happily drunk nor queasily remorseful, we’re unwilling to let go of the night we’ve just shared, but wary of being present when the city wakes. We can sense the clocks uniformly ticking toward alarms, but for now our peace is only disturbed by the repetitive tinny jingle emanating from the Family Mart entrance as we sit on the cool marble steps outside, eating unidentifiable fried food with our hands. The street cooking is what brings us here, and I’m in the process of negotiating a meal.

There are two types of food-vendor^[2] outside Family Mart: the lady with the things speared on sticks, and a woman with a large table covered in bowls of raw meat, vegetables and rice.

Tonight I’m eschewing my usual order of ‘miscellaneous green root on a stick’ for the more substantial offers of the fried-rice vendor. I’m looking at a bowl of what appears to be bamboo shoots, but I’m wary, having recently been given chicken as a vegetarian option in a restaurant. Despite my best efforts, the stall owner is unable to comprehend my basic Mandarin, and after several attempts at “Is this vegetarian?” and “Is this meat?” I resorted to just naming animals while pointing at the bowl desperately. She stares at me blankly.

My Italian friend, who speaks no Chinese and yet seems to have fared well during her time here, comes over to see if progress can be made utilising her significant sign-language skills. As physically expressive as the Italians often are, none of our group are expecting the elaborate mime that then follows. Like a parody of a street-performer, she begins to silently portray a tree growing, starting as a seed emerging from the earth, twisting upwards. As we all stare at her open-mouthed, she then starts to beg like a dog, barking and licking my hand.

We’re all entranced, street-food vendors and European students alike, as she furiously mimes various animals and plants. The vendor doesn’t have the slightest hint of recognition in her eyes; she looks confused, nervous almost, and this charade continues until a Chinese-speaking friend arrives.

“What’s Elena doing?” she asks me.

“Trying to ascertain whether it’s bamboo shoots in that bowl”, I respond.

Everyone holds their breath. Finally, someone who can break the stalemate. This futile exchange can come to an end, and the catharsis of a question answered will buoy the dying embers of our evening.

Words are exchanged with the vendor.

“She says it’s pig intestine.”

City: shanghai
Author: Paul Hartnett
Location: the Raffles department store at People’s Square

14.02
I hope this is going to work. Feels kind of weird.

14.03
Rodney said this would be a good place to get pictures. Raffles^[1]. Hm, Don’t know. Will have to wait and see.

14.05
Feel kind of wonky. What time is it back in London? Jet lag, a curse.

14.07
Not sunny, not dark. Light’s kind of OK.

14.10
People think this kind of photography^[2] is so easy, that you just go out and there are stunners every five minutes.

14.20
Maybe I should have applied for a journalist’s visa. What happens if I get stopped and questioned?

14.40
Nothing yet. This is how a fisherman feels, waiting for the bait to get taken. Maybe I’m getting too old for this. I kind of feel like a dirty old man, stalking the streets. For ‘street-style’? Yeah, right. Oh, I’m getting paranoid.

14.41
Oh, here’s one. Nice bit of customising on the collar.

14.46
That was easy enough. Giving a card always helps.

14.48
And here’s another. Cool hair. Six hairstyles all on the same head. And, yep, some piece of crazy MADE IN HONG KONG plastic toy crap to accessorise. Coolio.

14.55
Nearly an hour, and that’s all I’ve got. There’s just so much black cotton about, black denim. Just black. Just nothing. Where are all the individuals?

13.01
It’s like… one long catwalk of H&M zombies. Where are all the individuals?

14.02
Oh, here’s one. Fabulous. Those shoes are just…