Report from ShanghaiOct 23, 2009
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Dear all We are now in Wuhan in central China but thought i would send you all a brief Shanghai account and John's report made at the time before progressing to Wuhan. I liked Shanghai. Stylish, materialistic, expensive, full on, energetic. Jill's description of it as a bit blade runnerish is a good one. Imagine this city in a hundred years and a bit more decrepit and you have blade runner. They are gearing up for the world expo next year so there is even more construction than usual. You couldn't see much along the Bund as there are hoardings all the way along. The Shanghai museum is an absolute knock out - see John's report below. I loved the painting and porcelain in particular - stunning. Some more stunning meals and a wonderful time with my Qiuran's best friend Holly. On our last night we went modern Chinese which could have been a high end Melbourne restaurant with things being a bit Shanghainese, a bit of the rest of China and a bit of nod to the rest of the world. Each table spot lit and dark in between. A bamboo garden out the window. Tres chic. We stayed in a great place in Shanghai in the old French concession. interesting just walking around there. Plain tree lined streets. Fascinating street life and activity all around. I loved the shanghai dumplings we stumbled upon. Plum little numbers full of soupy liquid and delicious filling and fried on one side. Our hotel a little boutique one above a cafe - or that's what they would call it in Oz. A wee bit of luxury before going back to basics here. Signing off and pasting in John's report which some of you will already have Zaijian Joan Monday was a frabjous day. The superb Shanghai Museum all day and a wonderful time with a dear friend of our sister in law over dinner. Calloo callay! Tuesday started with a lovely walk around our local area (the old French concession), then down to a trashy antique street recommended by the guide books, then to an appalling area full of westerners drinking at beer barns that everyone and all the guide books said was wonderful, then an enjoyable time at a local Shanghainese restaurant. An excellent Wednesday started at an art district followed by the truly fabulous Shanghai Museum again, then an evening sipping Martinis in the cloud 9 bar looking down on Shanghai from the 87th (I kid you not) floor and an interesting contemporary style Chinese meal at a classy local to finish off our stay in the really exciting city of Shanghai. Shanghai is all construction site - including the Bund where the view of the river is blocked off by hoardings and cranes and dust and building - all in preparation for the world expo next year. It's a hectic place. The museum is truly outstanding - thank you John and Sue and Jill for recommending it so strongly - that meant we went as soon as we could and that gave us a chance to get back to it. It is modern and the displays are top quality, with good explanations in English, excellent models of ancient pottery kilns and workshops and even an excellent shop. We started with the bronzes - some pieces from about 2,000BC and reaching astonishing quality by around the 12thC BC, Mycaenean time in Greece. The workmanship is extraordinary enough, but they are also vividly alive with images of animals and people and an earlier stage of Chinese script. The pottery it goes without saying was utterly wonderful, reaching a peak (in the examples on display here) for me in the 15th-18th centuries. After that there is increased technical skill but they are less interesting (to me, of course). It so often seems that when a technique is mastered the technique takes over and the art slips in quality, as if the real talent goes looking for something new to struggle with. Not that it's always a new technique - many artists continually reinvent themselves, often with switches of focus and subject matter, like Goya or Velasquez, or Shakespeare or Picasso, keeping a challenge in front of you is what's essential if you aren't going to rot. We all know that, even if we don't live by it. The painting - inkbrush - is also wonderful. As we were walking along Joan and I were talking in our excited way about the work in front of us and a Chinese man turned and asked us what we thought of it in excellent English, then told us about the artist. It turned out that he was an artist himself. He works in Holland but has just set up a studio in Shanghai and invited us to visit him, which we wanted to do but we ran out of time so I'll look up his website and maybe send him a message. He told us how he'd left China for Europe twenty years ago with a young man's hopes of making a big splash in Western Contemporary art, but came to realise that he was Chinese and that was something he couldn't ignore. And here he was, not only back with a studio in Shanghai but standing in front of the works of the old Chinese masters. I find that very moving for reasons I'm not entirely clear about. I think it has to do with my own sense of the vitality of the best of the past, a certain sense of loss with the passing of time. I don't only mean personal time but a feeling of what we lose as we become less connected with the universe and come to inhabit more and more a merely human world. I don't mean 'merely' only in a disparaging way because we are a wonderful species, but we are not enough. 'Earliness' at its best can also mean 'closer to the non human', an otherness we all need to be replenished by. On Monday night we had dinner with a friend of our sister in law Qiuran from the days when they both worked in Shanghai. A wonderful person. The struggle of working women to bring up children, the anxieties about schooling and how to do the best for their future is so familiar to anyone who has been through those difficult early years of having children. You feel teary with a complex mixture of empathy, nostalgia and love, too, I suppose, knowing those feelings so well, but finding it hard to quite describe the mixture of joy and worry. In China I think that these familiar anxieties are heightened, partly because of the sheer velocity of change here and with such change - unprecedented in history? With the important exception of indigenous peoples taken over by alien invaders, it must be. She ordered what I could only describe as a banquet of wonderful Shanghainese food, but you have probably had enough of my food talk so I won't say more. It shouldn't be a surprise but I'm always struck by how often you can feel much more at home with individuals of apparently completely different cultures than many in your own culture. Do you find that? On an early morning walk the other day at about 6.30 a tarted up woman came out of a bar and said, 'Hey, you want to come and have a drink?' I laughed and she laughed too, as if to say, 'well I'm only trying to make a living.' I was shaking my head thinking what do they think of us longnosed foreign devils? Then about 50 metres further along I heard hip hop music and looked in through a window where I saw a half drunk pint of beer on a sill. Suddenly there were a group of young poms pissed as newts, f-ing and c-ing loudly. I love the courtesy and warmth of the Chinese in Beijing and Shanghai and I have to confess it has come as a complete surprise. Tonight an old bloke started to get out of his seat in the subway train gesturing to me to take his seat and I thought I must look a lot worse than I thought I did. Then I thought he probably wanted to show that the Chinese were a good people. You may want to say that there is a national pride in this and maybe so, but it has a personal aspect. In Beijing last week while I was standing looking at some skewered delicacies in 'xiao chi lu' or 'little eat street' a man next to me blew a breath at a lot of scorpions and beetles and they started wriggling. I laughed of course and he did too but then he screwed up his face as if to say, 'awful stuff - I wouldn't eat that either, I'm like you.' There is a delicacy in this that I like a lot, a love of making personal contact with others. Even a couple of cab drivers have given us laughing instructions in how to speak better Chinese. It is so great to have Joan to travel with. We have some slightly different areas of interest but most overlap or coincide so that we both get a similar level of excitement from almost everything we see and do. Where our interests are different we learn from each other. I first realised this in India, where she took me into the thick of the bazaars to haggle over silk and carpets, adding a whole new dimension to my sense of that country. I used to think I could happily travel on my own, but I wouldn't want to now. Zaijan cong Zhongguo John
