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Healthcare and the Medical Profession:
The increasing cost of medical treatment, the lack of effective checks by the state casts doubt on the level of ethics in the medical profession. The healthcare industry doing so admirably in India only enhances these worries. The editorial looks into what might be going wrong when a profession/ industry thrives but there is no improvement in the development indicators associated with it –infant mortality, life expectancy etc.
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Film: |
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The Tree of Life
(Terrence Malick)
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India’s ‘Foreign Policy’: A Long way from Bandung |
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Under External Affairs minister SM Krishna, India’s foreign affairs activity seems to have become restricted to registering protests of various sorts – at the indignities suffered by Indians in Australia, at a Russian court’s ban on the Bhagwad Gita in remote Siberia and at SRK being detained for two hours in a US airport. Are India’s foreign policy initiatives directed outward as they should be or are they directed towards influential private interests?
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Home > Contents > Article: Kamayani Sharma |
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The Elephant And The Dragon
A Young Indian’s Travels in Three Chinese Cities
Kamayani Sharma
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I
X’ian |
“Mosque.”
A silent stare.
“Uh...mosque, mosque...” I gesticulated wildly, drawing a minaret in the air.
More uncomfortable staring.
The smell of the little confectionary at the corner of the Xi’an Muslim Quarter’s food market was whelming me, sugar-soaked wafts of the aroma of hot dough crusting into sweet bread. It was getting dark and I started feeling warm despite the December chill, as ovens and grills sparked to life all along the zigzagging street. Jaime and Jorge, my |
newfound Mexican friends, weren't having much better luck. The baker was starting to get impatient. Was I going to buy anything or not. I threw my hands up in the air and looked up with an expression of abjection, firming my palms into curves. "Mesjeed!" She squealed happily, straightening her scarf and frantically motioning to an alley across the road. A man passing by heard her, saw us and, almost like a relay race, we were being directed by one person after another. It was almost six, time for the evening prayer. Good Muslims like ourselves should not miss it, they seemed to be indicating. And that is how I ended up having my most spiritual experience ever, a Hindu girl mistaken for a Musalman in the land of the godless.
II
Xi’an is one of those places it is impossible to get lost in. A tourist town, it is also incredibly pedestrian-friendly. I’d almost missed my flight in from Hong Kong and did that whole thing they do in the movies, running to catch the plane at the last minute, careening into the cramped economy class end. Except there was neither a boy waiting at the other end of the ordeal to make it worthwhile and nor, more importantly, a cool soundtrack playing while I did this (unless one counts airplane Muzak). Night had fallen by the time I entered the mainland, much to my chagrin at my own stupidity in planning the trip. Well ho-hum. That’s when I got my first taste of muteness - nobody could tell me what time it was. The word ‘time’, that I took for granted in the seediest, most rundown streets of India and which even a scarlet-tongued paanwala knew, held no meaning here. Oh the arrogant Anglophone! So used to reaching for the jar labelled ‘English’, from a country of many languages each of which could bend and break English to its will, where words of coloniser and colony had lived together so long that they had begun resembling each other and would do each other’s chores without complaint. Those poor Chinese, who cannot pronounce English sounds like we can, much less master its grammar, this is why we get all those outsourcing jobs haha. My smugness disappeared. Tapping my wrist where a watch would’ve been only got me half-scared, half-amused, fully bewildered looks as if I were a clown in some exotic farce. So much for universal sign language. Move over Disney’s Little Mermaid, this fish was definitely out of water. It is hard to breathe when you can’t speak, as you gasp and rasp, move your jaw up and down to allow air into your diaphragm through your lungs and voice box, realise for the first time that those two systems in your body - the respiratory and the vocal - are closer than you had imagined and that the moods of one affect the other, like a household of aged spinster sisters. Language is ultimately a bunch of fancy vibrations in your throat and when those cease to make sense, it is time to stow them away wrapped in the cotton of their meanings. For the next fortnight, I had to learn to take in oxygen without using it on my vocal chords.
At 9 ‘o’ clock at night, knuckles frozen and ears turned to stone, I shivered on the pavement watching the airport bus pull away. A swarm of men on mopeds surrounded me, asking me where I wanted to go and offering to take me there. It took me a moment to recognise this dialect. Autowallese. That brisk monotone, that impatient tumble of rote sounds falling out of a bursting larynx, that visible desire to drop you off, make a buck and be done for the day...frankly, I’m surprised it took me that long. Still, I wasn’t taking a chance at night with an unknown dude in an unknown city - that’s just too many unknowns when you’re barely 21, just about 5’2” and routinely jump at small noises. Clutching the paper where I’d jotted down the name of my hostel in careful characters, I walked away.
In China, my fingers got a chance to reinvent themselves and go on their own little holiday. Jabbing at pieces of paper to ask for directions became their primary vocation as they briefly left behind the life to which they had been hitherto accustomed, eating, Facebooking, pointing and laughing. It also struck me, as I walked on turning right and left to reach the main road, that illiteracy would be a major handicap for any non-Mandarin speaking tourist coming to urban China alone. In all my two weeks there, only once was I thwarted in my attempt to ask for directions because the person I’d asked, a woman selling sweets on an Eastern Beijing roadside, couldn’t read. On the whole, their theliwalas make up for not knowing English by knowing how to read their own language, although I don’t know what the actual literacy figures are. At the same time, I tap my chin about how a traveller knowing neither Hindi nor English would fare on the streets of India with just a bunch of ink scrawls as mediators between worlds.
Half an hour of being told to keep going straight had me tired, thirsty, scared and irritated. At a traffic junction on the main road, I stopped to take stock of my situation. Cold. Check. Hungry. Check. Prime target for sexual offender. Check. Hoo boy. Two girls about my age walked past me. My last chance at getting to the inn.
“Inde?” one of them repeated when I told her I was from India. Her face lit up. They had changed direction and were walking me to the hostel. We exchanged names with some difficulty. I asked if they were sisters. They burst into laughter and shook their heads. Staring at the pavement as she struggled to remember the word, one of the girls finally said, “Friend.” It dawned on me much later that they couldn’t be sisters. China does not allow siblings. From a country obsessed with joint families where the more, the merrier, often to our economic detriment, it’s very hard to appreciate not having someone to share parents with. Entire generations growing up without the notion of sharing genes and parental attention in a society that literally affords them no concept of the experience, this throws up questions. India has its share of single children but they live in a context where closeness among cousins or even growing up with friends who have siblings can provide a point of reference. The ‘Little Emperor’ syndrome has been studied and remarked upon extensively and there is certainly a sense of entitlement I can see as toddlers waddle around, making their parents and grandparents run behind them, resigned and indulgent. However, what makes me curious is how the institution of friendship would then come to be shaped. I see people in their late 20s, the first generation to be affected by the single child policy, hold hands and walk closely together in open displays of platonic affection. Bonds between unrelated adults of the same sex seem deep and strong. Family remains paramount in ancestor-worshipping China, just as in all Oriental cultures, but the script of friendship seems to now be taking on a responsibility to city dwelling young men and women who must deal with the flux and pressures of a fast-mutating socio-political scaffolding.
III
The terracotta warriors, made to guard the tomb of the ancient emperor Qin Shi Huang, are incredible, rows upon rows of life size sentries and no two alike. The pits vary in size and the task of excavation continues from the ’70s when a simple farmer, who sits at the museum there and cheerily autographs, stumbled upon them while scooping out a well. Apparently, back in the day, the paunchier your belly and the hairier your moustache, the sexier you were. Sometimes, I am truly glad that we don’t live back in the day. Just like actual soldiers in the 3rd century BCE, these statues wore their hair according to station and shoes according to marital status. It was as if an actual ancient army had been petrified and preserved. Considering the huge amount of slave labour that went into accomplishing this extraordinary feat, there is a sense of discomfort at seeing a few hangar’s worth of literal blood, sweat and tears spread out before you, the artistry and beauty of the figures orphaned by the anonymity of their creators. It also made one ponder over the changing relationship with death that history has witnessed, especially when you think about the pyramids and even the Taj Mahal. There’s this whole fascination with preserving life after death, pretending that the cessation of physical being doesn’t actually signify any real change, that somehow by erecting grand works of scale and beauty, the past will be honoured and maintained. As with the millennia of thievery in the pyramids, the pits of the first Emperor’s tomb were sacked for weapons and valuables immediately after his death, proving that the only effect that projects like this have is to remind successive generations that humankind’s obsession with eternity cannot account for anything beyond a few moments.
Two fellow hostellers hailing from Mexico, Jorge and Jaime, and I struck out on our own after that. A slightly cleaner version of Dehradun’s Paltan Bazaar, where I’d grown up licking softies, the Muslim Quarter was perfect for those lazy, desultory ambles that cities must provide to their dwellers as respite from the aim and routine of work. The sun yawned before it settled in for the night, the athleticism of the tree branches struck you as they bent over the street and shops sold food and objects I’d never seen or tasted before. I like to judge cities by the way their cats behave. Xi’an’s cats were plump and jaunty, slipping below wooden carts selling savouries, perching atop musty piles of cheap scrolls meant to attract tourists and blinking at tourists from tree branches. On our way to the Great Mosque, I followed them with my eyes; one turned into a darkened alley where the silhouettes of two men talking in the shadows looked eerie. A second cat scrambled onto a teenage boy’s stereo booming out Uighur pop tracks, lying down on it with an air of proprietorship. Another climbed into the lap of a huge old Mongol; his lugubrious nose arranged his expression into one of utmost melancholy, his enigmatic hands retired on the cat’s fur and I am convinced that he was a five hundred year old Cossack come to die in the arms of his boyhood.
And then there was the mosque, where there are pious cats who curl up in obeisance.
The classical Chinese garden is meant for solitude and individual contemplation, furnished with tranquil ponds, curiously hewn rocks and a luxurious sense of space that is low lying and wide. Traditional Islamic architecture decorated the gazebo, intricate geometrical figures enlivening the austere structure. The mosque itself married the pagoda with Arab architectural influences and Chinese characters with Islamic calligraphy. The three of us walked around in the empty compound, watching cats slink away into corners, sitting silently on the stone bench and aware of the serenity this place had to offer. The call for prayer joined twilight in stretching across the patch of sky above and a hundred men descended into the building, transforming the sphere of detached meditation into a vibrant exercise in community as they quietly took off their shoes, adjusted their skullcaps and, all in one big coordinated mass, kneeled down to bow before Mecca, a place that was as far away in their imaginations as it was in actual geographical terms. The Hui Muslims have been here since the 7th century CE and it’s worth a thought to wonder at how they anchor their isolated little tribe within the Han majority, so removed from the rest of the Muslim world. Simultaneously, it is to be noted that very few conflicts in China can ever arise because of religious disagreements. The State recognises no religion and there seems to be no incompatibility between an adherence to faith in one’s personal scheme and the exercise of cultural freedoms granted by the polis. Certainly one may pray to the almighty as often as one likes but deviating from the sanctioned national civil code, be it clothes or marriage, is not a thought that would seem to enter any Chinese mind.
Across the road was a folk house, hosting tea ceremonies and showing a puppet show. Later I discovered that artists from Shaanxi, the province in which Xi’an is located, display works there and even put them up for sale. The mention of tea cheered everyone up, tired as we were. The old building had a veritable labyrinth folded up inside it, rooms leading to other rooms leading to ornate courtyards and replete with pieces of art and craft, including a slightly scary old curtained bed that looked like Dracula probably had his way with his wives on it. We finally found the tea room and plunked ourselves onto the elegant wooden bench. This bench accompanied a table specifically made for tea-making, with shapes and grooves that accommodated teapots, cups, drips of flavoured liquid and runnels of hot water. The bhaiyya in me was flipping out, seeing tea be treated so well. I come from a culture that boils chai directly in milk like a boss. There was no milk here at all. Cue thunder, lightning, wolves howling at moon etc. I sniffed suspiciously and gave the whole affair a long hard stare. The men, one on each side of me, were totally oblivious to my discomfort, scanning the menu happily as an amiable lady seated herself across from us to serve.
The Chinese teapot is a fascinating object. It has no lid, a large hole in its bottom and a tube that runs up to the spout. You pour the hot water into the hole at the base and turn it back up before siphoning the liquid into dainty little cups and drinking. We had a few teas, the most memorable being this lychee concoction that had apparently been used by a legendary courtesan, Madam Yang of the Tang dynasty, to maintain her complexion. Oh if only someone had told me this during my dermatologically challenged adolescence! Anyway, I was just freaking out in general: no milk, upside down teapots, delicate cups...my simple North Indian brain was in a tizzy. Tea with milk is indeed hard to come by in China as I discovered in my fortnight there.
Our last stop before returning to the hostel was a shadow puppet show. Again, there was a lot of confusion about where exactly this was and lots of doors were tried and knocked at before we finally came upon the right room. It was a bit like that old Microsoft Encarta 1995 game, Mindmaze, where you had to answer trivia questions to make your way through the castle to the all-important throne room. A dimly lit and cluttered parlour, the puppeteers sat in the shadows playing cards, disgruntled that we’d interrupted their game. With much loud sighing and tsk-tsk, they motioned us inside and had us sit in the empty little room as they went behind the huge screen on end of it. There was muffled muttering and much shuffling as we settled in to watch. It was the story of a pig and a princess, from what I could gather, their voices going comically high and low as they strutted about in profile. The puppets were vivid and carefully decorated to allow their colours to be seen through the screen, the light adjusted to impart a focus and glow to them and the dexterity with which they were being controlled causing them to be delightfully animated and lifelike. My favourite bit was how when the pig cackled evilly, his mandible moved up and down like a funny little box. Afterwards, the puppeteers let us pull some strings of our own and it was possibly my goofiest moment in a long time to prop the pig up in front of me and cackle as I tugged at his jaw. “Ahyahyahya-th-th-that’s all folks!” - Porky Pig.
Beijing |
Beijing is the biggest city I have ever been in. It is absolutely, breathtakingly, marvelously huge. It is also the cleanest city I have ever been in, elegant cypresses lining its wide and orderly roads, wintry colours subduing the bustle of the capital. Coming from a country as populated as India, it’s very hard to blink at crowds. China is the only country in the world that could make us nervous on that score, the sheer “number of people” that foreigners are always remarking upon back home is something I suppose an Indian would really only get to experience in |
China. There is, however, an incredible amount of serenity in the way urban China operates. People cross roads calmly and quickly, in a systematic throng, as cars patiently wait without honking like deranged geese. For the Indian pedestrian, Beijing is the Promised Land where roads are crossed without threat to life and limb. Perhaps it is their history of regulation that make them so amenable to following rules in civic life, although fellow backpackers would tell me how things were incredibly different in rural China and smaller towns. I found that there is an unhurriedness to their gait and a provincial peacefulness that I found both incomprehensible and charming.
Two things that jump out at you about the Chinese capital are: public transport and public lavatories. The first thing you scratch your head about regarding Beijing is how for such a big city, their bladders seem really small, going by the amount of free public loos. And, before you ask, they are cleaner than Sulabh. The only Chinese ideogram I can still read is the one for toilet since the city’s ecology is literally swamped with them. The second thing you are fascinated by is cheap, efficient buses and trains.
For one yuan, you can take a bus to literally go from one end of this giant metropolis to the other. Although there are conductors aboard, sometimes you just push in your note into a machine and get off where you need to. It was a bit confusing for me on the first day, figuring out routes written in Chinese characters. I have officially taken one free ride on the Beijing bus transport system, albeit more by accident than design and aided and abetted by everyone else on the bus. That’s the other thing though - people in Beijing are really, really nice. I think we tend to find the Chinese inscrutable and enigmatic simply because they aren’t as expressive as we are, imputing their reserved ways to unfriendliness and xenophobia. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Not one person in China declined to help me with directions even as I made a ceremony out of whipping out my guidebook and pointing at alphabets that they had to hunch over and squint to read. Be it the suit-clad corporate gang of middle-aged men who walked me to Tian’anmen Square on their way to work or the nervous young couple from Tianjin who, with their halting English and delighted squeals at being able to say ‘communication’, led me to the architectural sight that is the National Centre for Performing Arts. They just aren’t as demonstrative as we are. This has its upside though. The Beijing subway, larger and more complicated than anything I’ve ever navigated and I played Chip’s Challenge, was my first experience in local mass transit that did not involve ripped fabric and a reference to my mother.
I hesitate to put this down to as vague a reason as their political past, which might have encouraged restraint in public life and also to extrapolate the attitudes of a vast country on the basis of observations in one city, but there is certainly a coolness of temper which can puzzle the openly emotional Indian. Perhaps in part it really is because a long-prevailing single party system of government has caused their relationship with their State owned commons to be less anxious and more accepting. There seems to be less anger here and people seem content. A lawyer friend who has been living here a year told me over some delectable Peking duck that, just like most communities, people have an issue with their local government more than the remote tyranny of central administration. They are not oppressed in the way we imagine them to be, merrily going about their business as they do in Bombay and London. They are oppressed in the way most citizens all over the world are, perfectly satisfied with their lot as their compatriots in rural regions and hinterlands are exploited and violated economically and existentially. Quite possibly, the saddest Chinese I saw were the pandas at Beijing zoo who would turn away and bury their heads in their paws should you so much as look at them. Accounts of the humans being thus scrutinized and pressured into abject misery are a mite overrated. Yes the Chinese city fake-glitters but then so does the Indian city, the levels of apathy not so different once you get past the discussion on democratic freedom. But we need to think a bit more about comparable atrocities back home before gasping so loudly and sniffing so judgmentally. Somewhere between Stepford and step-up, Beijing made me ask, “So what?” to beliefs I’d thought were cast in stone and whisper guiltily that this is what New Delhi should be.
Another reason New Delhi could stand to become a bit more like Beijing (all married and settled with kids, like) is because of how it treats its womenfolk. I felt safer clambering aboard a bus at midnight in a place where nobody’d understand me if I screamed for help than I’d ever felt at high noon in Dilli. That the bus driver was a woman probably helped. Buses ply throughout the day and night, women both driving and conducting, making it so much more convenient and easy for women to be out and about as they please. Which is why the latest police statement prohibiting women from working after 8 pm in Gurgaon makes me want to tear my hair, scalp and eventually my brain out. The cultural revolution made sure that women got as a big a share in public life as men, visual records of gender relations right from posters to films showing a far less sexist scheme of things than we, with our obsession with the chastity of Mother India, can ever hope to find in our narrative of nationhood. Modern India has been built for men by men. Modern China, at least if one were to judge by its cities, is very visibly not. That is not to say that darker and more covert, systemic crimes against women such as foeticide and discrimination within the family do not happen and it would be unsurprising if they did not, in the heavily patriarchal historical framework within which new China thrives. But it then piques one’s curiosity even more that those truths should reside with an aggressively egalitarian facade.
It is not as if I didn’t have a single uncomfortable encounter. My very first introduction to Beijing was to find myself dropped off at an unlit, deserted and narrow alleyway, winding like a dragon’s tail between forbidding facades of old buildings, their windows like snake eyes. Somewhere in this labyrinth was my hostel, I’d been told. Later, after a couple of panic attacks and trailing behind a little old lady on a bicycle for protection as I expected to be set upon by crouching tigers and hidden muggers, the innkeeper told me that this was a hutong, a typical Old Beijing neighborhood created by a gathering of courtyards. For almost a millennium, the hutong has been the nerve of the community of Beijing’s gentry and middle classes, much like the peth of Pune or even the mohalla of North India, with its aangan. Apparently, everything my mum had ever told me about dark dangerous alleys was moot here. Although not entirely perhaps. Nianluogu Xiang is an old historic street in North Beijing which has undergone a recent transformation into a site of cultural and economic revival, fancy stores and quirky little shops galore, all synthetic, pop-China hyperreal glory selling canvas satchels with pictures of Obama’s face transposed onto Mao’s iconic image so reminiscent of Che Guevara. I’d heard of a Mongolian dairy there and bought myself a traditional Uighur dessert of yoghurt and figs to eat as I wandered through the bylanes of this network at night, beneath the stars, savoring faded revolutionary graffiti from the ’60s as easily as I scooped down the tangy sweetmeat of the nomads. Mao’er Hutong was where Mao had been born and raised and I was keen to see this legendary road. Scarcely had I rounded the curb when someone who can only be described as a Tibetan Jack Sparrow figure popped up in front of me. I tried to get past him but he kept blocking me and steering me towards his shop selling the kind of wares I can get for 20 bucks at Bhotiya Market, promising me a deal, naturally. I was trying to be polite and extricate myself from this awkward cacolingual situation but also with this dreadful awareness that I was not, in any circumstances, to enter the shop. Brandishing my plastic spoon, I backed away. Oh where was Chow Yun Fat when you needed him, my womanly instincts wrung their hands. Mr. T kept following me out onto the crowded main street though and I guess he had by now figured out that I was Indian because he kept yelling, “Inde”! “We gave you asylum, you bastard!” I shrieked as I disappeared into the melee of shoppers and tourists. That’s one good thing about nobody knowing English.
Though possibly the most uncomfortable encounter I had was with Tian’anmen Square, oppressive and gloomy even on a bright and crisp morning. The weird thing was that this was a site overrun with camera-toting tourists and visitors. The Chinese government obviously does not acknowledge the horrible truth behind the reason for the Square’s popularity. If nothing happened here, why were all these people here at all? Why is it significant? It would seem, from the huge statue of a heroic Red Army watching over women with their one child, that everyone had convened to pay homage to the obelisk of the Monument to the People’s Heroes. Of course.
Before I left for Shanghai that night, I managed one more surreal experience in the most unexpected quarter. Spending an afternoon at the Beijing Observatory was a singular delight and one that I am still processing. This medieval astronomical centre is like a little memento from the early Renaissance that has been conserved in Beijing memory, parallel time and space engulfing you as you step in. The observatory had been intended, assembled and designed by Jesuit scholars, the foremost being the Belgian Ferdinand Verbiest, mounted along the watchtower that was built during the days of Kublai Khan. It was beautiful confusion to encounter 600 year old Europe through 600 year old China in 21st century Beijing, history executing a complicated series of dance steps right before me. The overcast teatime weather and the empty courtyard and rooftop, a cool breeze swirling around, imbalanced my carefully set historical clock. I was undone by the exquisite craftsmanship on the huge instruments - dragons wrapped around armillary spheres, eccentric rabbit water clocks, the sheer intricacy of the designs on the stone plinths supporting these scientific tools, meant to measure and record but also to look splendid doing so. In standing on the rooftop of this old castle of knowledge, climbing its weathered, chipped stairs that had felt so many feet, was a profound sense of the extraordinary, of human achievement, of the love affair between continents and centuries and art and science. The eternally elusive moment between the past and the future consumed me in a lightning flash of historical self-awareness. Dragons guarding time? Star Trek lunchboxes were so next century. The Chinese might not have gotten the full colonial treatment but in turning some quiet corners and glancing sideways at the West now and then, they’ve had conversations that are certainly worth eavesdropping on.
Shanghai |
The night train from Beijing to Shanghai was something that I’d been looking forward to. Foregoing the MagLev, I had booked my ticket in the 2nd class compartment, just like I do back home. It was with a strange mixture of awe, dismay and delight that I beheld my bunk in a four berth compartment, a pair of nylon slippers lying on my pillow and a television complete with headphones embedded into the wall.
This was going to be a very comfortable train ride, I thought, snuggling into the blanket and tuning into a |
Mandarin soap opera. Is the standard of living better in China? It would appear so, at least in the cities. Poverty looks different too, less abject and wretched. At the Lama Temple in Beijing, a blind beggar had been lying against the temple’s wall strumming an Er Hu, a fragile violin, his voice equally weak and hopeless. But he had warm, woollen clothes to protect himself from the cold. It is an image that sticks when pondering over the conditions of resource distribution. I did not find anyone to ask about how the State takes up the welfare of those without enough income but I am curious about how the urban poor get by. It is obvious that rural China staggers under the weight of the country’s hidden economic problems, tales of sweatshops only the most infamous indicators of this. But how do its cities manage to gloss over this uncomfortable reality? In Bombay and Delhi, one cannot pretend away children begging at traffic signals and yet they are cities too. In Beijing and Shanghai, I did not come across any pre-adolescent looking for a handout. Does big city China pack off its impoverished kids to sweatshops and put them out of sight and out of mind even as it moves its rural labour to cities to take advantage of the fact that those labourers will not then be able to avail of welfare benefits that would have been their due according to the local registration schemes in their hometowns and villages? China pretends to be less poor than it is and in doing so, remains poor.
Chinese television is a bit more fun than all this dourness. As I channel-surfed on the train, I became inordinately fond of this one music video starring mainland heartthrob and missing Backstreet Boy, Wong Leemon. A Han-dsome young pop star, he seems to be a sensation among young girls here, his lanky frame stiffening as his arms spread wide while he croons an angsty ballad about separation and loss. Also a familiar face, Jet Li, seems to be something like Sanjay Dutt in China, a lovable and aging action hero who appears frequently in that mainstay of blockbuster Chinese cinema – the trashy period film. Their action films show a lot more oestrogen-fuelled bloodlust than anything I’ve ever seen in a Hindi movie. I watched some bits of what looked like a late ’90s Khiladi type yoof film and the women characters seemed very much in the thick of things and as crucial to the plot as the men without having to be anyone’s love interest. Considering that certain extremely successful Bollywood actresses’ entire careers are premised on them taking their clothes off, it would not hurt to take a look at these incredibly attractive models of how females can and should be depicted in a male-dominated coda of cultural representation.
A whole night of whizzing past the suburban belt between Beijing and Shanghai, through Nanjing and a landscape of distant lights and dark smoggy patches, gave me a huge appetite by the time I’d dumped my bag in my hostel room. Even as I wolfed down breakfast, I found myself regarding the differences in gastronomical customs between India and China. There is rather a struggle to dexterously manoeuvre two sticks on a plate or in a bowl and hope that one comes away with something between them, much like an infant playing with her food. At the same time, just like the elaborate tea ceremony, there seems to be an element of moderation and control in consuming food that appears to be part of the general self-possession of the Chinese. Chopsticks are difficult to master and they ensure that you eat only in small bite-sized pieces. I found that I could not stuff myself, the way I do when I tear chunks of dosas and paranthas to gorge on. Indians with impatient hands and an unapologetic zest for food may find it mystifying how sedate the Chinese can be about their meals. At the same time, during my stay there, whether I ate alone or with friends, it seemed customary to order a lot. Many dishes would be asked for and then the diners, be they merely two in number, would partake of the spread by directly applying their chopsticks to the platters and transferring small amounts into their plates or bowls. To middle class Indians who grow up learning never to waste food, this excess can be off-putting. While one can truly savour rice in this manner, the most adroit thing I have ever accomplished with my fingers was wrapping a bite of duck in a thin disc of flour using chopsticks. I wish I had a Youtube video to show my mum.
As I set forth in my trusty (and appropriately hued) red suede sneakers to explore Shanghai, I was at once disgruntled to realise the effect of this sort of cautious relationship with food. You’re thin. It’s true - none of the three cities I had visited seemed to have any trouble with obesity. The women are willowy and lissom to the point of annoyance and the men are lean and rangy to the point of making you regret the language barrier. Of course, there is the Engels coefficient to consider...these are rich people not spending much of their money on food while just a few kilometres outside the city limits, hard-toiling peasant and labourer families are unable to spend on anything but food. Of course, the latter’s lack of fat would be for entirely different reasons.
If Beijing is like New Delhi, conservative and still old-fashioned, Shanghai is like Bombay, energetic and exuberant and enigmatic. It is a city of the night, its chequered history as a port of vice and den of depravity well-documented and well-imagined. There is something very beautiful about Shanghai in the way there is about only some great cities with secrets, a raffish charm and an abandon that is earned. Cities like this are badly behaved and good spirited, tarts with hearts. Its very name lends itself to an accusation of deceit and fraud. The burnished bling hides a patchwork archive of anecdotes and histories and tales and yarns and reminisces and hopes and dreams. I fell in love with it. It is nothing like anywhere in the world even though it’s supposed to be the city of the future. The Shanghai History Museum is a brilliantly compiled record of this fact, designed as an interactive stroll through two centuries in the most stimulating way possible. In fact, as much as I and many years worth of people have fallen in love with Shanghai, it seems to be quite in love with itself and its oldness. The Museum and the Urban Planning Centre testify to this, the latter even having recreated a 1930s Shanghainese street that leads out to a metro station.
Shanghai lives in many time zones. Its nostalgic obsession with its past conveniently bleeds into its impatient fixation with the future. It is not a city that for those who live in the moment. A young city, it throbs with the vitality and pulse of yuppie kids with too much money and too little time. Be not fooled by sepia notions of Chinese youth being at all deprived. These are convenient communists, luxury brands flooding their markets and cheap local imitations of legit gadgets ready at hand. It was like everything I had seen shown in films and on the telly about New York, the impeccably dressed women, the pubs, the vibrancy and vigour. In fact, the enthusiasm for style is so infectious that this was the only city where I actually bothered to dress up for just a regular day out. Not to take away from the fact that our girls and boys also know how to dress very well or to belabour my earlier point about a less gendered public space but Shanghai was the first city I had been in where I could and did wear my hem above my knees in public transport. And also there is the fact that our northern, dry cities that would really be able to permit certain kinds of fashion away from the muggy, tropical grime of coastal metros, certainly cannot handle anything more than a jeans and tee. Street fashion is only possible on streets that allow it.
Despite its speed and the vertigo that assaults you as you deal with the dizzying tinsel of Pudong’s business district, symbol of China’s progress, they certainly know how to preserve their peace of mind. The river Huangpu around which Shanghai has been built runs right through the heart of the city, seemingly dividing its business and cultural centres. As busy as the city is in catching up with some elusive ideal, it also offers ways to exit the race for a while and retreat. I walked for an hour after tea along the Huangpu’s banks, as night dawned and the Bund, the distant art deco promenade on the opposite bank, blossomed into a resplendent carnival of lights. It occurred to me that from where I stood in the silhouetted foliage of the riverside trees, I could probably get a sense of how those ships and boats coasted down in the old days, their cargoes bursting with opium. What it must have been like to stand at this spot at the turn of the century and peer into the night for a sign of a ships’s spectral shadow on the waters lit by gas lamps. I grasped at that old air of unknown danger to evoke the Shanghai of yore.
I did not have to pretend or wait too long, as it turned out. The Bund is lined with century old buildings right from the first HSBC to the Russian Consulate and one of the constructions in the middle is the erstwhile Jardine-Matheson warehouse, menacing and distinguished although no longer a hub of opium transactions. Still, it retains an aura about itself, a sheen of strange light seeming to coat it, helpfully supplied by a vivid imagination. I popped into the road right next to it as I was sauntering about the area. Although past nine, it was hardly late for Shanghai and so it came as a surprise to find the road rather empty, barring a couple of stragglers. While it was not exactly ill-lit, it was not well-lit either. The sky seemed to have changed colour and the atmosphere had thickened almost imperceptibly as I tried to get my bearings. I crossed an old art deco Wine & Cigarettes shop and spied some dodgy characters crouched behind cars smoking what I'm convinced was an opium bong (OK probably not but my dramatic thoughts had been let loose by this point). Just as I was sure that I’d be discovered in a body bag in East Nanjing Street, this big man wearing a Russian hat ran out of the Wine & Cheese shop and brushed past me, muttering something in a very Slavic tongue. I looked back and the lady at the counter had a really creepy enigmatic expression on her face. The only thing missing from this scene was Snowy the dog and a finger beckoning me to The Blue Lotus. Which, by the way, was the Tintin comic I found an authentic Mandarin edition of in a flea market the next day.
To recover, I had to sate a full day’s raging appetite by getting a good, slightly expensive meal in one of Shanghai’s better eateries. Hunan cuisine is one of those varieties of Chinese food that busts the myth about it being bland and without spices. A south-central province, Hunan offers a range of delights meant to set your tongue on fire. The trouble was I couldn’t put the fire out. I didn’t know the word for water and motioning to the glass was not helping. Alone in an upscale restaurant without the ability to ask for a glass of water is not a pleasant situation. My waiter saved the day, whipping out his iPhone and asking me to type in English to translate the word into Mandarin. I owe the late Steve Jobs a dinner, I suppose. Oh well, in hell then. Another myth about Chinese food is that there isn’t enough vegetarian to choose from. A fellow vegetarian backpacker and I managed to locate a lovely place in the French Concession to not kill animals in. In fast food joints, you can actually order soy milk. Speaking of healthful beverages, Tsingtao is their equivalent of Kingfisher. Introduced by the Germans in 1903, the beer has its merits. While not as spunky as our brew, Tsingtao is strong and reliable as a mild depressant. In other words, the Tsing of good times. Drinking is quite fun in Shanghai. While I did want to go pub-hopping alone, I sort of chickened out at the last minute and ended up going with a friend from the hostel. Those guys really know how to burn up the dance floor; any illusions I might have had about the Chinese being uptight went out the window when I saw the Kung Fu disco moves that inebriated Shanghainese youngsters pulled out after a few too many. Those kids really are fast as lightning.
What they are not though is inquisitive about other countries. The few sentences worth of conversation that I did have with locals did not elicit any queries or interest in where I came from beyond a polite smile. This is the Middle Kingdom for a reason, centre of the universe and leader of the new world order. It is a bit puzzling when one knows that Fa Hien and Hieun Tsang were captivated enough by the idea of India to undertake arduous journeys here even though nobody returned the favour from our end. I did meet one young man who I am still in touch with, a guide at the Ohel Moshe Synagogue which has now been converted into a museum of the Holocaust refugees of Shanghai. The place itself is quite riveting, a well-curated window into a tumultuous and heart-warming episode of exodus and asylum, with thousands of Ashkenazi Jews fleeing the horrors of the Third Reich to raise children here. How I got into the synagogue is an anecdote. I ended up standing behind a rather pompous American Jewish family, the kind whose matriarch makes it a point to introduce her three sons by Ivy League university rather than name. At the ticket window, she sniffed loudly and asked if I was Jewish. What happened next is anyone’s guess but my offence at being asked this question so rudely, morphed into a childish desire to do mischief. Putting on my most solemn expression, I bade the counter clerk ‘Shalom’ and turned to her, “Yes, I just discovered that my grandmother may have had Baghdadi Jewish ancestry.” I don’t even know how I managed to make this watertight but I did because she got very excited and left thinking about young Esther Ezekiel, who had led an adventurous life in Bombay in the ’30s. The guide, who was a recent college graduate and perhaps a couple of years older than I, ended up striking up a conversation with me about India and asking for recommendations of history books. I attribute some of the parochialism to the fact that unlike our violent submission to a foreign power, China never really opened up to any long-term outsider. Within its own vast confines, a panoply of historical phenomena have probably occurred and left residues, but colonialism and its definitive, ineluctable regime of attitudes and paradigms have never touched China, leaving it disaffected by and disengaged from the Other. We are not yet fancily post-national enough to find this anything but dismaying. Single-party government also works with a consciousness that does not have to grapple with the daily civilisational tensions that we do, even as it may intellectually respect this. Mind you, I am not being normative about diversity. Just descriptive. India just happens to be way more pluralistic and heterogeneous and cannot be controlled by one unifying ideology. And I am no Huntington either when I affirm the possibility of resolutions as much as the inevitability of clashes.
The real clash in China is of course between the artist and the State, the thinker and the government. They have sectioned off entire areas of cities and devoted them to art districts. While I only managed to see Beijing’s sprawling, majestic798 Art District at night, it was Shanghai’s modish and hip M50 that seems like the place to trace the hushed contours of dissent. Chinese art is State-funded, everyone knows that, and Ai Weiwei is a cautionary tale that has so many sides and asides to it that one is left scratching one’s head about the real status of China’s robust art scene. Make no mistake, it is no less dynamic and impudent than art in freer societies, funding be damned. Much like the Iranian New Wave, contemporary Chinese artists whose works I saw at the Shanghai Art Museum and the M50 walk tightropes and risk personal security to sneak in all kinds of pert, piquant disavowals of the government. The cynical argument is perhaps true, that the government wants gullible tourists like myself to be taken in by all this seeming freedom of expression and be wowed by their talent. I succumb to the ruse. Indian artist friends of mine argue that the fact that they can put up whatever they like even if it is going to be burnt by Right wing zealot shows how much more permissive the Indian state is about art works. I am not sure how having an art work destroyed before a public can savour it is much better off than not being allowed to make it, since both approaches rest on a refusal to grant the artist the right to display. Based on the work of collectives like Liu Dao who won me over with the manic, retropolitan energy of their Goddamned Shanghai show at Island 6, I’d say they’re doing alright. The art district is also the only place where you are likely to find English-speaking Chinese, as I discovered when speaking to a young gallery assistant and having just finished interning at a gallery in Bombay, felt a kinship with her that transcended barriers of language. The Propaganda Poster Museum is another very interesting space, if only because it quite boastfully exhibits four decades worth of Party art. A quick survey of China’s history and its relationships with the world, this is a feast for politically aware tourists who will marvel at how high emotions ran regarding Cuba, the Vietnam War, the Russians and the Arab world, apart from being chronicles of China’s own communist trajectory. I bought myself a copy of a 1970s poster depicting three children, two boys and a girl, pointing rifles at an American soldier gleefully. Disturbing? Yep. But there you are.
II
Lilongs in Shanghai are like hutongs in Beijing, cosy old higgledy-piggledy neighbourhoods. They seem more romantic though, shaded with cypresses and lazier and are made up of Sino-European houses called shikumens, an architectural style that combines brick walls and courtyards with traditional doors. These turn-of-the-century houses are no longer as widely inhabited as apartments but retain their charm, conjuring up scenes of brimming ballrooms, high stakes card games and qipao clad hostesses at balconies. Walking through the lilongs at twilight, the whiff of perfume and the sense of foreign waters nearby, I gathered up Shanghai in my arms, its drama and its drudgery, to take back as a souvenir of another time and another space. Of course, this sort of abstract wisdom was not going to fly with friends expecting gifts back home, so I found myself on my last night in China much the same situation as I had been on my first, walking really fast and holding up a piece of paper to ask for directions, this time to a boutique chopsticks store that I had heard of. Yes, they exist. Before you snigger, try saying ‘international cricket sensation’ to a North American. Hurts, doesn’t it? A boutique chopstick store is very much a respectable establishment that stocks just about any kind of chopstick for any kind of occasion and person. I picked up a bunch of hand painted local sticks for friends and an exquisite set for my mum. This, along with all the cheap knick-knacks - keychains, calendars, fridge magnets, figurines, postcards - that I had picked up between Yuyuan Bazaar and Tianzifang art market, the latter packed with fantastic but expensive Shanghaiana that I will have to save up for in my next trip.
I did finally manage a MagLev trip without taking the Beijing-Shanghai Bullet. As I departed Shanghai, I took the high speed train to the airport, from a central metro station. The city blurred past me, much like the past fortnight had. There was so much I still had to absorb and of course photos to upload on Facebook as legitimate proof of my trip. But that was later. As I sat at the window, trying to catch my last images of this great, beautiful, complicated, scary, welcoming country, my eyes scurried back and forth in frenzied haste to collect everything for my memory. My tongue stretched itself, ready to resume its duties. And my mind hugged itself tight, trying to hold together a profoundly significant and meaningful encounter between the elephant and the dragon.
Originally from Dehradun, Kamayani Sharma graduated from Fergusson College (Pune University) in August 2011 with a degree in philosophy. She is a student of art history at the Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum and an intern at ART India, the visual arts quarterly. Apart from striking contemplative poses by the sea and catching local trains with the grace of a penguin on crack, she is involved in independent scholarship and gender-sensitization of late night taxi drivers.
Courtesy: www.sumimike.net
Courtesy: www.corfu-fp7.eu
Courtesy: http://eurorivercruises.com
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