Christmas in Shanghai

I’d been to Shanghai twice before—the first time in 1987, in the wide-eyed company of writer-friends most of whom, including me, didn’t even know how to use chopsticks then, and the second time last year, to cover an international conference of massage therapists (I kid you not). Last week I made good on a longstanding pledge to bring Beng to China, thanks to budget fares I secured from an online promo of Cebu Pacific last May (yes, I do plan a little early). Beng’s been to Hong Kong and Shenzen a few times but never yet to the heart of the mainland, so I thought this would be a great way to celebrate Christmas—albeit Christmas, as Deng Xiaoping would have said, with Chinese characteristics. We landed in Shanghai’s supersized Pudong Airport past midnight, and I knew we were in the right place when I saw two nut-brown Pinoys at the arrivals area welcoming our flight with a hand-lettered sign: “Hatid-Sundo Singkuwenta ang Isa.” Had I been traveling alone I would’ve availed myself of the service, if only out of journalistic curiosity, but I had promised Beng a real holiday so we took a cab for the 30-km ride to the city center, and ended up paying five times more. (Real holidays cost real money!) Our hotel, fortunately, was nice, big, and warm (Shanghai is freezing this time of year—real holidays are cheaper in winter), and we saved ourselves a breakfast and made up for some of the cab fare by dozing till noon the next day. As Beng should’ve suspected, I also came to Shanghai in quest of Chinese-made pens, well known (or, to be less than kind, notorious) among pen fanciers for being conscientious copies of Western classics such as the Parker 51. I’m not talking about the crude Montblanc fakes that are hawked on every streetcorner, nor the smarter and pricier “replicas” you can find in Shanghai’s backstreet emporia, alongside the Coach and LV bags. I used the word “conscientious,” because the Chinese pen company Hero did clone the Parker 51 down to the last detail, then stamped its name on it and sold it unabashedly as its own. You’d have to admire the cheekiness in this age of globalization and IPR, which apparently hasn’t caught up with Hero yet. But to cut to the chase, thanks to some tips from the Internet, I learned that most of Shanghai’s stationery shops were to be found on “Book Street,” which I established to be Fuzhou Road. Much to my delight, I discovered that this—like most of the other must-see’s on my list—was just a few blocks from our hotel, so Beng and I marched off after lunch to explore its offerings. It was, indeed, a street full of shops selling paper, paintbrushes, art and calligraphy supplies, books, and, yes, pens! Store after store brought up the names I’d read about online—Jinghao, Duke, Kaigelu, Liseur, Picasso, Montagut (don’t ask me why), and Hero. Sadly, despite my willingness to contribute to the health of China’s beleaguered economy, nearly all of the pens I came across were much too blingy for my taste, burdened with all manner of silly adornments—although, looking at new Shanghai’s Disneyland-esque skyline, with orbs and cones sitting on top of spires and neon lights zigzagging up and down 30 floors’ worth of facades, I shouldn’t have been too surprised. I came away with a token purchase—the most sedate Hero I could find, a Parker 45 “tribute” pen, to put it nicely—along with a bag of 10 Hero “Parker 51s” at a little over a dollar each to give away to friends as souvenirs of an earnest if misplaced admiration for something Western. The West, of course, is all over China, most especially Shanghai, which saw more of the West than the rest of the country as a city carved up into settlements by the Western powers early in the last century. It was no coincidence that the Chinese Communist Party held its first National Congress here in 1921 under Mao Zedong; the site where this took place is now a museum devoted to China’s efforts to kick out the foreign devils (in the museum shop, you can still buy Mao and CCP pins for 5 yuan or about P35 each). As if to say something, the museum happens to be located in Xintiandi, the city’s new posh district; you can step out of Mao’s shadow and walk straight into a chi-chi French restaurant across the street. Shanghai’s other museums seem to hardly mention Mao, looking far into the past (the Shanghai Museum, devoted to ancient arts) and squarely into the future (the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum). Two museums I regretted not having seen were the Shanghai Museum of Public Security, which promised 70,000 exhibits including “a skull with a pair of scissors sticking into it,” and The Museum of Ancient Chinese Sex Culture (a.k.a. the Shanghai Sex Museum), which opened in 1999 but moved to Tongli town 50 kilometers away in 2004 for want of more visitors (an enduring mystery, considering the billions of sexual acts that produced China today). But what we lacked in culture, we more than made up for in shopping, and Shanghai’s Yu Yuan Garden—which I had visited 20 years and 40 pounds earlier—can’t be beat for the sheer size and variety of the offerings. (By “shopping” I don’t mean carting home Ming vases and life-size clay horsemen, but 30-yuan T-shirts and 10-yuan scarves.) I’m a big fan of Chinese cuisine, but we decided to ease ourselves into the local diet by trying KFC with Chinese characteristics, and realized (as we later would at McDonalds) that that meant “hot and spicy,” no matter what you thought the smiling girl across the counter was trying to say. When we did what the Shanghainese do and marched bravely into a restaurant whose name we couldn’t read, we ended up with a dinner of three soups—noodles, dumplings, and hot and sour—as well as an extra order of dumplings; apparently, every time we pointed at a picture of a dish, it was as good as cooked and paid for. But it was, all told, a merry vacation, a long march into the late December chill of an otherwise friendly and familiar neighbor, armed with a map and a steaming cob of corn, bought on the street for 3 yuan. Everywhere around us were reminders of how far Shanghai and China had come from that meeting room in Xintiandi—Batman on HBO, Givenchy at the mall, Starbucks in Yu Yuan, Volkswagen on the road. Every other block, it seemed another hutong—a traditional compound or cluster of houses—was biting the dust to make way for a new skyscraper hoping to outdo the Oriental Pearl TV Tower in the bright-lights-big-city Pudong New Area across the Huangpu River. As mighty excavators rumbled late into the day, laughing teenagers flashed V-signs and had their pictures taken in front of a towering Christmas tree on Nanjing Road, and “Jingle Bells” and “Silent Night” tinkled out of the shopfronts, enticing pedestrians to come by and pick up an almond-eyed Santa or, better yet, a beribboned red ox for the Chinese New Year. It may not have been heaven and nature singing, but it was Yuletide in Shanghai. Email me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.