July 20, 2006 – A Sunday Afternoon in Shanghai

July 20, 2006 – A Sunday Afternoon in Shanghai

It’s Sunday July 9th and I’m on Zhangyang Road in Shanghai at the intersection of Nan Quan Road. I’m looking down Zhangyang toward what appears to be a few long blocks of retail shops, restaurants, and hotels. In fact, I’m in the Pudong Lujiazui's finance and trading area, which largely didn’t exist a decade ago according to the People’s Daily Online—from an April 18, 2000 story entitled “Behind Booming Pudong.” The article said “Pudong was largely an area consisting of shanty houses, dusty factories and farmland, neglected for centuries, until the Chinese government announced its development and opening to the rest of the world on April 18, 1990.” In the decade after that proclamation, “nearly 6,000 companies from 67 countries and regions worldwide, including 98 of the world's 500 tleading multinational, have invested some 29.4 billion U.S. dollars in Pudong.” I had no way of verifying this claim but if the skyscrapers surrounding me along Zhangyang Road were any indication, I would say that the article came close to the truth.

The western brands blaring out from billboards large and small mounted on the lower floors of high rise building are a testament to the migration of western culture into the green field that was once rural Shanghai: Nike, Adidas, Starbucks, Papa John’s Pizza, Kodak (on the back of a bus more modern than those found in U.S. cities)… Marketing and brand development have not been lost on the Chinese either. One ten-story, block-long building across six-lane Zhangyang Road from where I stood contains four huge billboards, three stories tall and about a fourth that size wide. The first shows two American-looking teenagers, a boy and girl, dressed up in denim jeans and cool button-down the middle, dual breast pocket with flaps western shirts in a blue-green-white plaid (his) and red white plaid (hers) pattern. They are both leaning their butts on top of a waist high five-horizontal-white-plank fence with green rolling hills in front of a distant dense forest in the background. The Texwood Group produced the ad and their line of denim clothing for men and women are called the Apple Collection. Pretty savvy marketing if you ask me. The next billboard to the left shows a glimmering silvery skyline of skyscrapers and Chinese characters, so not easy to discern their products. The third in the line shows a lone attractive slim young Chinese woman with tight-fitting, low-rise jeans and a turquoise tube top that reveals a bare midriff. Needless to say, she’s striking a pose that’s pure hip. The fourth billboard shows the head and shoulder of an attractive Chinese woman clad in a pearl colored dressing gown, I think. She is posed in three-quarter profile with her left shoulder slightly forward in the picture. She is looking out at the viewer her face turned slightly to the left, the hint of a smile on her face. A mirror is off to her right reflecting her face in one-quarter profile—has she just completed applying her morning make-up? Hair pulled back tight behind her head reveals a flawless high forehead, warm brown eyes, full pinkish-red, lip-sticked lips. She’s pitching cosmetics—successfully I would surmise.

Further down Zhangyang Road, I see a green traffic sign, not unlike what you’d see in any U.S. city, with “Times Square” in English and Chinese as well as the words “Underground Carbarn” below next to the international sign for parking: the white letter “P” within a white-outlined box. As I reach the intersection of Pudong and Zhangyang Road, I’m confronted with one of those intersections that you now find on the Las Vegas Strip. No foot traffic allowed across the surface streets, rather pedestrian cross each road via an elevated walkway accessed by a wide stairway at right angle to the raised bridge. The structure spans the four sides of the intersection. I determine to cross to the other size of Zhangyang Road by proceeding east over Pudong Road then north over Zhangyang then west over Pudong once again. In the process, I pause along the bridge to take pictures with my Nikon Coolpix digital camera of the tall buildings surrounding the interchange as well as the stream of traffic along Pudong and Zhangyang Road. Standing still from a lofty perch above a stream of traffic gives the impression of watching life fast forwarded. On the southeast side of the intersection I’m facing northwest and there I see a white façade five stories high that curves right from Zhangyang to Pudong Road. It stands in front of a larger structure half again as high, though the structure behind is the 10-story building with the four large billboards I saw earlier. To the left of the high rise is a structure that resembles square boxes unevenly stacked atop one another—beige in color and apparently condos, if the art deco windows on each box are any indication.

The stark white façade has eleven three-story high, ten-foot wide arched openings that allow pedestrian traffic access to a covered walkway in front of a store entrance behind. On the surface of the façade is written in colorful orange and red letters “Soccer Beer Festival” which is to the left of a huge soccer ball atop three green wide wavy lines—signifying grass? Above the grass and to right of the ball is a string of Chinese characters, probably inviting viewers to the beer bash. To the right of this large display is a large dark green circle with the word NEXTAGE written so that the NEXT is inside the circle in white and the AGE trails off outside the circle in the same green color. According to Frommer’s Travel Guide, Nextage is the second-largest department store on earth, surpassed only by Macy's in New York, which has 2.15 million square feet of retail space according to the Guinness Book of World Records—Harrods in London by contrast has only 1 million square feet. Nextage does have a Guinness record of its own, though. On December 20, 1995, the store recorded 1.07 million shoppers. The ten-story tall block-long building with the four billboards I saw earlier walking along Zhangyang toward Pudong Road was the outside of the huge shopping structure.

I look across the road from Nextage and see Times Square written at the top of a structure not quite at tall as its cross-street rival. It’s actually a shopping mall that had enough pull with the city to get a street sign on Zhangyang Road pointing to its parking structure “carbarn”. If these shops indicate the amount of disposable income of Shanghai residence, I have to believe the average citizen is doing well financially.

The heat and humidity of this mid-afternoon Sunday is finally beginning to get to me. I’ve shot two 64 Mbyte flash memory cards worth of pictures in my Nikon and I’m in dire need of a drink. I decide to retrace my steps to return to my room at the Sofitel Jin Jiang Hotel. As I walk toward the Intercontinental Hotel about a block or two away, another lady on her bicycle with a wooden box full of faux designer watches mounted behind her seat approaches me and offers a special two-for-one deal. I smile and shake my head no. She persists and I point to the perfectly good watch I have on my left wrist. She increases the offer to three for one. I hold firm to my refusal though I continue to smile as does she, both aware of the game we’re playing. She finally relents and I walk on. As I near the Intercontinental, I notice an outside display sponsored by Lenova, the Chinese computer maker that purchased the IBM consumer desktop and notebook PC business. In a public square on the west side of the Intercontinental Hotel, Lenova has fenced off a square area with waist high white plastic fence containing the word “Thinkpad” written along its length. The square resembles a scaled-down soccer field complete with green artificial turf lining running along the plastic fence but leaving the red brick paving the public square visible in the center. The side of the area opposite the street has a small goal net guarded by a wooden goalie arms and legs outstretched like one part of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man—arms outstretched horizontally and legs spread apart. His face has a photograph—presumably of a famous soccer goalie—pasted on it. I watch three contestants unsuccessfully attempt to kick the soccer ball through the goalie. The last one came close enough to garner applause from the crowd standing outside the plastic fenced field. France and Spain were about to meet in the final game of the 2006 Soccer World Cup.

I move on just as drops of rain begin to fall. At first the drops are intermittent and I decide to cross back over Zhangyang where there is some shelter to get out of a downpour. I reach the other side as a sudden spurt of rain drops sends everyone looking for shelter. As soon as it starts, it ends and everyone carries on including me as I start walking along Zhangyang the way I came. Instead of returning to Century Avenue, I turn right on Dongfang Road, which is the address for the Upscale St Regis Hotel as well as the Hotel Nikko and Holiday Inn. This stretch of road lacks an abundance of shade and I found walking in the direct heat tiring. I reach Pu Dian Road and consult the tourist map I had been carrying only to realize that I’ve gone out of my way and must backtrack further to Century Avenue. I turn left on Pu Dian and with few other pedestrians I trudge along a sidewalk that passes in front of a line of deserted office buildings, their workers off on Sunday. I make it back to Century Avenue turn right following it for a block to its intersection with Yanggao Road South where I turn right again and make my way back to the Sofitel and a cold shower and plenty of water. Sunday in Shanghai, somebody should write a song, something Bobby Darin could sing were he still around.