douwangle

As I left the hostel today, I realized I have been wearing the same shirt for three days in a row. Granted, after a month of traveling, my shirt options are limited, but I did mean to at least give this one a bit of a break at some point. Oh well. After my shower I'll swap it out for another.

Today was going to be the day I went to Hangzhou, an apparently charming little town near Shanghai with a big, lovely lake to explore. Unfortunately, the forecast for Hangzhou for both of my remaining full days in China says thunderstorms, so I may not get to go, which is a big bummer. I considered braving the thunderstorms to go today, when they were supposed to be scattered as opposed to not-scattered, but I just didn't want to spend the whole day outside in the rain, at least two hours from my hotel and dry clothes. If by some miracle the forecast for tomorrow changes, I will go. For today, though, I decided instead to go to the Jade Buddha Temple.

The subway ride to the Jade Buddha Temple was the worst subway experience I have had in China. The first train I took wasn't particularly full, but people pushed on and off as if they thought they wouldn't make it. At the stop where I had to switch trains, people trying to get onto the train lined up all the way across the doors as they opened so that the people inside had to shove our way out, making the whole process half as fast and twice as horrible as it could have been. One man held his tiny baby in front of him like a shield as he pushed in at the front of the pack, which made me really angry. I got off the train alright, and the man with the baby got on with no more than the usual few minor bumps (the baby shield did not keep people from running into the man because they had to run into people to get off the train; at least they tried not to bump him hard), but I couldn't believe he wasn't more careful.

I was going to change trains at that stop, but I couldn't find a way to the other line that didn't involve turning in my ticket and needing to buy a new one. I resigned myself to the extra three kuai and set off for the transfer. The transfer station was at the Shanghai Railroad Station, and it was completely packed, with lots of people toting large luggage. One guy with several bags dangling from a bamboo pole over his shoulder (in Shanghai, in 2009) temporarily blocked all foot traffic by turning perpendicular to the flow and just standing there for a moment. I'm not even sure where the throngs of people pouring through the transfer passageway came from, since my own train wasn't that full, but it was mobbed. The crowd moved along slowly, with a few impatient folks pushing past one person only to have to push past the person beyond them. Other people cut through the flow of bodies at odd diagonals, yielding to no-one unless absolutely forced to. I found the whole thing immensely frustrating, but tried to go with the flow as well as I could, noticing partway through the long transfer tunnel that my hands had unconsciously tensed into fists.

When we made it to the stop for the other line, I still had to buy my new ticket to get back on the subway. I headed for the ticket vending machines, pushing my way through the packed station, only to stop in mild horror when I saw the ticket lines. Usually, when I've bought tickets for the subway in China, I've had to contend with five or so people arranged in rough lines in front of two or three vending machines. While there may be a little bit of confusion and the occasional cutting, it's generally a matter of less than a minute before I get to the machine and buy my ticket. The ticket lines under Shanghai Station were something else entirely. While there were multiple machines running, each had a rangy line of five or more people in front of it, and additional people fanned out to the sides, looking like they would seize any chance to leap in front of the people waiting. Everybody involved looked grouchy, and the lines showed no visible movement. Unwilling to stand in that mob just to get one stop closer to my destination, I decided to walk.

The problem with walking is that Shanghai Station is off the northern edge of the map in my guidebook. I knew that one street nearby would get me back on the map and to where I was going, but once I got up above ground, I couldn't find it in the confusion outside the train station, and the only map to be had on the walls nearby was in Chinese only. As I was beginning to comb the area looking for a street I would recognize, I nearly ran into an available cab. I started to walk around it to keep looking, but saw that I had been offered an easier option and took the cab the rest of the way to the temple for 11 yuan, relieved to be free of the throngs and vowing never to return to Shanghai Station if at all possible.

Outside the Jade Buddha Temple, a few people were milling around and apparently bickering over something. As I looked at them and wondered if they were going in and if I should wait for them to move before I tried to get in myself, a slick-looking man greeted me in English and told me where the ticket booth was and tried to chat with me as I ordered my ticket. When I was done, he told me my Chinese was very good, although all he had heard me say was “Hello, one please.” (Actually, there's not even a “please” when you say it in Chinese, but the translation looks weird without it.) I didn't know how to say in Chinese that he'd hardly heard me me anything well enough for it to have the impact I wanted, so I ignored that. He soldiered on and invited me to his tea house “right near here, to relax after your visit.” Because he was still speaking English and I didn't know any Chinese that was emphatic enough, I switched to English and said “No, I don't want to. I've been to tea houses.” I'm not sure if he picked up my dark and jaded tone, but he did stop trying to talk to me right away, so that was cool. I left him and the knot of loiterers behind and made my way into the temple.

I didn't write up my visit to the Lama Temple in Beijing (yet!), so I can't compare the Jade Buddha Temple to it and expect anybody to understand. However, I will quickly say that the Jade Buddha Temple is much, much smaller and less elaborate than the Lama Temple, but nearly as full of incense smoke. I was surprised by how little there was to see inside. A front hall contained two golden Buddhas, with personifications of North, South, East and West along the walls. The Buddhas were the usual, but the four guardians were a particularly nice set, very expressive and individual. I picked my way around Chinese visitors leaving offerings of incense as delicately as possible to get a good view of the hall. Unfortunately, I wasn't sure if photos were allowed, so I didn't get a shot of the awesome Guardians.

The second hall in the temple had some more Buddhas. Since there were no explanatory signs anywhere in the temple, I can't say for sure what they were, but three Buddhas in a row usually means they are the past, present and future Buddhas, so I assume they were those. Behind the Buddhas was a carved mountain with lots of small carved figures on it, which seems to be a frequent feature in these temples. Other temples with explanatory signs have identified the figures as Arhats, but I'm not exactly sure what an Arhat is other than that it looks like a person and sometimes has flash mobs on mountains.

Beyond the second hall, a building that looked more like a regular old building and less like a temple building sported signs about the jade Buddha. There are actually two jade Buddhas at the Jade Buddha Temple, a reclining one and a sitting one, but only the sitting one is worthy of its own admission fee. I paid for my additional ticket and made my way into the ordinary-looking building, past a few gilded temple accessories in cases (with no signs in English and only a couple of tiny cards in handwritten Chinese, I had no idea what they were for, but they were quite pretty) and some framed photos of people with captions in Chinese. The photos showed notable people visiting the Jade Buddha Temple. While most of them weren't very notable to me, I'm pretty sure that one photo with a caption dated from the 80s showed Nancy Reagan.

The jade Buddha was on the second floor of the building, in a room with an ornate ceiling with tiny gilded figures seated in niches. It was set on an altar 20 feet beyond a railing that kept most visitors back from the altar and the three prayer stools in front of it. Quiet music that I found at once restful and slightly cheesy played over hidden speakers as people moved through the passageway between the railing and the wall, some stopping to bow to the Buddha or buy offerings of lamp oil. Despite the distance and the odd music, the jade Buddha was captivating. It was carved from cloudy white jade, with accents made from gold and jewels. The jade had been polished to a shine. The Buddha's eyes had been painted black and the lips red, and the expression carved onto its face was serene. The statue wasn't the most lifelike I've seen by far, but the hands, feet and face gave a sense of expressiveness that was unique and pleasant.

Two female attendants in button down shirts behind the railing in the jade Buddha room were selling offerings of lamp oil to visitors. Visitors would hold the oil in its bottle and bow three times to the Buddha, then hand it to the attendants, who would pour it into a chalice on the altar. Many of the visitors bought lamp oil. Others crammed bills into an offering box in front of the railing. I stood and watched for a very long time, glancing between the visitors and the Buddha on its altar. One group of three visitors was allowed through the barrier to offer incense to the Buddha from the three low prayer stools in front of the altar. I watched them bow holding the incense and wondered who they were or what they had donated that had gotten them through the barrier. A few minutes after they left, two monks came in, an older one and a younger one. The old monk stood by as the young monk sank to his knees and then bowed so deeply he nearly flattened himself into the floor. The attendants brought him a stick of incense and he bowed three more times, going from standing to folded up on the floor with each bow. I thought he looked very humble and pious as he did so. Most of the other visitors just bent at the waist to bow, though one older woman also bowed with her knees and forehead on the floor and stayed there for a minute, very still. The space between the railing and the wall was narrow enough that people could hardly get by her, but luckily the room was never crowded.

I watched a couple of French-speaking families surreptitiously take a video of the motionless Buddha figure, despite the fact that it was clearly forbidden in English, Chinese, and pictograms. When they filed on, I was left alone with the attendants, I would have been happy to look at the jade Buddha and enjoy the quiet room for a bit longer, but I had stood there so long that I felt like they were beginning to look at me funny, so after a few more moments, I wandered on as well, feeling refreshed after not having been swarmed or elbowed for some time.

After the first jade Buddha, the second one was a letdown. The reclining jade Buddha was a much smaller figure and was located in a second-floor souvenir shop at the back of the temple. It sat in an attractive case, surrounded on all sides by jade, ceramics, and calligraphy scrolls for sale at exorbitant prices. Prayer stools stood in front of it, but I couldn't imagine anybody praying to the small Buddha as the shopkeepers looked on and a Chinese pop song saying “Kiss me baby” in English played over the speakers.

Downstairs from the reclining jade Buddha was another, much larger reclining Buddha figure. It looked like a much larger model of the small Buddha upstairs, and I didn't think it was made from real jade. However, people were kneeling in front of it in the shop where it reclined, even as a calligraphy seller ten feet away hollered out to me in English about how beautiful and antique his wares were (he was painting one “antique” as he spoke—I hope he just doesn't know what the English word means) and I carefully ignored him.

It was a pretty long walk from the temple to the subway stop where I had planned to get off, and a couple of times as I walked to it, I thought I was lost. However, in the end I found it with no problem and got back on the train. I decided to change trains twice instead of once to avoid having to change at Shanghai Station again. The trip was more or less without incident, though at the first station where I had to change trains, I was surprised to see crowds of people backing up at the top of the escalator down to the platform. As the crowd moved forward, I saw that the issue was that the down escalator had been closed for cleaning in the middle of the day on a weekend, forcing hundreds of people to walk down the stairs instead. As I made my slow way down the stairs, blocked in by people on all sides, I watched a crew of four uniformed escalator cleaners nonchalantly rubbing down the metal bits of the stopped escalator with rags.

The only Chinese food I have found in my neighborhood is the cold noodle stand, and I can't have that every day. Instead, I had McDonald's french fries and chocolate cake from a bakery for my lunch. I will Chinese food with vegetables for my dinner once I get this posted, I swear.

I'll end the post with some very quick revised impressions of Shanghai. I retract anything I said about people being about the same as in Beijing and Xi'an. In the past couple of days, people in Shanghai have struck me as more pushy and impolite than in the other Chinese cities I've visited. I've also run into attempted scam after attempted scam, which is something that can happen in Beijing, but I never once actually had any issue or even ran into someone trying to catch me. People here have been making me as mad as people in Beijing did in 2005 (but did not this visit), which either means that people in Beijing have gotten better or that I have gotten more tolerant but the Shanghainese are even worse than the people in Beijing. I actually think it's a bit of both, based on the fact that I remember people in Beijing being more impatient and inconsiderate in 2005 than there were on this visit, but also that there is not a lot of reason why people in Xi'an would have been significantly Olympicized but they didn't bug me. Part of this impression may just be where I've been and my mood, but I do think there's at least some truth to it. It bums me out that the richest and most developed city in China is so full of selfish assholes, and I certainly hope that this doesn't mean that more of China will be like this as the country gets richer.

One quick note in case anybody misunderstands my intent: I don't think that Chinese people in Shanghai or any other city are inherently bad or unpleasant people. I just think that based on their recent history they have reason to feel like they need to make their own way in the world and that hesitating to grab something due to compassion for strangers can actually hurt them, and that they have no incentive to be good to people they don't know. In this environment, there's a really strong sense of every man for himself, which is upsetting to people who have been trained to think that that's not acceptable. Unfortunately, as long as a few people behave badly, it's really hard to make the larger group change. I know that I am a decent and compassionate person, but encountering even a few truly unpleasant people in a sea of neutral people make me feel like I am surrounded by millions and millions of people who don't feel compassion for me and are as likely to hurt me as help me, which zaps my sense of general empathy pretty fast. I remember feeling exactly this way when I was living in Beijing in 2005, and I don't like it, but I also feel like doggedly trying to follow the rules I've been taught will just mean I get hit by mopeds and elbowed off subway trains. Of course someone who lives their whole life in this environment will absorb it to some extent.

This still doesn't mean I want to spend a lot more time in Shanghai. I will stick with Beijing, where people are just as likely to run me over, but will at least only try to sell me overpriced stuff rather than pretending to be my friend to take my money, and where people line up to get on the subway at least half the time. And where I can always find a good plate of yu xiang eggplant if I want it—what the crap, Shanghai??