Subway Series: NYC vs. Shanghai

by Matt

Many of Val’s blog entries contrast the US and China with an emphasis on how strange this place is.  However, I want to highlight that despite all of this strangeness, China can also be awe-inspiring.

Take the subway system, for example.

Living in New York City for the past several years, we heard a lot about the 2nd Avenue subway line.  It’s been in the works for over 75 years, jokingly referred to as "The Line That Time Forgot.”  With powerful labor unions, pesky shop owners, and conflicted Upper East Side residents, the project has faced a series of false starts and plenty of dysfunction.  Phase I of the project, which runs a measly two miles up the east side from 62nd St to 96th St, still has yet to open.

Contrast all of this with the subway system in Shanghai, a city with three times the population of NYC. Imminent domain, labor groups, and environmental concerns be damned, this city – and country, for that matter – gets stuff done!  The city is adding entire subway lines (not just two mile sections) at a pace of one line per year.

Here’s a subway map from 2000, when the city had just a few lines.

Here’s a map from 2010, after a decade of expansion aided by the World Expo.

And here’s the planned map for 2020.

  

Unlike the infamously incomplete 2nd Avenue subway in NYC, I have no doubt that this aggressive expansion will actually materialize on schedule.

PS – While NYC’s subway has rats and Ninja Turtles, the Shanghai subway can boast of air-conditioning, underground cell phone service, safety barricades lining the platform, and to-the-second updates on arriving trains.

The Dog & Baby Show

This past weekend, we went to Zhongshan Park to see the cherry blossoms, which were supposedly at peak bloom last week.  They were, in fact, quite pretty to view.

Sadly for the cherry blossoms though, they just could not compete with the spectacle we created by introducing our curious little blue-eyed baby to a dog owner who was overeager for photo ops.  Both dog and baby garnered attention for their walking; TJ because (as we've been told by every local female over 50 in Shanghai) Chinese babies just don't walk when they're this young/small, and the dog because they're still rare as pets here, and I mean c'mon, shoes and hind-leg walking?!?  

 I’ll allow the photos to tell the rest of the story...

dog and baby meet

dog owner in gray sweatshirt

the crowd gathers

awaiting further instructions

and we've created a spectacle

the new friends -- and showbiz partners -- strutting their stuff

Airing out the Laundry

In New York City, I knew the seasons had shifted when I walked down the sidewalk and felt a drip drip drip from high above.  The condensation from window air conditioning units was a sign that the weather was heating up.  

Don't mind the drips.

Well, Shanghai has it’s own version of this phenomenon, only here the drips come from people’s wet laundry.  

In a city of 24 million people, where almost everyone lives in apartments and almost no one owns dryers, wet laundry has to dry somewhere.  Often people hang it from poles they’ve rigged out of their windows.   

Allowing car exhaust to add that final hint of freshness to the linens.

If that doesn’t work, they just walk down to a nearby intersection and fashion up wires between light poles on the street.   

As a result, laundry has become just another obstacle to avoid while walking along local neighborhood streets here.   

Caution: dripping intimates overhead.

My favorite anecdote is when I had to warn a visiting friend to look out for a particularly low-hanging pair of underwear he almost put his face through.  

 I’m learning that in this town, laundry (along with so many other things) trumps pedestrians.

Why didn't the chicken cross the road? Crosswalk blocked by laundry.

Double-decker laundry poles assert their dominance by blocking a storefront.

Big Brother

China has been in the international news lately.  Coincidentally (hmmm), our internet has slowed down to a snail’s pace.  As I researched a news article for my post on gutter oil, my browser suddenly hiccupped.  It had hit a wall: the great firewall.  Because we have a VPN -- which affords us the ability to check facebook and use unrestricted Google and even write this blog – we often forget that we do not live in a country with our familiar individual freedoms.  Thanks for the reminder, big brother.

Gutter Oil

Xu Ayi cooks for us twice a week, which is wonderful for two main reasons: I don’t have to prepare two meals a week, and we get to eat authentic home style Chinese cooking on a regular basis.

On Wednesday, she made fried duck.  She had a bit of leftover oil, and so she placed it in a bowl and set the bowl in the oven.   

(Side note: her relationship with the oven is worthy of an entirely separate post.  For now, I’ll just say that she believes its primary purpose is as an insulated cupboard to store used oil.)

Matt and I later discussed the merits of saving what is perhaps a half-cup of used cooking oil, which brought us to the conversation of gutter oil.  It’s lovely stuff.  Enterprising gangs have created a booming illegal business that deals in the reprocessing and trade of recycled cooking oil.  They dive into sewers where street runoff accumulates and skim the used oil -- plus whatever sticks to it -- that has risen to the surface.  After similarly collecting oil from restaurant garbage bins, animal fat from slaughterhouse waste, and plenty of delicious toxins along the way, they “clean” it through a series of dubious science experiments, and sell it as cooking oil to street vendors and hole-in-the-wall restaurants.   Yummy!

The Chinese government is attempting to crack down on this obviously harmful activity; just last week, they arrested over one hundred people involved in the gutter oil operation.*  It’s interesting as a foreigner witnessing this collision of entrepreneurialism, industrialization, and desperation.  Rapid economic growth begets a rapidly expanding chasm between the haves and have-nots, and the result is this strange world of swindlers whose creativity might be celebrated if it wasn’t so utterly disgusting.

In a country where people are slogging through gutters, skimming used cooking oil off the top of sewage, and reselling it for a small profit, our little half-cup of oil in the oven is looking pretty darn delicious.

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* Here’s a WSJ article with the story of the gutter oil arrests

A Few Days "Off"

It’s the Qingming, or “Tomb Sweeping”, festival here right now.  This is one of the official national holidays in China, and the purpose is to remember and celebrate ancestors, originally by cleaning their tombstones.  Nowadays, people visit the resting places of their family or friends, bringing gifts of fruit, bread, paper money, and yellow flowers (to connote joy and happiness). 

An expat newsletter that I subscribe to pointed out the interesting juxtaposition of this major spring holiday with the Western/Christian counterpart.  Whereas the Qingming Festival is a holiday to celebrate the dead, Easter is a holiday to celebrate life.

Another difference between the notion of holidays that I’m used to and the ones here is how the Chinese government structures time off for their national celebrations.  Apparently the concept of the three-day weekend is just too radical for the Chinese.  Instead, for official holidays, workers get weekdays off, but must make up that time by working weekends around the weekday holiday.  Thus, Matt just worked a seven-day workweek (Monday thru Sunday), now has 3 days off (Monday thru Wednesday), will report back to work for two days (Thursday and Friday), and then resumes his normal schedule with a two-day weekend.  This is so confusing, even to local born-and-raised Chinese, that offices post elaborate schedules explaining day-by-day when you should show up and when you should stay home.  Insanity!

In any case, we are going to enjoy this little three-day holiday, the newly-arrived warm weather, and a kid on the run, by visiting lots of parks and play gyms.  And by thinking joyous thoughts about our dear family and friends, wherever they may now be.

Jing'an Temple

Matt’s office moved in January; unfortunately this meant the end of the ten-minute walk to work and the beginning of a subway journey across town everyday.  However, it also means the discovery of a new neighborhood, and some interesting new neighbors…

Tucked in between mega-malls and grand office towers in the new-construction-crazed Jing’an neighborhood is a spectacular Buddhist temple.  And although Matt passes under it daily (the subway station sits below it), he had never visited the temple.  So yesterday we decided to explore it on his lunch break.  It features a gigantic silver Buddha, amazing white marble railings, and many gold-leafed roofs.  However, the highlight for me was the woodwork, ranging from intricately carved doors to the main temple itself, composed entirely of teak from Myanmar – and no nails! 

Jing'an Temple main courtyard

Silver Buddha

amazing eaves & railings

that's Matt's office building barely visible through the glare of sunshine

a tree grows in Shanghai

huge adverts peeking through the serenity

Burmese teak columns inside the main temple