Chinese Relativity: West meets East

It has been a while since my last post, and a lot has happened.  I traveled to the east coast of China for a few weeks and for the first time saw the other side of the spectrum here.

The first city I stopped at was Shanghai.  I couch surfed in Shanghai and thus got to see the city from a local’s perspective.  For the first time in my life, I felt like a real country bumpkin as I tried to explain my daily challenges to the Shanghai born and Shanghai bred.  I felt another kind of information gap between other westerners and myself in Shanghai.  I really liked Shanghai because nobody stared at me or gave me particular attention, but other foreigners, who had not yet traveled to the west of China, felt that they actually WERE the subjects of unwanted attention.  This relativity proved to be the reoccurring theme of my travels East.  It seems that no matter where you go in China, you will encounter a malaise of xenophobia, but it will wax and wane depending on where you go.

Also in Shanghai I encountered the phenomenon of an entire subway full of people on iphones.  I never frequented public transportation in America, so I can’t comment there, but it was truly astonishing to see over 80% of people simultaneously engrossed in an identical product. From my conversations with the Shanghainese, I learned that there is similar superficiality in many different areas of Shanghai life.  Supposedly, according to a Shanghai resident, Shanghai girls will project that they are high maintenance in order to be more attractive. Also, within the city there is some prejudice against those who come from the suburbs.  To me, this all seems to be the unfortunate symptoms of materialism of American proportions in conjunction with strongly superficial class distinction.  To summarize Shanghai in a sentence, I’d have to say that it is not the best place to travel, but definitely a great place to live; The subway was super convenient, the international influence was apparent, and I felt more or less comfortable being myself.

I also got to visit Beijing during vacation, which seemed to be a pretty solid medium between the estrangement of western China and the modernization of Shanghai. In contrast with Shanghai, Beijing is a fantastic place to travel, but a terrible place to live. The day I arrived and the day I left had so much unbearably horrible pollution that the air could be chewed and tasted. Fortunately, the two days I was walking around the capital city, it was all blue skies and clean air. It was really easy to get from place to place, and with some Chinese language skills, the whole city became my playground, including a lake next to the Forbidden City which was frozen over.

As far as anecdotes go, one sticks out in my mind. While in Beijing and Shanghai, I saw a total of four dogs poop on the sidewalk, and each time the owner picked up the poop to put it in a trashcan. (Not going to mention how totally absurd it is to call that a healthy man-animal relationship) However, in Kaili, I have seen countless times, a child poop on the sidewalk, and the mother just wipe and walk. This disturbing parallel really encapsulates the West-East dichotomy over here. The spectrum China covers is huge, and my travels have really taught me that it is quite shortsighted to think of it as only one collective.