The River at the Centre of the World (11 page)

And yet what made Shanghai so appealing to the foreigners who first settled there was an attitude among the local people that might well have prompted gentler sentiments than these. For unlike in the rest of China, where the barbarian foreigners were regarded by the Chinese with a deep and abiding contempt – after all, the inherent superiority of the Chinese was, and still remains, central to the national psyche – early settlers in Shanghai wrote of their distinct impression that they were, well, almost
liked
.

Few foreigners would go so far as to say the Shanghai Chinese admired or respected them – there was a general acceptance that a people with five thousand years of uninterrupted civilization behind them had some right to hauteur. One might not agree with it, one might try to ignore, skulking behind one's own mock-superior airs – the club's exclusionary policies, frequent reminders of who had won the Opium Wars, or of who had sacked the Summer Palace up in Beijing. But it was always there, and it would be a wise expatriate who would try not to fight it.

Yet in Shanghai there seemed less need to fight. It was always thought that here the subterranean hostility had abated somewhat, that the Shanghainese ‘were little afflicted’, as one writer put it, ‘with that peculiarly passionate hatred of the pale-eyed and fair-haired beings which was so widespread among the Cantonese.’ They seemed more open-minded here, more willing to adapt to foreign ways, more tolerant of the devils from across the water. The Shanghainese learned, happily and willingly, and masking their disdain, from the foreigners. And within this distinction lies the root, undoubtedly, of the future success of the city. Her location on the Yangtze is her greatest boon; her people, unique in all China (and speaking the ugliest of languages, a discordant mélange of Mandarin and Cantonese spoken by no one outside the Yangtze delta), are her greatest asset.

For while sin is at the core of Shanghai's reputation, the more sober reality – what allowed the city to survive and to prosper, and what made it less of a Gomorrah than it seems – was its unashamed and freebooting mercantilism. This was a city in which the trader was absolute king, a city (perhaps the last in the world) that was created by and for and utterly dominated by the demands of the merchant. Shanghai was a place so dedicated in its commitment to commerce that Hong Kong seemed by comparison a dreamy city of poets and philosophers. Shanghai was a place founded in the traditions of Genoa and Venice. It was guided by the same kind of aggressive self-interest that was invented by the Germans of the Hanseatic League – with the Rhenish traders of fourteenth-century North Europe replaced by the Britons and the Frenchmen and the Americans who came to China in the nineteenth. True, the merchant of Shanghai played, and he played hard and fast and loose, and there are those who will say he became unshackled from his moral guide-wires in doing so: that is one side of Shanghai's story, and the more titillating one for today's palates. But he also worked, and traded, conducting business on a breathtaking scale: the legacy of that side of the city is what remains. And this is what a place like Hazelwood stood for, or stands for today: the memory of sin on the city's surface, but the reality of sturdily respectable – or at least sturdily profitable – commerce underneath.

I walked down what used to be Avenue Joffre one spring evening to see something of that legacy at work. I was coming back from taking a stroll around what is left of Hazelwood's lawns, and I headed east, towards the winking towers on the Whangpoo. The avenue is now Huaihai Road, and though its name gives it stout revolutionary credentials,
*
and though for many years it was as dull and grey as ditchwater, it is now one of the liveliest of streets in any city, a Chinese version of the Ginza.

Coloured lights were strung in arches along its length. Small dress shops, tiny Japanese restaurants, sports cars parked outside nightclubs with their ubiquitous neon lure, the flickering Kara-O K signs, smart-looking cafés with names like Los Angeles and the wrongly spelled Cordon Blue. The street was choked with people – mostly young, nearly all Chinese: the Europeans stay on the six-mile strip of Nanjing Road, a few blocks north, where the prices are higher, the shops are open later and there is a McDonald's. Huaihai Road is by contrast a purely Chinese affair: the shops, the bars, the discos all Chinese-owned, the customers all from the suburbs and the tiny city streets called
hutongs
and the tower blocks of flats near by.

As we were passing one particularly glossy-looking bar, Lily suddenly beckoned to me: three girls were sitting together at a window table, each nursing a can of Coca-Cola. One girl was talking on a mobile telephone; there were three pagers on the table, each beside a pack of Marlboros.

‘Prostitutes!’ said Lily. ‘Can tell them a mile off.’

We sat down with them. None of the three spoke English, nor had any of them ever had a western client. The girl with the phone said her name was Xiao-an – Little Serenity – and she charged four hundred renminbi for an hour with a man. Did the police bother her? ‘They are often our best customers,’ she said, and the three exploded in laughter. She was not a Shanghainese – she had come down from the far north, after hearing how good the money could be. She thought she would stay in Shanghai a year, and then go back home to Harbin in Manchuria and set up a karaoke club of her own. ‘This is a good life,’ she said. ‘Shanghai must be like your New York, I think.’

Outside the window I could see two policemen, who must have been only too aware of what was going on. Indeed there were a lot of police in Shanghai: at every crossing one stood on a plinth, directing traffic.

I spoke to one of them: he was unarmed (although Lily kept insisting that all Chinese policemen did keep side arms under their shirts), but he did have a radio, and he would be able to get brother officers within thirty seconds if any motorist broke the law. Shanghai seemed to me one of the most aggressively policed of Chinese cities. Maybe it has to be: maybe the old habits of lawlessness – this was a gangland city, after all – have not yet died. Something of the sin remains.

And older citizens are brought in to help regulate matters too: old men with tattered red and green flags stand at every intersection to make sure people don't jaywalk, and that cyclists don't ride against red lights. Equally venerable men and women are employed by shops to advise innocents on how best to get onto an escalator, or how to find their way among the maze of stalls and corridors. ‘There was no unemployment in Shanghai under the old-style Communists,’ one old man remarked to me. ‘And there isn't any now, under the new ones. Everyone here works. Everyone here makes money, everyone makes his contribution to seeing that the city keeps going.’
*

This ancient directed me around a corner, to Joyful Undertaking Street (where I tried to explain to an uncomprehending Lily why a joyful undertaker would be hard to find) and the old pink building where the Communists first met in July 1921. It used to be a girls' school: now a museum, a shrine for the Shanghai faithful. Pictures of a young-looking Mao were on the wall, ranged beside those of the other twelve delegates at that first gathering. But I noticed that of this group, eight are dignified with full-page pictures in the brochure on sale in the foyer for a couple of renminbi. The others – an augury of things to come – have small and out-of-focus snapshots, and explanations in the rubric that they either had left or had been expelled from the
Party
, or,
horribile dictu
, had gone over to the Japanese.

We wandered idly through the school halls, looking at various icons of Imperial cruelty. A ticket that gave a worker in a capitalist tram-factory permission to spend only two minutes in the bathroom particularly exercised Lily – it made her so angry, in fact, that she immediately developed a spectacular nosebleed and had to be looked after by the crone who ran the place. The woman kept soothing Lily by saying how her red blood was a symbol of her socialist purity – she looked witheringly up at me while she delivered this homily – and demanded that Lily sign the visitors' book in blood. ‘It is a symbol,’ she kept saying. ‘A sign. I am very proud to know you.’ Lily, as perplexed as most modern young Chinese about the realities of Marxist-Leninism, made an excuse, signed the book in ink, and we hurried back out into the lights of Huaihai Road.

There, under one spreading tree a number of elderly ladies had set up ear-cleaning stalls. Nearby, younger masseuses offered to twist and pummel the tip of one of your fingers, promising thereby to make you feel younger and more active for the night ahead. Beside them was a man selling crickets' cages, and another offering steaming buns, ten jiao each. This was China still, no matter the neon, the mobile phones and bleepers, and no matter the distinctive rumble I could hear beneath them – a Manhattan-like rumble – of the brand-new subway trains rolling their passengers home.

The subways – one line is now ready, six more are to be opened before the end of the century – are already changing the lives of the millions who live here. One example came home to me especially vividly. A few years before I had been making a film in which I examined in some detail the life of a young Hong Kong bank worker, and of his opposite number in Shanghai. It was, back in 1988, a brutal comparison.

The Hong Kong man spoke English, had a huge flat, drove a two-year-old Toyota, worked in a vast air-conditioned skyscraper, took annual holidays in Thailand and California. His Shanghai counterpart, Ge Guo-hong, was a clever, rather intense young man who did exactly the same work for the same bank, but in a cramped and ancient office that stood not far from where I was now walking. He told me, rather sullenly, that he spent three hours in a dirty bus each day travelling to and from work, standing – never sitting; he could never find an empty seat – in the hot and muggy air. He lived in a tiny one-room flat five floors up – no lift, of course – and his wife worked in a factory: their combined earnings were such that neither had ever had a holiday. His life, he said, was not good.

I looked for him on this new journey, but in vain. I found where his old flat had been, but it had been demolished, and a hotel was being built on the site by a South Korean company. A shopkeeper who had appeared in the film remembered him, though rather vaguely. The last definite news was from two years before, when he heard that Ge's wife was living with relations across the river in Pudong, and had for a while worked as a waitress in the French-owned Sofitel on Nanjing Road, where she had been trying to learn how to speak French in the process. Had Mr Ge still worked at the bank, I reflected, and had he still lived in his old district, he would now be able to travel to his office in one of the new air-conditioned subway trains, and his journey – a trip that beforehand would have taken him ninety miserable minutes each way – would take him only nine minutes, and would cost no more.

His old office block had been knocked down six months before, and the bank is now housed on the tenth and eleventh floor of a skyscraper overlooking the Whangpoo, a building that is every bit as glittering as its parent in Hong Kong. When I went there and asked for Mr Ge, an ancient Chinese man operating an abacus at the back of the room, and who spoke impeccable English, said the name to himself over and over again. ‘Ge Guo-hong. Ge Guo-hong.’ He then turned to me and, in the rueful tones of an Oxford lodge porter, said: ‘Sorry, old man – the name doesn't ring a bell with me.’.

But then I found one of his friends, a man who worked in the bank's computer department. It turned out that Mr Ge was away from Shanghai and had been for ‘some years’. He was on special leave, studying at a university in Philadelphia. He was getting a doctorate and a command of English, and quite possibly a green card. There was more to it than that. The friend explained:

‘It was all to do with the film. You made it? You may not realize, but you changed his life in a very big way. Mr Ge was ashamed by what he saw when you compared his life with that Mr Wong, or whatever his name was. He became determined to do better than the man in Hong Kong. We all saw the film. The office people sent a copy up from Hong Kong – we looked at the tape time after time. We all felt the same way: we thought it was quite wrong that the Hong Kong people, who are not in any way as clever as we are, should do better than us.

‘So he has gone, sort of as our ambassador. He will come back, and he will be a great success. We will show those southern people how poor they really are!’

I asked the young man what he thought of the new Shanghai, symbolized by the Pearl Tower he could see from his window.

‘I like the new Shanghai,’ he said. ‘But that thing? I try not to look at it. It's not the kind of symbol I want to see. I am very proud of this city. But that – that looks, how to say it in English? somewhat vulgar.’ ‘Tacky!’ chimed in another man, who said he had been to San Francisco, and who knew American slang. ‘Yes, that's it – tacky.’

The bank's office is at the southern end of a half-mile stretch of castellated Imperial architecture that offers the world the best-known face of Shanghai. We have to thank a prescient taotai for its existence, however, and not the foreigners who built it. When the first settlements were being delineated – the Americans to the north of Suzhou creek, the British in twenty-three muddy acres to its south – the Chinese laid down a rule: to preserve the rights of coolies who used the towpath to track their grain boats up the Whangpoo and towards the Yangtze, no foreign building would be allowed within thirty feet of the river itself. So a line of stakes was driven in at the water's edge, and a wide road was created between the river and the new city. This was an esplanade to which the British gave the Persian name: the Bund.

The scale of the walkway was titanic. It was more like a seafront than a riverfront: a stretch of open land positively demanding that a slew of imposing buildings be built to march along its length. The great consulates and clubs and commercial houses all competed to oblige: the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank, the Yokohama Specie Bank, Jardines, the Shanghai Club, the British Consulate, the Chartered Bank, Butterfield & Swire, Victor Sassoon's Cathay Hotel, and the immense Maritime Custom House, with its tower clock that played a fair version of the chimes of faraway Big Ben, or by some accounts, the clock on Westminster Abbey, and which in any case the Shang-hailanders, as the expatriate community liked to be known, called Big Ching.