Burgeoning Shanghai
The people who live there make this city a great destination for travelers curious about the chinese

Author: By Marguerite Jordan, Globe Correspondent

Date: SUNDAY, February 21, 1999

Page: M13

Section: Travel

While many travelers have some anxieties about visiting China, just mention Shanghai, and they are out and out frightened. Visitors expect it to be dangerous, dirty, and downtrodden, to be endured as a brief stop before boarding a boat to cruise up the Yangste River.

In his book, ``Riding the Iron Rooster,'' Paul Theroux writes, ``Shanghai is an old brown riverside city with the look of Brooklyn, and the Chinese -- who are comforted by crowds -- like it for its mobs and its street life.'' The city is definitely rundown, dusty, and congested. Yet, Morris notes, its crinkly sidestreets and the people who live there make this city a great destination for travelers curious about how the Chinese live.

Since Shanghai is so heavily populated, the government has allotted each person an interior living space roughly the size of a dining room table. Apartments have barely enough room for bedding, bicycles, and cooking utensils. As a result, most Shangainese live their lives outdoors, giving the visitor an upclose view of these urban-dwellers, who are family-oriented, gregarious, practical. They seem happy.

The lovely thing about the Chinese is that they stare at you, which means you -- the curious traveler -- have permission to stare back. A stare quickly becomes a smile and a connection is made. Children are the easiest, of course. They say, ``Hello,'' in a singsong voice, and then they laugh at their ability to spot you at 15 yards. In the urban villages, off a bit from the tourist sights, I encounter hundreds of very curious people. ``What do I think of their city, their new art museum? Where am I from? Do I like Celine Dion?'' (``Titanic'' is in all the theaters.)

I spent several days -- on my own and with a guide from my hotel -- wandering between the significant tourist venues and the places the Shanghainese call home. In the neighborhoods noise and charcoal smoke blend with freshly washed shirts and overalls hanging above doorways. On the sidewalks a barber shaves his toweled customer, a scribe types a letter, a woman chops scallions and cabbage. Over a steel-drum-turned-brazier a butcher cooks a brace of ducks. Children are bathed in tin pans scarcely bigger than their bottoms. The egg-lady wheels her cart through the crowds, delivering ``instant'' 100-year-old snacks to men playing cards around a three-legged stool.

Every morning at 7 scores of men and women -- mostly middle-aged -- gather outdoors in parks, and in front of the old Soviet Friendship building.

For an hour before work they come together to dance an intensely serious tango. It's exercise, it's social life, and it is an important piece of Shanghai culture, going back to the swinging, anything-goes days of the '30s. In his book, ``The Chinese, Portrait of a People,'' John Fraser writes of dancing making a comeback, even though ``. . . from 1963 to 1978 dancing was strictly taboo, branded `decadent and bourgeois.' ''

Opposite my hotel, around an outdoor paved space the size of a small ballroom, I watch as couples pair off to ``Begin the Beguine.'' The men wear open-necked cotton dress shirts and crisply pressed slacks; women wear print blouses and knee-length skirts and low heels. Their instructor is a slender impresario who explains the steps while dancing with his (unsmiling, bored) teenaged daughter. Latino music emanates from his boom-box. He whirls her around the floor, dipping and swirling, as he instructs his pupils: ``Queeck, queeck, slooow!''

After a perceptive spouse gives her husband a nudge, I am swept up in this early morning dance mania. My charming partner speaks no English, but he smiles and moves me -- queeckly -- around the floor. The other dancers look up from their feet, giving smiles of encouragement. Welcome to our fun-loving town, they say. Across the street, groups of people are doing Tai Chi. I'll try that later.

I grew up on National Geographic picturs of the teeming masses cycling through China's cities.

I feel that it wouldn't be a true visit without joining the crowd. It's said there are seven million bicycles in Shanghai. The hotel's manager has offered me his, a smart shiny black number with tons of gears, but I want to be like the Chinese, with a no-speed balloon-tire model. My bike, a real egg-beater, is borrowed from one of the kitchen staff. Afraid that my unsteadiness will cause a rear-ender, I panic each time the crowd surges forward.

I find my place in the crowd after a wobbly start and give the other cyclists a thumbs-up. They laugh and return the salute. As with the dancing, there is a certain rhythm.

Crisscrossing the dusty inner city, I can see hundreds of yellow cranes engaged in bringing skyscrapers (now up to 1,500-plus) to life; wrecking balls are furiously knocking down old houses. From my vantage of a raised seat, I look down onto countless truckbeds crammed with pigs. Pedi-cabs, motor scooters, and Rolls-Royces vie for space with rusted municipal buses stuffed with commuters.

Searching the neighborhoods for the pungent details of this crowded city, I find that although pedestrians fill the streets in surges like a football crowd emptying a stadium, there seems to be an unwritten rule not to come too close. The sounds of tinny bicycle bells and sputtering motor scooters compete with the smells of diesel and rotten vegetables tossed behind market stalls. Neighbors yell to each other, Neopolitan-style, across crowded alleys. At impromptu sidewalk markets vendors shout their prices for blouses, skirts, wallets, hats, and practical household items, like plastic pails and vegetable peelers. When there is a sale to be made people are motivated to understand. Either some passerby speaks English, or a few hand signals suffice.

Located on the Huangpu River, a tributary of the Yangtse, the city was in an ideal position to become a bustling port. Yet the settlement was just a backward fishing village in AD 960, when the name Shanghai, which means ``on the sea,'' was first used. By the middle of the 16th century, residents had built a 23-foot high crenellated city wall and a moat to protect themselves from invading Japanese pirates. In the 1800s, first British, then French, Japanese, Americans, and White Russians carved out colonial concessions throughout the city.

By the 1930s Shanghai had the richest economy in all of China. Art Deco architecture -- in quantity of buildings, second only to Miami -- signaled an opening to the West. It had more manufacturing, motorcars, banks and foreign investment than any other city in the country. It was said that people were so rich that they bought fur coats to keep their car engines warm. In this era, Shanghai was synonymous with sin. There were gangsters and tycoons at the six-story Great World House of Pleasure for freak shows, singsong girls, mah-jong schools, gambling tables, massage parlors, and dancers.

During World War II, the Japanese overran the city. In 1949, with the Communist takeover, freedom disappeared for the normally independent Shanghainese. Later when the so-called Cultural Revolution came, countless works of art and icons were smashed. The present move toward a free market society, being pursued with a vengeance, officially begun in 1991 when Deng Xiaoping declared, ``to get rich is glorious,'' and Shanghai took him on his word. Jiang Zemin, the country's present leader, was mayor of Shanghai from 1985-1988 and supports the enlargement of the city's market economy.

The best known sights of Shanghai are found in the Old Town and around The Peace Hotel (built by the Sassoon merchant family), the major tourist crossroads where Nanjing Road meets the river. This area of faded grandeur known as the Bund, Anglo-Indian for quayside, contains a mile's worth of 1930s buildings facing the river and the developing Pudong, the designated area for all new office building construction. More than a million tourists and locals flock daily along the walkway overlooking the river, to see and be seen. Any day of the week you may run into a bridal party posing for photos here or in front of a nearby restaurant.

The European-style buildings lord it over the eastern end of Nanjing/Nanking Road, named after the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, which ceded sections of the city to foreigners. Cobbled originally, it was built for horsemen and called the Great Maloo, the Great Horse Road. John Steinbeck thought it was one of the most interesting streets in the world.

It is China's longest shopping street. Every day about a half million people come here for clothes, appliances, household goods. They stop for snacks at Kentucky Fried Chicken or Haagen Daz shops. At night the street is an electrified neon billboard to capitalism. In the French Concession, antique shops and pastry shops abound. In the Old Town, the Huxingting Tea-House and Yu Garden offer unforgettable sights.

Visitors may find the Tourist Board of Shanghai a work in progress. As a result, hotel concierges are heaven-sent, especially if you want to go beyond the usual tourist haunts. The staff at the Portman Ritz-Carlton, where 95 percent of its clientele are in China on business, takes it as a personal challenge to meet any request.

I wanted a bike -- they offered me two. I wished to meet artists. I was taken to the home/studio of two, and was even given an art lesson. A visit to Dr. Sun Yat-sen's house? Easily done. A guide led me through the various concessions, where each wave of foreigners made its mark. A two-hour trip to the town known as the Venice of China was quickly arranged. Watch the famous Shanghai acrobats? I did not have to leave the hotel complex.

Knowing that Shanghai was once home to thousands of Jews, I visit the last of the synagogues, which is now a very small museum. An elderly Chinese man who lives in the neighborhood recites a lively history of those who lived and worshipped here, starting in the mid-1800s when the wealthy Sassoons and Hardoons came from Iraq. Russian Jews arrived later, and, in the period leading up to World War II, thousands from Central Europe found refuge here, the one Asian city that didn't require a visa. According to Pan Guang's ``The Jews of Shanghai,'' ``From 1933 to 1941, Shanghai accepted 30,000 Jewish refugees coming from Europe, . . . more refugees than those taken in by Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India combined.''

To a degree far greater than any other city in China, Shanghai has accommodated an influx of millions from the provinces and around the world. It is a New York kind of place, with large swatches of a Brooklyn thrown in, as Theroux noted. In a city so crowded, and -- well -- so murky, I never expected such a homey feel. Shanghai is meant to be explored and savored, but definitely not feared.

For information on the Portman Ritz-Carlton, telephone 800-241-3333.