Pretty in Print

Two recent publications that can’t be read online: the first in Gray’s Sporting Journal’s fortieth anniversary issue, the next in Songs of Ourselves, from Blue Heron Book Works.

If you can’t get to a newsstand, here’s what the opening spread of the Gray’s story looks like on an iPad.

 

The painting is by Alberto Rey and—in case you were hoping to add it to your collection—is already owned by the University of Virginia.

The story itself is set in Mexico and Montana. Although it’s absolutely fiction, the narrative roughly chronicles the puzzlement I feel both when stalking bonefish on the flats and trying to understand the so-called new economy. (Remember Touch America?)

My contribution to Songs of Ourselves, on the other hand, feels like a big departure from my usual work. Subtitled America’s Interior Landscape, the book wants to identify an idea that I’ve been searching for from Morocco to Mongolia: “the thing that makes us American.” As I was telling my sister today, my bit—which I called “The Journal of Infectious Diseases”—is “basically a memoir in the form of a collage.”

According to the Journal of Infectious Diseases, the most common reason for travel among tourists who contract cholera is—you guessed it—a visit with the relatives.

Christmas in China

If you live in Shanghai, the scent of Christmas comes alloyed with that of diesel exhaust and fermented tofu. You won’t lack for Christmas lights or Christmas sales, and you can buy Christmas decorations exactly like those for sale in any North American discount chain at your local Carrefour.

But if, like our family, you can’t abide an artificial tree, and were disappointed by the peculiar selection of conifers at the flower market in Hongqiao or the landscaping center on Cao’an Lu, then His Royal Highness Prince Joachim of Denmark is your man.

Never mind the environmental impacts of shipping Danish trees to China. At this time of year, you really don’t want to ponder all the thorny issues of globalization.

What you need is the crisp odor of fresh-cut fir, the caress of branches as you hang your new ornaments, a scattering of needles on your living room floor.

Call Maggie at Shanghai Blue Fish Trading (021 5045 4088 or 135 6442 3727). I met her last December and was impressed with her efficiency. She’ll arrange for delivery to your home, and even pick up the weary twig when the season is over. Prices range from 490 to 2360 yuan, depending on size.

Shanghai Update

The Complete Residents Guide to Shanghai is now available at Amazon. My assignment included the chapter on exploring the city’s neighborhoods, parks, tourist attractions, and historical sites. Most of what appears on pp. 168–194 and 204–224 is my work.

If you're in China now or going soon, see my post for Friday, June 29, 2007, which describes our favorite route for circumnavigating the Bund.

Shanghai, revisited

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I wrote most of a chapter for Explorer Publishing’s Complete Residents' Guide to Shanghai. Most of what appears on pp. 168–194 and 204–224 is my work. As far as I can tell, the full Residents' Guide is not yet available at Amazon.com, but you can order the Shanghai Mini Explorer, due out this month.

Looking Back

10,000 copies of Explorer Publishing's guide to Shanghai will be given away to registered attendants at September's Expat Show. I wrote the chapter on exploring the city, which was a bit like writing a condensed version of War and Peace. If I neglected your favorite spot, please post a comment here.

For a good read, set in Shanghai, try Qiu Xiaolong’s When Red Is Black. If you’ve lived there in past decade, you’ll find plenty of illuminating detail about the city. If you haven’t, you’ll still enjoy the distracted manner in which Inspector Chen, the poet of the police bureau, solves this case.

Before You Go

What should you do on your last evening in Shanghai? Circumnavigate the Bund. Which means see its inscrutable mix of architecture from as many different angles as you can, from various elevations, and from both sides of the Huangpu River.


You can begin wherever you like (it’s a circle after all) but don’t start until sunset, when Shanghai’s lights and shadows are at their best. Use the elevated crosswalks over Yan’an Lu and Zhongshan Lu. The view from both is panoramic. The former Bund meteorological tower, a museum for many years, is now a bar named Atanu (3313 0871). Climb the circular staircase to the third-level deck for a cocktail or two. They don’t stint on the gin.

Back on ground level, walk south until you see the turnstiles for the Huangpu ferry. The ticket office is behind you, in a little booth by the road. Exchange 2 yuan for a blue plastic token and you’re on your way. The ferry is airconditioned but the most urgent views are outside, leaning against the rail, where the neon reflects from the glistening surface of the river. The captain will dodge freighters and barge traffic on his trip across the current.

You will dock just south of the Citigroup building, then walk north, toward the Pearl Tower. You can turn into the gate for the Riverside Promenade, or make a brief detour into the elevators of the Shangri-la Hotel. The uppermost floor of Tower 2 houses Jade on 36, an atmospheric bar and innovative restaurant, with floor-to-ceiling windows (and really cool bathrooms).

Continue north along the river, past the Super Brand Mall, to the entrance to the Bund Sightseeing Tunnel (35 yuan), one of the world’s oddest forms of urban transport, with a seizure-inducing light show and cryptic narration.

Emerge somewhat dazzled, then take the underground passage near Nanjing Road, and stroll south again. You have any number of choices for a celebratory dinner in 18 on the Bund, 5 on the Bund, or 3 on the Bund. The food at Laris is wonderful, but the winelist is annoyingly overpriced. For reasonably affordable extravagance, my pick would be appetizers in the bar at Jean Georges (6321 7733), the Shanghai outpost of New York’s celebrity chef, Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Ask to see the dining-room menu, and don’t neglect either the crunchy tiger prawns or the foie gras brulée.

Dreamscape, with formaldehyde

For years I have had a recurring dream that takes place in an old museum of natural history. Not one of the new and shiny temples to technology, but a musty building with wooden staircases, peeling paint, and open windows. As it turns out, this place exists in Shanghai. The Natural History Gallery on 260 Yan’an East Road houses a well-seasoned collection of the taxidermist’s art in the former Cotton Exchange building, built in 1923. If you go, be prepared to share the dinosaur bones, neolithic dioramas, and jars of snakes in preservative with groups of shuddering schoolgirls. Don’t miss the stuffed whale shark suspended in front of aqua blue curtains, or, nearly hidden in a second-floor gallery: two deadpan mummies, chastely draped.

Another Break in the Wall

Sorry for the long silence, but the Chinese censors have been more effective than usual the past two weeks. I'm back in the States now, so will post this old message:


On Wednesday, while running down addresses for Explorer Publishing’s Complete Residents Guide to Shanghai (due out in September), I visited the only remnant of Shanghai’s old city wall. It’s part of the western gate, built in 1553, a tower where archers could take aim at the sort of Japanese invaders who didn’t come armed with credit cards.

The rest of the wall was demolished in 1912, according to a Shanghai government website, because it had become “an obstacle in the city’s economic development and communication.”

The address is 269 Dajing Road and the entry fee is 5 yuan. On the second floor of the Dajing Pavilion, a stone bears an inscription that translates as “His majesty’s good faith lasts eternally,” referring to the Ming emperor, I suppose. The ground floor houses a small historical exhibit, including a scale model of the old city.

Outside the wall, in the small park that adjoins the splendidly developed and exceedingly communicative Renmin Road, an old man hung his cap and cane on a fencepost, then commenced his silent practice of tai chi.

In Olde Shanghai

On Sunday, I followed freelance photographer Gangfeng Wang on a tour of the Shanghai neighborhood where he grew up. The aging blocks of shikumen housing are slated for demolition by the end of 2007. He introduced us to several residents, and also took us inside a grand building that I’ll describe below.

The central staircase, as wide as the lane outside, winds upward to the former ballroom. Above our heads, the day’s laundry dries on bamboo poles slotted between the balusters. On the second-floor landing, the judge’s widow is frying her lunch: a platter of small headless fish, each no longer than a teaspoon.

Eleven judges once shared this dwelling, a mansion that its Concession-era owner intended to house a single family. But the Party liberated it for the judges—and now the survivors and descendants of judges, three of whom stand side by side at their stoves at this very moment, each tending a single burner.

Their collective spirit came to a halt with the advent of utility bills. Each resident has designated gas, electric, and water meters, with separate switches and taps. Although for the first 50 years, they all took turns in the lone bathtub and toilet.

The judge’s widow has lived in this place since she was 25 and that’s what she wants us to know. Last year, she and her housemates were finally rewarded with private bathrooms.

Steam rises from the widow’s wok and I follow its path upward, to a decorated plaster ceiling, once pink and gold and perhaps green, but now the tactile brown of five decades of cooking grease. One resident tried to paint it white, the widow says, but we think it looks better this way.


P.S. This entry emerged from a brief exercise with the writing group that I am now (sadly) leaving. Thanks to all of you for your stories and your friendship.

Photograph (and Memories)

In the name of research, I’ve recently permitted myself to order from several atypical menus. Yesterday I ate something unexplainable. Not sickening or repulsive, just baffling.

The restaurant was La Villa Rouge, housed in the former EMI Recording Studios. The place has made more than one “best of Shanghai” list over the years, and is reported to boast a team of Japanese chefs. The setting is stylishly retro, overlooking Xujiahui Park, complete with music memorabilia. The prices are utterly modern, if not exorbitant.


I ordered ceviche, expecting something that would go down well with a cold beer and got this instead: four blandly boiled shrimp, and a few specks of caviar, served in a martini glass, on a bed of what looked like pudding and tasted like instant mashed potatoes. No hint of the advertised lime vinaigrette.

Just thinking about this disappointment makes me want to remember some of my favorites, and there have been many, in places as far apart as Los Barriles, Mexico, and Tokyo, Japan.

Halibut ceviche at Alaska’s Double Musky Inn in 1989. A Filipino version, called kinilaw, at Balicasag Island Dive Resort, near Bohol. And conch salad, made dockside in the Florida Keys, before the U.S. ban on conch harvesting.

Here’s that recipe, if you ever find yourself in an appropriate spot. Catch six conchs and pack them overnight in crushed ice. After the grip on the shell loosens with the chill, pull the animal free. Trim away the guts and peel off the skin. Dice the conch meat into a punchbowl along with two sweet onions, two green peppers, and a quart of cherry tomatoes. Season the mix with cilantro and jalapenos and cover with fresh lime juice. Refrigerate for at least several more hours, or as long as you can stand it.

An Updated Guide to Shanghai

In Shanghai, the more things change, the more they continue to change. It’s hard to overstate the pace of transformation in this place. For anyone who plans to visit the city in the near term, here are some guidebook regulars that no longer exist or are currently under renovation:

Hengshan Moller Villa. One of Shanghai’s so-called boutique hotels. To picture the larger setting imagine Hans Christian Andersen meets the Pasadena Freeway. Knock on the gate if you desire a conversation straight out of the Wizard of Oz. No, you can’t look inside, but the hotel is scheduled to re-open in the fall of 2007.

Peace Hotel. The adjective legendary means Noel Coward wrote “Private Lives” here in 1930 and the same jazz band was still playing last year. (At least they sounded like the same band.) The Jinjiang Group has joined forces with Saudi and Swiss companies for two years’ worth of remodeling.

Ohel Moishe Synagogue (and its museum of the Jewish experience in Shanghai). Completely shrouded at the moment. Should re-open to the public by late August or September. Mr. Wang, the 88-year-old volunteer docent, who grew up in the ghetto himself, holds court now at Huoshan Park, a block away.

Ohel Rachel Synagogue. Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright visited in 1998. When I tried last week, the security guards wouldn’t let me in the driveway. No lengthy explanations, just a sheet of paper whose words I can’t quite recall. Something like, “Private business. Closed to viewing.”

Xiang Yang Market. Although cash is still king, the emperor’s favorite source for fake brand-name goods has been gone for almost a year. Several pretenders to the throne have emerged, most notably the Fenshine Fashion Accessories Plaza, at 580 Nanjing West Road.

Mao in Love

Last week I visited the restored lane house where Mao lived for nine months in 1924 with the second of his four wives, Yang Kaihui, their two young sons, and Yang’s mother. He was thirty-one years old. The Chinese Communist Party was an infant of three.

Many historians now estimate that Mao could be held responsible for 70 million deaths.

Yang might be included in this number. She was arrested in Changsha by a local warlord, and executed on November 14, 1930. Mao, who was by then a leader of the Red Army—and involved with another “revolutionary wife”—made no move to save her.

Some of this information, of course, is not mentioned in the exhibit. The official text, in Chinese and English, is properly fawning. For example: “Although from 1927 to 1949 Mao Zedong was unable to come to Shanghai personally . . . , Mao Zedong timely gave instructions to point out the way forward for the struggle of the People of Shanghai.”

The setting is benign, approaching somnolence. On the morning that I went, there were no other visitors. Without any sense of historical perspective, you might imagine yourself at a shrine to the love-nest of some long-forgotten martyrs.



Note: Although at least one guidebook lists a Weihai Lu address, the entrance is around the corner at 120 Maoming Lu.

To restore your sense of Shanghai’s reality, enter the gate at 590 Weihai Lu and walk north toward the Nanjing Road West Metro Station. I revived considerably by watching the lane’s residents hanging laundry and washing vegetables.

Onward and Upward with the Arts

Don't know who coined the phrase but I like it at least as much as The New Yorker.

I admit here that it's time to leave Mumbai as a setting and return to Shanghai. Anything approaching coherence in that narrative would require the time for a thoughtful revision. Considering my workload and our imminent departure from China, that luxury is unavailable at the moment.

Although I have been enjoying Shanghai in a way unknown to longer-term residents, and was detained briefly by the traffic police last week. At the corner of Nanjing Road and the Bund, by a cop with dark glasses who had perhaps watched one too many Clint Eastwood movies. He closed his fingers around my wrist and kept asking me what I'd expect if I'd broken the law in America.

The peak of his cap came up short of my chin but by the time I thought to break away we had attracted an encircling crowd of onlookers. I made the cowardly bid of pretending that I knew no Mandarin, but a saintly woman stepped in and interpreted for us, preventing an international incident and convincing him, somehow, not only to let me go without a fine, but to pretend as if he had never seen me before.

And that's the end of the Mumbai story, for now.

The Beginning of a Long Story

At the end of January, I fell asleep in the biggest city on the continent and awoke in the biggest city on the subcontinent. The miracle of the red-eye, as performed by Air India. The true populations of both Shanghai and Mumbai are hard to count, but it's not the figures that impress, or the rankings. Either place contains more than enough individuals to overwhelm all sense of proportion.

Although I know nothing about fashion, I went to Mumbai to watch two American designers prepare their collection for Paris. (More on that in posts to come.)

I also walked around a bit, sometimes with a destination in mind, sometimes without. The crowds in Mumbai seemed very different from those in Shanghai: more dense, more vivid, more intractable.

On a Sunday afternoon, the causeway to the Haji Ali shrine seethed with a relentless parade of humanity: babies with Kohl-rimmed eyes, frail men leaning on their middle-aged sons, black-veiled women, and women in bright scarves—saffron or pomegranate or lime—each new color turning your head like a greeting.




Built in 1431, the white-domed mosque occupies the rocky islet where Haji Ali distributed his worldly wealth to the poor. Or where he drowned on his way to Mecca. Or possibly where his casket washed ashore after drifting all the way from what is now Pakistan. I don't know the real story, but I do know that the causeway is submerged at high tide, and at the hour I visited, it was dry.

One group of maimed men had linked themselves together in a sort of collapsed circle. They chanted, faces pressed to the stone, stumps in the air, waving in unison like some ruined troupe of synchronized swimmers, bereft even of water.

Before You Go

I used to think that the best way to visit any city was to approach your stay like a relocation. That by trying to make yourself at home, you would open yourself to a wider range of experiences than the typical hotels-and-hotspots tour.

But a contrary strategy works just as well. If you want to rediscover the place you call home, treat it like a tourist destination.

After two years in Shanghai, our family of four is packing again, this time for Vermont. With the weeks counting down until our summer departure, we’ve begun asking ourselves what we haven’t seen or tasted yet. And what we want to do one more time, before the inevitable downturn in our personal boom-and-bust economy.

Here are two of the definitive responses, one at each end of the cultural and culinary spectrum. Strangely enough, you have to carry your own plates at both of them.

First, the splurge. Thanks to a convergence of business travelers and pleasure seekers, many of Shanghai’s five-star properties offer extravagant Sunday brunches. Three hours of more-or-less wholesome dissipation at the Westin Bund Center can include caviar, foie gras, lobster, and a river of Champagne (Piper Heidsieck, if you’re so inclined). There are serving stations on two floors surrounding a grandiose atrium, a genuinely diverting stage show, and, as you meander between the mushroom risotto and the roast duck, you’ll overhear conversations in German, Italian, and Finnish, among others. A pleasantly hallucinatory experience for about $70 per adult, half that for children; reservations essential.

You’ll leave satisfied, but not necessarily fulfilled, because fulfillment requires awareness. Brunch at the Westin is a transitory cocoon. Fine and silken, but also soporific.

On another Sunday, we’ll wake and breakfast at home. A debate will begin over the relative merits of Shanghai’s two principal varieties of soup dumplings. The English name is misleading. These delicacies are not served in soup; rather, they contain soup: a little burst of hot and fragrant broth, along with a mouthful of ground pork or minced crab, encased in a wheat-flour wrapper.

Maybe we’ll make the short drive to Nanxiang Town, original home of the steamed xiao long bao, where several blocks of dumpling restaurants flank the entrance to Guyi Garden, a classic Ming Dynasty maze of ponds, rocks, and bridges.

But more likely we’ll opt for the pan-fried shengjian mantou at Yang’s, on Wujiang Road. Until last week, this side street near the Nanjing Road West Metro Station hosted an untidy throng of pushcart vendors, hawking everything from barbecued oysters to bootlegged movies. These freelance capitalists have been displaced, however, in the name of public order, municipal cleanliness, and copyright protection.

Because Yang’s occupies two legal (and nearly identical) storefronts, our meal will be unaffected by the crackdown. And for that we’ll be thankful. The miraculous price—about 50 cents for a plate of four—doesn’t begin to explain their appeal. These dumplings are simultaneously crisp, succulent, tender, and savory.

The long lines might have something to do with our anticipation. All that sizzling and steaming, along with the white-aproned task force churning out fresh dumplings with astonishing precision. Then there’s the cheerful throng inside, on three levels linked by a narrow staircase, and the eager hunt for a few stools at one of the communal tables.

In a world of perfect fulfillment, our dumplings are just cool enough to taste by the time we find our seats. After that, it’s all a matter of technique. Our preferred method involves a judicious lift with the chopsticks, a prudent nip in the wrapper, then a pensive slurp—all before taking that first bite. You can spot the amateurs by the soup stains on their shirts.