Journey into China: Day 5: Jade Jewelry, Basketball Shoes, and Duck Blood Cakes

Public Group Dancing in the Morning: A Chinese Custom

Business today happens in the afternoon, so the morning is for absorbing Chinese culture.  I breakfast at the hotel buffet, where I’m beginning to make friends with the Chinese ladies.  One woman prepares my plates for me and laughs constantly; I speak enough Chinese to amuse her, and she likes watching me eat Chinese dishes.  We try to pronounce “fork, knife, and spoon” together, though she really struggles with “spoon.”

I step out onto East Nanjing Rd., the bustling pedestrian commercial street lined with shopping malls and restaurants that aspires to be Shanghai’s Times Square.  I walk west to People’s Park and pass the Municipal Government Headquarters.  Here solemn soldiers stand at attention as black vehicles with tinted windows race in off the streets on important business.  Party Business is conducted inside this building, and that is secretive, opaque, and potent business.

I traverse people’s park to enter the Shanghai Museum, one of the country’s premier collections of Chinese historical artifacts.  I’m the first in the door at 9 AM.

Lions stand guard at the Shanghai Museum.

It’s a four story building with a central glass atrium hovering above floors and walls of marble.  I begin at the top floor.  For two hours I peruse the world-class masterpieces of Chinese artisans.  

In the jade exhibit, I observe 3,000 years of development of ritual, ceremonial and decorative jade carvings.  The greenish-white hues are luminous and stunning.

In the minorities exhibit, I see hundreds of garments from China’s minorities, who comprise 5% of the population.  Tibetan, Ugyar, Mongolian, and a hundred aboriginal peoples you’ve never heard of have developed riotous explosions of color in their traditional garments.  As I study the map of Chinese ethnicities, I realize that though the Han Chinese are by far the dominant national ethnic majority, aboriginal Chinese peoples possess an underappreciated diversity of cultural traditions.

In the Ming furniture exhibit, I see the sandalwood and tropical hardwood masterpieces of the Chinese gentry.  Beds, desks, bureaus, display cases, chairs.  There was undoubtedly a focus on beauty over comfort, but as works of art the furniture pieces are unequaled.

In the metal exhibit, I see the masterpieces of old, including food containers, wine jugs, weapons, and sculptures.  The process of pouring and casting molten bronze and iron was mastered early in China, and some of these pieces date back to thousands of years before Jesus.

In the ceramics exhibit, I discover how the Chinese turn porcelain clay into the porcelain china for which the country has been hailed for a thousand years.  Masterpieces abound.

The calligraphy exhibit bores me, but the naturalist watercolors of jagged mountains, tumbling rivers, philosophers’ retreats, and lotus blossoms is striking. My favorite pictures show people with real expressions of wonder, frustration, or excitement, rather than of stoic, staid, or sterile features. 

I peruse every single exhibit until I conquer Shanghai museum.  

I lunch on the eighth floor at Raffles City Supermall.  I order in flawed Chinese, which is why I order one too many dishes. The best dish is the signature crispy pork buns with sesame seeds.

Cultural tourism gives way to business. Our group of American teachers and Chinese agents holds our rendezvous at the hotel at 1:00.  We pile into taxis to travel northeast to the Hongkou University district.

We drive north over the Suzhou River, cut around a northern bend of the Huangpu River and delve deeper into a flashy, vertical, new section of the city.  We disembark into the frigid afternoon cold (40s F) into a college town: scooters, snack shops, fountains, indie cafes, young people everywhere.  We stop into a coffee shop, where I read a message board that primarily advertises people looking for friends to practice languages with (English, Chinese, Japanese, French, everything).

We ride an elevator up to a cramped room full of teenagers and teachers.  Steven Hong, our minder, delivers eight minute presentations in Chinese about each of our six schools.  Then we disperse into our own classrooms, where students stream in one by one over two hours.  I meet all kinds of students with all kinds of interests and all levels of English. Some highlights: “America is more free.  I want to go there.”  “I like shoes and basketball.  America has a lot of shoes.” “Hawai’i has a more comfortable environment than here.”  It is hard to tell which students are really serious about studying in America, which are excited to talk to a foreigner about America, and which are doing an assignment for English class by talking to me.  My hope is that most of the students are the former.


We close with group photos, and return through the chilly night to our hotel.  

At dinnertime, we walk to a seventh story restaurant for Hot Pot, traditional Chinese style cooking where you cook all the food in boiling water at your table.  This would prove to be my most adventurous mealof the trip, and one of the most unusual of my life.   Tonight the menu includes: duck blood, cow stomach, quail eggs, and duck liver.  I eat it all, of course.  One life to live!

Hao Chi (Mmmmmm)

Duck Blood Cakes

Pig Liver on Ice

I return to the hotel for an 8 PM interview with an impressive young man who has taken the high-speed train and the metro, donned a suit, and brought his robot.  He immediately demonstrates what his robot can do, hands over his test scores, and articulates his ambitions for his future in clean English.  This one is a winner.  As he speaks of his love for soccer and robotics, I begin to sense that my school might not be the best fit for him.  My job is to advocate for my school, but this young man might do better in Cambridge or Connecticut in a big, established, traditional boarding school.  I encourage him to do his research about all the schools to which he is applying, and I offer my assistance as he seeks to set the course for his bright future.

A full day segues into a full night’s rest.