The Lows of Shang-High

Shanghai cast me a strange look when I went to the theatre alone on a Tuesday evening. She didn’t understand. Why are you watching a play alone?

I saw the much-acclaimed Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land, a marvellous work created by one of Asia’s most highly regarded Taiwanese playwrights and theatre directors, Stan Lai. It was a superb theatrical adaptation of the Oscar-winning film. An unusual, refreshing and deeply entertaining synthesis of two romantically beautiful, yet political and hilarious stories of love, loss, and one’s longing for utopia, set in different times — one modern and the other period.

It told of two troupes of actors who, by accident, booked their rehearsals at the same time, and later discovered how the themes of their plays collide. But, annoyingly, there were two screens positioned awkwardly at each side of the stage, showing distractingly unsynchronised English subtitles.

There’s just something about Shanghai that’s not quite right.

On the following day, Shanghai took me on a motorbike ride at two in the morning to an open-plan bar that sells over 3,000 brands of beer from all around the world, fed me enchiladas and nachos, then put me into a taxi and saw me home at four. The bar is called Beer Lady. Shanghai spoke to me in her New York accent and invited me to a gallery at the Bellagio. Shanghai refused to seat me at a Szechuan boiled fish restaurant because the fish, sold by every half kilo, is too much for one person; yet went on to feed me a dozen fat, juicy pork and chive Shandong dumplings, dripping with unpretentiousness and broth.

Shanghai also spoke to me in Shanghainese — a svelte, willowy dialect, not at all jarring coming from a lady dressed in a finely embroidered qipao.

Apart from that, everything that Shanghai had given me was not Shanghai.

Shanghai is a port city; once it attracted the British, twice the Opium Wars, and countless times the world. Shanghai, also called the Paris of the East, is very much like Paris. The Huangpu River, like the Seine, splits the land into Pudong, the trade zone in the east, and chi-chi Puxi à la Rive Gauche in the west.

Shanghai is obsessed with the French phoenix trees because the Shanghainese believe the branches are where the immortal bird comes to rest its feet. Shanghai’s favourite word is “civilisation”. Everywhere in the city there were banners that screamed, “Be civilised!” and “You are the civilised culture!”

Shanghai tries very hard to be civilised, but I am not entirely convinced that everyone in her hands understands the meaning of civilisation in quite the same way.

Being in Shanghai is like being in a deluxe A380 — seeing the First Class passengers and those in Economy shoehorned into their respective spaces within very close proximity, separated by a tiny curtain, yet all moving in the same direction, at the same speed.

The similarity between Shanghai and Mumbai is that the rich live depressingly close to the poor; the difference being that, in Shanghai, the class system is fervently overthrown and everybody is conditioned to aspire to the same heights and to want the same things.

And you’ve probably guessed it. It’s the C word. Don’t make me say the C word.

What most people didn’t see, nor realise, is that Shanghai is marginally desperate and comically confused.

The Marriage Market in People’s Park is where cut-throat, geriatric Tinder representatives come to play. Parents pay a fee to “market” their children to potential suitors. There were walls and walls of get-me-hitched CVs, airing ghastly personal information for the public to pick and choose.

Your future in-laws want to know what you do (if you work for a foreign-owned company, definitely put that in), your Chinese zodiac (because a rabbit must not be with a tiger), your blood type, whether you own a car or property, and, most importantly of all, your monthly salary.

Don’t worry about explaining how meditation and your regular sessions of Tabata yoga have made you a better person. No need to tell them your opinions on gender equality or what a great sense of humour you have. It doesn’t matter.

As famously quipped by a female contestant on the country’s top dating television show: “I would rather cry in a BMW than smile on a bicycle.”

So if that floats your boat, know that someone out there is willing to cry you a river.

Infuriatingly, people think this is a Chinese thing, and the younger generation blame it on tradition and culture. It’s not. Not even close. Despite being born and bred in Malaysia, and being ethnically Chinese myself, I know.

Just as people use religion to mask their greed and instigate wars, tradition and culture are convenient excuses. I’ll tell you what — the one and only reason is that these parents are frankly bored. Bored out of their minds. Bellicosely and bulimically bored. So bored that they binge on their neighbours’ guff and purge it onto their children.

The older generation of Mainland Chinese grew up in a time when the country was toiling day and night to rise. There was not much money, not much entertainment — there was nothing. Now that China has joined the superpower club, they are beginning to lay down their ploughs and play dollhouse, catching up on all the playtime they lost in their youth.

It’s the hangover of social and economic reform. The one-child policy certainly didn’t help.

Tianzifang in the French Concession area is a faux marbling of alleyways, pigmented by boutique shops, art galleries, and a terrazzo of tourists. Decidedly quaint and ultimately meaningless. A self-inflated toytown where spending more than 45 minutes will likely lead you to buy something you don’t need.

There is little to say about Tianzifang, except that it’s somewhere you should go because the Shanghainese insist upon it. So go — then forget about it, until someone back in England asks if you’ve visited Tianzifang in Shanghai, to which you say yes, and move on to discuss something far more worthwhile.