Shanghai Journal: Landings

Shanghai journal

Friday, December 2, 11

Sometime within the next 36 to 48 hours I will become a rice ball. This much is certain. We have been here a shade over four days and my consumption of the many and varied (albeit delicious) forms of rice has overshadowed virtually all other sensory impressions of this time in China thus far. 130 pounds of ambulatory, verbally challenged rice inside various wrappings from Hudson Trail Outfitter s or Hugo Boss navigating the startlingly cold streets of the French Concession in Shanghai. Jasmine scented rice. Brown rice. Saffron rice. Rice with tofu. Rice at breakfast. Rice at lunch. Rice at….

And I like rice. Really.

How it is possible for a nation of 1.4 Billion to grow enough rice to feed itself boggles the mind. There are vats of it, seemingly endless vats of it everywhere. Bags of it in various weights dot the small street-side shops abounding here. Stacked, stuffed, packed and shelved from the street to the back of the diminutive rectangular notches cut into the low buildings which have stood since the 1930s in this part of the city under the linden trees planted by French colonialists who carved their enclave in Shanghai and required the Chinese themselves to obtain papers to enter parts of their own country for the privilege of working for people from Europe.

And we wonder why revolutions happen…

Even in the cold December air the smell of food dominates. Open-air preparation abounds, the scent of wok oils sizzling, the sound of stir fry flipping, cooks and their beans, tofu, onions and sprouts slipping in and out of sight through the steam of water and sesame oil. Hot coals on a fog-thick night turning heavy air red as the bicycles slip by and the occasional bone-rattling heavy truck bores a hole in your skull.

China, it seems, is always hungry.

At four am on a jet-lagged sleepless night walking down deserted streets the only things open on Shanghzi street is the 24 hour Japanese sushi stand (which makes great cappuccino) and McDonalds. The rain comes and the air clears and you smell, faintly, the sea after the water absorbs the dust and the carbon monoxide and the almost touchable dirt in the air. Beyond being hungry, China is every bit as polluted as it is reputed to be. You smell the food, but you taste the air before the rain.

Yet when the air clears the taste is sweet, the air so pure. It makes you long for it, and draws your awareness of what we sacrifice in pursuit of “modernization.”

A colleague told a story the other day of Shanghai. He said that he went out of the country for a week on business. When he returned he had friends arriving from overseas. To meet he chose a popular, delightful restaurant not so far from his house. When he arrived, not jus the restaurant, but the entire block was gone. Razed. Vanished.

In a week.

He thought he’d lost his mind. “That’s China” he says.

On Shanghai’s east side entire neighborhoods, the size of cities, just spring into being. The Green Tree Hotel where we found ourselves on our first night was in a neighborhood that didn’t exist a few years before. “This – all this was vegetable gardens.” Re-bar loaded trucks, stacked metal - like old kindling - fill at every corner as history vanishes in days, replaced by towers erected willy-nilly everywhere. The city grows and people have to have places to live, and so the charm of two stories surrenders to the necessity of 40. Elevated roads out your sixth floor hotel window layer like some madman’s cake and you see, from that window, the old lady sipping tea as behind her the traffic clogs the elevated. Gardens spring up in the areas underneath the tangle of traffic exchanges and thick vines crawl in spyrograph-like patterns. Plantings drip over the highest elevated roadway, and you feel like you’re looking at a fantasy.

The US feels small, New York modest. Its like Los Angeles was supersized in a McDonald’s patterned-world. Come across the largest bridge in Shanghai, the carotid artery between East and West and you are so far up that you have to spiral down to the ground in three consecutive 360 degree loops, a hot wheels track run amok. It takes minutes to spin to the bottom and spill out into the semi-dark of the underpasses and “old” Shanghai.

Yet, in the end, it is magical. Shanghai is magical – a city spinning in multiple centrifuges at the same time. Shanghainese are clearly proud of their city, their enchanted city locked in the embrace of central planning and controlled infrastructural chaos.

Down the street a wok turns, the coals glow and the food turns in deep elegant twists from a skilled arm. The sound of traffic fades, the sound of mandarin rises in the laughter of a late night meal, chopsticks clicking and laughter spilling over into the night.

WAR: An Introduction

As CityDance heads towards it's 2008-2009 season opening concert at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (Saturday, October 18 at 7:30pm in the Terrace Theater) we're posting video documentaries with our choreographers. We start with Austin McCormick, whose work War has it's Washington premiere with us at the Terrace Theater.

Han

By Paul Gordon Emerson

Han is a Korean word for which there is no literal translation. It means, roughly, "a state of sorrow so deep there are no tears, yet there is still hope." It's a word I didn't know when the dance company traveled to Sarajevo, the Capital of Bosnia & Herzegovina, to perform in the summer of 2006. I found it only after we had come back, and for me it defined the city I had long been in love with without ever entering. 

Sarajevo was a symbol of the ability of people to get along, to cooperate, to find common ground, common purpose and love across religion and ethnic diversity for 800 years. While it seems a long time ago now, all that was strained to, and beyond, breaking during the wars which consumed Yugoslavia as it disintegrated in the early and mid 1990s. Sarajevo, as the capital of the republic with the greatest ethnic diversity, and with by far the largest muslim population of the core republics which made up Yugoslavia, became the nexus of a series of power struggles over independence and control. For those within it that war was not simply a war to prevent an occupying power from taking over. It was a war which ripped apart the sinews of the city, house by house, neighbor by neighbor, family by family. The difference in Sarajevo was that, unlike so many other parts of the Republic, Sarajevans kept trying to preserve the common identity of being just that -- a Sarajevan. They tried to hold onto what was best, not what was worst, in us, and they did so under sniper fire from former neighbors who now nestled into the houses in the hills with rifles, picking people off as they cued for bread, or ran for water. They did so under mortar fire which devastated entire crowds standing in line for bread. They did so when a walk by the river in the fog was the only safe time to step outside. 

If you're looking for a bit of symbolism about what sort of city Sarajevo was and is, look to the treasure of the National Library. The Library held 1.5 million volumes and was the repository of a history of intellect, wisdom, inquiry and identity. In 1992, as a part of a systematic campaign to wipe out the common history of the Republic, Serb national forces hit it with incendiary grenades, setting it on fire. Instead of watching it burn, Sarajevans cued up and formed a fire line, hauling everything they could save out of the building -- a book, a manuscript, a paper at a time. All under sniper fire from the hills which took the life of one of the librarians. The death of knowledge, and of common history, was very much on the minds of the Serbian nationalists. 

The picture above is of a cellist from the Sarajevo Opera and Sarajevo Philharmonic. His name is Vedran Smailovic. Mr. Smailovic became a symbol of courage and passion in Sarajevo by playing at funerals and in public spaces in the heart of the seige of Sarajevo. Music was a healing tool. His cello was his rifle, and he used it in ways that resonate every day there still. After the fires had finally gone out in the National Library, he played there, atop the rubble. 

It is unclear to me whether dance can ever suggest the depth of what we experienced in Sarajevo. Perhaps in more capable hands than mine. But Han, the dance, is a reflection on Han the word and Han the life of a people who have endured.