Shanghai Shock

When in Asia, you have to see the sights, so I got a cab driver to show me the sights around Shanghai.

The cabby spoke no English, and I spoke even less Chinese. His vocabulary was limited to "Stop," "No stop," and "OK." So was my Chinese, which was in fact a slightly Chinese pronunciation of "Stop," "No Stop," and "OK." He would take me places where I should have stayed for an hour, seeing the sights, but I never knew what I was supposed to do when we got there, and he couldn't tell me, so I would come back after five minutes and he would shake his head and mutter obscene things about me in Chinese.

When I asked him "How long?" at one point, tapping on my watch meaningfully, we almost had driver panic meltdown. I kept holding up five fingers, trying to indicate five minutes, but five fingers in Chinese is probably, with my luck, five times as bad as one finger held up meaningfully in English. That was our longest conversation. I did not get a chance to talk about spiritual things. I assumed that if the concept of five minutes wasn't working, trying to convey an eternity in hell might take just about that long to get across.

I had great fears of arriving in Shanghai and finding it so strange and foreign (and non-English speaking) that I would be unable to get out of the airport. Eventually, search parties would find my starved and shriveled corpse just next to the taxi stand, five fingers held up, blowing in the wind. But my fears were unfounded: in my afternoon tour, I beheld any number of Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's outlets. Our tour encompassed the apparently wealthier downtown areas. I saw more Mercedes in Shanghai than in my home town of Colorado Springs (at least two), some Cadillacs, and a few Jeep Cherokees. Volkswagen seems to have cornered the taxi market: every cab is a Santana.

Traffic in Shanghai has its own charms. There were little sticker signs in my cab that said things like Absolutely No Jaywalking, No Spitting on the Sidewalks, and No Littering. Well, there was little litter, and what there was being swept up almost before it hit the ground by tiny ladies with witches' brooms, and hardly anyone was spitting, except for this one nice-looking college girl who hawked one out. But they were all making up for it in jaywalking. I think I have it figured out: it is illegal to use the marked crosswalks to cross streets. It has to be true, because everybody was crossing everywhere, a constant and casual strolling across the busiest and widest of streets. The streets are full of taxis and bicycles, along with the very occasional Cherokee. Bicycles now occupy the role in Chinese life that donkeys or yaks or whatever they used to use here did. Well-dressed businessmen and women are on bikes by the thousands, as well as grandmothers, girls in mini-skirts, and people hauling huge loads of things in bike-trailers.

Shanghai is completely flat, no hills, so the workers haul monster loads of bags, carpets, boxes, lumber, libraries, and emergency surgical wards. Absolutely fearless, they cut in front of each other as well as cars, trucks, buses, airplanes, Mongol hordes.

Driving itself is a lesson in traffic suggestions, as opposed to traffic regulations. During my "tour," my driver used his horn instead of his brakes. He drove in the opposing lane of traffic to pass (when it was full of other approaching cars and larger predators, like buses, not just on the odd occasion when it was briefly empty). Nobody got mad; they just all calmly honked and/or got out of the way. My driver seemed to consider cyclists and pedestrians as things to be used as speed bumps. Intersections were a fascinating study in anarchy. Usually there was a traffic cop trying manfully to bring order out of chaos. More often, any intersection was to be used to accomplish the goal, regardless of the path taken. To turn left, we might go entirely into the other lane of traffic, cars and bikes weaving around us in both directions and on both sides. Thrown into the mix were little three-wheeled cabs that were a cross between a tricycle and a phone booth. The driver sat in the front, and in a box just big enough for two between the rear wheels and right behind the driver would be the passengers. They were always thoughtfully shielded from the madness around them by pieces of plywood or curtain stuck up on all four sides. If it was intended to offer privacy, it did that, though there was barely enough room to hold hands. Certainly it offered no protection from noise or terror. I guess the riders would have been hard to spit on, though.

Shanghai's streets are spotless. You could put them in Switzerland, almost. What is especially not present is doggy doo-doo; in fact, the producers of doggy doo-doo, doggies, are not present either. I encountered no pets. This is in direct contrast to, say, Paris, which is an anagram for Poop All over In the Streets. In Paris, the streets are paved in poop, and there are more dogs than kids in Geneva (this is true), and more per capita poop than fondue. In Geneva, many times I couldn't take my kids to movies, but I could have taken a dog to any restaurant and perched it under my table, regardless of size. I've got a feeling that dogs appear in a slightly different mode in Chinese restaurants.

© 2000 Andrew Fletcher. All rights reserved. (Used here with permission)

Andy Fletcher has lived in 42 residences in 21 cities and four countries. He went to 10 schools and 6 universities, and has a degree from a college in Japan that he can not read. He has had 19 jobs and 21 cars (including a Russian Lada and two Austin Mini Coopers) in which he has had 11 wrecks. He has skied in 67 ski resorts in 6 countries and 5 states, travels more than is wise (40 countries and counting), and is illiterate in 6 languages, not counting being able to say "chocolate ice cream" in Russian. He writes for paltry sums and works for Young Life International in Colorado, where he now lives with his beautiful wife and feisty teenagers.