Shanghai – Monsieur Tortue, mon sauveur!

On the floor in a Chinese Metro station. If you're laughing now, you're a racist.

Before I saw Tortoise Man – or Monsieur Tortue, it sounds funnier in French – I had been left a little cold by Shanghai. It’s the name, I guess - exotic, dangerous, sleazy, Eastern Shanghai. So why did it look and feel so clean and safe and sterile? In a couple of weeks in China I had understood absolutely nothing – the language sounded like a Tuvan throat singer raping a duck, the food all tasted like toenails and phlegm dipped in MSG, the people were all unfriendly, closed-faced mucus factories. It was wonderful – just what China should be. But Shanghai seemed different, or rather, not different enough, if you catch my drift. I spent my first week ordering burgers and quesadillas from English menus and chatting to friendly, engaged young people with good English. I kept expecting someone to tell me that I had caught the wrong train and was in fact in Singapore. I should say at this stage that friendly people in Shanghai are hardly the norm. In fact Shanghaiese on the whole are the most fantastically rude people I have met, but at least they’re actively rude – pushing, sneering, eye-rollingly rude –  rather than the blank, apathetic coldness I had encountered in the rest of China.

            So it was with a happy mix of relief and confusion that I saw a middle-aged man in a yellow hard hat holding a walking stick with a medium-sized tortoise balanced on top. Both of them, tortoise and man, blinked slowly and gazed impassively at the steady stream of high-heeled women and speeding taxis on the busy inner-city intersection. I perched on the seat of one of a thousand scooters parked on the footpath and watched for a good 15 minutes. He didn’t appear to be selling it for food, as I had suspected. He just stood there, as immobile as the tortoise.

            “What the fuck is that about?” I asked myself sagely. Why was it balanced on a stick? Was there some significance to the hard hat? It couldn’t be that dangerous, could it? None of the locals even looked twice. I was definitely in China.

            Once I had established that fact I spent the next month completely ignoring it. Instead, I lived the expat life – Singaporean beer, Mexican food and Irish pubs. I moved into my girlfriend’s flat, an anonymous but cozy concrete box halfway up a concrete tower surrounded by other concrete towers so similar they had giant numbers painted on them, for a too-brief but very sweet taste of domestic bliss. In the mornings I hung out of the window and watched the heads of a dozen pensioners moving in synchronized slow motion as they practiced Tai Chi. A couple of times a week men in suits let off fireworks to celebrate a new business venture. The rockets screamed up between the apartment buildings and rattled windows and set off car alarms as they burst and sent sizzling sparks bouncing through 12^th story windows. The businessmen would duck behind trees and benches and slap each other on the back, giggling until their supply was exhausted. Then they would pass around packs of imported cigarettes and go and get drunk. Or drunker. If Alicia wasn’t working we wandered down straight, broad roads lined with hole-in-the-wall restaurants and convenience stores and through underpasses over which even broader, straighter highways ran. Occasionally we caught glimpses of the Shanghai that was – an old man in a blue suit mending shoes next to an ancient single-speed bicycle or a row of wobbly houses with swooping roofs of cracked tiles. But mostly it was straight lines, concrete, glass and traffic.

Laundry day.

Twice we caught the Metro to The Bund where we pushed past the ‘mother tigers’ – middle-aged women, short and stocky with gravity-defying hair and hard elbows who love to storm onto train carriages the moment the doors open and have generally taken rudeness to a whole new level – to get off the train and walk to the river front. On one bank an unrelieved row of stern Victorian sandstone monsters wraps around the river. Across the river, beyond the chugging barges and tourist cruise boats, Pudong rises. With its spires, curved glass and primary colours, it looks uncannily like the city where TV’s The Jetsons lived.

Pudong. Meet George Jetson..

Every night we went out and lived large in the expat Disneyland that is Shanghai. We were joined by a veritable posse of Alicia’s English teaching mates as we hit the best value burger and beer joints, buffets and smoky local dives. It was marvelous. Most nights someone would decide it was a good idea to go to a club. And they were right, because Chinese clubs are fantastic. Young, hip people dress up and sit at high tables that occupy the space where the dance floor should be. They drink warm beer and play nonsensical dice games and scream conversations at each other over ear-splitting Korean screech pop. By the end of the night paralytic couples dry hump each other on couches while fat men with soft hands chain smoke and watch them intently. Our favourite club was a strange, curving place reached by mirrored tunnel. Think of the Starship Enterprise if it had been designed by Liberace and captained by Elton John. Like that only less restrained. The music was routinely awful and every night we were kicked off the dance floor for an hour while an odd little man in a white suit and enormous sunglasses mimed songs that none of us liked. But it had a big round bar in the middle and the $8 cover charge included all drinks. Most nights at around 4am someone would sit up abruptly.

            “Shit, guys. We’ve got class in 4 hours.”

            Everyone would sigh and finish their drinks and stagger outside. The best Mandarin speaker, or if it was a really heavy night just the person who could still speak, would hail a taxi while the rest of us pretended to have sex in a garden bed, or gave each other piggy back rides, or sang obscure 90’s pop ballads. After the taxi ride home, those of us who lived near each other would eat armfuls of grilled chicken skewers and oily fried rice served in a plastic bags before stumbling home.

The crew

Many thanks go out to Adrien, Stu, James, Sean, Dave, Marquia, Dorothee, Greg, Matt, Chris, Claire and especially and always to Alicia for showing me a ridiculously good time and for being my surrogate Shanghai family. After yet another tearful goodbye to Alicia, I boarded a train to Beijing – alone again and armed only with an out of tune ukulele and my native wit and charm. Oh dear.