The Steussy Ranch

The last time I stepped foot in Mainland China was April 24, 1989. I had just spent a month in-country, seeing Guangzhou, Guilin, Kunming and Shanghai. I spent the final five days of my trip in that city. The night before I left, the evening sky was filled with the protests of students as the forces that culminated in the Tiananmen Massacre of June 5. My American host at Fudan University told me it was probably a football match.

Regarding Shanghai, it’s hard to imagine a deeper contrast. Nanjing East Road, today a vast shopping route, was a sparsely traveled narrow road. I remember a few dozen shops open, including a dusty old bakery (one of the few in China – bakeries are not part of Chinese cuisine), a bookstore with perhaps a dozen titles, a few magazine shops and little more. Dust was everywhere.

Shanghai had been an international city, an open port since the Opium Wars in the early 1800′s. Prior to that, it was simply a sleepy fishing and weaving village of little importance. As trade came through the area, foreigners moved in. By the beginnings of the 20th Century, while there were only 20 to 30,000 westerners living there, their army of Chinese laborers had built them a full city of western buildings, paved roads and the like.

In 1989, much of this was still visibly evident. Between the concrete monstrosities of communist construction, there were numerous beautiful mansions and villas for the wealth few. In the middle of the city was the abandoned British horse racing track. A gigantic part of the inner city, it was leveled to build the People’s Square park and complex of museums.

Today, Shanghai is again a cosmopolitan center of business, finance and trade.

Skyscrapers dot the skyline. Streets are littered with shops, banks and other modern delights. The remaining old villas of pre-communist China are marked by historical markers, but are otherwise not very noticeable between the modern, trendy constructions of the present.

But these were changes I was expecting. The news, after all, is full of detail on the changing face of China. But there were aspects of these changes that struck me to the core. Three things in particular that I was not expecting.

1) Chinese Backpackers and Tourists. When I traveled China in 1989, moving from one place to another was so enormously complicated, difficult and expensive, few Chinese people did so for pleasure. I remember talking to people in a village outside of Kunming. None of them had traveled anywhere expect to the provincial capital. And those trips were only by necessity, not to see the sights.

The Chinese backpackers were everywhere, taking pictures of everything. They look exactly like I did when I was one of the first independent travelers in China all those years ago. These people saw what we were doing, copied it, and made it theirs. The Chinese backpackers, in the swarming thousands, are my spiritual descendants.

Suzhou Redlight

2) Red Light Districts in Suzhou. Nothing prepared me for a red light district in the People’s Republic of China. Walking to a pub to meet a friend and watch World Cup Soccer one night, a Mama-san grabbed my arm and took me into her small pub to show me her girls. It simply shocked me. I’ve seen Manila, Hong Kong and the infamous Patpong District in Bangkok, but never expected anything here. There was one for foreigners (located on Shiquan Street, near the intersection with Fenghuang Street), and one that was exclusively Chinese south of the Night Market.

Suzhou Massage

A local resident told me that Shanghai had closed all of their redlight districts in preparation for the Expo, and that several of them had move to Suzhou, an hours drive to the west.

Friendly People

3) Talking to People. In 1989, Chinese people were extremely reticent to talk to foreigners traveling in their country. I don’t blame them; people with foreign connections were targets during some of the upheavals in the ’60s and ’70s.

Today is different. It really is possible to sit down and talk with people. Not everyone, but lots of people are certainly open to just talking for a period of time. Common questions when they learn I can speak Chinese: “Where are you from?” “How do you like China?” “How many kids do you have?” “Four!?!?!?!”

It’s a different place. And, very largely, for the good. Twenty years ago I thought growing up Chinese was a terrible tragedy. I’m so happy to be proven wrong.

One of my Chinese professors once told me that learning any language is a graduating series of failures, coming at higher and higher levels. When you start a language, you fail at the simplest things. Then you can pass the salt and find the toilet, but you can’t determine who’s who in your friend’s family (a fairly complicated process in Chinese). And so on …

Re-acquiring the language after a twenty year hiatus was like this, only at warp speed. I’d listened to elementary CD’s at home in Southern California, which all seemed clear as a bell. But when I stepped in my first taxi on the first day in Shanghai and tried to tell the driver to turn left or right, my mouth opened and nothing came out.

It was like this for the first three or four days. The very simplest of statements came only with great difficulty. I moved into a youth hostel in Suzhou where very few people spoke English (the clientele were mostly Chinese backpackers). And there were days in that hostel when I would wake up in the morning, dreading going out and challenging my lack of language again. Several times, I thought I’d imagined ever speaking Chinese in the past. It was one of those ways the brain tricks you into thinking that you are someone special or different. No, I’d never done it.

Then, on Wednesday, after living in the hostel for three days, I negotiated changing my room to a nicer one. The whole negotiation and moving was done entirely in the language. One of the assistants in the hostel looked at me and said, “You speak Chinese now?” It was my first serious breakthrough. I was in heaven.

Every day after that had a breakthrough of one kind or another, very much like learning a language from scratch, but much, much faster. Phrases would come to my mouth, unbidden but remembered. The long phrase for percentage in Chinese was one. Thursday, I had a 20 minute conversation about my family with two cleaning ladies at the hostel. I’d been back in China for six days then.

The re-learning was not a smooth ride. While I gained confidence, there would always be somewhere to fall down. And once a conversation goes poorly, it becomes difficult to re-start it and convince your partner that, yes, you do understand what they are saying.

My professional conference started on Monday, June 28. I’d been in-country for ten days and, while not at all fluent, I was able to make myself understood and listen to other people. My level was still one where the language was a basic and blunt tool, not a thing of joy.

On my days back in Shanghai, before coming back to the US, I found myself again able to make simple jokes. Taxis had long ceased to be a problem. I could work my way around most forgotten or mis-understood words. I’d found part of my tongue, but not all of it. I can now remember being able to play word games twenty years ago, and know that those memories are genuine. And if I were to remain in-country for some time, I’d certainly re-acquire the ability.

But the last two days in Shanghai before boarding the plane were really very comfortable for me. My language was back, and I could use it.

I made it back from China. “So, how was it?” you ask.

Confusing, big, crowded, busy, noisy. Everything that you’ve heard, and lot’s that you haven’t. I plan on doing a few posts over the next few days, detailing some of the things that I was interested in.

As an overview, the trip was very successful. I gave a well-received speech and met lots of people from my industry in Suzhou. By coming ten days early, I was able to re-start my Chinese language skills from twenty years ago. And, I was able to get all of my techie-things more or less accomplished (bypassing the Great Firewall and posting to Facebook – getting my iPhone to work on a Chinese SIM card – and the like).

I expected to see lots of things: buildings, roadways and factories. I was not expecting to see others: Chinese backpackers, loads of Chinese speaking foreigners and an incredible invasion of American franchise stores.

If you want to see my photos from Facebook, but for some reason haven’t managed to, they can be seen on the following links:

Shanghai, my first day

Suzhou, my first day in a smaller Chinese city

Traveling in China

Day Trip to Shanghai

Back in Suzhou

Speaking at LISA, Five Star Hotel and a return to Shanghai

Seeing Nick and Aubrey, and my last day in China