Shanghai Days

We're in the final stretch. There's not many days left before it's goodbye China and so I'm spending the remaining time back in Shanghai, avoiding any more trains and planes save for the one that will carry me back to LA. So turns out Shanghai learned my time here is short and that I had been hoping for sunny weather in which to explore and romp about the city. Well, Shanghai says to itself, it says, “Ain't no way I'm letting that jerk off easy,” and at that very moment the clouds opened up and the rain came a' tumbling down.

It hasn't let up. A quick check on the internet forecasts stormy days the entire rest of the week. If Shanghai had a face, it would have my foot in it.

Ness and Ramsey are back to work, welcoming a new class of students who already speak way better English than I could ever hope to speak Chinese, even if a funnel was shoved down my throat, foie gras-style, and giant chunks of Mandarin were forced through. Considering it took me practically this entire trip just to remember how to count to ten, I'm not sure there's hope. Bu Hao.

I joined Ness and Ramsey in some of their classes on Tuesday and had fun soaking in that whole dynamic. My favorite thing was hearing the “American” names the students had chosen for themselves. Most students stuck to the conventional ones: Michael, Lily, Kristen, etc. Others were a little more...creative, with names like Tree, Grape, Demon, Linky, and BlackSister (yes, BlackSister). One guy so proudly announced his name, Fantasy, that we just didn't have the heart to tell him that Fantasy is a stripper name. Well, Ness, didn't have the heart. I would have told him if she'd let me.

When not at the university, Ness and I have been wandering the soggy streets of Shanghai in search of good restaurants or cheap souvenirs to bring home to the nieces. Saw the Propaganda Poster Art Center, stuffed away in the basement of an apartment complex (super fun to find!). The posters are all original prints, and there are hundreds. Upon learning our nationality, the owner, Yang Pei Ming, followed us around and pointed to the images of long-nosed crazed-looking American caricatures and chortled incessantly (It was weird, but you kind of just had to laugh along with him.) When I pointed to my own long nose and then back at the posters, that set him off even further. He spoke pretty decent English and helped us decipher a lot of what were were seeing. In the posters, Mao is always depicted as valiantly leading peasants and workers against Western imperialists, or holding smiley children, or surrounded by a village family, their modest home stuffed with the bounties of harvest (this while the Great Leap Forward was starving millions). One of my favorites was of students on a train, waving their little red books happily as they are being sent to the countryside to be re-educated through hard labor. Gotta love that stuff.