September 19, 2006 – Intersection of Laoshun Lu and Zhang Yang Lu

September 19, 2006 – Intersection of Laoshun Lu and Zhang Yang Lu

I’m in Pudong Shanghai sitting on a low concrete wall at the entrance to a Starbucks on the northeast corner of the large shopping complex called Times Square across from Nextage, the second largest department store in the world. Times Square is a building only slightly smaller than the over five story high, block-long Nextage. The two giant structures sit on the eastern corners at the intersection of Laoshan Road and Zhang Yang Road. The intersection is alive with pedestrian and automotive traffic. The air is filled with the sounds of blaring horns, the shrill of intersection crossing guards whistling to chastise the constant stream of foot and auto infractions that continue to occur despite their shrill commands to cease.

There is a cooling breeze blowing making the late summer day quite pleasant to be out of doors in a long sleeve print dress shirt and a pair of $12 Costco jeans. I’ve just been told by the guard outside Times Square that I cannot sit on the wall but can take an outdoor chair in Starbucks’ patio dining area: three round tables each with a nondescript umbrella and four web vinyl metal frame chairs. The entire exchange was carried out in Chinese but I understood the body language. I had initially considered sitting in the chairs but felt I needed to buy a Caffe Latte to earn the privilege, but obviously not. How much is a double Caffe Latte in Shanghai? I learn after inadvertently ordering two that they cost 25 RMB each ($3.16), the pair about the cost of a packet of underwear at Nextage.

I sit at the table with my plastic bag purchase from Nextage beside the two cups of latte I just purchased, one capped the other open so I can sip as I write in my Reporter’s Notebook the impressions of the busy intersection. Looking diagonally across the intersection, there is a nine story building on the right. The corner of the rectangular building facing me comprises a cylindrical structure that extends a floor above the main structure. The cylinder is wrapped in a metal mesh that hides a structure of equally spaced vertical beams with horizontal beams crossing between the vertical ones at equally space distances. Sitting atop the cylinder is what appears to be a crown, but is in reality the vertical and horizontal beams without the metal mesh covering. Two rectangular structures flank both sides of the cylindrical crown, everything painted a gray with the slightest hint of brown. The entire corner reminded me of a castle. The skyline of Shanghai is populated by buildings with characteristics that demand to be noticed.

As I write a young couple takes the table next to me and the man begins to talk loudly in Mandarin to his female companion. What strikes me about the exchange is the amount of talking the young man does. He goes on and on with short responses from his companion. It’s the opposite of most conversation involving a man and a woman. It’s as if he were giving a dissertation on some topic and she were interjecting comments on the points he’s making.

I notice that the wind has begun to gust and the stiff plastic bags containing my purchase from Nextage are flapping about. As I continue to write, a sudden burst of wind is strong enough to abruptly move the bag with enough force to send the second cup of latte tumbling off the table. It hits with a “plop” and the contents spill onto the concrete between my table and the table where the couple is seated. Luckily none of the liquid spills on me or my neighbors and I take the handful of napkins and begin to soak up the mess. The talkative male asks if he can help and I smile and shake my head no. I take soaked napkins and empty cup and cap into Starbucks. The lady attendant is already on her way out with a mop to clean up the spill. If I were into portends, I would think that the wind was telling me to move along, which I decide to do.

The older I’ve gotten the more pleasure I derive from walking about new places taking in the life on the street. When I was a young child, walking about each new place my family and I moved became part of my getting to know my new surroundings. It was the only thing I could afford to do. As a young boy, I recalled running about freely through the streets of Biloxi, Mississippi near our house. When I was old enough to be in school, I explored the streets of Morningside Heights in El Paso, Texas where I went to grade school a few blocks from our house. As a nine-year old I explored the suburban neighborhood of Ponce Puerto Rico somehow managing to communicate in pidgin Spanish with the neighborhood kids. As an older pre-teen I delivered papers on the streets of Lawton, Oklahoma. As a high-school senior, I walked the streets of downtown Tacoma and Seattle, Washington. The street life of a city tells a great deal about its economic and political health and much about the character of the place too.

Now as then, walking the streets of a city, I see the spectrum of humanity from the lowest economic strata to the highest. What strikes me about the byways of Pudong is that I didn’t see any souls who had given up. Perhaps they were there just as they are in any major metropolitan area living in boxes on the sidewalk, feeding themselves from the discards of others, but hidden away from the gaze of passersby. Along this stretch of Laoshun Road, I didn’t see evidence of them anywhere. Every soul along the blocks I walked seemed to be engaged in some kind of work, the lowest on the economic strata collecting recyclables, the highest collecting cash from the sale of goods and services. The character of this stretch of Laoshun Road was rampant entrepreneurship, mixed with an energy that was palpable. It was almost electric, a whole community of overachievers, all wanting to do something faster than their neighbor. This was the energy of a people suddenly grasping their own potential and being propelled by the realization.

I’m reminded of another time 43 years ago when as a young man I disembarked the train that had carried me from Yokosuka to Tokyo at Shimbashi station. It was mid afternoon as I recalled on a Saturday and I found my way to the Dai Ichi Hotel nearby the train station. Back then it was the “Holiday Inn” of Japan, a comfortable hotel with Japanese and Western accommodations. Dressed in a suit that I had made in Yokosuka, I checked in, dropped off my overnight case in my room and returned to lobby and out the front door to explore Tokyo. Walking along Chuo Dori to the Ginza, I recalled that same electric energy of people in a hurry to get their work done. As in Pudong, I kept coming upon high rise buildings under construction; this at a time when you could look out from Tokyo tower and not see any building over six or seven stories in height. When I returned to Tokyo twenty five years later the entire skyline was filled with skyscrapers. I had arrived in Pudong well after the start of this incredible building boom that continues around me as I walk, surrounded by skyscrapers and round the clock construction.

Three days later I’m in a taxi being driven to Pudong airport for a flight back to San Jose with a change of planes in Tokyo. It’s around 8:00 AM right in the middle of the morning rush hour and the traffic along Yanggao Road, a wide high-speed boulevard that is teaming with traffic and the constant sound of horns as drivers exhort one another to move along or get out of the way; our cab driver aggressively moving from lane to lane making headway against the slower moving traffic. The air is filled with the exhaust of countless cars, trucks, and buses as polluted if not more than LA during the worst of the smog in the 1950s and 60s when pollution laws were nonexistent. This is the social cost of progress and you could argue to price a society pays to pull itself in line with other wealthy nations.

What strikes me, however, is the infrastructure. The roads are newly built, pothole free and made for high speed travel. The traffic lights at intersections are new and the computer system controlling them efficient enough to keep traffic moving in all directions. Everywhere you look the infrastructure has kept pace with the runaway development: roads, airports, communications, airlines—the planes are some of the newest I’ve traveled in a while. This is a place in its ascendancy, a sharp contrast to the U.S. with its once envied highway system cracked and pocked full of patched potholes; an airline industry that running in bankruptcy, an electrical grid that strains under the weight of extreme heat and cold.

The contrast is startling and it makes me a bit sad that we no longer seem to have the will to maintain our crumbling culture. I’m reminded of an aging fat cat with clogged arteries, a mind that beginning to loose intellectual sharpness, a body that would rather languish on a couch in front of a TV rather than compete in some strenuous activity. I guess cultures like people grow old. Old as I am, I can relate, though I refuse to become sedentary in my declining years—death will have to catch me, I don’t plan to sit about waiting for him.