One McBooth Please, For Here

I went to McDonald’s today for lunch. Friday is my long day at work—I have no classes on Fridays so I work the normal 10-6, eight hour work-day. And because I’m here all day, I usually grab my lunch downtown and go for something nice each Friday. There is a massive building called the “Shanghai No. 1 Food Mall” a short walk down East Nanjing Road, the pedestrian shopping street by my workplace, which is full of small restaurants across several floors. Some floors are like food courts, some just have restaurants, and some are open-market food stalls that swarm with locals during holidays and festival periods, selling things like moon cakes and red been buns. My favorite lunch spots though are Sushi Express, the Tokyo-style sushi-go-round (of the same kind I was obsessed with in Japan), and Coco Curry, a chain that serves up Japanese style curries and rice (another spot I was obsessed with in Japan). Today was a less glamorous exception. I went to McDonald’s. 18 kuai Spicy McChicken with fries.

But that is not noteworthy. I took a seat, party of one, on the second floor seating area that has some tall stool-style seats along a shelf that overlooks the first floor seating area. I was munching on some fries when I noticed this Chinese man, maybe upper twenties or lower thirties, tattered jacket, unshaven and a bit unkempt, hanging out at one of the booths by himself. His face was really tanned, as if he had spent a lot of time outdoors. He had no food, bought nothing, sort of rudely propped up his feet on the seat next to him, and he seemed to be scanning the other tables and watching people. This didn’t really phase me. McDonald’s and other western style fast food joints are notorious in China for their lax “loiter” policies. Many of these restaurants are open 24 hours and if you walk in to one at 4am after a night of clubbing or something, you will inevitably encounter youngsters or homeless people fast asleep, heads on the table, some having bought a small drink, some shamelessly buy nothing at all. Employees don’t bat an eye. They’ll clean up around them and let them sleep. This happens in the middle of the day too. It seems as if there is some unwritten code of tolerance for people who need a place to crash and have nowhere else to go. I have abused this code in the past. On my stopover to Lanzhou during my “Great Eurasian Adventure” period, my overnight train from Jiayuguan spit me out into the dark, wintery chill of the city’s pre-dawn hours and I had about five hours to kill, with my pack, dead tired, before I could check into this Chinese hotel room I had booked. I spent them wisely and without bother at a KFC in the train station, along with lots of other people doing the same.

A follow up photo of an earlier post on my commute---stuffing in to a subway car

This is what the station looks like at 5pm, it gets busier as rush hour develops

This is why I wasn’t too phased by the man hanging out by himself and without food, chilling in some first floor booth. But I watched him a bit. Another thing about western fast food joints in China is that the trend is that when you’re done eating your meal, you can just leave your tray on your table and a designated employee will take it to the trash for you. If you take up your tray yourself, people give you odd looks. During busy hours, the employees sometimes have a hard time efficiently clearing all the trash and trays and sometimes it collects. The man I had been watching, after a little while, got up from his seat and moved toward a table where a group of young Chinese girls had just vacated and left behind a fair amount of trays and trash. The man sat in one of the seats, looked around a little sheepishly, then began picking through the remains, looking for leftover food. He compiled what he could find into one empty burger container and shoved the rest aside for the McDonald’s employees to haul away. He had some success. He found lots of fries, found some veggies from the burger boxes, chiefly lettuce bits and tomato remains, and some soda from a cup. I had never seen this before but it seemed to me a really clever way to find food if you have no money. No one apart from me noticed him or cared and he ate quickly, as if he hadn’t eaten in a while. When he was done, he sat there quietly and re-commenced his scanning.

麦当劳 (mai dang lao)---Chinese for McDonald's

This is the McDonald's by my workplace. Also included: a McCafe, surprisingly good spot for a coffee

A crap photo of the golden arches outside an H&M

A slightly worse photo of the inside

These lines can get chaotic and seating is often at a premium

It was a sad scene. I actually haven’t seen too much public homelessness or street begging in China which may or may not be incredible considering how large the population is. Either the government is quite good at implementing social welfare policies or beggars and homeless people are shuttled out of the public eye. I remember when I was first in Beijing in 2007, you could see a fair amount of beggars and people sleeping in public spaces, especially around the Tiananmen area and where tourists congregated. But after 2008, after the Olympics that is, exactly zero beggars or homeless could be seen anywhere near Tiananmen which came as a shock at first, at least to me. But I had heard that the city government essentially initiated a huge movement to take care of this ‘problem’. Again, I’m not sure exactly how—whether they were relocated, arrested, or given proper care, I couldn’t say.

Some beggars congregate around Nanjing East Road, where I work, and where lots of tourists come. But they scatter when police walk by and I’ve seen more than a few beggars being chased away from the main pedestrian areas.

If I had seen this in another country, somewhere in the third world, I wouldn’t have been surprised and I probably wouldn’t have mentioned it. But for some reason this seemed noteworthy to me, having seen it in Shanghai. In many respects, China is still considered a “developing” country, not necessarily of the third world, but on the same token, not really a member of the developed world either—an industrializing country with a recently established, but rapidly increasing middle-class. Beggars and the homeless should be a not surprising part of development. But it’s a hard thing to find in China. Interesting phenomenon.

By the way, it’s midterm time for me. Stressful days ahead. I just wrote a paper on the long term effects of Yeltsin period, post-Soviet liberal economic reforms in Russia, lovely, and I have a presentation coming up on the implications of an emerging northern sea route in the Arctic on the shipping industry in Asia. I’m an international affairs nerd and so I really get into this stuff, but I’ve been busy. Just wanted to explain the obvious loosening of my self-imposed post deadlines.

But the warm weather is here and along with it are some sweet events in Shanghai, including two huge outdoor music festivals (Midi and Strawberry) and a couple of cycle events (a scene which I am increasingly enjoying). I just conducted some interviews with a local fixed gear bike shop in the French Concession and will get to write an online piece on that for the magazine. And “Labor Day”, in more of the Communist sense than the holiday’s counterpart in the US, a Soviet legacy to China and much of Eastern Europe, is May 1st which extends my weekend. I think I and some Fudan buddies are going to try and take over some park on the outskirts of the city and do some barbecuing. I’m excited.

Go Red Sox!

Give Me Food or Give Me Love

I was sitting on a park bench yesterday afternoon and watched as a small kitten single handedly destroyed a perfectly pleasant picnic on the lawn in front of the university’s main building for two Chinese girls. This kitten wasn’t messing around. It was hungry. And a little curious.

It was about 6 in the evening. I had twenty minutes to kill before my Chinese class and I was just arriving at the campus from work that afternoon. I stopped off at the East Gate of the campus and grabbed a coffee, 12 kuai, the best coffee in town, from this small shack next to a fried rice joint. Take out only. I took the coffee and walked across the huge lawn that sprawls neatly in front of the main campus’ main building, the Guanghua Tower. On nice days, students lay out on the lawn, picnic, play games, and hang out here. It is a great spot for people watching and for spending a few moments collecting your thoughts after a long day. Benches are hard to come by here as this area is so popular. But I found one facing the lawn. I darted across the large grassy space and claimed my prize.

Sprawled in front of me were the usual collection of students. A young Chinese student and his girlfriend were smooching awkwardly in one section. A grandmother had propped up her stroller and let her toddler run around with a balloon. And off to my left a couple of Chinese girls, undergraduate college students probably, had laid out a blanket, secured the corners with their shoes, and set out some food. There were some plastic containers of recently barbecued meet from one of the ubiquitous street food vendors outside the gate, a few bags of chips, and two six packs of beer cans, one Suntory, the other Tsing Tao. One of the girls was pretty normal looking, with thick glasses and relatively subdued. The other girl was pretty chubby and more lively. They were enjoining themselves.

Behind me there was another young Chinese couple taking photos of a small kitten with their smart phones. Lets get into this a bit. First thing worth noting: Fudan University is infested with cute stray cats. Don’t take this the wrong way and I have no way of proving this, it is all conjecture, but I’ve heard that stray critters don’t last too long in Chinese cities. I’ve heard all kinds of things, that illegal street food vendors hunt down stray dogs, cats, rats, whatever, to bulk up the meat in their trays, or that the police collect all stray animals and put them down to reduce the spread of disease. Either way, I’ve never seen stray dogs, cats, or even any rats in this or any other Chinese city. Except that their are tons of stray cats on Fudan’s campus. My theory is that the students are very tolerant of cute kittens and want to have them around all the time. So if I was a stray cat, I’d live here too. And they really are cute, there’s no denying that. The other point worth mentioning here is that Chinese youngsters love to take photos with their smart phones, like really love it. Especially of cute stuff. Every day, walking around the campus to and from classes, I’ll see a Chinese girl up close to a flower, taking a photo, then taking a selfie of herself with the flower, and then repeating, over and over and at all angles until her smart phone is filled with the same photo, over and over again, or so it seems to me. Or she’ll make her boyfriend take a photo of her with the flower, over and over again. Cats aren’t spared photos either. A cat will wander through the park and trailing it will be a small crowd of students, snapping away, petting it, throwing food at it, etc.

This was happening behind me on the bench. A young couple was stooped over a cute kitten, brown and black stripes, like a tiger, bright green eyes, very adorable. They were taking photos and petting it. They had had enough and casually walked away. The cat started wandering toward me, popped out from under my bench and walked through my legs and stopped to survey the lawn spread in front of me. It spotted the picnicking girls to my left. It had a mission. I sat back, relaxed, and watched the show.

The kitten slowly, casually, with some swagger in its tail, wandered over to the girls who were facing away from me. They never saw it coming. The girl with the thick glasses was taking a swig of a beer and the chubby girl had one hand in an open bag of chips. They were chatting quietly. The kitten stealthily, carefully stepped onto the blanket, split the girls, and aimed for the open containers of barbecued meat in the middle. Then I heard at first a very quiet, and then very quickly getting louder, collective “Eeeeeehhhhhhhwwwwwww…” as the girls became exasperated at the thought of the kitten touching their food. “别过来! 别过来!” Bie guolai! Bie guolai! Don’t come over here! said the chubby one, clearly the more exasperated of the two. The chubby girl started making lots of whiny noises, took her bag of chips and a couple of containers of meat and stood up, eyeing the cat at a safe distance. The girl with the thick glasses did the same, but remained seated.

The kitten all the while completely ignored the girls and their whining and began to poke around. It found a nice open container of meat, settled down into the folds of the blanket, and began to dig in. The chubby girl from a distance began whining a little more loudly and then made some whimpering noises and began to bend her knees a little, bobbing up and down in helplessness. The seated girl, now equally whiny, began to swat the air around the kitten, hoping that the shooing motion would be enough to dissuade the kitten. It was not. The kitten just stood there as if to say, “Give me food or give me love.” Apparently the girls had no interest in actually touching the kitten and therefore the kitten had no incentive to move. This little kitten had effectively rained on their parade. Both girls, awkwardly paralyzed and whiny, held as much food in the air as they could. The chubby girl, tiring of this state of non-picnicking, started to eat a bit of the meat from the container she was holding, and then finally took out her smart phone, snapped a photo of the kitten, before returning to her post off the blanket, and back to her whimpering.

This went on for literally 15 minutes, nearly the whole time I was sitting there. Eventually the kitten started to get antsy. The chubby girl stood there, watching the seated girl squirm around the now mobile kitten. Then the kitten started walking towards the chubby girl, who made more noises of exasperation, and started trotting around the blanket, trying to avoid the approaching kitten. The seated girl said something to the chubby girl who responded, “我怕! 我怕! 我怕!” Wo pa! I’m scared! and then finally offered the kitten a conciliatory prize by tossing a piece of meat away from the blanket and into the grass a little ways off. The kitten took the bait and was finally preoccupied, away from the picnic. The chubby girl took back her seat, both girls eyeing the kitten warily.

Satisfied with my bout of free entertainment, I picked up my bag and my coffee and headed off to class.

Not THE perpetrator, but a troublemaker, no doubt

What wet flowers look like when taken at close range with an iPhone

The action took place here, from my vantage point on the bench

Presumably Fudan students' smartphones are filled with pictures like this

A mini panorama of the lawn in front of the Guanghua Tower

So as not to dominate this post with kittens and picnics, I saw something pretty interesting today at lunch. On Mondays, after my morning class, I have about a half hour to get some lunch before I hop the subway downtown to get to work for the afternoon. I usually eat up in the Fudan area as opposed to downtown because it’s much cheaper. There is a small side street that runs the length of the academic building where my class is located and along the street are some really small, cheap, outdoor food shops and vendors. They prop up tables and stools along the sidewalk in nice weather and for this reason, I like to go down there for a quick bite of lunch, sit in the sun, and relax a little before work. Sitting and eating on the sidewalk is another great way to people watch—something I do often. 

Today, as I was waiting for my 特色蛋炒饭, te se dan chaofan, specialty egg fried rice, to cook up on the wok of a small food stall under an umbrella tent, I noticed that along the sidewalk were some huge piles of dirt and garbage, but garbage from construction materials as opposed to rubbish. The piles had been neatly brushed into large heaps in a few spots along the sidewalk and they’ve been there a long time. Either no one has the manpower to move them or perhaps the money to hire someone else to move them. Instead, they’ve become sort of a fixture of the sidewalk and of the view from the pop up tables set out at lunch time. But this time, I noticed that from these heaps of dirt and garbage were sprouting some small plants, neatly collected into groups as if it was a make-shift garden. Little metallic stands were aiding the little plants in vertical growth. And small fence-like materials were set up to protect them. I thought it was really interesting and took a few photos with my phone when I heard from off to my right, “朋友! pengyou, friend (pause…)朋友! (another pause…) 朋友!” Finally realizing I was being summoned in the friendliest of ways and immediately fearing I had done something offensive by taking photos of their cultivated garbage mounds, I turned to say, “你好,” nihao, hello, and found my rice master holding up a spoonful of some red peppers, grounded in a fine powder, with a mischievous grin on his face. I said, “啊. 可以吧” ah, keyi ba, ah, yeah go for it, and satisfied he dumped the spoonful of powder in the rice.

I always seem to take photos of food after I've eaten most of it. My plate of specialty egg fried rice

A close-up of the dirt pile, not easily seen are the plants on the lower left and upper right

The dirt piles sitting on the sidewalk, in between some store fronts to the right and the street off to the left

I’m not sure what the little plants are for. Probably not for eating, there wasn’t enough there. But I was somehow comforted by the thought of the local shopkeepers making best use of their dirt mounds, cultivating and encouraging life in this micro-hostile atmosphere, bits of greenery surrounded by crumbles of dirt, broken cement blocks, and wires, if even because, why not?

With that bit of positivity now fresh in my mind, I picked up, grabbed a fresh papaya juice for the road, and walked to the subway.

On Buses

Riding public buses in China is one of the more unpleasant things one can do. Traffic in China is a nightmare. Rules seldom apply to cars and rules never apply to scooters or bikes. Pedestrians have no rights, ever, and I thank God every time I cross a street and don’t get plowed over by a taxi. And rush hour traffic, whether riding the metro or taking the bus or catching a cab downtown, is a frightening, sweaty adventure. A fight for humanity. A constant struggle to just get home. There are a lot of things to like about China, buses is not one of them.

During the week, when finishing up from work downtown at the magazine, leaving the office around 5pm, I hop the metro to get back up to the university. 5pm is a little on the early side of the rush hour spectrum, but here my journey begins. Although I’ll admit the commute is not nearly as bad as that of the commuters on Tokyo’s subways (I used to live in a city near Tokyo), where the ritual stand-in-line-and-hope-to-get-in-the-third-train-that-stops-in-front-of-you ordeal is a given and expected. A place where they have full-time shovers on hire to stand by the subway car entrances and literally push and squeeze every last ounce of person available until the door is able to fully close. Beijing is like that too, in some stations (watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG-meaGqg-M). But Shanghai isn’t that bad, for what it’s worth, at least on Line 10 heading north. I check my bag through the metal detector heading into the subway entrance, swipe my card at the gate, and plummet down the escalator to the depths of the station. Lines start at the bottom where they begin by the platform’s edge and merge in the middle, as people on opposite ends await their appropriate direction. Squeezing around the corner of the bottom of the escalator to get deeper into the waiting platform, away from the crowds, is a challenge because the people hop in line and stand defiantly, stolidly, all the way to the wall and sit there, unbudging. I often have to literally shove my way through, cursing under my breath and rolling my eyes, breaking across the lines like a game of red rover. The line standees grumble, bobble over, and pop back into place.

The subway has these plastic barriers between the platform edge and the approaching train. There are little arrows printed on the ground indicating where people should stand in line, along the edges of the door frames, and where people should be exiting the train, through the middle. These arrows have power over the people until about three seconds before the doors open up to the train. Then it’s a free for all. The lines of people on either edge of the frame smash together, completely blocking those exiting the train from getting out. There is no option but to buckle down, drop your shoulder a bit, and plow through the stampede. Upon entering the train, I clasp on to the closest anything I can get a hold of, handle dangling from the bars above or the edge of the seats, or bars in between cars. But often I can’t get a hold of anything. Twenty minutes of subway surfing later and I walk from the station to the nearest bus stop, a ten minute walk away, taking me across a shopping plaza, under a highway overpass, and to the stop in front of another shopping mall. There was a street performer today, a musician, pretty good with a guitar.

Waiting for the bus to get to work, mid-afternoon

The bus

Everyone has seats, it's quite and comforable

The 960, not one I can take to get to the metro

Subway entrance near Fudan, at Wujiaoqiang

The waiting platform in the subway

On the subway

But the bus is where the real fun begins. Waiting for either the 99 or 749 and watching dozens of other buses churn by can be frustrating as I stand there contemplating the commute, counting myself lucky for not having been hit by something of vehicular stuff as I made my way to the stop. On average I wait about 5 minutes for a bus, which is not that bad. But the frequency doesn’t help. There is an actual bus stop but the hundred or so people waiting for the bus all scatter around the sidewalk and into the main street as scooters beep and zigzag their way through the crowds like Plinco chips. And because there are so many people waiting for the bus in the street, the bus, screaming in like it wants to kill everybody, has to slam on its breaks and stop near the middle of this three lane highway. But no one knows exactly where the bus will stop. So wherever it does wind up stopping, people start running alongside as it slows, hoping they’ll be one of the first to get onboard. The idea is, shove your way to the front so that you can increase your chances of getting a seat, or even of getting on at all. Sometimes the bus is so full that it doesn’t bother to stop at all. But when it does stop, all’s fair and the mad dash to the door leaves people screaming, shoving, groaning. Old women duck under my arms and kids maneuver to the front, crawling through legs. I’m always so taken with the process that I wind up getting on last. Not that I don’t try though. I push and shove with the best of them.

The last time I got on the bus, I was standing by the side entrance. Every trip on the bus winds up being about the same. The bus screams to a start, taking all onboard by surprise. When one person loses their balance and falls, they usually take three or four others down with them. And the engines are ill-prepared to deal with the driver’s demands. The scream and groan as the manual shifter pops in and out of gears, metal on metal, grinding loudly and rumbling below our feet. Stalling is frequent as cars beep in and around the motionless bus. And corners are taken at full speed, centrifugal forces throwing riders about. When the bus approaches a stop, it turns suddenly in towards the curb and the breaks are so suddenly applied that it takes every ounce of strength in my arms to keep me from falling over. Approaching my stop, I have to squeeze through the masses that congregate by the door. I yell, “我在下车了!” Wo zai xiachele! I’m getting off! And then, “啊, 对不起! 对不起!” Ah, duibuqi! Duibuqi! Ah, sorry! Sorry! As I step on people’s shoes. The bus screams to a halt, opens its back doors, and I literally jump off, through the crowd of riders, to the freedom of the street below. I land, two feet at a time, stand upright, and take a huge sigh of relief, as the bus groans to a start, metal gears grinding against other metal gears, and then excels into the traffic and away. I don’t look back.

Having gone back through this post I realize that this has been little more that the cranky ramblings of an expatriate, still seemingly maladjusted to the uniquely overwhelming population density of China and all the problems and social effects that induces. This effect, intense population density on commuters and public transportation, affects me daily. And actually, one such commute was so obnoxious I went straight back to write about it. So here it is. With that said, because I sound so cranky, I think it’s time to dial it down a tad and give credit where credit is due. In the spirit of positivity, I am also nearly equally impressed by the fortitude and skill of the bus drivers here in Shanghai, as I am shocked with their shortcomings. The fact that they go, day in and day out, without murdering people on the street, or going nuts on the bus, or plowing down scooters who themselves decide to plow down disembarking bus riders, is truly a miracle. If I got in any one of these buses and had a go of the route, I wouldn’t make it one block, I’m sure of that.

Of note, all the pictures featured here, all the casual, non-professional photos of buses and the subway, were taken during the relatively easy commute I take heading downtown, midday, to the magazine. I couldn't be bothered to try and take photos on the way back, during the mayhem of my return journey. I probably would have lost my phone in the process--and we need none of that!

By the way, what once was an idea to post every Sunday has become rather an effort to post weekly, more generally, as I’m sure you’ve noticed I’ve been missing my Sunday deadline. Sorry for that. Blame the lack of beard. You were forewarned. But things are getting busy at the same time. I have weekly presentations in my classes that require extensive time to prepare and things are getting busier at the magazine as well. I’m writing there, nearly constantly, and if not writing, then going out on fact finding missions. I went with a coworker last week, touring and exploring the different “fake” markets here in the city. And the week before that, we explored Little Tokyo’s hidden sake bars. And did I mention the spa review I wrote? And the complementary $150 spa session that accompanied the review? I’m having fun with this. But I’ll try and stick to my Sunday deadline in the future.

See you next week.