back here

           Some people say that when you first return home after living in a foreign land, you experience a second culture shock. It has been a little over a week since I have returned home from China. I knew I needed to write a post that would serve to sort of close that portion of an amazing experience, but it has taken me longer than I expected. The whole first week that I was home, it felt like half of my head was still in China, and I think a part of it still lingers there.

Somehow the days here seem significantly longer, and its funny how easily you forget what a real sky looks like until you’re standing in the middle of strip-mall parking lot, gazing up at the perfectly textured clouds above you. The skies I saw in China always had a diluted milky-ness to them, even on the bluest of days. But at night, the constant white of the sky served as a canvas for the lights below, emitting a burnt orange and red glow that seemed more magnificent and mysterious than any sunset I had witnessed Stateside.

I have wondered if it was strange that I spend so much time analyzing the skies of the places I go to. I remember writing about my first impression of Shanghai’s polluted skies in one of my earliest posts, and still dwelling on them long after I had finished writing. The sky looms over everything and all of us, and its expanse is immeasurable to the human gazer. But the sky, more so than the watches on our wrists, serve as our measure of passing time; the days that turned into night, the clouds that turned into sun, the shorter days that got longer. Those days when Shanghai was still a new city and rain fell from the sky almost every day, until it was replaced by sun and warmth some weeks later. I’m not sure how long it took, I wasn’t counting, but that was time passing.  

Time is a constant thing, but the human brain can easily distort it. I remember reading an article somewhere that explained why experiencing summers as a little kid seems so much longer than experiencing them as an adult. When you’re a little kid, everything is still new to you. Time slows down and summer feels longer because you’re brain has to process all the new experiences. But as an adult, every day begins to turn into a routine, and life in general isn’t so new to you anymore. Back here, at home, the days may be physically longer, but I remember the days feeling longer when I was away.

I’m not sure if what I’m currently experiencing is a second culture shock, because everything here, even the sky, is too familiar to me.  I wish it were culture shock again—to be able to experience the surprise and curiosity that comes with a new land, to slow time down a little bit. Maybe it’s the restlessness of my nature, or the brain’s hunger to always process new things, to wander somewhere I haven’t been before. I know I will return to China in the future, if not the near future. And when I go back there, I may see some familiar things, but also things that have changed to the point where they are unrecognizable. A second culture shock, I could call it, because China, too, has a restless nature.  

young ones

            Recently, I’ve begun to think a lot about young people in Shanghai, and in China in general. Last weekend I got the chance to attend the X-games as well as some music festivals (the Midi music festival and the Strawberry festival). The music and dancing were fun, but I found myself mostly people watching. Like I have seen at most of the music festivals I have been to in the US, teenagers and twenty-somethings dress to be seen. At times it didn’t feel like I was in China at all, or at least the China you think you’re in when you see high school students crowded together on the sidewalk, each one dressed in the same white and red track-suit uniform. Instead, I saw in their outfits more fun and individuality than I have ever seen before. But one aspect that seemed purely “China” were the red scarves that many of them wore at the music festivals, around their arms and around their necks, and I didn’t have to look too far to find someone dawning a Mao-style hat with the unmistakable red star sewn right above the rim.

            I think that’s the most interesting part about seeing so many young people gathered together in one place. The fact that while there seems to be complete oblivion, there is also complete awareness; a social awareness and a historical awareness. The Mao hats and red scarves mixed with the wild ways that they dressed could be seen as the contrast between suppression and freedom of expression. But at the same time, those very scarves and hats unified them, each individual a part of a generation different from the rest. I recently talked to my friend Jessie, who is a student here at ECNU. She told me that the generation gap—between people our age and the older generation of our parents—is growing, and there is a clear clash between opinions and perspectives of both generations. I’m sure that no parent in China would go to a music festival flaunting their red scarves and Mao-attire. They were the generation who lived during Mao Zedong’s reign and the immense limit of freedom under his Communist regime. They lived through it all, so how could we, who did not live through that, possibly understand all of the ingrained emotions and politics and nuances?

I did not grow up in China, and I don’t know what it is to be young in China. But I think I understand what it is to be a part of a generation where you feel both powerless and full of a daunting responsibility; naive, but a historical conscience is embedded in you. We are at that age when we are still young, where we are optimistic, but this optimism is gradually being chipped away at to make way for cynicism. But at the same time, I think this is what makes our generation unique. There are responsibilities and challenges ahead of us; as the generation of our fathers and mothers grow old, we must take their place, and maybe clean up the messes that our leaders will have left for us. The future seems to be getting closer, but perhaps that’s what makes being young—in China or in the US or anywhere else—so exciting. We will be ready when the time comes, but for now, we can keep dancing to the music. 

look, see

a glimpse into my travels during spring break

There are images from Guilin, Xiamen, the Tulou villages of Fujian Province

trains, buses, cars, hostels,

good food

and

good friends.

spring break in china from Kathryn Tam on Vimeo.

pieces of home

"tear down"

Shikumen houses

inside

Whenever I would visit my grandmother in her Chinatown apartment in New York, she would often tell me stories about her life right before she and her sister left China for America at age twelve. She told me how the boat she was on got robbed by pirates, and how she was so scared that before they could take anything from her, she took the only gold coin she had and threw it overboard into the dark waters below. And the look that she and her father, my great grandfather, shared right before she left, not knowing if she would ever see him again; she told me that, too, but in fewer words. One of her most vivid memories is of the last night she spent in her village in Guangzhou. She went around her house, touching every piece of furniture and every object. This was so she would never forget the things that defined her home and herself, and she never did forget.

Last Saturday I went on a trip with my photography class to a neighborhood in Shanghai where some Shikumen houses still remain. The area feels almost like an inverted city, with the Shikumen buildings, usually no taller than 3 storys, in the middle and highrises surrounding them. For a moment you can feel disoriented. These houses, whose architecture is a mixture of Western and Chinese influence, were built from the late 19^th century and into the early 20^th century. And they are beautiful, these elegant, strong, stoic structures. They emanate an intimacy that you feel immediately when you wander within its narrow walkways, surrounded by stone walls on both sides.

An old woman allowed us inside her home and gave us a tour of one of these buildings. Small hanging lamps and the occasional bare bulb lit the way upstairs as we walked on squares of beautiful painted tiles. Other houses in the neighborhood are not as lucky, though. The actual plan is for most of the Shikumen houses to be torn down, so modern residential towers can take their place. Many houses are mere skeletons that look as if they could crumble at your touch, and rooms once occupied by humans now have garbage to take up floor space. Some houses are partially torn down, framed by the beams of those who once stood before them. There was life made here once, and a place someone called home. A few families still reside in these houses, even as ones are being torn down across the street from them.

Years from now, when these families have probably been forced to move out, will they come back to see what has become of their home? Maybe, like some sort of archeological dig, they would eventually uncover traces of a life they left behind. They would examine these old objects, brushing off layer after layer of dust, all the while measuring the age of its abandonment. One down, on to the next. Look at what used to be here, what we used to be. But I don’t think those families would come back. Maybe they, like my grandmother, touched every object, every piece of furniture, every texture of the wall before they left what they had always known, the image and the feeling imprinted in their minds and on the tips of their fingers. Maybe to return would mean to start rubbing the lines, blurring the image that was perfectly there.

When my grandmother was twelve years old, she left for America and never returned. She never wanted to. She married at twenty, and started a family and a home. Sometimes she and I, in her apartment on the twenty-seventh floor, will look out the window onto lower Manhattan, just as the lights of the Brooklyn Bridge turn on and the city continues to stay awake. It is difficult to have to leave home and never come back, but it is also possible to make a new home. I don’t know how long it takes, perhaps it takes a very, very long time to go somewhere else and be able to say, “This is my home now.” But I hope those who must leave their Shikumen homes imprint in their minds the image, feel, and scent of where they are now.  So wherever they go, no matter how far they must travel, this will go with them, because it should be a part of them. When the heart has been invested in a place, the mind and the memory tend to work a little harder. 

on the place that i am in

a barber shop beneath an overpass

Last semester when I was at a literary festival in New York, I heard an author say that she was not able to truly write about America until she left America. Sometimes I wonder if that could be the case for me as well. I have been in China for a little over a month now, but the longer I have stayed here, the harder it has become for me to write about China.

Before I arrived in Shanghai, I think I had this certain “idea” of China from all of the documentaries I watched and news articles I read. On the plane headed to Pudong International Airport, I had my nose stuck inside The Economist for a large duration of the trip. “China’s Paradox of Prosperity” was the title of the issue, which had a new weekly section solely dedicated to China. I underlined and dog-eared articles I deemed epic, as if I were searching for some code that was hidden in the text. And I thought I had cracked that code, too. As flight UA-87 taxied to the terminal, I had come to a conclusion: China needed to be saved. But every day I feel that my imagined China is rapidly being revised. All of those words and phrases that I safely tucked into my mental pocket when I read about China—“rapid development,” “state capitalism,” “censorship,” “disparity”—are getting stale. I am beginning to grow tired of them.

On days when I don't have too many classes, I have gotten into the habit of wandering around the neighborhoods of Shanghai, camera in hand, with no destination in mind. And whenever I return back from these trips, I feel those economic terms and euphemisms begin to slip away and get replaced by images instead. Birds and building, dirt and concrete, highway and river, brick and clothesline. These are the elements upon which this city has been built. Sure, there is “rapid development” everywhere. But when you actually stand beneath a concrete and steel structure and look up, the term “rapid development” doesn’t seem so accurate anymore. You feel small, but at the same time you are in complete awe that something so huge can be built by human hands.

But maybe they are right, all of those people who write for The Economist or report for Planet Money. China is a country of paradox and disparity. But the paradox I see is the one between the China I saw in America and the China I see here, now. Before, China was just a landmass with a lot of people, with problems that could be solved if only given a healthy dose of American democracy. This is what I thought before. But now I realize how silly that sounds. China has shown me that I am no missionary, and it doesn’t need saving. China is a complicated country, and the longer I have been here, the more infatuated I have become with this place. I feel myself being absorbed into the concrete walls, the clotheslines, rivers, bikes, and air, and my idea of China is gradually getting rewritten. Who knows if after I return America, only then will I be able to truly write about China. But for now, I think I’ll let myself be absorbed into this place. 

finding light

a circular pedestrian walkway 

Standing guard

The Oriental Pearl Tower in a puddle

Last weekend I explored Pudong, the east side of Shanghai. We went there at night, so the entire area felt a little bit like an empty amusement park. But even with the lack of visible stars in the Shanghai sky, these lights try to make up for it. They are an artificial galaxy, beautiful and lonely. 

a lesson in construction

workers dormitories

The most peaceful place I have discovered in Shanghai so far has not been the park near ECNU, but a construction site that you can see from above if you look out the window from the top floor of the academic building on campus. A friend and I went to this construction site last Friday as the sun was going down, and I must tell you, it is like being in a completely different world. Behind the white concrete walls that try to keep people out is a jungle of wire, metal, rust and wood. And the strangest thing is that you can't hear any of the traffic that you know is flowing adjacent to the site. It is a nature of its own kind.

Migrant construction workers live in what some call "prefabricated" dorms on the sites. Most are made of metal sheets, and they are reminiscent of trailer homes. The construction site is eerily beautiful at sundown, but it's difficult to imagine what it would be like to live there day after day, waking up to an continuously changing landscape and an ever-growing tangle of scrap metal and garbage. I try to imagine what it would be like to look out from a worker's dormitory and see the highrises lit up in any color you can think of; a bunch of artificial rainbows that light up the night. And then I realize that where I live is just as much a part of Shanghai's skyline as the buildings you see on the postcards. But where I live is hidden behind a concrete wall and a garbage jungle, and where I live is temporary. And it is on these temporary habitats upon which skyscrapers are built.

"If all the people of Shanghai were to gather on the streets, they would have to sit on top of each other."

my bed in my dorm at ECNU

Well, it has been a long while since I have posted on here, and this is the first time I have been really able to connect to the Internet since I arrived. But to be honest, I think it was nice to be disconnected for several days.

My first arrival in Shanghai felt a little surreal, like I was in some sort of a dream-like state. The trip from Shanghai Pudong International Airport to the campus of East China Normal University, where I am staying, can probably represent the transitional Shanghai that I am slowly getting to know. Through the bus windows, I could see highrise buildings trying their best to cut through the thick haze that makes the sky a milky white. When rain, fog, and air pollution mix together, it produces an effect on Shanghai's landscape that is both beautiful and unsettling. The outlines of buildings, windows, doors, frames, and clotheslines stubbornly stick to their actual form, as if the buildings where transformed directly from the architect's draft and on to its upright, three-dimensional position. I think there is something innate in all of us that can know, without having to look very hard, when life is present. I did not have to look very hard through the bus window to see that in those many buildings, almost every room was without furniture, light, a couple, a family. Life did not exist here, at least not yet. 

This, I think, is the image I know I will always look back to when I think about the first time I was introduced to this city. Shanghai is a city in transition; the new is being built and the old is being torn down. Someone here told me that if all of people of Shanghai were to come from the buildings where they live and then gather on the streets, there would not be enough room to fit everyone, and they would have to sit on top of each other. That is a good way to picture a population of 23 million people and counting. Shanghai is growing larger every day, and it is changing in ways both obvious and subtle. It is a Shanghai under continuous construction, and by the end of my four months here, this post probably will not even be relevant anymore. But for now, this city is ruled by cranes.

"That's why I say, 'If you pack lightly, you live lightly.' If you can figure out your suitcase, you can pretty much figure out your life."

With four days until Chinese New Year and about two weeks to go until I'm on a plane headed for Shanghai, I have to start making a list of things to pack. So far on my list I have "camera; other camera; water colors?" I'll be landing during Shanghai's coldest month, so I should probably go back and add in some essentials like clothes and my passport and whatnot. But for now, I'll write this post and show you a very cute video of Diane von Furstenberg's own advice for packing a suitcase. If I can figure out my own suitcase, then maybe I can figure out my life too. I'll keep you posted.

DVF from Luis Aguirre on Vimeo.

"If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter a sensation that is one's very own."

On my  last birthday, my sister gave me one of the best gifts I have ever received. It was a book titled "China in Ten Words" by Yu Hua, and ever since I unwrapped it, my nose has been buried in its pages every night by the light of a single lamp in my room. It's hard to describe how I feel reading it because Yu Hua writes of things that are both unfamiliar and too familiar to me. But if there was one thing I would want you--reader, seer, and thinker--to take away from my blog, I hope that it would even be the tiniest fraction of what Yu Hua thinks of literature.

So as I start my travels, studies, and wanderings to Shanghai and elsewhere, with this blog as my shadow, I hope that you might be able to discover unfamiliar things, recognize the familiar, and maybe set off to find the things about a place or yourself that you never knew existed--here, there, far and near.