Hefei Impressions

Last week was China’s Mid-Autumn Festival, and the government gave us Thursday and Friday off.  It would have been a four-day weekend, but the government made us do a make-up day on Sunday, meaning we pay for our three-day weekend with a six-day workweek.  Can’t win them all.

My roommate and I spent the three days in Hefei, capital of Anhui Province.  Hefei is one of China’s smaller and less famous provincial capitals. despite being just a short distance from Nanjing and other glittering cities of the coastal regions, Hefei is just inland enough to feel a world away.  We caught the bullet train there in three hours.

First impression at getting off the bullet train: on the other side of the platform was one of the oldest trains I had ever seen.  Full of rusted, boxy green cars, of the kind I haven’t ridden in years.   The new bullet trains are all sleek and white.   These green ones go much slower and are decidedly less comfortable inside – I presume they are being phased out slowly.  This one was on its way to Dongguan, hundreds of miles to the south in Guangdong Province.  What a long way to go…

Second impression of Hefei: It was hot as hell.  After stashing our bags at a hotel, we walked around for a bit, grew horribly sweaty, and dipped into a mall to wait out the heat.  We ate ice cream next to an underground supermarket, which had set up kiosk to sell pre-made sushi near the entrance.  They were playing the documentary <Jiro Dreams of Sushi> on a TV next to the sushi.  The movie is about one of Japan’s greatest living sushi masters, full of slow-motion shots of expert hands molding mouth-watering, translucent strips of fish onto secret-recipe rice.  The juxtaposition did not serve the supermarket sushi well.  Advertising fail.

With temperatures coming down in the late afternoon, we ventured out and stumbled into a bustling city park full of families on picnics and kids tugging parents’ sleeves to try out an entire amusement park’s worth of rides.   The coolest part was a raised track winding through the park, on which were attached giant wheels that people could peddle themselves along on.   The falling danger alone probably would have had the thing torn down in the US on fear of lawsuits, but it looked kind of fun.

On Day 2 we paid a visit to the China University of Science and Technology (CUST).  It’s one of China’s top technical schools, and something of an odd fit for Hefei since most of China’s best universities concentrate in its biggest cities.   CUST is known for having a special training center for gifted children, where child prodigies from all over the country are gathered together to hone their skills and then venture out to conquer various fields.  We were hoping to lay eyes on a few of the baby geniuses ourselves, but unfortunately the campus was mostly quiet owing to the holiday.  We did stumble upon the prodigies’ probable training building, though, at the School for Gifted Youth.

Class photos of the program’s first years in the 1970s.  Beside this was a “Where are they now” poster showing all the famous universities where they studied PhDs or now taught, as well as the various international awards and accolades receive (including a MacArthur genius grant or two).

We spent the afternoon of Day 2 at the Anhui Provincial Museum.  The downtown museum seemed a little threadbare – my old  Lonely Planet from 2007 said it was under renovation and I had been expecting by now for there to be a little more of a shine to it.  Later I heard that they had built a new branch of the museum a few miles away in Hefei’s purpose-built new downtown – maybe all of the best exhibits had migrated there.

One exception was a thorough exhibition of the works of Pan Yuliang, an Anhui native and artist whose tumultuous life led from abandonment and prostitution as a child to international acclaim drawing and painting in Paris.  That’s her in the middle of the picture below.

Most of the works on display were line drawings of nude women with thighs almost as thick as their waists.  The attendants in that room were serious about the no photography rules, but in other galleries they were more lax.  I developed a soft spot for the paintings of women in late Qing dynasty dress, a style I still remember clearly from my senior thesis research.

And finally, a self-portrait of the artist herself, brow furrowed in a way not dissimilar from her photos.

Changes in Pudong

Credit: The Altantic

Over the summer, Shanghai residents who had grown tired of reading news articles ticking up the days of record-breaking heat received a brief reprieve when front pages everywhere announced that the Shanghai Tower had topped out.  Two things here probably merit explanation: 1) The Shanghai Tower is an under-construction building set to be Shanghai’s tallest and the second-tallest in the world.  2) “Topping out” means they have laid the highest beam of the main structure.  They’ll continue reinforcing it and adding glass windows and fitting out the inside, but it won’t be getting any taller.

That the tower was close to topping out has been obvious to anyone in the city for months.  Over a year ago it was poking up among Pudong’s thicket of highrises, and earlier this year it was reaching up beyond the tops of its two skyscraping neighbors and previous city record-holders, the Jin Mao Tower and the Shanghai World Financial Centre (SWFC).  Now it stands at is absolute height, taller even than it will be after completion thanks to a quartet of cranes poking from the summit hauling beams and other materials 600 meters into the sky.   I can see it from miles away.  Riding the light rail line that runs down the western rim of the city center, I can catch glimpses of it piercing the horizon when there’s a break in the rows of high rise apartment blocks, sort of like the Eiffel Tower in the opening credits of The 400 Blows.  A few weeks ago while rummaging through the wreckage of a demolished neighborhood near downtown, you could see the tower emerging behind the caved-in roofs, glittering like a Christmas tree thanks to all the welders working into the evening hours.

Pudong’s legend by now is well known.  In 1990 there was virtually nothing over there, but with a stroke it was decided that Shanghai was to become the financial center of China, and the financial center of Shanghai would be on the other side of the river, an area full of warehouses and shantytowns that few considered legitimate parts of the city.  Up went the Oriental Pearl TV Tower in around 1993, and after that the high rises proliferated like rabbits.  By the time I first arrived in 2005, the waterfront was already an impressive sight, with one of the three supertall skyscrapers already finished.  The Jin Mao Tower is 430 meters tall, which seemed pretty vertiginous then, but it was followed a few years later by the 490 sqm SWFC.  At that time I remember an architectural critic declaring that SWFC would give Pudong’s skyline the final exclamation mark (presumably Jin Mao was the first) it needed to cement its place among the world’s cities.  Now we have the Shanghai Tower following at 630 sqm, and we may need to officially change Pudong’s name to “Pudong!!!”  Standing on the other side of the river, it does kind of bellow at you, so the appellation makes sense.

I know from my job that there are almost no land parcels left in Pudong’s financial area, which means this may well be the true conclusion of the skyline’s 20-year journey from non-existence.  Of course, the story of Shanghai’s development is far from over – I’ve seen the plans, I know the half-dozen other parts of the city that the government wishes to become a “new Pudong”.  But this part of the city may be passing into a new age.  For two decades its been in a permanent state of becoming, a work-in-progress statement to the boundless ambition of the city, its people, and a national government that spares no expense on the accouterments of national and civic success.  Now that may transition to the city as finished project, something sleeker but less dynamic, a symbol of realized ideals rather than potential.

Enjoy these last few months, then, when construction cranes are as much a character in Pudong’s skyline drama as the buildings themselves.  They will be shuffled off stage soon enough, dismantled and moved elsewhere to menace historic neighborhoods and bring the promise of gaudy office towers and overpriced housing to other parts of China.  Searching for metaphors for the raw energy of Pudong-as-construction site, I discarded as too cliche the idea that the place seems to crackle with electricity, but on one of this summer’s stormy nights, mother nature was all too happy to blatantly make that point herself:

Fitting, I guess, since subtlety never was part of Pudong!!!’s vocabulary.

New post up on Tea Leaf Nation

The past couple of weeks I’ve been busy again with writing another article for Tea Leaf Nation, this time on my experience interning at a company in Chongqing in 2011, just before the city’s Communist Party boss got consumed by scandal.

Click here for the article. 

North Shanghai Heritage Walk

Last week I was flying through Shanghai in Google Earth and realized that cutting across the northern part of the city there was a belt of old neighborhoods that ran for a few miles from the train station to the river.  You can tell the neighborhoods are old because they houses are so small and pressed so close together.   Hoping these might be some living, breathing versions of the communities I found being demolished the week before, I made use of the beautiful weather on Saturday to walk the entire strip.  

Pictures of the old 1920s-1930s era houses below. I’d love to type more in detail, but alas, I just got home, it’s almost 11:00 PM, and I have a big presentation tomorrow.