a weirdo in china, pt. 11: partition

I set my course in the direction of the Forbidden City.

Tiananmen Square

The entrance to the F.C. stands right on Tiananmen Square, which is an enormous, empty, soulless expanse of concrete dead in the center of Beijing. One one end, the mausoleum of Chairman Mao, in which his preserved body lies forever in state. I did not go to see it.

At the other end, the Gate of Heavenly Peace itself promises entry to that most forbidden of cities, watched over by Grandpa Mao himself.

For being an enormous city square packed with thousands of tourists, Tiananmen Square is a surprisingly subdued place. And don't be fooled by the color of the sky in these pictures -- this is what passes for a sunny day in the smog-chocked Beijing city center. People came out in droves, but they seemed to be maintaining a respectful attitude in the presence of these foundational pieces of Chinese national identity.

Our guide actually mentioned the 'student protests', but only to say she couldn't discuss them in any depth. She seemed unsure whether we'd even know what she meant. I've found that explaining the Western view on Chinese totalitarianism to mainland Chinese is kind of a waste of time. Their government has done a pretty spectacular job constructing a narrative where China is essentially blameless. So we just shrugged and said, yeah, every American who knows about China knows about Tiananmen Square.

So it was huge and striking and somber. More than anything, there was an air of sacrifice to the place, a constant reminder that the Anti-Japanese War (yes, they call it that) was an existential struggle that forged a nation of heroes. It's a strange contrast that America, young as it is, is so temporally distant from its founding fathers, while China's five-thousand-year history still permits it to produce figures like Mao who can reinvent the country anew.

Once passing through the gate and entering the Forbidden City proper, the first thing I noticed was a basketball court.

This was part of a rest and relaxation area for the guards stationed in the square and Forbidden City, I guess?

But moving past that, I started to take in the interior. I found that it looked like most of Beijing, actually:  huge, monolithic, and repetitive.

There were gardens, sculptures, courtyards, fancy pagodas, and all the rest, but surprisingly little that I would call beautiful. It felt like a museum more than a palace, and from what I know about the lifestyle of most Chinese emperors, that probably isn't too far from the truth.

We processed through the Forbidden City, ooh-ing and aah-ing where appropriate, but ultimately it's just the same type of building, with minor variations, repeated over an enormous piece of real estate. It's the kind of thing that's not really easy to appreciate from inside, so I was happy when we found the exit.

Jingshan Park, just outside the F.C., is a hill with a pavilion atop which offers the ideal viewing angle to really absorb the majesty of the golden-roofed city. It really delivered!

This stuff all kind of speaks for itself. It's a phenomenal visual spectacle, and it purports to be a cultural spectacle as well, but it's kind of hard to see that. When you visit Europe and go to castles, there is a great deal of reverence and import placed on the royal persons who once lived there, but there's also this general vibe that feudalism was pretty bad and we're all better off thanks to the Enlightenment and the supremacy of liberal humanist principles.

The Chinese approach to the Forbidden City and its history seems to be beyond that reverence, though. The attempts to create continuity between the emperors and the Communist Party leaders are clear, clumsy even. Autocracy is an accepted fact of life. Sure, Mao wasn't right about everything -- our guide said she was taught the 70/30 rule in school, Mao was 70% right, 30% wrong -- but he had the general idea.

And...that's just preposterous. The only thing today's China has in common with the society Mao envisioned is that it idolizes Mao. But they keep the pretense going, because what else do they have? The men in suits running the country today didn't save their people from the brutality of Japanese invaders.

But the City is open. Is that progress? I was told repeatedly that the people actually running the government today have their offices far, far away from the noise and pollution of central Beijing. They would never stoop, I was told, to being around the riff-raff.

It's a Pleasure Island, and I was glad to leave it, even if the views were great.

a weirdo in china, pt. 10: exquisition

So I ditched Shanghai and set out for Beijing!

We took the high-speed rail out of Hongqiao Station, which has an operating speed of roughly 350 km/h. It was a really nice ride, with cheap snacks. I spent most of the 4-hour trip chilling in a connecting compartment with a beer, looking out the window at the insane sights we were speeding past.

We were moving too quickly for me to get good pictures of the most extraordinary stuff. But there were more than a few amusement parks:

I also saw pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, and a colossal Iron Man (hulkbuster, obviously). If you can dream it, someone in China has built it.

It wasn't a bad train ride by any means. The trains were one of the most enjoyable things about my visit to China, really. They were the only times I truly felt like someone cared about my well-being as a customer, as opposed to just trying to take me for all I was worth.

So the ride was comfortable, the views were good, the snacks were tasty and cheap, and as we went north, we hit a point where I could look out the window and actually see the transition between rice and wheat cultivation. It felt like I was getting a glimpse of China almost as well as when I'd been wandering the backstreets of Shanghai. It felt good.

Then I got to Beijing.

The air hit me like a hammer. When I'd arrived in Shanghai, I'd believed I knew what they meant when they talked about poor air quality. The air throughout Shanghai has the character of the air outside an airport terminal, with its permanent sensation of exhaust and despair. But, for all that, it was pretty light and breathable.

Beijing's wasn't. Beijing's air smells like a spoiled-beef-and-ground-pearl-flavored cigar. It has all the noxious character of a soaking-wet, incontinent St. Bernard. It smells like a man with a bacterial infection in his armpits mistakenly used a cinderblock for deodorant. And then decided he liked it and kept doing it for fifty years.

And it doesn't just smell. It has a texture, and it clings to everything. It makes the whole place feel ill and overused. People asked me why I didn't just use a mask, but the air already makes you think you're wearing one. It smothers you. Walking outside for more than two minutes made my eyes start to burn. A mask wouldn't be enough. You'd need a hazmat suit to protect yourself.

Pollution is terrible!

So, you'll have to excuse me if there's a bit of a scarcity of outdoor pictures from Beijing. I tried to go for a walk and get a feel for the neighborhood, but the atmosphere was more oppressive than any totalitarian regime could ever hope to be. It made me wonder if the entire smog system wasn't just a modern anti-assembly device.

For dinner, we had Peking Duck, which was delicious. It was eaten so quickly I didn't even get a picture of it. And I will give China this: its nice restaurants are really nicely decorated.

Even if the outside of the building, like every building in Beijing, just looks like a boring grey blob.

But Beijing is the capital city, so if any place is going to give us a sense for what it means to be 'Chinese', at least by Chinese standards, it has to be here. But I'm really starting to think even China is just going through the motions.

If it ain't lethally broke, why fix it?

a weirdo in china, pt. 9: admission

It was my last day in Shanghai. I had to make it count. So I set my sights on the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum!

It's really big. I couldn't find an angle that would fit the whole thing in one picture, so here's the central 1/5.

As a matter of national impression, China really, really wants you to see it as a technological wonderland in the same way South Korea, and to a greater extent Japan, have managed to position themselves. And where there's a strong enough profit motive to do it, they generally succeed. For example:

This here is a vending machine you can only interact with by using your phone. You scan the QR code at the top and it takes you to a website that handles all ordering/payment. Unless you don't have a Chinese phone, like me, in which case you find another vending machine.

There's no arguing how effective phone-based payments have been at transforming transactions at every level of society. From the lowliest street vendor to the fanciest department stores, nearly all currency exchanges take place by phone. When I arrived, cash in hand, I was told I would seem like a bit of bumpkin, and while nobody was actually annoyed by my old-fashioned paper money, it definitely slowed things down compared to everybody else.

I mean, beggars accept e-payments. It's that ubiquitous. So I was understandably excited about going to see this museum and uncovering just what other technological marvels China had been hiding in its expansive, Qin Dynasty-era sleeves.

Well, it turns out fully 1/3 of the museum was dedicated to nature, in the aspect of a natural history section. Which, while pretty cool, is basically the opposite of science and technology...

I came to China to see panda...sculptures.

And the natural history area was easily twice as crowded as the rest of the museum. I've heard unimpressive things about the Shanghai zoo, but at least it has one. It also has its own natural history museum. I mean, I didn't even see any dinosaurs at this place.

But at least it had a spider wing.

Surprisingly mobbed!

And a temperature-controlled rainforest section, which in Shanghai just means they turned off the A/C.

Naturally, it contains sculptures of giant insects doing battle, because...science!

There were a lot more animal exhibits than just the panda, naturally, and I got a slight chuckle from the prominence the moose got in the North America exhibit. All the Chinese tourists were pointing excitedly at it. Moose are a big deal no matter the locale, it seems.

Turkey fight!

I eventually got tired of animals and wandered over to the rest of the museum, to see what they had to offer that was actually related to Science and Technology. The rest of the exhibits were pretty cool, but roughly on the level of scientific rigor of what they offer at the Franklin Institute (including four IMAX theaters). That's not a bad thing, though! It's just right for kids. And the robot exhibit finally had some of what I was looking for.

You can compete in archery with a robot, for some reason! The robot wins.

They also had CALISTHENICS ROBOT (built cars) and RISK ELIMINATING ROBOT (blows up land mines, or prepares actuarial tables).

If you want to learn more about robots, check out these knockoff Transformers toys in the gift shop!

There were many more exhibits, all pretty fun, but it would take forever to go through them all. However, the museum did give me the perfect way of explaining China's relationship with technology.

There is an extensive waiting area in front of the museum. If you look at the picture of the front again, you'll see a covered, fenced-in area in the lower right. That's normally where the line is:

And it streeeeeeeetches to the very end of the plaza.

Now, this particular day was super rainy, so not that many people came out to the museum. There was almost no line to speak of, and nobody was using the covered waiting area at all.

I noticed as I was walking up that there are nozzles which spray mist over the waiting area to help keep people in the line cool. How did I notice?

Because they were running.

That's right. Not a soul in line, on a soaking-wet typhoon day, and these misters are still running all-out. It's a wonderful technological solution to a problem that exists basically everywhere in Shanghai. Yet it's been enacted with the broadest, brute-force method, in a way that winds up being wasteful and visibly ridiculous. And the picture doesn't even show the worst of it. When I got out of the metro and stepped into the plaza, I thought it had gotten foggy. But that was just the mist filling the plaza!

Overall, I thought it was a nice museum, and a really great value for money, especially for kids. But it really underlined for me the fundamentally surface-level approach the average Chinese institution takes to solving problems. In a sense, it was a relief to know it wasn't personal.

On to Beijing!

a weirdo in china, pt. 8: intermission

Sorry for the extensive delay in posting this -- the internet was awful at my Beijing hotel, and after leaving Shanghai I couldn't connect to my blog to post anything.

*******

The next day was another big one for sightseeing. I decided to visit Yu Garden, a famous household garden dating back to the Ming dynasty. I decided to try to find it without relying on GPS, and I got completely lost on the way, and accidentally went to the City God Temple first.

This guy looks smug for a reason.

It's ostensibly a large temple complex dedicated to the particular gods who oversee Shanghai. In practice, it's a tourist trap, and does a poor job concealing that.

Such craftsmanship.

Room after room of cheap, shiny Buddhas and other god-figures got old REAL fast. I was glad it only cost USD $1.50 to get in there, because otherwise I would have been really grumpy! I only stuck around long enough to snap these photos and I was on my way.

These people are praying that they don't have to spend much longer here.

I turned the corner and found my real destination. After fending off a very pushy woman begging in the ticket line, I got my ticket and made my way inside a much more serene spot.

To enter, you need to cross the Nine-Turn Bridge, so designed because apparently demons are stupid enough that they get really confused when a bridge turns a lot and they won't be able to follow you across it. I don't know, the demons I've met have generally had a bit more wherewithal, but I suppose you take what placebos you can.

I don't know why they were spraying mist all over this boat.

There were some pretty cool fountains, though. And I wasn't even inside yet!

The gardens themselves were gorgeous. Shanghai contains a fair amount of foliage for a filthy cesspool of a city, especially in some of the hipper shopping districts, but everything generally feels constrained and disappointingly regimented. The gardens were different, there was a bit of natural, unchecked beauty. It was more like the constructions had been placed around the natural elements than the reverse, and it was beautiful.

I spent almost two hours just soaking in it. I think I may have been starved for nature, and a sense of cleanliness.

The thing about Shanghai is that everything is filthy. Yes, the streets are littered with trash, but so are the sidewalks, and so are peoples' homes. It is imperative that you are understand that this is just the natural state of things there. Regular people lack the time and inclination to pick up large messes, there is only a token effort made at official street-cleaning, and so piles of refuse and rubble simply grow and encompass entire stretches of walkway, courtyard, or alley.

Admittedly, this is outside of an active construction site.
But it actually looks better than many of the storefronts I walked past.

On top of the general sense of disorder, there's dirt and decay everywhere. Most of the official notices I saw were faded, frayed, or otherwise distressed. It's like the entire city is a broken window. Coupled with the poor air quality and fundamentally mercenary attitude of the populace, and Shanghai has all the character of a highway truck stop. And not one of the more savory ones. Beijing's a little different, but I'll get to that later.

There are some bright spots.

So the gardens were truly a much-needed time of respite for me. It gave me the chance to recharge my batteries, in a sense. Plus, it was quiet, which I only really understood I'd been missing when I returned into Shanghai proper and found myself once again assaulted with the clamor of dozens of millions of people doing their thing. And, of course, once again lost myself in the backstreets, far from the city center.

But a typhoon was on its away, and I had to hasten home. I only had one day left in Shanghai after this, but at least I felt like I had really seen it from every side, from the glitter and futurism of the Bund to the scrappy, beaten-down streets at the edge of the city. What more was left to see?

a weirdo in china, pt. 7: photoemission

On this day, I finally saw what all the fuss was about.

It was a relatively quiet start to the day. My feet were hurting a bit from all the walking I'd been doing, so I took it easy and explored the local neighborhoods a bit, but there wasn't all that much to see.

For lunch, a friend and I got Anhui food. I thought standards of quality were pretty low around here in general, but this place opened my eyes. Their vegetable of choice is celery.

That last one is jellyfish, for your information, and it was pretty gross. It had the consistency of a plastic wallet and the flavor of a plastic lemon. Maybe somebody does jellyfish right, but it wasn't these guys. Also, they lied to us and told us their cuisine was similar to Sichuan, just because that's what we were looking for. Jerks.

After that disappointment, I knew I had to make things right. I had to visit...the Bund.

The Bund is a stretch of river walk in Shanghai that has a perfect view of all the most iconic buildings in the city. It is, without hyperbole, one of the two most amazing views I've ever experienced, with the other being the sight of the cathedral in Cologne.

Nanjing Road, where the crush of people approaches the ridiculous. This cop had to cut off the crowd and order us to stop so that cars could go past, but people kept slipping past his cordon, smugglers in the night.

It was amazing. It was necessary. If you go to Shanghai, go see the Bund.