Shanghaied Again: China Back On My Mind

In the late 1950's, Mao Zedong led the Chinese people on a "Great Leap Forward" moving the country from an agrarian to industrial society. Late Saturday night, I took my own "Great Leap Forward" and reset my clocks one hour ahead an hour in anticipation of the arrival of Daylight Savings Time in the wee hours of Sunday morning. When I awoke seven hours later, three things "Shanghaied" me, and China (which I wrote about on Thursday) was back on my mind.

While enjoying a leisurely Sunday morning reading the newspaper during breakfast I came across Renewing China's capital of cool: Updated metropolis spruces up to welcome World Expo 2010 by David Armstrong, the "above the fold" story on the front page of today's San Francisco Chronicle Travel section. (His companion piece, Suzhou: Historic city embraces its past, blends with the new appears on page 7 of the print edition). And my Yahoo "homepage newspaper" featured Shanghai goes chic as China's showcase by Associated Press writer Elaine Kurtenbach. Armstrong says that a ton of yuan has been spent preparing for the Shanghai World Expo (May 1-October 31) which both writers expect will draw 70 million visitors to the city. Armstrong and Kurtenbach take their readers on a "walking with your fingers" tour of popular tourist venues like the Bund (pronounced "bond"), Nanjing Road, and the French Concession. You will find tips on when to go to Shanghai, how to get there, where to eat and sleep, and what to do, in both stories.

But what really transported me back to China in my mind this sunny Sunday morning was an e-mail from poet, novelist, and travel writer Linda Watanabe McFerrin with a link to her 2005 San Francisco Chronicle story Shanghaied by the Past: The evolution of a modern city mindful of its colorful past. Linda's mother and grandparents left Japan in 1925, moved to Shanghai, and lived in the French Concession. Her grandfather was a Welsh professor of English literature. Her grandmother was an actress (see photo to left) and "had fled the constraints of a traditional Japanese samurai family for the freedom and excitement of Shanghai. At the time, the French Concession was the place to be."

Here are just a few of the ways that Linda describes Shanghai from the 1920's until the 21^st century:

• "Some call Shanghai the Pearl of the Orient. And, in many ways, it is -- organic, iridescent, a nacreous gemstone wrapped around a suffering center stuffed into the belly button of China. Behind this glittering umbilicus, China's largest river, the great Yangtze, crawls through the fat middle of the country all the way from Tibet."
  
• "Extraterritoriality -- freedom from Chinese law and a great distance from their own -- came with a license and licentiousness that lent Shanghai all the gravity of a frat party thrown in someone else's house."
  
• "At one time there were close to 1,500 opium dens in Shanghai and more than 50 shops that peddled it openly. Gangsters like "Big Eared" Du Yuesheng capitalized on this depravity, making financial killings in opium, prostitution and labor racketeering, and finding acceptance and even respectability in a governing body with similar values. Shanghai was a desperate place."
  
• "Today, after decades of social penance under the scouring influence of communism, Shanghai has resumed its capitalistic course, this time with Beijing's blessing. The French Concession is again the place to be -- hallowed, in a way, by its significance as a cradle of communism."
  
• "Western visitors again gravitate toward the Bund with its antique symbols of European dominance and savvy developers have been happy to comply, dusting off colonial haunts and reframing them for a new generation of devotees. The Peace Hotel -- which in its former Cathay Hotel incarnation was home away from home to such notables as Charlie Chaplin, George Bernard Shaw and Noel Coward -- still draws sentimental admirers with romantic notions of Shanghai in its decadent heyday, and Nanjing Lu and Nanjing Xi Lu (once Nanjing and Bubbling Well Roads), with their big department stores, museums, top-of-the-line hotels and high-end shopping, are as popular as ever with the local and international set."
  
• "[T]he new Shanghai has a great deal in common with the old. The Communist regime was particularly hard on Shanghai, believing the western loyalties and bourgeois values it promoted were especially pernicious. Maybe they were on to something. The beggars are back. So are the expats, the drugs, the sex, the shopping and the real estate boom. The Chinese would say that places have personality, an energy and a spirit that is the product of their geography. If this is the case, Shanghai will always be the head of the Yangtze dragon: powerful, irrepressible, optimistic, wealthy, ambitious, dangerous."
  

For the first time in weeks there are no rain clouds on the horizon. The sun is shining brightly and the temperature is rising above 60. I should be out enjoying the fine weather. But I have been "Shanghaied" once again and have China On My Mind.

(Linda Watanabe McFerrin heads up Left Coast Writers, a literary salon that meets monthly at Book Passage in Corte Madera and hosts readings and book launches at the bookstore's San Francisco Ferry Building and Corte Madera locations. Linda's latest novel, Dead Love, is due out later this year. Her stories have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, CSAA's Via magazine, and other publications.)