First things first.
When visiting Shanghai, be prepared to work with the restrictions that come to be imposed upon you within the framework of a communist government. At the personal front, you will not be allowed to access gmail and facebook directly. So if you think you will keep updating your status on either of these platforms regularly and smoothly, it's not going to work. You will need what is called a VPN - Virtual Private Network - a facility that will allow you to fake your real location and access information on your google or facebook account. This may rather be tedious for the speeds of internet may drop and all VPN sites may not allow you to access every virtual place you may like to reach to.
At the larger level, you will be subject to the Chinese land - which means all sorts of written and oral communication is non-English. There are many perspectives to this aspect, and I am still unable to resolve the pros and cons in my head. It may almost be impossible to communicate in China if you don't know their language. (something similar to visiting Kerala)! The tones, rhetorics, script, gestures - all may be different, including the way we count 1 to 10 on fingers. Thanks to an offline app from google translate, we could convey our everyday basics to shopkeepers and public around. Government officials, police and staff at metro stations etc. will be able to speak to you in English. But thats about it. You won't be able to read menu cards at restaurants, street signage, maps on phone, street iconography, shop names - everything is in Chinese. At once, you realize how incapacitated you are just because of the virtue of language. Think a step further, and you will understand the hegemony of English in the global scene. China clearly slaps the world with its secure and sound operations in mandarin.
I loved looking at the Chinese characters - they looked beautiful to my architectural eye. I particularly liked how contained they are into invisible squares - together forming a neat consistent outline. Their geometric construct appealed to me. Further, the fact that each character could be interpreted in multiple ways in the given context deepened my interest in the way their script must have been conceived. In a brief conversation with a Chinese student about how the script is written and understood, I learnt each stroke of character in Chinese guides the way in which it will be pronounced and spoken. At the same time, these are often derived from its visual counterpart in the real world. That means that the character for a tree would look like the diagram of a real tree. The script is inherently etymological, constantly hinting at the contextual specificity of the written word. Loosely, for example, mist will be written as "water in the air", or a particular fish will be written as "an animal from fresh water lake". Understanding the real world in this manner makes Chinese conceptually sharper.
It's not as if the Chinese don't know English. They use mobile phones, tablets and computers that are wired in English - to type Chinese characters and words. They are fairly fast at it, as one observes on metro trains while they type on WeChat or make a search on Baidu. WeChat is a fairly advanced version of Whatsapp in China which is used for a range of activities beyond chatting. You may hear people sending across snippets of voice messages all the time, as you walk along the streets. Further, the app can be used for announcements, payments, bookings, updating your own status, and so on. It's their mini version of Facebook. Baidu is the Google counterpart in China. It's primarily in Chinese and fairly limited in terms of its search outputs. A few Chinese colleagues informed me how scholarship is so difficult and gets limited through Baidu searches, how commercial it is to be filled with numerous advertisements, and how constrained its reach is. On some occasions, they remained curious about the references I kept mentioning in my conversations, for they had not come across them in their Baidu searches.
China does not support Google maps, so you have to use Baidu maps - where everything is in Chinese. They may not make any sense to you as an outsider unaware of their script! In present times, as a traveler, you can not move around a city without internet connection. If you have to be on your own, you should be equipped with your maps, apps and chaps. For this, you need a smart phone with a reasonable data and calling connection. Data and calling plans in China can be very expensive. However, it is possible to bargain your priorities for mobile plans in China. After being sold a fake SIM card along the street-side shop, I went to a registered mobile store to purchase a new one with the help of a local friend. He was able to negotiate for me a customised deal with more data, compensating on the amount of talk time! It is there that I thought what a brilliant idea it would be for buyers to be able to customise their mobile plans...something like buying vegetables as per your need. What it opened up for me is the lucidity and arbitrariness with which telecommunication companies actually fix prices for its consumers. Wouldn't it be useful to pay only for what and how you use - won't that also manage the burden on telecom lines more efficiently instead of making a population more consumerist?
Having spoken about the limitations, I must point out on the other hand that Shanghai is an extremely organized city. The metro lines make a web while intersecting with each other to connecting different neighbourhoods in the city. Neighbourhoods in Shanghai are almost analogous to those in Mumbai. Unlike my entry to Manhattan, New York, which was marked by a distinct starkness of the sky scraping buildings almost perspectivally covering up the sky, Shanghai's landscape wasn't really alienating. The scale of buildings and the street life in Shanghai are immediately relatable to an Indian city. One is not funneled between the tunneled sky scraping streets like in New York. Instead, streets are wider, buildings are fairly spaced out, optimally high, and further, the drying laundry & its infrastructure on building skins remind you of the lives that inhabit them.
Most parts of Shanghai have lanes dedicated for bicyclers. Bicycles have become popular in the city with the coming of rental companies like Ofo and Mobike that lend users the vehicle for as low as 1 RMB for an hour. You can pick and park the cycle in most parts of the city. Motorcycles and bikes on the other hand are electric and they do not make any noise on the roads. In narrower streets, they move effortlessly with pin drop silence. Sometimes, your footsteps are louder than the quietly moving vehicles. Cars don't honk unnecessarily, and roads are rather lively but quiet. Traffic rules seemed confusing to me because vehicles kept turning and passing by even when signals were red. Perhaps there were intermediate rules between slow movers like pedestrians and bikes which I could not investigate into.
Much built landscape of Shanghai that we see today is gentrified. Gentrification is a repeating narrative for its emerging urbanity, bringing a more consumerist dimension to the city. Gated communities and commercial-recreational zones are replacing older communal housing settlements. People who are moved from the inner city to rehabilitation spots are often compensated with money or property. Often, they do not have any right to protest against eviction. Thus, many end up accepting and moving to an apartment away from the city as allocated by the Government. Another dimension to this movement is the cultural fact that owning a house, for men, is a precondition for marriage. Many young Chinese men living in older fabrics await for renewal schemes to be able to own a property and move on with their personal lives. I understand that my explanation above has certainly flattened the complexity of such issues. It is a subject to investigate deeper. It is therefore, that the organizers of Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society were so eager to have my talk on our project "What is a Home?" wherein we had documented the stories of ten sites of rehabilitation and resettlement in the city of Mumbai.
Several young men came for the talk, including a philosophers, engineers, architects and artists. Most of them were interested in the question of "What is a home?" They shared their own stories and contemplations on the idea of a home - intellectual and physical. Some raised questions of existence and what it means to exist. One of them brought to light the etymological understand of the word - he elaborated how "ex" refers to "outside" and "ist" refers to the "inside" - and thus existence is about the movement between the inside and outside. Another young guy spoke about the pressure of owning a house after his marriage, which he contests with the idea of home as a shared social space, not necessarily physical. Several stories and ideas about the home came to light over the discussion, which almost collapsed in the helplessness of the political ideology that Shanghai, as opposed to Mumbai, operates within.
When visiting Shanghai, be prepared to work with the restrictions that come to be imposed upon you within the framework of a communist government. At the personal front, you will not be allowed to access gmail and facebook directly. So if you think you will keep updating your status on either of these platforms regularly and smoothly, it's not going to work. You will need what is called a VPN - Virtual Private Network - a facility that will allow you to fake your real location and access information on your google or facebook account. This may rather be tedious for the speeds of internet may drop and all VPN sites may not allow you to access every virtual place you may like to reach to.
At the larger level, you will be subject to the Chinese land - which means all sorts of written and oral communication is non-English. There are many perspectives to this aspect, and I am still unable to resolve the pros and cons in my head. It may almost be impossible to communicate in China if you don't know their language. (something similar to visiting Kerala)! The tones, rhetorics, script, gestures - all may be different, including the way we count 1 to 10 on fingers. Thanks to an offline app from google translate, we could convey our everyday basics to shopkeepers and public around. Government officials, police and staff at metro stations etc. will be able to speak to you in English. But thats about it. You won't be able to read menu cards at restaurants, street signage, maps on phone, street iconography, shop names - everything is in Chinese. At once, you realize how incapacitated you are just because of the virtue of language. Think a step further, and you will understand the hegemony of English in the global scene. China clearly slaps the world with its secure and sound operations in mandarin.
I loved looking at the Chinese characters - they looked beautiful to my architectural eye. I particularly liked how contained they are into invisible squares - together forming a neat consistent outline. Their geometric construct appealed to me. Further, the fact that each character could be interpreted in multiple ways in the given context deepened my interest in the way their script must have been conceived. In a brief conversation with a Chinese student about how the script is written and understood, I learnt each stroke of character in Chinese guides the way in which it will be pronounced and spoken. At the same time, these are often derived from its visual counterpart in the real world. That means that the character for a tree would look like the diagram of a real tree. The script is inherently etymological, constantly hinting at the contextual specificity of the written word. Loosely, for example, mist will be written as "water in the air", or a particular fish will be written as "an animal from fresh water lake". Understanding the real world in this manner makes Chinese conceptually sharper.
It's not as if the Chinese don't know English. They use mobile phones, tablets and computers that are wired in English - to type Chinese characters and words. They are fairly fast at it, as one observes on metro trains while they type on WeChat or make a search on Baidu. WeChat is a fairly advanced version of Whatsapp in China which is used for a range of activities beyond chatting. You may hear people sending across snippets of voice messages all the time, as you walk along the streets. Further, the app can be used for announcements, payments, bookings, updating your own status, and so on. It's their mini version of Facebook. Baidu is the Google counterpart in China. It's primarily in Chinese and fairly limited in terms of its search outputs. A few Chinese colleagues informed me how scholarship is so difficult and gets limited through Baidu searches, how commercial it is to be filled with numerous advertisements, and how constrained its reach is. On some occasions, they remained curious about the references I kept mentioning in my conversations, for they had not come across them in their Baidu searches.
China does not support Google maps, so you have to use Baidu maps - where everything is in Chinese. They may not make any sense to you as an outsider unaware of their script! In present times, as a traveler, you can not move around a city without internet connection. If you have to be on your own, you should be equipped with your maps, apps and chaps. For this, you need a smart phone with a reasonable data and calling connection. Data and calling plans in China can be very expensive. However, it is possible to bargain your priorities for mobile plans in China. After being sold a fake SIM card along the street-side shop, I went to a registered mobile store to purchase a new one with the help of a local friend. He was able to negotiate for me a customised deal with more data, compensating on the amount of talk time! It is there that I thought what a brilliant idea it would be for buyers to be able to customise their mobile plans...something like buying vegetables as per your need. What it opened up for me is the lucidity and arbitrariness with which telecommunication companies actually fix prices for its consumers. Wouldn't it be useful to pay only for what and how you use - won't that also manage the burden on telecom lines more efficiently instead of making a population more consumerist?
Having spoken about the limitations, I must point out on the other hand that Shanghai is an extremely organized city. The metro lines make a web while intersecting with each other to connecting different neighbourhoods in the city. Neighbourhoods in Shanghai are almost analogous to those in Mumbai. Unlike my entry to Manhattan, New York, which was marked by a distinct starkness of the sky scraping buildings almost perspectivally covering up the sky, Shanghai's landscape wasn't really alienating. The scale of buildings and the street life in Shanghai are immediately relatable to an Indian city. One is not funneled between the tunneled sky scraping streets like in New York. Instead, streets are wider, buildings are fairly spaced out, optimally high, and further, the drying laundry & its infrastructure on building skins remind you of the lives that inhabit them.
Most parts of Shanghai have lanes dedicated for bicyclers. Bicycles have become popular in the city with the coming of rental companies like Ofo and Mobike that lend users the vehicle for as low as 1 RMB for an hour. You can pick and park the cycle in most parts of the city. Motorcycles and bikes on the other hand are electric and they do not make any noise on the roads. In narrower streets, they move effortlessly with pin drop silence. Sometimes, your footsteps are louder than the quietly moving vehicles. Cars don't honk unnecessarily, and roads are rather lively but quiet. Traffic rules seemed confusing to me because vehicles kept turning and passing by even when signals were red. Perhaps there were intermediate rules between slow movers like pedestrians and bikes which I could not investigate into.
Much built landscape of Shanghai that we see today is gentrified. Gentrification is a repeating narrative for its emerging urbanity, bringing a more consumerist dimension to the city. Gated communities and commercial-recreational zones are replacing older communal housing settlements. People who are moved from the inner city to rehabilitation spots are often compensated with money or property. Often, they do not have any right to protest against eviction. Thus, many end up accepting and moving to an apartment away from the city as allocated by the Government. Another dimension to this movement is the cultural fact that owning a house, for men, is a precondition for marriage. Many young Chinese men living in older fabrics await for renewal schemes to be able to own a property and move on with their personal lives. I understand that my explanation above has certainly flattened the complexity of such issues. It is a subject to investigate deeper. It is therefore, that the organizers of Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society were so eager to have my talk on our project "What is a Home?" wherein we had documented the stories of ten sites of rehabilitation and resettlement in the city of Mumbai.
Several young men came for the talk, including a philosophers, engineers, architects and artists. Most of them were interested in the question of "What is a home?" They shared their own stories and contemplations on the idea of a home - intellectual and physical. Some raised questions of existence and what it means to exist. One of them brought to light the etymological understand of the word - he elaborated how "ex" refers to "outside" and "ist" refers to the "inside" - and thus existence is about the movement between the inside and outside. Another young guy spoke about the pressure of owning a house after his marriage, which he contests with the idea of home as a shared social space, not necessarily physical. Several stories and ideas about the home came to light over the discussion, which almost collapsed in the helplessness of the political ideology that Shanghai, as opposed to Mumbai, operates within.
No comments:
Post a Comment