The perils of going home to Shanghai

As soon as the halo (and novelty) of home-coming to shanghai wears off, every time I go back it seems to be a werid cognitive dissonance kind of event. I was trained from young to think our boundless motherland has the best taste and best scenery and best mannered people, but after visiting japan and various other places, the comparison made is quite salient and dreadful. Let’s face it, the city itself has many vices to an occasional and intrepid home coming visitor under the guise of a semi-holiday and inherent tendency to love the place. First to hit you is always the people, more people, people dress in slightly drab and out of fashioned overalls and over enthusiastic sports wear, and people would invariably smoke and talk with double the decibel as you used to. But these civil aspects are rather easier to digest and adapt after a few days in the big smog and taking any form of mass public transport, it usually is the first thing you notice stepping off the insulated and staid air of an airplane and hit the corrugated faux marble floor with littering (and occasionally unknown liquid stain consist of mainly children urine and spit.. eeeerrr).

After the first wave of human quality hits you, it then come the attitude or the lack of. Shouting securities and snobbish immigration officers easily rub off and stab through the remaining wafer thin layer of illusion you might still harbour that china is civilised and modern society. So with the hope and illusion quickly decisively dashed even before you stepping out of the immigration zone, the adaptation process would rapidly ramp up speed until you completely become a local once you squeeze into the first public transport. Stepping out of the luggage carousal area, you notice the badly designed advertisement boards and tacky/cheesy ad one liners and slightly repulsive logo designs. The number of people cracking snack seeds while waiting for bags/friends start to increase, and a light stench of smoker breath permeates from nowhere even as no one is allowed to smoke indoor yet. Then you drag your 30 kg luggage gingerly out of that smoggy sliding glass door to come face to face and skin to skin to your homeland’s stingy winter chilled air, and BANG the final bits of reality hits. The night sky is customarily red with not a star in sight, and the hawkers trolling everyone for every little item from maps to torch to a lung (im exaggerating) start to fluster around you. Cigeratte smoke intensity increased dramatically once you are outside too, like incense in a well endowed temple. If you are lucky enough to be in a position to hail a taxi, you probably will be stuck for the next 30 minutes or more, in the back seat of a 5year old VW passat with hospital-white sheets covering all seats and a 7 inch low end LCD blasting rotating ads to you. The driver, like taxi drivers everywhere, will probably be disgruntled and keeps a plastic lock lock water bottle by his side. It would, however, be an interesting journey as your brain is now functioning nonstop to try to assimilate your senses to the road condition that is nothing less than a complete hazard. The sheer bravery and audacity the driver cuts through the traffic congestion is pure heroic and he is doing that while tip toeing on clutch and slicing through all 5 gears in his right hand. You notice and coarse bumps in gear shifting especially the first several gears. Everyone accelerates and brakes and corners in such a ferocious aggravation while you brain tells you to hold on to your seatbelt but you fumble around fishing for a belt buckle but there’s not a thing to be found – seat belt in the backseat of taxi is unheard of in this land.

so that is even before you eat any of the food you are reminded so frequently of. Oh the endless supply! You then venture out with people to hunt for food, only to find two things: the good are expensive, and the bad are not that cheap. This goes with everything else: shopping, drinks, tickets to parks, etc. After a while you forget all the western propaganda and the anti-revolutionists of Tibet (hmmmmm Tibet) that food is all poisoned and the society is corrupt to its core, and go on your merry way to have fun.

After a few days though, the inability to see beyond 100 meters is starting to bother you. Where as anywhere you look back in oz you see acres of blue sky and occasional birds, in shanghai the big magic city, you are walled off and generally feel trapped and thus depressed. It is more appropriate to go outside the city for a while at this point, but you usually don’t have the luxury or time to do that. You start to live in the same way you lived before you go abroad and start talking like everyone around you, and you are genuinely surprised you can still talk that fast and think like a true chinese. You are invigorated. The whole poison thing and smog and even the cold is not bothering you anymore.