Monsoon Honeymoon: An Oriental Travelogue: Part I: Honolulu-Shanghai

How do you prepare for the unknown?

In our postmodern world you can book a ticket to some far-distant dream destination in mere mili-seconds, you can embark on virtual city tours from your couch, and you can research almost any tourist site or business on TripAdvisor.

Yet still, uncertainty abounds when you move beyond the Known World.  When my fiance Leigh and I decided to launch ourselves into the sub-Continent,  we knew just a few truths: We wanted to go together.  We wanted to explore a place we hadn't been before.  We wanted to leave our Known Worlds for a while.  Shirking visits to our home towns, the glittering cities of North America, and the pleasures of equatorial sanctuaries, we booked two tickets to Delhi via Shanghai.  It's the unknowns that would bring the trip alive, we thought. . .

Day-by-day, as we came to terms with the unexpected together, the white and black magic of discovery took hold.

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Sunday, June 16

Honolulu International Airport, 11 AM

Harried and overjoyed, we rushed through Father's Day Calls, final logistical messages, and mental packing lists in the early morning hours.  China Eastern Airlines was our low cost carrier.  Hundreds of excitable Chinese milled around the waiting room, saddled with Duty Free bags and colored by sun-singed skin.

The eleven hour opening stretch of the trip was remarkable primarily for the explosions of Cantonese and Mandarin language that floated through the cabin.

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Monday, June 17

Shanghai begins to make its impression felt one hundred miles out to sea.  The pulsating human energy of China's firebrand metropolis radiates visibly through the sea and the air.  The clear blue skies of the Pacific Ocean begin to give way to a hazy fog that thickens on approach.  Down in the sea, container trips start to appear, first one, then ten, soon one hundred, until the whole ocean is littered with a miasma of ships moving materials into and goods out of the Workshop of the World.   The mighty Yangtze river- home to some 350 million people and central artery of the Middle Kingdom - has permanently swamped the nearshore waters, churning the Big Blue of the Pacific into a chocolate milk swamp of silt, mud, and pollution.  

I had been dreaming, romanticizing, and living in a fantasy Shanghai ever since I studied Chinese in 2003, and now, at long last, I would compare my dream with reality.

3 PM: Shanghai Customs was fairly breezy.  Oscar-winner Jessica Chastayne- in town for the Shanghai Film Festival-  lined up just in front of us, and she looked as mortal as the rest of us  in the face of Chinese Authorities.

With a newly shaved head, I tried to make small talk in rudimentary Mandarin with the customs agent.  He eyed me suspiciously and called over his superior to inquire why I was talking Chinese.  Leigh looked over at me with worry as I grinned and explained that I had lived in, um, er, Taiwan.  Smooth. . .

With seven layover hours to spend, we boarded the German-designed bullet train Maglev.  The thrill of hurtling toward the City at 200 mph was simply sensational.  Meanwhile, outside the train, stacks of concrete housing, farms, temples and villages occupied every usable inch of land.

The early summer humidity blasted us as we commuted by Metro link into the cente r of the city.  90 degrees of wet heat mixed with the wafting new aromas of tofu, ginger, tapioca, fruit, and humanity to reduce us to a stupor.  Leigh trusted sharp traveler's instincts as we navigated currency exchange, ticket purchase, and city transport.

We emerged from subterranean caverns at East Nanjing Loo (East South Capital Rd.).  Here was modern Shanghai!  Broad pedestrian walkways, towering temples of commerce, vigilant police, style queens, culinary explosions, the Apple Store.  Wide-eyed and gawking, I bumped into a Chinese woman almost immediately.  She wasn't impressed. 

Leigh and I strolled this central commercial core down to the Huangpu River, an urban tributary to the mightier waters surrounding Shanghai.

And then, we arrived at the place you all know: The exact spot where this many-splendored city has been reduced to two postcard pictures that are prominently and relentlessly featured in magazine articles the world over. This is the place where the Old and the New face off across the River, distilling into one architectural metaphor the entire modern drama of China's incomparable growth.

On one side was the Bund.  This one mile river-front stretch of European buildings represented all of the countries, industries, and cultural influences of nineteenth century China: British bankers, Dutch traders, Italian artists, French cultural attaches, Chinese entrepreneurs.  The architectural range is simply stunning, and in a city of dense construction, limited green space, and ad-hoc urban planning, the stately lines of the broad riverfront boulevard are refreshing.  

Across the river, in the Pudong New Area, lies the former farmland that has been transformed almost overnight into one of the most recognizable skylines on earth.  The World Financial Center scrapes the sky, with a soaring missing piece at the top that makes it look like God's bottle opener.  The Oriental Pearl Tower, showcasing its bulbous red orbs arranged in a triangular cube, looks like the building aliens would call home.  The whole effect of this ultra-modern skyline is transporting.  As Leigh and I melted in the liquid heat of summer Shanghai, we snapped a few inevitable pictures so we would one day remember that we had once stood at this iconic spot.

We drifted south along the Huangpu River.  Unlike the Charles River, the Chicago River, and the East River, which Americans have cleaned, decorated, and celebrated, the Huangpu is a working river.  China doesn't  have the luxury for its rivers to be recreational.  As we strolled along, an endless procession of goods and materials floated to port.  Coal, timber, fuel, oil, garbage.  The boat drivers seemed to slow down, as much because of strict regulations as to enjoy the stunning cityscape in the midst of the exhausting workday. The Huangpu is filthy yet functional, a watery personification of the world's most important emerging nation.

Leigh and my Hawaiian sensibilities had us crying out for something green, so we retreated away from the River into the sanctuary of YuYuan Garden.  With manicured grass, flowing streams, and perfectly trimmed flowers, the Garden looked more like a Platonic ideal of a garden than a public space for human use.  Unlike the rowdy democratic spaces of a European park in summer, YuYuan is meant primarily for looking.  As security officers eyed our movements, we dared not intrude on the grass.

Suddenly an amicable pair of Chinese men in their mid-twenties descended on us with questions.  Where are you from?  What is your name?  What are you doing here?  Within minutes they invited us to join them for a martial arts and tea ceremony.  How could we resist?  On the way, I learned from my new tour guide many insights.  1. Life in Shanghai is crowded, difficult, and expensive.  2. If you don't have a house, you won't find a wife. 3. Shanghai weekends go gangbusters, as people from the hinterlands flood the city for shopping, eating and touristing.  

Unfortunately we didn't have time to attend the martial arts tea party.  We pressed on, buoyed  by a lemon-lime juice with plentiful cuts of agave, and a mango smoothie.  

Our final stop on our whirlwind layover tour was the Shanghai City Museum.  The ovalesque building with semi-circle cuts looked like a crossbreed between Mayan magnificence and Chinese aesthetics.  Across the grand boulevard lay the Shanghai Municipal Government building, a stately and soaring structure.  Chinese military men surrounded the building at attention.  We watched their sunset ritual of bringing down the national flag.  Simultaneously, I showed my yo-yo tricks to a small Chinese girl, who then showed me her superior tricks.

We vanished into the subterranean bowels of China's surging metropolis, and moved via Metro and Maglev back to Pudong International.

Four hours in a city is superficial and cursory, but my romantic dreams of an expatriate life in Shanghai have been put to rest.  As the glittering lights of the world's fastest rising nation gave way to the concrete realities of humidity, pollution, tight spaces, tighter regulation, and high prices, my delusions of Chinese grandeur have vanished for good.

9 PM Blastoff: Shanghai-Delhi. . . .