Disappearing History Tour
Yesterday I woke up to a dusting of snow on the roofs of the buildings out my window and in the afternoon went out in it--the coldest, wettest day I've experienced here so far. I felt like I was late but reminded myself that while everything in New York takes me longer than I allow for, everything in Shanghai has taken me less. I was signed up for a walking tour run by a group called Historic Shanghai, expats who seem to have been here a long time, amazing super-nerds who have learned Mandarin and learned the place with a depth most don't aspire to.
We met in front of Confucius Temple in the Old City, about twenty of us, all bundled up and ready. I cursed myself for leaving behind my gloves (at home in Pudong) and my hat and scarf (at home in Brooklyn). We explored the temple first, saw stones that had been dredged up from nearby rivers and displayed as meditative objects of admiration for their longevity and shape, saw a woman who works at the temple directing another through a prayer, a blessing, saw trees covered with wishes, saw the temple garden. Then walked into the neighborhood.
To a bird the buildings might have seemed so low and disarrayed compared to the mammoth towers that loomed up in the near distance all around, but we got to know its layers and pieces, thanks to the help of our guide--a young Siberian woman named Katia who started getting to know the city when she came here nearly 13 years ago, just by walking around, looking for interesting things and taking photos. Then I guess she started learning the language and the history. She no longer lives here full-time but is clearly very invested, and through earpieces attached to radios slung around our necks, told us how the Old City neighborhood has been slated recently for redevelopment, a real big tragedy that she didn't see coming so soon. Certain buildings will be preserved, and it will be a long process of figuring out how to buy out the neighborhood, but that it's inevitable. I think in Shanghai and the other first-tier cities (Beijing, Shenzhen, Guangzho), this is a pervading theme and there is more to see regarding old China in smaller cities. (To explore in coming months.)
As my hands got number and the sky got grayer, we twisted and turned through older parts of the neighborhood, pausing to admire history that was all but vanished--a wall carving nearly peaking out of clumsy cement, a mansion with a balcony turned into an apartment, columns now serving as corners, murals with slogans from the revolution under peeling paint. We tucked into complexes where gates were ajar, murmuring, listening to stories of the people who had lived here, to the age-old tale of how each house had once been built by a family with wealth, and now, three generations down, had been divvied up in ingenious yet slapdash ways by the original family's descendants, their servants and their descendants.
We ended in a truly hidden place, not open to tourists, known as the Hermit's Library, one of the only Ming era houses remaining in Shanghai that's not been drawn and quartered, but anyway still falling down, very sad. Learned about the very difficult state of preservation here. In the decade Katia's known it, Hermit's Library, in particular, had fallen into more disrepair due to nearby construction and also weather. In pretense, efforts at preservation by outside parties have been blocked, selling tickets disallowed. One woman lives there, her name is Yuan, the caretaker, a job she had shared with her mother who now lives in Canada. Yuan, who let us in, used her flashlight to show us the ornate carved corners of the room in which she lives, piled with things. The house, a museum of dissolution, shards of pottery set out in rows, tables in the centers of rooms, scaffolding of unfinished wood elegantly built and tied with rope to keep the top floor from falling in.
Before we left her, Yuan took a photo of us in the miraculously bright courtyard, boasting she's very good at group photos after all these years of letting people in.
Before she left us, Katia congratulated us on being "hard-core" and I could barely use my hands to find my metro card and get home.