Untitled Document

01 February 2001

Long Marchers

She lay there below me, enigmatic. Her curves and contours were lit by the full-silver moon. She was highlighted in way that showed her charms. For a woman of her age she carried it well. It showed an odd combination of her flesh, and estate jewelry and the flashy brass of her new geometric jewelry. By her subtle shape she showed an elegance of an age we do not now know, though she intentionally showed it. She was an ancient tease, and she knew it. She had been all things to all people in her time, ravished but victorious against a host of needy lovers. Tender or abusive as they had been, they were gone and she remained. She was triumphant.

She was Shanghai. I know what I had expected. Something from a Cultural Revolution World version of Suzy Wong, a down-at-the-heels sister of the Wanchai district of Hong Kong. Circa 1980, when I first met her and loved her. Instead I was vaulted across the century.

Tonight, we stopped in the Pudong New Area and took a high speed elevator halfway up the third tallest building in the world. We strolled along corridors of marble and glass and looked north across the Huangpu River to The Bund, the three-mile stretch of riverfront that was the heart of the European concession. The solid European buildings along the river's edge had been designed to show the dominance and eternity of the Western Empires.

Now the Chinese kept them as a token of a stolen moment, a time when the Middle Kingdom did not rule all before it. As I looked at the decorative lights which outlined the stately colonial buildings I thought of Cho En-Lai, Mao's great lieutenant from the Long March and later the Foreign Minister of the People's Republic:

"What do you think of the impact of the French Revolution, Mr. Secretary?" asked the Western press. Cho pulled enigmatically on a Salem filter cigarette. "Too soon to tell" he said. There was not an ironic bone in his body.

We had arrived just an hour before at the dramatic new Pudong International airport miles away from the city center. It looked a lot like Dulles, save that the arches were not so swept, and the roof seemed more permanently grounded. It was stainless and gleaming and empty. Then we were in a Consulate van, exhausted.

Since we left the Embassy in Tokyo I had been discussing- at high decibels- the product of our day's discussions in Japan with the senior member of the Delegation. I was frustrated, and jet-lagged, and in the stuffy van I fell asleep, finally out of conversation. When I awoke, I was in the New China.

The Delegation was dazed by this stop, too tired and too disoriented to appreciate that the Hyatt was part of the New China, the reality, and the Bund was just part of a historical preservation effort. When we escaped from the Tower, we crossed under the river and made our way to the Regal International East Asian Hotel.

It too was a marvelous place of rich wood and buffed marble floors. It was thoroughly Western in approach, but if you looked at it askance, you could just catch a not-quite-western proportion, a nuance that says this is something else altogether. It was nearly 10:00pm, but we have but one night in China and damn the fatigue. We agree to meet in the lobby as soon as our bags were delivered to our rooms…..

Where we all waited in the dark as we waited for the luggage cart to hopefully re-unite us with our skivvies and sundries. The door worked on a card-swipe lock. I entered my room, and could tell in the dimness that it was a vast room featuring a vast double bed.

And that was all I could discover, since none of the lights worked. I tried all the switches, searched for the master switch, and was growing increasingly frustrated when I found a card-reader near the door. I found if I swiped my room key through the reader, the lights would briefly flash into illumination. It only took me a few minutes to figure out that if I wanted more permanent light, the room key needed to be left inserted.

Later, I discovered I was not the only one who waited in the dark. We decided it was an excellent device to enforce conservation on the profligate Westerners. And it also would be an excellent tool for Security to know when they could come up and search your bags. But that is another story.

Amy-the-Consulate-Escort walked us down Kangping Road, a tree-lined boulevard with bustling all-night barbershops and clubs. The patterned sidewalk, whitewashed walls and the regular trees are familiar to me somehow.

"Hey, Amy" I said "This reminds me of Hanoi."

She turned to look at me. "Well, it should. This is part of the old French Concession."

"Oh, I get it." I said with wonder. "That's the connection. It wasn't Vietnam I was seeing and this isn't China. It is all France. In fact, wasn't this legally French soil?"

"I can't talk for the Vietnamese," said Amy. "But trust me, the Chinese didn't concede a thing."

There are late model cars everywhere and they will stop for nothing and no one. The boulevard is treacherous for the pedestrian. To keep the cars from driving up on the curb, pairs of shin-high metal stanchions connected by chains have been placed every hundred feet or so. It is treacherous for a group wandering along, looking around and taking. It is cool but not cold.

Chinese kids in dark leather strolling the streets. The cars will stop for no one. We take our lives in our hands and cross the street at the "Real Love" Disco and 24-hour bowling alley. There is a twelve-foot nine-pin out front. We have to choose between the Bourbon Street, a large Ante-bellum New Orleans-style building, and the Club Old Times.

We decide that old times in Shanghai may have more authenticity, and inside the club is dark wood, tiny tables, and sepia photos of the pre-revolution China on the walls. We find a table wedged in the back where we drink Tsing Dao and Tiger beers and eat fried chicken morsels complete with tiny bones and strange puffy fried potato crisps . In the background play the hot hits of the 70s-80s-90s, and not the ones from Nanjing Province. There are few Westerners present and nobody seems to mind.

Later, in the privacy and comfort of my vast bed, I watch CNN flicker across the room. It is past midnight, and we have agreed to rally in the lobby for a brisk jog at 0600. I curse myself for a fool and drift off into sleep as someone talks about Alan Greenspan…..

I arise with the alarm clock, space age, at 0545. Still tired. There is Nescafe in little foil pouches. The full moon is still out, though the sky is beginning to tinge with dawn. The jogging party departs at 0630 sharp, with the Consulate people picking us up in the van at 0830. We have two former Infantry officers in the group, one of the Army Ranger flavor and one of the Marines.

There is a certain tension and rivalry in these things. I have abandoned ego. I blew my right knee out a couple years ago, result of too much pavement pounding. Working up for marathons that I hoped would assuage the suspicion I wasn't getting any younger. It is coming back nicely, thank you very kindly, so I have opted for moderation. I just go out for ten or fifteen minutes and then turn around and come back at a comfortable pace. But the ritual jog to start the day is part of these delegations, since it may be the only time to see the strange city when it is vulnerable.

I am prepared. I have 500 milliliters of Nescafe coursing toward my brain and a 500-yuan note tucked in my glove. This is an old lesson hard-learned from jogging overseas. You can get turned around, and sometimes the way back isn't. But you can always get a cab, if you have money. And a room key to wave at the driver to get you where you need to be. We left Hotel lobby and did some cursory stretches.

The light was coming up and the morning crisp. Our infantry officers were well clad in Gore-tex running suits. I had gloves and a watch cap and a thick sweatshirt and jogging shorts. We had wandered to the left last night, down to the Club Old Times, so this morning we run to the right down Hen Shang Road, toward the Shanghai Library.

I pound down the street constantly looking down, since the pavement is studded with low stanchions to prevent vehicular traffic on the sidewalk. Treacherous. Perhaps a mile down the boulevard we jog under an overpass featuring a street-wide ad for a local cigarette and emerge into a vast plaza where the Fuxing and Hualhai Roads collide.

To our left looms a massive square building whose façade is a bisected glass sphere five stories tall. Diagonally across the ten empty traffic lanes are two giant department stores, gaily colored with banners proclaiming "Merry Christmas" and "Happy New Year Shanghai 2001."

Merry Christmas was festooned all over town- jolly Santas and reindeer-and the locals seemed to be leaving it up for the Chinese New Year next week. We took a couple minutes to drink it all in. It was massive and new and bizarre and optimistic. The dawn was beginning to flood the plaza with orange light. The pollution makes the sky hazy and the heroic geometric shapes of the new skyline emerge slowly as improbably shaped blocks of darker gray.

We took off again, this time at a brisker military pace. I glanced at my watch a few blocks further, lungs beginning to burn a bit, and realized it was twelve minutes out. That gets me at least my twenty-minute workout, so I bid farewell to the Infantry, which plows purposefully on into the Shanghai dawn.

Crossing back through the Plaza I realize I am passing McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken shops I do not recall from the way out. Bad sign. I stop and retrace my steps and find the giant cigarette ad hiding on the other side of a small park. Once more I am on Hen Sheng Road, with happy feet, and find the hotel.

The infantry did not. They ran for another ten minutes and got turned around at the same place in the plaza. They forged ahead- onward!- and it took forty-five minutes for them to finally stop and ask some Chinese how to get back. They had to ask several people, since it was mostly Cantonese at this time of the morning. The escort officer who ran along behind them was chagrined, since it would take her longer to get presentable on return to the hotel.

This was a one-night stand in China. On return to the hotel I drank another packet of Nescafe, showered, dressed for success in a dark business suit, packed and bag-dragged it all down to the lobby.

I believe in traveling light, but there was no way for it on this trip- we would be in temperate, arctic and tropical climates. The bags went out full, and got fuller with each stop. The bags even began to multiply. It could have been worse. The last time I was in Hanoi, the famous Central Jail ("Hanoi Hilton") was being torn down, and visitors were presented with bricks as unique souvenirs. Being the junior member on that trip, I wound up carrying a bag containing a major portion of an interior wall. But that is another story.

Downstairs at the Regal International East Asia there was a lavish breakfast buffet of both Chinese and Western delicacies. Rich coffee, eggs, fried cabbage, sausage, bacon, cucumbers, steamed dumplings, hare stew. Some items sampled, most not. After their travail, the infantry is only minutes late coming down, but they miss the breakfast. We have our bags in the van and waiting for them out front.

The Consulate is a few minutes down the road a trip. It had been a Jardine-Matheson mercantile compound (the prototype for Clavel's Nobel House) after starting as a colonial family residence. There is an outside entrance cut into the wall for access to Visa and Consul services.

Two People's Liberation Army Guards flank it. At the real gate to the compound is security checkpoint with metal detectors. Within the whitewashed walls is a large rambling home set on a lawn that had to be two-acres, bordered by ornamental mulberry trees. Inside, past the glassed-in Marine sentry box it is old dark wood and stained glass. The reception area features a large circular table atop a rung with the United States Seal. An oaken staircase leads up and around to the business offices on the second floor, and a formal dining room for official functions is through great doors to the left. Except for the Marine in glass, it is all straight out of 1920.

We were scheduled to have two sessions of meetings, one for the senior members of the delegation, and another for us with some Americans from Nanjing. They have been delayed, and will not arrive until after lunch. I could dutifully attend a session in which I had no interest, watching PowerPoint Slides on the roles, missions and functions of another American Agency in China.

Or, I could blow it off and wander around. It would be a pity to travel all the way to Shanghai and have to settle for a couple beers at the Club Old Times, five hours unconscious in a hotel and a twenty minute jog. I approached our Senior Staffer and offered up the options. Since we were scheduled to go directly from lunch to the airport, I made the case that someone needed to go shopping for the group. To my delight, The delegation cut me and the Congressional escort lady loose and we were free in Shanghai for the morning.

We took orders: "Postcards!" "Cute little things!" "Have fun!"

As they trudged up the stairs to the conference room, we floated back out past the Marine and down into the formal garden. This was better than cutting class in High School. The sun was full up, the sky was hazy blue and the breeze was fresh and crisp. I had a trench-coat, a broad smile and a pocket full of yuan. I had always wanted to see the Bund close up, and this was the chance of a lifetime. Now, the only thing we had to do was figure out where it was, avoid international incidents, and get back before we lost the group……what could go wrong?

We wandered down the street and over a couple of blocks. We found the entrance to the subway and went down. It was gleaming and shiny and not at all what I expected. We went down and got to the platform.

The little guy on the subway could have been sixty or he could have been eighty. He could have walked with Mao on the big swing around Chiang Kai Check's Nationalists, and on to eventual victory in 1948.

He wore a little Mao hat and his gaze was implacable. He was staring at Val's chest, or he was staring past her chest at me in my trench coat because he was exactly that tall. It was hard to tell. But it was a penetrating gaze, neither friendly nor particularly hostile. It was an intense and unwavering look, like that of a hawk on his prey. I leaned over to Val. "I think he may consider us to be lick-spittle running dogs of colonialism."

"But nice" she said. It was pretty clear that even if there were more westerners recently in town, they didn't hang on the Shanghai subway. We had a lot of fans before we got off.

It was a fine subway, and like everything I had seen in Shanghai, it was first class and totally approachable for English speakers. The station was deserted when Val and I arrived. It was four minutes after nine in the morning, and the place was deserted.

We purchased two yuan tickets, sufficient to get us to Peoples Square and ventured down to the tracks. When we arrived, a Chinese man came up to Val, gestured at the sign above us (Chinese and English) and asked her a question in Cantonese, clearly seeking directions. Val pointed at one of the directions at random. He bowed, satisfied, and walked briskly away in the direction she had pointed. Val rolled her eyes. "Why would he think I would know anything here?"

"I think they like you" I said as our train pulled into the platform. As we rolled off, we passed below several sites I wish I had seen up close. The site of the first National Congress of the Communist Party of China. The site of the headquarters of the Provisional Government of Korea- presumably the united one under Kim Il Sung, circa 1951. That was the year I was born. I was sorry we missed the residence of Dr. Sun Yat Sen, George Washington of China, still claimed by Communist and Nationalist alike.

Three stops down the line we departed the car and the unwavering gaze of our Long March admirer, at People's Square. The morning had blossomed into a magnificent day. Still crisp, there were dozens of retired people in the park under the looming eves of the Grand Theater. We wandered along, objects of gentle curiosity. Once we left the park the buildings were those of the West: stolid brick blocks of flats and businesses with quaint and optimistic Victorian facades.

We were disoriented from being underground, and were struggling to make the tourist map coexist with the reality beneath our feet. A middle-aged woman stopped to help us in our confusion, pointing east down a wide mall toward the river.

We were on Nanjing Lu (Road), which according to the literature, is known as the number one commercial street in China. It runs about 5.5 clicks through the center of Shanghai from the Bund on the Huang Pu River to the Jing'an Temple in the west. They claim there are more than 600 stores along both sides of the street.

Further, the locals claim there to be "a satisfactory variety of goods of brand names, high quality ones, special local products and newly developed products, which are a feast for eyes."

It turned out to be true. Everything under the sun was for sale, and in the alleys off the main drag I found a Chairman Mao cigarette lighter that plays the Chinese National Anthem when you open the cover.

Most of Nanjing Road was turned into a pedestrian mall two years ago. It is not all the way down to the Bund, where the streets narrow. My tourist guide informed me that Nanjing Road is a wonderful view at night, "with colorful and dazzling lights too beautiful to be absorbed all at once."

I would have been willing to try.

We passed he Peace Hotel, where a jazz band of octogenarians, placed apparently in suspended animation during the Great Cultural Revolution, still plays the songs they played for the Colonials in 1935. Near that corner is an imposing but somewhat forlorn bronze lion in front of an equally imposing Greek Revival Building of commerce, left long behind by the Brits on whose Empire the sun finally set.

We arrived at the river's edge after about an hour's wander. Across the river rose Shanghai's equivalent of the Space Needle: the 468 meter Oriental Pearl TV Tower, tallest in Asia and third tallest in the world. It's graceful spire transitions to a great sphere about three quarters of the way down, just like a snake that had swallowed a basketball.

Silhouetted before it is the only public representation of the Great Helmsman Mao I saw in town, aside from my cigarette lighter. His statue leans forward in heroic pose, wind sweeping his upward-turned and confident face. A line of children, cute as buttons in colorful sweaters and windbreakers moved along the street under the careful gaze of their caregivers.

"Look!" I said to Val. "It's the Emerging Threat!"

Later, we had collected the delegation from the Consulate, agreed with the PLA troopers at the visa gate that they did not want to be photographed with us, and piled back into the van. We took a measured drive back to the southeast to Pudong Airport. I was a little concerned that we were inside the two-hour advance time I normally reserve for international flights, but traffic was light, and I wasn't responsible for this trip. We arrived at the "Departing Flights" drop off point about an hour and ten minutes before the flight. In daylight, the heroic proportions radiated confidence. We piled the bags onto travel carts, bade farewell to the embassy driver, and rolled into the vast and eerily quiet hall. We were looking for Asiana Airlines to wing us to Korea. I couldn't find the airline listed anywhere. I looked at Val, horror beginning to show in her eyes as the worst event in an escort officers career began to unfold. It was confirmed moments later by a perky Chinese girl at Information a few moments later. "Oh," she said in the most terrifying words it is possible to hear on international travel. "You are at wrong Airport. So sorry." She smiled.

I won't tell of the asses and elbows from that point, the broken Chinese, or the horror which dawned in the eyes of the Consulate driver, who we found still at the curb as we hurled bags two or three at a time into the back. He burned rubber on the way out, and the skill and audacity of this Chinese hero and the ostensible forty-minute drive to Hongqiao National was a wonder to behold. The intricate timing of trip hung in the balance, and we drove places most official vans will never see. At the airport we moved with deliberate speed through the chokepoints of airport tax, ticketing, Immigration and Passport Control, adrenaline coursing through our veins.

As it turned out, we were comfortably seated on the airplane with nearly three minutes to spare. Relaxed and refreshed, we pushed back from the gate for the flight to the Land of the Morning calm. Wondering where the bags were going to go……