Huan Hsu - The Porcelain Thief

Far from the old city, my uncle had established his company and its living quarters in Pudong’s Zhangjiang area. Until the 1990s Pudong was undeveloped and agricultural, and most people crossed the river by ferry; it might have taken the better part of a day to travel the fifteen miles from the living quarters to the Bund. But after two decades of frenzied, nonstop growth, I could access downtown Puxi from Zhangjiang by taxi in thirty minutes, crossing the Huangpu on a seven-lane, quarter-mile-long suspension bridge so monumental that the spiraling off-ramp made three full revolutions before reaching street level, and all for about 70 RMB, or roughly ten dollars.

It was Pudong that built the landmark, skyscraping towers that had replaced the Bund as Shanghai’s—and China’s—iconic skyline: the futuristic Oriental Pearl Tower; the serrated, crystal-topped, eighty-eight-story Jin Mao, home to the five-star Grand Hyatt hotel and its peerless dinner buffet—until the Shangri-La came along and did it bigger, better, and more expensive; and the bladelike, 101-floor Shanghai World Financial Center nearing completion right next door to the Jin Mao, tower cranes (the national bird of China, as the joke went) perched on its peak and putting its final beams and panels into place.

Pudong is home to the city’s convention center, biggest shopping mall, largest park, tallest buildings, and lots and lots of dust. As in many American exurbs, Zhangjiang’s wide streets indicate that its preferred mode of travel depends on internal combustion engines, and its scale verges on the inhuman. Residents live in gated communities, and the rare sidewalk tends to disappear abruptly. Pudong contains the expat enclaves of Big Thumb Plaza and Jinqiao (Golden Bridge), home to international schools set on expansive, manicured playing fields, community centers offering Western psychologists to treat the population of trailing spouses suffering from adjustment disorders, and Western-style eateries luring families of polo-shirted parents and their cloistered children with weekday dining specials. On weekend nights tourists and locals alike gather on each bank of the Huangpu to gaze at the other side. Puxi is where nostalgic expats go to see how China used to look, but Pudong seems to better illustrate where China is going.

As we emerged from the subway in Puxi, Andrew insisted we first stop at a stationery store. “You should probably get a pen and notebook, because you’re never going to remember everything I tell you,” he said.

I assured him—sarcastically enough, I hoped—that I had a pretty good memory. He shrugged and gave me a skeptical look. And thus began, nearly half a century after China’s students and professional classes were involuntarily sent to the countryside, my own forced reeducation, as Andrew nagged me about my Chinese and sought every opportunity to test my vocabulary, reading comprehension, and even sense of direction. Andrew had never resisted speaking Chinese as a child and had since added the ability to read, and he seemed to relish watching me rifle through the sackful of memories from my one previous trip to Shanghai, a patchwork of fragments that might not even exist anymore, and he clucked his disapproval when I failed, which was often. When I squeezed out questions between gritted teeth, he responded with either an incredulous how-could-you-not-already-know impatience or a patronizing explanation. I wondered how someone so generous—he would frequently treat me to meals and taxi rides—could be such a pain in the ass. Yet as annoying as I found his officiousness, I still felt a sense of accomplishment when I was able to recall certain phrases or routes with enough precision to impress him. All these years later I was still trying to persuade my older cousin that I was smart enough.

The streets in Puxi reeked of raw sewage and stinky tofu while the industrial paint slathered over the endless new construction projects gave off a noxious stench that I would come to identify as Shanghai’s natural scent. We made our way farther west, into the leafy streets of the French Concession, lined with colonial-era villas and hundred-year-old European plane trees. The neighborhood’s stately homes had long since been parceled out to house multiple families, and many had fallen into disrepair. Tangles of ad hoc wiring snaked over their edifices and through empty doorways and windows, and laundry flapped on lines strung up in the overgrown yards. Whether it was their mouths when they were laughing or buildings under repair, the Chinese loved to shroud things from view, as if trying to hide their private selves. Yet they commonly wore their underwear—boxer shorts and tank tops or pajama shirts and bottoms—on the street, and they literally aired their laundry on tree branches, utility poles, or whatever public structure would do the trick, a habit that many expats found charming but made me cringe.

I disappointed Andrew again at the electronics mall, one of at least three within walking distance, several overbright floors of vendors, grouped by the items they sold, peddling an overwhelming array of consumer products from flat-screen televisions to coaxial cables. Everything, it seemed, except for voice recorders. Just asking vendors if they carried them required a long explanation from Andrew, and I deemed inadequate the few that we managed to find. Our circuit of the mall revealed that the sheer number of goods disguised their homogeneity. Neighboring shops sold nearly identical items, and I would never truly understand the provenance of their inventories. Every shopkeeper insisted that his or her products were bona fide, using terms like AA huo (think bond ratings) or shui huo (smuggled goods) and often pointing to the plastic-sealed packaging as evidence of its legitimacy. Andrew’s opinion was that I wasn’t buying anything expensive enough to worry about that; the dubiousness of Chinese goods rendered everything under a certain price point as disposable as the bottled water I consumed each day.

Before heading back to the living quarters—by subway, and unaided, as part of Andrew’s colloquium on Shanghai transportation—Andrew took me to an upscale Japanese-owned supermarket in the basement of a luxury shopping mall in the Jing’An district, the western border of the French Concession and which took its name from an opulent Buddhist temple dating back to 1216 that now sat atop a major metro station. We entered the supermarket at the fruit section, which displayed model specimens of lychees, dragonfruits, custard apples, and fig-shaped salaks, or snake fruit, named for their scaly skins. On the shelves stood pyramids of imported cherries, every flawless garnet fruit individually stacked with its stem pointing straight up, priced at nearly fifty dollars a pound. In the seafood section fishmongers wearing crisp white aprons, paper hats, gloves, and face masks sliced sushi-grade tuna to order. Under the fog of the open frozen food bins rested king crab legs, their joints the size of softballs. Almost everything was imported, sparkling clean, and very, very expensive. We exited through the perfume of freshly baked cream puffs. The scene was such a far cry from what I remembered of Shanghai, when it was nearly impossible to find a decent loaf of bread or chocolate chip cookie, much less a carton of Greek-style yogurt, that my awe left no room for hunger, which was probably the most un-Chinese part of it all.

Andrew surveyed the store with equal parts amazement and dismay. “Look at how clean this is!” he said. “The Japanese are superior to the Chinese. If I could renounce my family and everything about being Chinese, and be able to speak Japanese fluently, I’d do it.”

I found Andrew’s attitude toward his own ethnicity, including the liberal and unironic use of chink in his speech, a little disturbing. “You know, Chinese people are just not capable of innovation,” he said another time. “They’re just not. I’m not talking about the culture. I’m talking about the race.”