Too Much Too Much

I have kept on with saying Shanghai is too much; it's too far away, it's too intense, too insane, it's so future, so past, so alienating. And it is starting to wear thin, this constant awe at difference. But I think I'm getting somewhere new. This past weekend, as I was aimlessly biking on a too-short shared bike through half-built neighborhoods and over canals, desperately in search of an address my phone just would not translate, I decided that dense is what Shanghai really is, so dense with experience you can barely recognize yourself, especially not right away. But if you take deep breaths (only recommended on days when the AQI is below 150), if you have, if you make the time and the space, the density might start to dissipate.

I was on a bike on may to meet a friend, and coming from the third event in the last three days where I’d gotten to hear a genius woman writer talk about her work. On Thursday, there had been Gish Jen, a US-based fiction writer and visiting professor at my school. At our weekly faculty lunch series, she presented the essential ideas of her new nonfiction book, The Girl at the Baggage Claim. Her notion that we can think of two kinds of selves--Avocado-pit selves and Flexi-selves--on the surface had sounded to me simplistic, but is truly visionary in understanding the human tension between East and West, between individual-centered cultures and more collective ones. And on Friday, a friend suggested we meet for lunch at a restaurant where the Foreign Correspondents' club was hosting a talk titled, "How the West Got China Wrong," given by veteran journalist, Melinda Liu, sharing her experiences living and reporting from Beijing since the late seventies. Though Liu's throat was raw from a sickness, she persisted, regaling us with the moment she got shot down in a press conference by Deng Xiaoping (when the access was unimaginable compared to the tightness now), and reflecting on how her process has changed as she's seen the stories of China's recent history unfold. And on a lark, I'd just ended up at a Shanghai Literary Festival event. It was on the top floor of a beautiful old building on the Bund, where a sold-out crowd of Chinese students and older expats watched Hao Jingfeng in conversation with a local author and translator Austin Woerner. I had only started her award winning story, her only one that has been published in English that morning, called "Folding Beijing" (which you can find online in Uncanny Magazine). Jingfeng spoke at length about her inspirations, her fears, her process, her life as a scientist, as a mother, as a founder--with money she received for sponsorship after she was translated into English got some fame--of a company training kindergarten teachers in one of China's poorest mega-cities in curriculum centered on critical thinking.

As I biked, I made periodic stops, to check the GPS on my phone, just to confirm that I was on the right path, each time being sorely disappointed at how far I'd gone out of the range of my aim, each time putting the phone away and getting back on the bike and certain I got it this time, then again, after a few long blocks and a turn or two, stopping nad seeing I was wrong. The sun went from pleasant to punishing, my legs started to get sore, I felt more lost than I ever had, why had I agreed to this? Would my friend care if I missed her? This inner voice, a familiar tone of thinking for me, a way to hurt myself without facing the issue. But I would miss her, and this day. Here I was, finally, with nothing else to punish myself with, my phone finally at 10%, nothing left to do but keep on. Here I was in the Middle Kingdom, in 2019, able to ride a bike on a first day of spring; it was a very personal moment, but powered by something collective, too, something both magnificent and terrifying. And finally, late, sweaty, and blissful, I found my new friend and we meandered slowly, catching up as if we'd known each other for years, before we finally got to the art opening she'd wanted to go to. 

(Pictured, a tiny slice of said exhibition, a tiny pyramid of silk worms whose DNA had been injected with phosphorescence, by the conceptual artist Liang Shaoji. The exhibition is called "Growing" and it features "four pioneering artists working at the intersection of living organism, synthetic biology and ecological activism" and is showing at Chronus Art Center at M50 Artspace through June.)