The Bund and Nanjing Road

Huangpu Park: No Dogs or Chinese!

The very name, Shanghai, evokes the danger and glamour of the 30's, when the city was run by gangsters and full of opium dens, and rich white people hung out at the lawless crossroads. It evokes beautiful Chinese women in slender silk staring with hatred into the eyes of dangerous criminals, and trains outfitted like a Sultan's harem. For the faintest whiff of those days, visit the Bund, the stretch of monumental architecture at the edge of the Huangpu River and former British Concession. But if you blink, you realize that all you really see is classical Chicago-style architecture with touches of art deco, as in the famous Peace Hotel or the original HSBC (Hong Kong-Shanghai-Beijing-Corporation) with ceiling murals of the great financial centers of the world. Across the Huangpu River is Pudong, a few decades ago a rural village, now a veritable laboratory of skyscrapers,. A few blocks away is Nanjing Road, the neural center of the frantic shopping world that surpasses New York in its highs and in its lows.

On the Huangpu River

Pudong

The taxi ride to the Bund had no trees or flowers as had Beijing's carefully landscaped throughways, but lifted us Jetson-like to the skyscraper world, the dingier tenements, the old and brilliantly new skyscrapers of Mercedes-Benz and Caterpillar and Toyota and Deutsche Bank--the world of commerce. At street level the Bund is weighted with the solidity of 30's brick and stone, Art Nouveau and finance. The walk along the Huangpu River raised us above it all, across from Pudong, a perpetual World's Fair of space-age buildings. An exhibit in the famous Huangpu Park, where dogs and Chinese had been forbidden till the Communist Revolution, is a frieze of heroism - but no translation available. Inside an exhibit had brief and quirky translations of the Bund's "glorious" history - as did the lavish Art Deco Peace Hotel. But I was tired and a little euphoric as the pollution of Beijing cleared out of my lungs and the pieces of meat that had seasoned food that I'd tried started to clear my system. So I sat down in an arm chair in a small gallery of the beautiful Peace Hotel to read about the Jewish refugees of Shanghai. We would later visit the museum that told the story of 30,000 Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews sheltered by Shanghai. Major financiers like the Iraqi Jew Sassoon who built the Peace Hotel, had already been mainstays of Shanghai.

old Nanjing Road

We walked along Nanjing Road, which is more intense than Times Square with huge video screens and international brands and hawkers, and junk shops and huge Apple Store where hundreds of kids played with the computers, and incessant solicitations to buy watches and designer bags and flashing roller blades. We found a meal under glaring red lights that was vegetarian--Dr. Li had written out Chinese characters for me that stated I was a vegetarian. The waitress stood before our table and unblinkingly watched me eat The food is so cheap you can't afford to stay home--about $5 for both our meals. Out in the street young Chinese shouted incessantly trying to pull in customers.

Chinese Nanjing Road

Further along, Nanjing Road is very Chinese, with Shanghai's Number One Department Store, and most impressive Chinese pharmacies. Lavish gilded and lacquered floors provide medical checks in bright gold examination rooms, and sell herbs and roots and traditional Chinese medicine. Since I had been subject to a headache every day of the trip to that point, and my migraine medicine was running out, I inquired about the Chinese version. (Since almost no one speaks English the sales people often have to phone up a friend who does, and serves as translator over the cell phone.) The TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) headache medicine (which cost less than $3) proved miraculous--until I tried to stop taking it! It was apparently habit-forming and in Paris I ended up with even more exquisitely painful withdrawal headaches for five days running!

Cai Tong De Tang (Pharmacy)

Further along Nanjing Road is The People's Square, the busiest metro stop (saying a lot! The impressive metro is packed everywhere--) and the soothing center of Shanghai, People's Park, which has displaced many thousands of residents to become one of those idyllic green spaces that makes central Shanghai liveable. Across the pond men loudly played cards, along the water's edge men fished, and in the pond a small creature like a gigantic tadpole or amphibious rat swam along the surface of the water, a kind of Gollum.

Beard Papa on the Metro

We began to be accosted by young Chinese, mostly visitors, who called after us "Come talk English! You are so cute!" After some exhausting exchanges I took refuge in the leafy glade of People's Park while Jacques went off to explore. But he didn't get far. Group after group of young Chinese implored him to come to the tea festival and speak English. "Father Christmas! You are so funny!" The very mention of tea made him jumpy after his tea scam in Beijing, and the attention of so many pretty young girls left him a bit shakey.

Vending machine on the metro

We got home on the packed metro, where the stops were announced only in Chinese and we had to struggle and strain to find our station. If Shanghai is like Manhattan, the walk from the station is the borderline of Brooklyn and Queens--heavily ethnic, people's laundry lining the sidewalks, heavy traffic of motos and bicycles playing chicken, inscrutable food stores where nothing looks familiar and the only writing is Chinese characters. But on entering the campus we are in a world of soft Shanghai breezes, gently rambling neighbors, and always someone moving in soft concentration through tai chi forms. in the most unlikely places.