I was on the subway the Thursday afternoon, on my way to work at the magazine. I was in a rush, but I was on time. I had just expended energy by aiding in Chinese to English translations, negotiating a new cell phone purchase for my girlfriend, exhausting stuff. The nice thing, one of the only nice things, about living so far up in the northern Yangpu district is that I nearly always get a seat on the subway. As I inch closer and closer to the city, the cars fill up fast, these people have to stand. I was seated, hunched in the corner by the door, glazing at the empty seat across from me. Enter: an army of old Chinese women, filling in the remaining seats in the car. They all seemed to know each other. Two women, sitting across from me, busied themselves by pouring over a recent purchase, a dark green knit sweater. They flipped it over, fingering the fabric in their hands, flipping it over and over, analyzing every detail as if they were former seamstresses and were critiquing its quality. The patterns, the stitching. Over and over. Another army of old women burst through the doors at the next station (was it old women shopping discount day?). They filed in and squeezed every ounce of remaining seats left, forcing spots meant more for one, to two. All apart from one found a seat. She darted around like a pinball, head down, looking for a space where none was available. She gave up, all her friends had seats. She laughed, smiled, reserved towards her misfortune, and then looked at me, making eye contact. Sheepishly, I got up, said, “请做, 做吧,” Qingzuo, zuoba. Please, have a seat, and she rushed to take my place. All the old women looked at me, smiled, and said, “谢谢!” Xiexie! Thank you, then instantly dismissed me as any group of old women would, returning to their gossip. I wandered over to the corner of the car.
In other news, I took my first excursion out of Shanghai’s city limits to the small Venetian-esque water village of Zhujiajiao (朱家角), about an hour’s bus ride to the city’s west. The village is one of several out in that area, villages that are all built around a system of intertwining canals and whose dense network of residential and commercial alleyways were built directly along the water’s edge, much like Venice. But this town was nothing like Venice of course, it was inherently Chinese. In fact, it is so Chinese that in filming the Hollywood blockbuster, Mission Impossible 3, they decided to put an entire Shanghai scene here, the scene where Tom Cruise is running along one of the canals, awkwardly shouting, “Xiaoxin! Xiaoxin!” (小心! 小心! Careful! Careful!) to the villagers around him, dodging people left and right, trying to get to a small Chinese house where the villain was holding his wife hostage. The scene looks great because of its location, way more Chinese looking than the internationally recognizable downtown centers of Shanghai.
It was a great day trip. I went with three German girls, my girlfriend, her friend from home and a new German friend from Fudan. On an absolutely beautiful springtime Saturday afternoon, we hopped a local bus from a small station outside the People’s Square in the city center, and about an hour later, driving down China’s famous G-50 highway, called the Yan’an elevated highway in the city (famous because so many China writers before me have traveled down this highway, starting in Shanghai at the Bund, going straight west across the entire country), we arrived in the sparsely populated township of Qingpu, where a brief walk through the town led us to the water village. We dutifully bought our touristy entrance tickets, affording us the chance to pop into the village’s more touristic spots, and set about finding a place to eat (it had been a late night the evening before and a sleepy wake up the morning of, we were starved). We found a great little restaurant on the second floor of one of the buildings along the main canal. It had an open terrace with tables under the gloriously warm sun, and tables along a wandering hallway up against large windows. We found a table towards the end of this hallway. The table was designed in a traditionally Chinese style, perfectly square, with a smaller square of marble inlaid to the table’s center, and molded into a dark wooden outer-rim, delicately carved in oriental patterns. Each side of the table had a long, thin, wooden bench. We were right up against the open bay window where we could peer directly down into the canal, watching men in sampan hats slowly sway back and forth, manually propelling and steering their gondola style boats to and from different pick up points along the village. We ordered yuxiang qiezi (鱼香茄子, fish-flavored eggplant), gongbao jiding (宫保鸡丁, diced chicken and peanuts) and qingcai (青菜, fresh vegetable dish of green onions and lettuce) with a large bowl of baifan (白饭, white rice). It was tasty.
We picked up, bellies satisfied, and toured the village. One of the highlights, one of the free highlights, is the village’s dense market streets, where pedestrians and market frequenters plunge into the dark alleyways to buy traditional Chinese goods, non-traditional cheap crap, and some really amazing stall foods. Some of the best stall foods I found sold Chinese sweets like caramelized peanut squares and chewy green-tea buns filled with Chinese red-bean paste (my favorite). Other stalls had various pork meats, different cuts of meat, I guess, from the pig. Pig feet and snouts, caramelized in a sweet glaze, and other meat products prepared in a similar way. I think this village was sort of well known for these types of shops. Some stalls had pictures of reporters interviewing the shop owners or had framed pictures of magazine articles written about them. Many had awkward pictures of an old woman, each shop’s resident old woman, presumably the shops’ head chefs, super-imposed over a strange digital display of flowers or something else unappealing, smiling sort of, holding a pan or spatula or something. It was weird. But their shops nonetheless were undeniably impressive.
The village was full of these alley ways. But every now and again, set in a bit deeper from the pedestrian romping market paths were some hidden temples and gardens. We walked into one. The entrance was shrouded in smoke bellowing from the temple within, smelling of incense, and we could hear some faint chanting. We pushed through to the source and as the smoke was clearing we could make out a courtyard full of yes, old Chinese women. Hundreds, standing, then kneeling, then patting their heads and hands on the floor, then rising and repeating, all the while chanting in unison, all aimed at a large bronze pot of burning paper. We stood there watching, mesmerized. Ten minutes passed and it was over. The women got up, looked around, and smiled, exiting en masse through the entrance we had just entered. We explored the aftermath.
Another temple, this time a monastery training school, had much smaller activities occurring but the grounds were active nonetheless. Several Buddhist temples sprawled along the central courtyard. In one, monks in robes were repeating some mantra, over and over, repeating after their master as he hit a low-bass drum. Further in, some bamboo passageways led to further temples. I broke off a bit, on my own, to take some photos in the seclusion of a cluster of smaller temples when a monk popped out from a bush and handed me an incense stick. Without words he pointed to a small golden box within which was a small flame. I lit the stick and watched it slowly burn along the edges, turning the black of the stick to an ashy white, releasing visible fumes into the air. Another monk, watching me from above on the top of some steps urged me inside and beckoned me to the foot of a large, elaborate, Buddha shrine. He had me kneel and put up my hands in prayer with the incense stick in between. He looked at me, clapped his hands and bowed a few times, reciting some singsongy prayer. Then he smiled wide, put his hands into fists raising them in the air a bit, and said, “Ah, good luck!” seeming pleased with himself. I put 5 kuai in the money box, as is tradition, I think, and he got excited and handed me a small red envelope. He took out the piece of paper inside and read aloud the three traditional Chinese characters inscribed: 禄 lu, a traditional word for money, 夀, shou, long life, and 福, fu, good fortune. He pointed to them and read them to me one by one, urging me to repeat them after him. Then he showed me to a man in the corner, another monk in robes, sitting at a writing desk. He had small circular spectacles on his face and looked up at me. I gave him my piece of paper and he said, “A-Haaa!” then said some things in Chinese that I couldn’t follow, then wrote some things on a piece of paper. The first line he described to me, in English, as, “Goooood family!” The second line, “Haaaappy endingggg! (his words, not mine)” The last line was, “Goooood luck! A-Haaaaa!” I said, “Xiexie,” and signed a registry. The registry had foreigners’ names, their countries, then how much they donated for this fortune reading. Each had a number like 150 or 200 kuai. Awkwardly, I reached into my pocket and pulled out 5 kuai, offering it to the monk. He said, “Ooooh,” rounding out his mouth like a fish, pointing to the numbers from other foreigners. I then reached for some coins, beckoning the 5.30 kuai towards him and then he smiled, taking my money, throwing it into a box. I left.
When all was said and done we had a great time in this village. We walked around for the majority of the day, then hopped an early evening bus back to the city. Finding where to catch the bus was a bit of a challenge and only snuck onto the bus right before it left. Lacking available seats, the four of us squeezed into the step leading down to the back entrance and watched the countryside whirl by from the bottom of the near street level window.
Last thing. I shaved my beard today. It was a nice beard. But my goal was to shave it when the weather got warmer. If for whatever reason my posts start to get less and less interesting, I blame the lack of beard. Just a head’s up.
In other news, I took my first excursion out of Shanghai’s city limits to the small Venetian-esque water village of Zhujiajiao (朱家角), about an hour’s bus ride to the city’s west. The village is one of several out in that area, villages that are all built around a system of intertwining canals and whose dense network of residential and commercial alleyways were built directly along the water’s edge, much like Venice. But this town was nothing like Venice of course, it was inherently Chinese. In fact, it is so Chinese that in filming the Hollywood blockbuster, Mission Impossible 3, they decided to put an entire Shanghai scene here, the scene where Tom Cruise is running along one of the canals, awkwardly shouting, “Xiaoxin! Xiaoxin!” (小心! 小心! Careful! Careful!) to the villagers around him, dodging people left and right, trying to get to a small Chinese house where the villain was holding his wife hostage. The scene looks great because of its location, way more Chinese looking than the internationally recognizable downtown centers of Shanghai.
It was a great day trip. I went with three German girls, my girlfriend, her friend from home and a new German friend from Fudan. On an absolutely beautiful springtime Saturday afternoon, we hopped a local bus from a small station outside the People’s Square in the city center, and about an hour later, driving down China’s famous G-50 highway, called the Yan’an elevated highway in the city (famous because so many China writers before me have traveled down this highway, starting in Shanghai at the Bund, going straight west across the entire country), we arrived in the sparsely populated township of Qingpu, where a brief walk through the town led us to the water village. We dutifully bought our touristy entrance tickets, affording us the chance to pop into the village’s more touristic spots, and set about finding a place to eat (it had been a late night the evening before and a sleepy wake up the morning of, we were starved). We found a great little restaurant on the second floor of one of the buildings along the main canal. It had an open terrace with tables under the gloriously warm sun, and tables along a wandering hallway up against large windows. We found a table towards the end of this hallway. The table was designed in a traditionally Chinese style, perfectly square, with a smaller square of marble inlaid to the table’s center, and molded into a dark wooden outer-rim, delicately carved in oriental patterns. Each side of the table had a long, thin, wooden bench. We were right up against the open bay window where we could peer directly down into the canal, watching men in sampan hats slowly sway back and forth, manually propelling and steering their gondola style boats to and from different pick up points along the village. We ordered yuxiang qiezi (鱼香茄子, fish-flavored eggplant), gongbao jiding (宫保鸡丁, diced chicken and peanuts) and qingcai (青菜, fresh vegetable dish of green onions and lettuce) with a large bowl of baifan (白饭, white rice). It was tasty.
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| The main canal running through Zhujiajiao |
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| Old lanterns within a temple entrance hall |
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| German girls, my girlfriend and her friend from home |
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| One of many pork meat stalls |
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| Resident old woman, with her photo in the shop's corner |
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| Temple where I was introduced to Buddhist fortune telling |
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| Old women army, praying towards the burning papers |
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| Lunch |
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| This reads, "Park car eat food" |
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| Giant cat eats baby! |
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| Shot of a local gondola driver from above on our restaurant terrace |
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| More gondolas |
The village was full of these alley ways. But every now and again, set in a bit deeper from the pedestrian romping market paths were some hidden temples and gardens. We walked into one. The entrance was shrouded in smoke bellowing from the temple within, smelling of incense, and we could hear some faint chanting. We pushed through to the source and as the smoke was clearing we could make out a courtyard full of yes, old Chinese women. Hundreds, standing, then kneeling, then patting their heads and hands on the floor, then rising and repeating, all the while chanting in unison, all aimed at a large bronze pot of burning paper. We stood there watching, mesmerized. Ten minutes passed and it was over. The women got up, looked around, and smiled, exiting en masse through the entrance we had just entered. We explored the aftermath.
Another temple, this time a monastery training school, had much smaller activities occurring but the grounds were active nonetheless. Several Buddhist temples sprawled along the central courtyard. In one, monks in robes were repeating some mantra, over and over, repeating after their master as he hit a low-bass drum. Further in, some bamboo passageways led to further temples. I broke off a bit, on my own, to take some photos in the seclusion of a cluster of smaller temples when a monk popped out from a bush and handed me an incense stick. Without words he pointed to a small golden box within which was a small flame. I lit the stick and watched it slowly burn along the edges, turning the black of the stick to an ashy white, releasing visible fumes into the air. Another monk, watching me from above on the top of some steps urged me inside and beckoned me to the foot of a large, elaborate, Buddha shrine. He had me kneel and put up my hands in prayer with the incense stick in between. He looked at me, clapped his hands and bowed a few times, reciting some singsongy prayer. Then he smiled wide, put his hands into fists raising them in the air a bit, and said, “Ah, good luck!” seeming pleased with himself. I put 5 kuai in the money box, as is tradition, I think, and he got excited and handed me a small red envelope. He took out the piece of paper inside and read aloud the three traditional Chinese characters inscribed: 禄 lu, a traditional word for money, 夀, shou, long life, and 福, fu, good fortune. He pointed to them and read them to me one by one, urging me to repeat them after him. Then he showed me to a man in the corner, another monk in robes, sitting at a writing desk. He had small circular spectacles on his face and looked up at me. I gave him my piece of paper and he said, “A-Haaa!” then said some things in Chinese that I couldn’t follow, then wrote some things on a piece of paper. The first line he described to me, in English, as, “Goooood family!” The second line, “Haaaappy endingggg! (his words, not mine)” The last line was, “Goooood luck! A-Haaaaa!” I said, “Xiexie,” and signed a registry. The registry had foreigners’ names, their countries, then how much they donated for this fortune reading. Each had a number like 150 or 200 kuai. Awkwardly, I reached into my pocket and pulled out 5 kuai, offering it to the monk. He said, “Ooooh,” rounding out his mouth like a fish, pointing to the numbers from other foreigners. I then reached for some coins, beckoning the 5.30 kuai towards him and then he smiled, taking my money, throwing it into a box. I left.
When all was said and done we had a great time in this village. We walked around for the majority of the day, then hopped an early evening bus back to the city. Finding where to catch the bus was a bit of a challenge and only snuck onto the bus right before it left. Lacking available seats, the four of us squeezed into the step leading down to the back entrance and watched the countryside whirl by from the bottom of the near street level window.
Last thing. I shaved my beard today. It was a nice beard. But my goal was to shave it when the weather got warmer. If for whatever reason my posts start to get less and less interesting, I blame the lack of beard. Just a head’s up.
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