Living in Cultural Limbo: Shanghai

Showing posts with label Shanghai. Show all posts

Saturday, April 2, 2011

Shikumen Houses

In case I gave you the wrong impression of Shanghai in my last post, Shanghai, despite being a very modern city, does have older parts as well. Aside from the instantly recognizable Bund, another characteristic of Shanghai's by-gone years are it's shikumen houses.

Shikumen houses are a specific style of housing built in the latter half of the 19th century in the foreign settlements to accommodate the influx of refugees from the neighboring Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces. Literally translated, the term "shikumen" (石库门) means "stone gate," which refers to the stone gates and black doors that were the cornerstone of shikumen architecture.

From the exterior, many of the shikumen houses look very Western in the sense that many incorporate architectural elements more traditionally found in Western cities into the buildings, such as it's namesake stone gates, and verandas. However, behind the gates most of the homes are still laid out in a more traditionally Chinese style that revolves around the central courtyard. In some ways, this mix, at least in my opinion, is the perfect mix of the blended Western and Chinese cultural atheistic that is so very unique to Shanghai.

While we were in Shanghai, Leslie & I spent a decent amount of time wandering around the shikumen houses in the older part of Shanghai. Although the shikumen houses (like the hutongs in Beijing) are constantly under the threat of a wrecking ball, there are still some areas with shikumen houses left, which I strongly believe need to be preserved. While the shikumen houses may not be glamorous or stunning like the Bund, they are also a vital part of Shanghai's heritage that is worth preserving.

Now for some pictures:

For more information on Shanghai's shikumen houses: http://www.shanghaiholiday.net/shikumen/

Friday, April 1, 2011

Shanghai, Take 2

Stop number three (number four for Leslie) on my winter break travel itinerary was Shanghai. Although I had been to Shanghai previously (see posts here and here), I was excited to return and explore it on my own more thoroughly.

Upon arriving in Shanghai and making our way over our hostel, it was immediately apparent that we were back in the big city. Instead of the more laid-back, quiet(er) pace of Qingdao and Hangzhou, in Shanghai we were immediately greeted with giant crowds, honking cars and a large rush of people going in all directions. I distinctly remember turning around and saying to Leslie "We're definitely back in the city now."

Though it's apparent immediately that Shanghai is a very metropolitan city, I think after spending several months in Beijing it's much more striking just how modern and cosmopolitan it actually is. In comparison, Beijing looks like the older, more worn-down sibling of the younger, more polished Shanghai. While the best phrases to describe Beijing probably are historical and politically significant, the words cosmopolitan and modern probably best describe Shanghai.

In some ways, the difference between Shanghai and Beijing almost remind me of New York and Washington, D.C. It's undeniable that politically, D.C. is a very important city. The decisions made in D.C. affect not only the people of the United States, but often the lives of many people outside of it's borders. That being said though, Washington, while it does have it's own local scene, does not have the cultural pull in the United States that New York does. Washington makes the laws, but arguably, New York is the cultural (not to mention financial) capital of the United States.

Likewise, in China, Beijing is undoubtedly the political and historical capital of the country. However, if you look at art and lifestyle trends, I'd say the majority of the taste-makers are centralized in Shanghai. Not to mention that like New York, Shanghai is also the financial capital of China. So while Beijing dictates the rules by which Chinese people abide by, Shanghai tells them how their lives should look, feel, hear, taste and probably even smell.

Of course with that being said, not all of Shanghai is the modern, glitzy city that most people think of right away when think of Shanghai. There are definitely old parts as well, but I'm leaving that for another post. So stay tuned.

More pictures on Angela Photo Musings

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

A funny thing happened on the way to the train station..

[I know it's been a while since I've posted anything about my travels back in January and February. You probably thought I forgot about it. Rest assured, I didn't. I've just been busy. Now back to posts on my winter break travels.]

In the last post about my trip, Leslie & I were in Hangzhou. Our plan was to travel from Hangzhou to Shanghai via the high-speed bullet train that connects the two cities, however we were only semi-successful in completing this goal. However, before we get to that, I have a funny little story about our cab ride from our hostel in Hangzhou to the Hangzhou train station.

As I mentioned, Leslie and I took a cab from the area our hostel was in to the train station. Since our hostel was located off a pedestrian street, we had to first walk out to a larger intersection with cars on it to flag our cab. After a short while, we were able to hail a cab, get in and let the cab driver know that we wanted to go to the train station. The driver, a woman, nods her head and says okay and takes off in the direction of the train station.

After driving a minute or two, we stop at a red light and the driver begins speaking to me. At first, I thought she was perhaps speaking to someone on the phone via a bluetooth or a hands-free device (that's what New York cab drivers are always doing), however after a split second I realize she's talking to me.

She asks me if I would mind and if we weren't pressed for time (we weren't), if she could stop the cab at the convenience store across the intersection so she could run in and use the restroom. She went on explain that at the train station, there's no place for her to pull over and run to the restroom. Since Leslie and I were in no rush, and I understood her urgency, I said it was fine (she also promised to stop the meter so we wouldn't be charged for her bathroom break).

During this entire interaction, the cab driver was incredibly polite and gracious. It just further shows how nice the people of Hangzhou were to use. However, since this entire conversation was in Mandarin, I can only imagine what Leslie first thought when the driver pulled over & ran out of the cab towards the restroom at the convenience store. After I explained it to her though, we had a good laugh.

It's definitely a good anecdote of our trip though.

Now back to the trains. Earlier, I mentioned that Leslie and I wanted to take the high-speed bullet train (the G train0 that allows you to travel a distance of roughly 190 km (118 miles) in a mere 45 minutes. However, since the train ticket agents we purchased the tickets from in Beijing weren't the most helpful nor clued-in of train agents, we ended up on the second-fastest train (the D train) that takes you the same distance in 1 1/2 hours, which is still impressively quick if you think about it.

D Train

Interior of the D train

Regardless, Leslie and I got to Shanghai just fine, despite a mess up about which Shanghai train station we were going to. (The previously mentioned clueless train ticket agents had said we were going to the Shanghai South Train station, but we ended up at the Shanghai Hongqiao Airport train station. Good thing Shanghai's metro system is very thorough.)

For those of you fretting about our missed opportunity, don't worry. Leslie & I made up for it by take the Maglev train, a high-speed electro-magnetic train that goes from Shanghai out to Pudong Airport, when we were leaving Shanghai. Although on our trip to the airport the train speed only climbed up to a "measly" 289 mph (465 km/hr), during it's fastest runs (which are normally in the afternoon), it can go up to 315 mph (507 km/hr).

Maglev Train

Monday, March 14, 2011

Ready, Set...Marry??

Some days here in China, I feel like I'm living in the midst of a Jane Austen novel. No, not in the nightly-balls-and-parties-and-touring-grand-English-estates sense, but more in the you-must-get-married-by-X-age sense. As much as I love reading a good Jane Austen novel occasionally, living in a what I like to call a marriage-obsessed culture is a different story altogether.

To call China a marriage-obsessed culture is not far-fetched. There is a lot of emphasis here on finding the 'right' person, getting married and starting a family, particularly on females here. In fact, the term for an unmarried woman over the age of 27 is 剩女(shèng nǚ) meaning leftover woman. No, I am not kidding, though I wish I was. (If you think 27 is rather young to be disparaging over a lack of husband, at least one of the articles I read on "sheng nu" alleged that a girl becomes a "sheng nu" at after the very young age of 25. Ack.)

The emphasis on marriage is so great that during the Spring Festival/Chinese New Year, many parents and singles headed to the temple fairs for the sole purpose of trying to find a potential marriage match. At the Beijing International Sculpture Park, an estimated 50,000+ people visited the park's love-matching event where parents and singles could consult relationship experts, find potential matches and look at the estimated 5,000 personal advertisements posted by other people looking for a potential partner.

Across town, a similar event at Ditan Park averaged 150,000 visitors per day to it's seven-day match-making event. Outside of the event, more desperate parents unwilling to pay the even entrance fee held signs touting their offspring's accomplishments in hopes of finding them a good match.

In Shanghai, the match-making fervor isn't limited to the Spring Festival. Every weekend, in People's Park in the center of Shanghai, parents gather craning their necks to look at papers posted on bushes touting a potential match's good attributes including background, education and physical traits, all in hopes that the next meeting they arrange for their son/daughter will lead to a good marriage.

The pressure to get married isn't just limited to the heterosexual set either. In Shanghai, in contrast to the open marriage market in People's Park, there is also a thriving fake-marriage market, in which lesbians and gays gather in hopes of finding someone to enter into a fake marriage with.

World Expo

Back in August, as a part of our tour package, my parents and I went to the World Expo in Shanghai. The tradition of the World Expo (also known in the past as the World's Fair or Universal Exhibition) dates back to the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, whose main feature was the famed Crystal Palace. Originally, the exhibitions were served as a platform to promote new technology and innovation; however, nowadays the World Expo serves more as a platform for "country-branding." That is to say, the main purpose of the different pavillions at the World Expo now serve as a platform for every country to promote it's national image internationally.

Personally, I wasn't that impressed by the World Expo. Although it's only fair to point out that my opinion was probably at least partially influenced by the fact that it was very hot and humid when we were there. Nonetheless, my parents & I wandered around looking at the architecture of the different pavilions which were each very unique in it's own way. I thought the European countries' pavilions were the most architecturally interesting. You can decide for yourself from the pictures below: