• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1298 0

on from the Temperance Lounge in the Nanjing train station, and with a caffeinated jitter made my way to the Soft Seat Lounge, where hundreds of besuited businessmen sat in comfortable, ergonomical seats, tinkering at laptops and barking into cell phones. Once again, I sputtered at how very delusional my preconceptions of China had been. Sacramento might be a heat-blasted backwater in America, but surely I wouldn’t feel like a poor, disconnected yokel missing out on the money train of globalization inside a train station in Nanjing. But I did. It’s a new train station, gleaming and shiny like the airport in Qingdao, with enormous windows offering panoramic views of Lake Xuanwu and shimmering high-rises soaring above the green hills. Again I wondered, Why couldn’t we have infrastructure like this? Are we not richer? Are we not more—quote unquote—advanced? Not for long, I thought, if this waiting room is somehow indicative—or if not indicative, predicative—of where, exactly, the train called China is heading. And then the announcement came that the train to Shanghai was departing imminently, and as several hundred businessmen raged toward the doors, battering one another to get on board, I allowed myself a brief contented moment of cultural smugness.

But this does not last long in China. A train ride from Nanjing to Shanghai is the Sino equivalent of the line connecting Philadelphia with New York. Whereas the Phil-NY run is very often a sad reminder of what midcentury America once was—a decaying sign on a passing bridge reads TRENTON MAKES. THE WORLD TAKES—the line linking Nanjing with Shanghai is, well, it’s blighted too. But it’s not a dead blight, it’s a living blight (except around Tai Hu, which was once a living lake, full of fish, but is now a dead lake full of dead fish). But this industrial furnace of a train route, with its belching factories and eye-popping destruction/construction of towns and cities, is unquestionably an industrious area, providing the funds that keep the crisply dressed businessmen around me tapping and yapping into the latest wonders emanating from the world of telecommunications.

And then, a short three hours later, I arrived in Shanghai. It’s always very exciting arriving in a city of 20 million people where you can’t speak the language and you can’t read the signs. Naturally, I had prepared accordingly. “Nihao,” I’d said to the taxi driver.

“Nihao,” he’d said, and I was pleased because apparently I could communicate my greetings in both Mandarin and Shanghainese. Proud that I’d bridged the communication gap, I handed him a note describing in crisply written Chinese characters my intended destination.

“Shanghai,” he said, pointing to the ground after reading my note. “Shanghai.”

“Ah. Yes. So it is. Sorry. Wrong note.”

I searched my pockets, pulling out tattered scraps of paper.

“Qingdao?” he said, arching his eyebrows. You want me to drive you to Qingdao?

“Er…No. Sorry. Here. Try this one.”

I didn’t understand his response. “Er, what’s that?” I said, offering the familiar big dopey grin.

With his hands, he pointed to the sky.

“Yep. That’s the place,” I said, and then as we made our way to an expressway leading toward Pudong, the gilded district that resides across the Huangpu River from the Bund and old Shanghai, I wondered if I’d very accidentally handed him the note that said, Please take me to the airport. Long inward sigh. Then I remembered that there’s a super-fast, state-of-the-art bullet train connecting the airport to Pudong, and I decided that this would be interesting too, to ride this train back into Shanghai, and so I settled back and relaxed into this ride toward I-didn’t-know-where. I’m flexible that way.

But I had handed him the correct note. The driver pulled up in front of the Jin Mao Tower, an enormous skyscraper that looks like an accordion that’s been stretched to its snapping point, and yet still looks really striking. It’s the tallest building in China, though not for long. Next door, cranes were already crafting a steel skeleton that would become the Shanghai