Back in China, August 2023: Notes from Tianjin and Shanghai

(A personal essay. Mostly impressions, basically no useful information.)

At the end of July, for various reasons, our summer plans were a mess. At the same time, everyone in the group chat was saying how much we missed one another. I happened to check the price of flights. It was not bad. So I suddenly decided to go back to China for a visit. We packed in a frantic rush and left. I forgot the camera, which was a massive mistake.

The flight connected through Abu Dhabi, where I had never been before. The airport was not large, slightly chaotic and absolutely packed. Then came a moment that hit me hard. I was sitting at the gate for the second leg as more and more Chinese passengers gathered around me. Suddenly I realized that this was the first time in three and a half years that I had seen so many Chinese people in one place. Everything came rushing back at once.

Daxing Airport is enormous, and it is a long walk from the gate. Our flight arrived in the morning, so the terminal was nearly empty. I collected the luggage and got out very quickly. For the record, it took about thirty minutes from landing to exit. A typhoon happened to be passing through that day. It was raining across Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei, with flooding in many places. The eighty-kilometer drive took two hours.

In Tianjin, metro construction sites seemed to be everywhere. The roads were still chaotic. Many shops along the street were closed, yet the traffic and the crowds kept surging. Driving felt tense and disorderly. But I knew it at once: this was still Tianjin, the hometown I knew.

At the hotel, the service at check-in stunned me. Five stars! I had stayed at the same hotel on my last trip and already liked it. This time it was even better. The warmth of the conversation, the speed of check-in, the almost invisible way someone guided us all the way to the room, then vanished like lightning. Flawless.

That became one of the strongest impressions of the entire trip: how dramatically service had improved. Tianjin stood out. Couriers, waiters, taxi drivers, shop assistants, every sort of service worker I met was capable and genuinely friendly. Even the old guys at traditional restaurants who once carried themselves like local emperors had changed. And there was no tip, nor any need for one. Honestly, it was startling.

My days in Tianjin were mostly spent sleeping and being treated to meals. Alcohol and jet lag kept me in a fog. I would wake up to the overwhelming warmth of classmates, friends and family, which of course led straight into the next round of fog. That sounds negative, but I am not complaining at all. I had grown used to solitude. To be suddenly wrapped in so much affection felt warm, and also left me a little unsure what to do with myself.

Then I left Tianjin for Shanghai. The neon was still there, the old cosmopolitan city still glittered, my second hometown.

On the way there, and after I arrived, I kept asking myself why my feelings for Shanghai seemed a little stronger than my feelings for Tianjin. Eventually I found the answer. The best years of my life were spent in Shanghai.

I love Shanghai. She is covered in scars and still absolutely wonderful.

Traffic jammed as soon as we reached the Yan'an Elevated Road from the railway station. For a moment I felt as if I had been pulled back more than a decade, back into the old sensation of going home. The streets flickered past the window like slides. Memories woke up one after another and mixed with the present. Real and unreal at the same time. Almost weightless.

I stayed on the Bund. It was packed. How packed? Both the pavement and the road were blocked, and even on foot I sometimes had to step into the traffic lane to get through.

I walked from the Bund toward People's Square, along Nanjing Road, Fuzhou Road, Guangdong Road... I felt as if I were inside a film, but a strange one. Its timeline was out of order. Its key frames were stacked on top of one another. The picture would not hold still. It was beautiful and impossible.

Back at the university, I walked the nearby streets. Everything felt familiar, as if I had walked them countless times and had only just stepped away.

The old residential compounds looked the same. I wondered how many of the people were still the same too.

The university was on holiday and nearly empty. Walking there bent time again. I felt as if I were heading to the cafeteria. Then I saw the dormitory and was dragged straight inside a memory: playing games in front of a CRT monitor, no air conditioning, cold showers in summer, and of course no hot water at all.

The supermarket was still there. The cafe was gone. The print shop below the dormitory and the entire little commercial street had disappeared.

The IC-card phone booths vanished with the renovation of the southwest building.

The library looked almost unchanged. I could not get in, of course, so I could only look from outside.

Eventually the heat defeated me and I had to take a taxi back to the hotel.

That evening I walked around People's Square. Raffles City, once the noisy place where everyone met, had faded. The small restaurants on Fuzhou Road and Guangdong Road were still loud.

All the taxis had become Roewe electric cars. Qiangsheng was still there. So was Dazhong. But ride-hailing had arrived, and neither company had its old dominance.

I cycled all the way to Xintiandi. Perhaps because it was a weekday, there were not many people, and foreign visitors had become rare. I tried to order a drink at Starbucks and was told they had nothing. The attitude was cold. Surprising.

I kept going to Huaihai Road, from Lane Crawford to Hermès. The old brilliance was gone. Few people, dim lights. Many years ago, I first heard Xu Wei's song "That Year" on Huaihai Road and disappeared completely into it. Years later, I think of that year and the Huaihai Road of that year. Seas turn into mulberry fields. Time flashes past like a white colt glimpsed through a crack.

Xu Wei, "That Year": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oymM45rvhdA