The China Travels of Richard Mueller (2)

The following is the China trip diary as written by Zoonauts author Richard Mueller

The China Travels: Four (conclusion)

Next we had ginger ale and donuts (?) with the senior V.P. of a top Chinese TV network. Again, I didn’t understand a word. Stories about most Chinese understanding English are a myth. I’ve met four, including a kid working at KFC, which shows you just how far an education goes here. Not so different from home, I guess.

The China Travels: Four
“A Tramp Abroad…” With apologies to Sam Clemens
The Shanghai Post and Telecommunications Hotel … October 12 2003

That’s me, a tramp, only because I used to be poorer and rode freight trains. And tonight I feel sort of trampy. Wearing black jeans, a black sweater and black vest, and my rain forest fedora, I went for a walk in the black windy night of Shanghai. Hip youngsters goggled at me, smiled, gave me a thumbs up and crooned unintelligible commentary. I, however, walked to KFC, sat in a booth, ate ersatz American chicken, drank Pepsi without ice (ice is made from the local water—don’t want a case of the Sun Yat Squirts) and read Vassilikos’ great novel Z. Walking down by the railway station, a wild blowing storm exploded off the East China Sea and I stumbled back to my hotel. I have been in Shanghai for three cloudy days and I’m beginning to hate it.

There are a few beauties along the waterfront, the marvelous old buildings of The Bund; and the Chinese I have met—publishers, reporters, teachers and students—are kind, generous and possessed of a bemused sense of humor that allows them to forget that they are growing up and old in a city hell-bent on economic boosterism, a city with an almost fanatic desire to turn itself inside out for the mighty Yuan. Everyone rushes here and there, screaming through traffic that would make a bishop blaspheme, with a stoic Oriental sense of being part of a great Confucian crapshoot. Wildly impressive buildings rake the skyline, each one different, each one more futuristic than the last, the entries in some great architectural pissing contest, like shards of fallen glass piercing a corpse. Among their feet, in the cramped and dirty streets, life is better only for the powers that be, the thrones. The rest rush on, ignoring statues of Confucius, Bach and Mao to get to the Gap.

I have seen some of the history of Shanghai, some of the people, some of the art. Tomorrow, perhaps, we shall go to the zoo. I have seen enough.

We shall travel from here to the smaller provincial city of HuangZhou, thence to storied Beijing with its Forbidden City, Tianamen Square and access to the Great Wall. We shall end in the Manchurian industrial city of Changchun, once Mukden, fought over by Russians and Japanese and remembered by Westerners, if remembered at all, for the boy-emperor Henry Pu-Yi. Each one of a different character than Shanghai. I shall return to Shanghai only to return home, but I shall not miss it.

I am a European American. Shanghai was once run by Europeans and Americans. It’s better now. But it is not my city.

The China Travels: Five
“Chinese Fire Drill”
The Shanghai Wing Hotel, Pu Dong … October 13 2003

A feeling of powerlessness and pointlessness has swept in with the incessant East China rain; and I was putting one foot before the other, certain that I had no control over the events of my life in this land without sun. I was quietly cussing everyone who had encouraged me to make this trip, at the mercy of my benevolent hosts, in a land of signs and menus I could not read, buffeted hither and yon by random events, and wishing desperately that I could be home, sleeping in my own bed, talking on the phone to my own friends, doing my own work to survive. It had been a bad day with few good moments.

It was checkout day at the Shanghai Post and Telecommunications Hotel, and David and Kim and I were running late. I skipped breakfast and went to answer emails, rushed and incomplete, but communication I needed to ground myself. An hour on the net cost 9 Yuan (about $1.10) on the business center’s only computer and the girl who ran the place seemed happy to see me as I was apparently her only diversion.

They were still cleaning up from the wedding reception the night before and the corridors and elevators still stank—the Chinese will smoke anywhere as if they believe that lung cancer is a myth. We piled into a cab and drove to a huge mart where Kim was meeting to discuss silk with a pleasant Korean cloth merchant. Next we picked up a relative of Kim’s and we were off to the zoo.

It was raining again and we slowly became soaked as we searched and backtracked looking for gorillas, monkeys, tigers and pandas. We located the illusive Francois’ Langur and her family, watched a bored silverback gorilla rattle around his small enclosure, were snarled at by several large cats, and finally got to watch a solitary panda eat bamboo shoots and ignore us utterly. I would have too. We were a mess.

The Shanghai Zoological Gardens is one of those zoos that, on a scale of 1-10, treats its human visitors to a 9 and its animal residents at maybe 2; cramped concrete cages, dirty enclosures, animals going slowly mad with boredom. David, who is used to the excellent Bronx Zoo, was appalled. I didn’t feel much better.

Acting on an inspired suggestion from David, our guide next attempted to lead us to the Jewish Community Center of Shanghai and got a Catholic Church instead. We finally found it, an inspiring little synagogue-museum in an old section of Pu Dong. 30,000 Jews made it to Shanghai in the late thirties due to the exertions of the Chinese consul in Vienna and the Japanese consul in Riga, who declared as many of them as possible to be Jews and sent them quickly on their way. When Hitler demanded that their hosts exterminate these refugees the Japanese, remembering how Hitler had railed against the ‘barbarous Asiatic’ Russians, quietly ignored him, and the Jews sat out the war. After, in the late 1940s, they headed out to Europe and the Americas.

When we asked the caretaker how many Jews were in Shanghai now, he said about 300 foreign businessmen. When we pressed him as to the number of Chinese Jews, he knew of only three. But the others escaped when, in the midst of savagery and barbarism, the Japanese had done a holy thing.

After we went looking for a place to buy the kind of traditional Chinese shirt we’d seen a black jazzman named Scott Wright wearing the night before but the fashions we found were modern and the trinkets were cheap, so we returned to the hotel and boarded a buss for the airport to pick up Kim’s husband, Shangri-La Publications publisher Sheldon Gosline, who was finally arriving after his missed flight some days earlier. Well, this time he’d gotten stuck in Tokyo so we were off to spend the night at a provincial hotel and ostrich sanctuary (The Shanghai Wing—**?—with no hot water and no computer). And by this time I was in a black funk, for I knew what was bothering me about this trip.

For 20 years, I’ve made my living and taken my joy in the English language. It is my greatest skill. Here I am almost retarded, at the mercy of anyone who can speak even a bit of my language, a silent and unknowing participant in the cacaphony around me. I feel a powerlessness I had seldom felt in my own land, the inability to cope with any situation more complex than counting out money or pointing and shrugging questioningly. I need English around me, and if you don’t see the big deal in that, you probably aren’t a writer.

Oh, and I was really starting to hate the food…

The China Travels: Six
“The Ostrich Farm”
The Shanghai Wing Hotel, Pu Dong … October 14 2003

We’re still at the little hotel near Pu Dong, waiting for Sheldon. He still hasn’t left Tokyo. Lightning has hit his plane and there was an avionics failure or something. Maybe Godzilla’s back. I’m beginning to doubt that there even is a Sheldon Gosline.

This morning after last night’s cold shower (as there was no hot water in my room) we breakfasted on hard-boiled eggs, eggrolls, a dumpling, odd vegetabular constructions, scrambled ostrich eggs and green tea. The best breakfast I’ve had so far on the trip was at Dinah’s on Sepulveda Boulevard near LAX: eggs sunny side up, fruit, biscuits and gravy, and hash browns. I still remember it very well and thank you, Carli, for suggesting it.

But before we had breakfast here in Pu Dong adjacent, we went for a walk around the grounds which are, in the manner Chinese, being simultaneously developed for a variety of multi-tasks. As this will also be made into a geological museum, they are planting disturbing petrified trees along the walkways and their workshops are turning out phony concrete rocks with stairways and tunnels for children to clamber over. But the lobby of the hotel is decorated with some fabulous real crystals and a huge painting of (I’m not making this up) a Chinese missile destroyer, with the pennany number of 118. I’m looking this up when I get home.

This resort is also expected to ensnare and ensorcel hordes of children, because their is kid-sized stuff everywhere, including an acre of grass covered with about twenty of the most disturbing looking bouncy houses I’ve ever seen.

And then we had the animals—

Actually, the first one we saw, strolling gravely along the sidewalk, was a cassowary. I spoke to it and it nodded gravely and went on its way. There was the usual animal abuse; a few shivering monkeys in concrete pens, a civet cat, peacocks, dogs in kennels and, most disturbing of all, a cage full of housecats, all starving for affection. I was beginning to suspect that, outside of naming years and movies after them, the Chinese are not that fond of animals.

We saw some deer in pens, and a flock of ostriches that sped back and forth, their wings canted forward like jumpjets. There was also a sweet-looking mule that I took some pictures of for a sweet mule-loving friend.

Later we sat and ate pieces of giant grapefruit called yodza as the sun came out for the first time in the daytime since I’d come to China, and we set out to the airport to await Sheldon, who, it turned out, would be delayed until 8:30 that evening. We were now a full day behind schedule.

CONTINUE to Part III

(The China Travels: SEVEN: “Shanghai Surprise”)



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