Dispatch: Shanghai
In New China, Love Can Get Messy
By Mao Jian
Sunday, November 11, 2007; Page B02
SHANGHAI
Recently I returned to my alma mater in Shanghai for a reunion with some classmates. Because of a school holiday, business around the school's back gate was light. We entered the little restaurant we used to frequent. The owner didn't recognize us, but she was a grand self-promoter. Her place was older than any establishment in the neighborhood, she boasted. Asked when it opened, she pointed to a sign on the door. It was in English: "Since 1980."
We laughed. Who, in this country with 5,000 years of glorious history, brags that they've been around since the 1980s? Around the Old City Temple, some joints bear the signature of emperors who reigned three centuries ago. And in Beijing -- well, three centuries is just a babe in the woods. The owner's face reddened. "Find me a store on this street with 20 years of history," she barked, "and your meal's on me."
These days in China, five years in business is a lifetime. One place near my apartment was a Sichuanese restaurant for a few months, then an Internet café for a few more. By springtime it was a bookstore, and by summer a flower shop. "Keep pace with the times," the political slogan goes.
Sizzling in the wok are not stuffed buns, but hearts beating fast, faster and faster still. Got to speed up to make a buck. Tear down the old courtyard, fill in Suzhou Creek, race to register that domain name. One day late is forever late. Overnight a fairy sprinkles her pixie dust and that corner shed turns into an idyllic café. But when you walk in, you see the owner reading a how-to guide on opening a restaurant. Yet another new idea is sprouting. Longevity is not the goal; speed is the style in China today.
My classmates and I look at one another, heavy with nostalgia. The '80s swim in front of our eyes, yet we blink and find ourselves in a new century. In the '80s, all was quiet by 8 p.m. The old man at his dumpling cart and the old lady selling eggs poached in green tea had quit their hawking. That's what passed for nightlife. By 9 p.m., everyone was in bed. Now the fun starts at 9 p.m.
Shanghai is once again leading China. And in Shanghai, life gravitates toward the night; consumption follows not far behind. If you close before 10 p.m., you don't qualify as a major establishment. Of course, there are plenty of places to go after 10 -- cafés, bars, nightclubs. No wonder friends who returned after living overseas in the 1990s exclaimed, "Wow, look at how decadently you live!"
Before, we took our dates to a public park -- entrance fee: a penny -- and simply strolled the night away. Now the soirée extend from restaurant to movie theater to coffee shop, and you'd better be prepared to shell out $150. To be modern is the highest goal in life, and today's interpretation of modernity means a Shanghai babe wearing Calvin Klein underwear. The whole of China follows in the footsteps of Shanghai. We're giving our 5,000 years of history a facelift; time to lighten up and move on.
Four bottles of spirits later, my friends and I are limp with drink. "Hey, skirt chaser," one classmate, intent on reliving our old antics, yells at another, Da Bao. "That one year, you were the one who got caught by the discipline squad smooching next to the literature department's lotus pond, weren't you?" Undoing his tie, Da Bao throws wild, desperate glares: "Hey, my wife is here!" If ex-wives are some of the world's most frightening beasts, college buddies are surely even worse.
We watch the sweat drip off Da Bao and hit the table. No one comes to his rescue.
Our classmate's tone turns earnest. "Seriously, skirt chaser, the girl from the Chinese department who killed herself. Did that have something to do with you? And when did you break up with that chick from our dorm?"
Da Bao's wife can't bring herself to listen and leaves early. Da Bao gets drunk. Short is the life of man; long is the night with friends.
Oh, how the '80s were fine. Boys with shaggy hair and clutching roses spied a girl and said: "Spring's here, come with me." And so went the prettiest one from the foreign languages department. The poets had found their market, and the campus thrived.
When the Cultural Revolution ended in the mid-1970s and the college entrance examination was reinstituted, the brightest people chose to study Chinese literature and shunned economics. Romance truly was in the air. But today, MBAs are the most prized degrees. Literature -- what's literature? Literature is no longer part of our consciousness; it contributes nothing to our vaunted GDP. Literature matters only for the adman. "Humanity, Poetic Living" reads a billboard tempting you to jump into the white-hot real estate market.
In the personal ads of the old days, "love of literature" was a guarantee of character. Now "personal assets" are the measure of moral standards. Back then, mind-bending dances peppered the campus; now, unending lectures from CEOs have taken their place.
At the end of the '80s, boys from the art department went on a kick of throwing impromptu dances. These were the same boys who copied Van Gogh paintings on the sly and bought a secondhand motorcycle with their earnings. About 10:30 p.m., "Auld Lang Syne" would begin floating out of the dance halls, and they would wait at the bridge closest to the girls' dorms, leaning against their bikes in that James Dean sort of way. When they saw an innocent and unsuspecting girl pass by, they'd rush up, full of profundity and chivalry, and say, "Mademoiselle, may we be so honored as to invite you to attend our art department's all-night ball?" The "art department" was still a selling point, motorcycles were cool and the words "all night" appealed to the prodigality of youth. The girls would look at one another. The long-haired boy would go one step further: "There will also be coffee and cake."
So the girls would sit on the motorcycle with strangers who took them to a classroom, pitch black, with eight or nine boys and a half-broken boombox. The promised coffee and cake existed only on canvas. Fully aware that they'd been had, the girls would nonetheless dance the night away. A few of the boys and girls even fell for each other.
But after just a few years, the coffee and cake came off the posters. Arts and literature, move over; now's the time for practicality and ambition.
Everyone began working jobs during the school year, so a certain shrewdness and materialism naturally seeped into campus life. Students began calling each other Mary and Judy; relationships became Westernized as well.
Before, what did we know about privacy? We swapped clothes and, when a date knocked, that new pair of shoes would find its way onto any feet, never mind the size. Romances and heartbreaks were affairs of the entire dorm. But now, Mary and Judy work together at Siemens, and there will be only one job opening after graduation. Competition corrupted campus life. When Judy finds out that Mary has a hushed relationship with one of the company's higher-ups, she goes home for a good cry and reclaims her lipstick and sunglasses, but not before tossing Judy an insult: "Out-of-towner." By Shanghai standards, you may as well be a Martian. The dorm splits into two camps.
Today, I teach at a university and often chat with students. They no longer mouth the words "she married rich" with scorn. Cynicism and grandeur have swept aside love and emotion in the manner of a Chinese song now famous on the Internet:
Love is like a pile of dung, flush it down and it never comes back.
Love is like a pile of dung, once it's out, it can't be blocked even if you try.
Love is like a pile of dung, sometimes it's the same, sometimes it's not.
Love is like a pile of dung, hold it in long enough, and it comes out as just a fart.
Plato said that "when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them." In China, as our love has changed, so have we.
hmmjx@126.com
Mao Jian, a writer based in Shanghai, is the author most recently of "Neither With You, Nor Without You," a collection of essays and reviews in Chinese. Translated by Xingyu Yang and Mei Zhang.
- Re: Dispatch: Shanghai - In New China, Love Can Get Messy By Mao Jianposted on 11/11/2007
世界总是变化的,一代人有一代人的生活。 - Re: Dispatch: Shanghai - In New China, Love Can Get Messy By Mao Jianposted on 11/11/2007
FYI: I did a search for this article, it was from Washington Post, Sunday outlook today.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/08/AR2007110800949.html?nav=rss_print/outlook
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