Shanghai

I went to China partly to try and get away from everything and find time to write, but when I got there I found I was so lonely that I couldn’t. I stopped going to class and spent my days wandering the streets of Chengdu, looking for something interesting—coffee shops, pool halls, temples. Not writing a word, hostile to everyone I met.

In April, I signed up to go on a school trip to tour Hangzhou and Suzhou, two reputedly beautiful cities in the east of China.

I was nineteen and in love for the first time, really, with a girl I left back in Colorado, Anne. Before I left, I sent her an email telling her everything I felt. On the train to Suzhou, after everyone in our group was asleep, I spent a long time with a flashlight, trying to write love letters to her and crumpling them up.

On the trip, I was invited by two Russian classmates to leave before everyone returned to Chengdu to travel on to Shanghai. It sounded like an adventure, and I thought it would be stupid to refuse.

So with two Russians I barely knew, I fled a bus into the pouring rain and hailed a taxi that would drive us through the afternoon traffic of Hangzhou—with scattered glimpses of the city, which really was quite beautiful, in the rain at least—to take us to a train to Shanghai.

The Russians were called Natasha and Ivan. Natasha was self-conscious of her English, I think, and she was quiet with me for a long time; but she and Ivan periodically broke into bouts of musical Russian together.

Ivan wanted to see some of my fiction, so I brought it up on my phone while we were on the train. He read through it carefully.

“But why did the man give the diary back at the end? And what is this ‘Grand Pavilion’? What country is this meant to be set in?”

He was supposed to meet up with a girl he had met when he was in Shanghai before. Ivan was twenty-five—to me, a paragon of weary experience—but his eyes lit up when he spoke of her.

It was a speed train, and looking out the window made me feel nauseous.

“Natasha.” I was unable to pronounce her name, but I did my best. “If you tell someone that you love them, and they say that they love you back, but then later on say that they were drunk, and apologize—what does that mean?” I’d been checking email feverishly while we were on the trip.

She was reading a magazine in Chinese, which amazed me. “I don’t know… why are you asking me this? Who said this to you?”

I saw that I had piqued Ivan’s interest, and it was important to me that he think I was capable of being tough.

“Nothing. I’ll tell you later.”

It was already dark when we arrived in Shanghai. We had stayed up all night the night before, and we were tired. We checked into our hotel and tried to find a bar that Ivan had been to before, but it had been closed for a while. We walked back to our hotel, where there were two double beds. Ivan talked his way into sharing one of them with Natasha, and I lay in the other, straining for the sound of any fooling around between the two of them before I fell asleep.

I did not sleep well. I kept thinking about Anne, but especially about the email I had sent to her and her email back and what she really felt. Just as it was getting light, I got a horrible cramp in my leg. I rolled out of my bed and onto the floor. I actually cried out with pain. I was in between the beds, on the side closer to Natasha, and I was so close that I wished I could just pull myself up there. Natasha woke up halfway, turned over, and met my eyes for a second. I think I apologized. She didn’t say anything, but rolled over, leaving me in my agony.

I decided to give up on sleep and take a walk outside, in the direction we had gone the night before. There was a long raised promenade along the other side of the street that I hadn’t given much notice to.

I climbed the stairs and found myself looking out over a river with all the financial towers of Shanghai on the other side. I stood there, looking across the river at Shanghai through the morning haze, unable to believe it. I thought about writing a novel set in Shanghai, and about the Cultural Revolution, and all kinds of other things. I bought a Coke and wandered way down the promenade. There were runners and couples holding hands and kids playing around on skateboards. Eventually, the promenade ended, and stairs led back down to the street. I threw away my Coke and started back to the hotel.

They were still asleep, so I sat in bed and read for a while. Ivan got up to take a shower. Natasha started to check emails.

She saw that I was awake. “Ed, who were you talking about on the train?”

I had just started to explain when Ivan came out of the shower. “Man, get ready,” he said. “We only have one night here, we can’t waste any time.”

Walking down the waterfront of Shanghai was the first time I can remember feeling inadequate in the way that I dressed. Walking along the river, you are flanked by European colonial buildings on one side and the financial skyscrapers on the other. I felt like I was a part of something historical and eternal. Walking with these two Muscovites, I felt like the poor bumpkin, seeing the big city for the first time. Ivan convinced me to buy new shoes. I threw my old ones in the trash.

 

That night, Ivan went to meet up with the girl that he knew, and Natasha and I got dinner together by ourselves. As technically I had broken up with Anne, I wanted to see this as a date, but my hopes pretty much crumbled through the night.

“I have to hook up with as many girls as I can while I’m in China,” I told Natasha when we were outside.

“What? Why?”

“Because she’s going to, while I’m away.”

We were walking along quiet, European-style streets. Shanghai and Chengdu were worlds apart.

“I know it doesn’t make sense. She likes to party a lot. I never liked to party that much before I knew her.”

“Ed, it’s not a competition,” she said. “These are real feelings. You can’t try and live up to someone else’s expectations.”

“But I have to. I love her.”

We met up with Ivan again and we all took the elevator up ninety floors to the bar at the Hyatt and drank cognac looking out over the lights of the city. I felt like an Egyptian king. We took the ferry back across the river and sat at a bar with a good view of the skyscrapers on the other side.

Ivan had led me to believe that we would be getting drunk at bars like these, but when we looked at the menu we both ordered one bottle of the cheapest beer and retreated back outside to the patio. We spent a long time taking in the view. Ivan said that there was nothing spiritual about Chengdu—it was all grey skyscrapers and noise and litter. In Shanghai, the streets were more spacious—there was room to breathe and think.

I thought about a temple I had visited in Chengdu early one Sunday morning, and how the streets came alive in the evenings when everyone came out to eat. But I thought he had a point—in Chengdu the good parts were hard to find. They seemed to be hidden among blocks and blocks of concrete. In Shanghai they were on display, panoramic.

I woke up early again the next morning, and daydreamed about coming back to Shanghai, about reuniting with Anne and convincing her to move out here, and living in an apartment and starting to write a book. I felt optimistic.

In the morning, we had to pack our things quickly and rush to get on the train back to Chengdu. All of us slept the whole way back on the train.

 

I had to go back to Shanghai at the end of May to submit some paperwork for my visa. In the meantime, things with Anne picked up and then cooled off again. I had a picture of Shanghai’s skyline up in my room in Chengdu.

I dropped my passport off at the office and then I had a few days to myself. I bought another Coke and wandered down to where the boardwalk ended.

That night, I got dressed up and went out to find a club that Ivan had told me about. I had very poor directions. I took a taxi to the block I thought it was on, expecting there to be people milling around outside. Instead, the streets were empty. The taxi driver dropped me off with a shrug, but I was wearing my new shoes, and some nice jeans I had bought, and I was determined. I started to zigzag through the streets in the direction I thought it might be.

I wandered for hours. When at last I found the club, it was in the middle of a park, overlooking a man-made lake. It was black and cubic, like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I went inside and looked around for the dance floor. The club was like a maze, all glass and pulsating with colors. I wove my way through tables with glass ice buckets and bottles with brands I recognized from rap songs. I went up a flight of stairs and found the bathroom. The bathroom was like the rest of the club, only eerily quiet. The upstairs was the same as the downstairs; I passed through people sitting and drinking without them noticing me. I went back downstairs, but I wasn’t sure if I had taken the same flight of stairs as before. Eventually I knew I was back at the entrance from the cool air.

I walked outside and into the man-made park. It wasn’t lit up at all; the lake and the trees were dark. I started to make my way towards the line of taxis at the edge of the park. I passed someone vomiting onto the ground.

On the way back to my hostel, the taxi drove through another neighborhood where there were people out. There was another club down the street named “Party Time.” It was lit up garishly in neon, and I could hear music coming from upstairs.

I asked the taxi driver to stop, and I paid him and got out. I peered in through the entrance of “Party Time.” There were concrete steps leading upstairs and it smelled dank. On an old couch with its cushions missing, sat two kids about my age who eyed me as I passed. They said something to each other in Chinese I didn’t understand.

I walked through a sad security checkpoint and into the main room. It was loud and bright. A few people were dancing in a small area of the club. At the bar stood six or seven women, not wearing much. They stood facing outwards, a few of them swaying softly from side to side.

A large, gruff, pot-bellied man was sitting down in a chair against the wall. He stood up and approached me warily.

“What are you doing here?” he said in English.

“I can speak Chinese,” I said.

He turned to his companion and laughed. “He’s a student,” he said.

His friend indicated the girls and said something back to the first.

The first man eyed me carefully. “He seems like a good person,” he said.

 

Leaving the club, or the brothel, I noticed that it had started to rain. I noticed that a smell of perfume clung to me. I walked around for a long time, leaving the street with the clubs, not thinking about where I was going, until I found a taxi to take me back to my hostel. I had deliberately chosen the one closest to the river this time. I passed by the doorway and walked down the well-lit streets, cobbled alleyways, street food peddlers with steaming carts, all reflecting in the rain. I climbed the steps and looked out over the river. I thought about what Ivan had said about Shanghai being spiritual. I walked down the street all the way to the end, paying no attention to the few people that were still there—lovers, people selling souvenirs.

On the way back to the hostel, I bought a plate of noodles from one of the stands. I stood in the steam and chatted to the man who sold them to me. He was cheerful. A platoon of workmen ambled down the street underneath umbrellas.

I got back to the hostel and sat in the common room, eating my plate of noodles. The nightwatchman was dozing in a chair, and everything was quiet. I thought about Anne. I wondered how I would explain this to her.