Poverty: A slice of authentic Shanghai

The Mongolian wind pierces your trousers; you feel your groin almost shrink to two raisins as you turn the corner into the knife-edge draught tearing through Huining Lu. In a blink you’re in 1950’s Shanghai. Feel the copperplate hues of the photograph you have walked into (image 6) * .

Huining Lu: more authentic than the skyscraper shacks that surge for hundreds of kilometres around you until you stepped into this place (images 193, 195). Why authentic? What makes this place more bona fide to you?

Outside of places like Huining Lu the high-rises have the feel of surreal ships with their endless sails of washing hanging from the racks outside windows.

Skyscraper shacks: tiny two-room apartments or bed-sitters stacked 25/30 stories, blocking out the sun as if you were in the Grand Canyon; they make luminous the setting for places like Huining Lu. The high-rises are still there, distanced in the mist that often rubs out even short distances in Shanghai, or makes a ghostly bluish steel-grey of them; the skyscraper shacks lose their sense of weight; seem about to float off in the mist that grants them this lightness (images 30, 31).

Huining Lu: a spindly, daddy-long-legs half-kilometre loop of gravel, cracked tar and concrete behind Laojiaban Lu, splintering into narrower alley-crevices that always seem to beckon with their secrets; who lives there? (image 161) Whose child is that? (image 38), till the lane broadens and swings back near Laojiaban 400 metres away from where you teach (image 166).

It’s a lane as busy and detailed as an impressionistic painting. There is something painterly in the crumbling, sodden, cement housing, a bric-a-brac of homes that look ready to collapse at any moment. Pot plants bravely make the most of it on window shelves amid the laundry too stiff to flap in the breeze.

Huining Lu: it is taking a Cezanne or Jackson Pollock masterpiece and strewing it with litter, dripping clothes, beggars, card players around scarred tables, fruit and vegetable sellers crouching over their 11.30am lunch or behind wooden stands (images 62, 85), over their eggs and dumplings simmering on flat sheets of blackened steel and oil drums turned by the would-be cooks (image 147) while the schoolchildren stand and wait with that sensuous look of hunger puckering their lips, sharpening their eyes.

No wonder Van Gogh, Cezanne and their kind spent hours and years meditating on the like. Something is stripped away, pared back to the bones of simplicity and honesty. This is what we are without our baubles and toys, our massed “peripherals”.

Here poverty is an art form: the textures of chairs and tables draped with clothing to dry in the sun as there is no space other than the lane (image 14). An art form because here poverty is not poverty: the red-cheeked, plum-faced chuckling fruit sellers are too happy, smell too much of their own fruit, of their bouncing-around little ones who cling to Mommy’s apron and gaze serenely at you while you buy strawberries! Strawberries! They can afford to sell that expensive fruit by the tub here!

The card players seem permanently on holiday, cigarettes dangling from their mouths (image 25). When do they work? Some you know run those little stores hardly bigger than telephone booths, serve customers when they come, then nonchalantly go back to their card games.

Work is an art form here: ease up from your card table and amble over to the waiting customer, serve him from your fruits store, throw in an extra tangerine to sweeten the deal and ensure she comes back, then amble back to the rickety card table and your fellow noisy players arguing and cackling over some unusual play of the cards.

Gape at the baths of fish and hairy crabs: for a mammoth city, your evening meal does not get fresher (images 93, 94). The best is the businessman nonchalantly strolling along with a fresh pig’s head in his hand (image 58) or the woman strolling about in pajamas (image 56) . A pig’s head is a prize possession for the evening meal. In many parts of China the pig’s head is regarded as the choicest part to eat and is reserved for honoured guests in the evening meal.

The poverty an art form because the people are happy, or at least content, detached, as they get on with things or with nothing: some sell their wares, their voices barely more than a murmur as they barter. The old man with the missing half-leg on his deck chair is there every day, waving his hand at you as he soaks up his bit of sunshine (image 26).

They shouldn’t be happy. You’re naïve, trying your hand in a sleight of hand as you write this to create a Romanticism that denies … what?

Perhaps you’re transferring this happiness, because how can they be happy with the little morsel they have from life? You come from two cites, Jo’burg and Cape Town; cities which have repeatedly told you that happiness is contingent on how much you possess.

Yet all you saw there were smug, bloated and too-often angry faces behind the wheels of their obscenely expensive cars. The price of just one of those cars, amortised, could feed a family here for ten years. Yet all you often saw in those South African cities was their restlessness, the fingers twitching over faces, mobile phones and laptops, cockroach feelers in the search for more and more.

Here, on Huining Lu, there is no more.

There is only today, a slow, languid drop of water glistening down from a tap in the wall. Take the drop or leave it for the others who surely will have it. Here, there is no more, and there need not be: the bowl of rice and braised pork will suffice, is ample, is there to be shared.

You are reminded of a canal walk in Shaoxing, a place two and a half hours from here in China, where you first lived nearly four years ago, where the canals reflected similar high-rises, though just a lot lower, in a smaller city, where you’d also go for a stroll between classes:

The willows give up being willows. What’s left
Of their sinews blackens the canals and threads
Among the washing women. The rain is not rain
But a falling mist that eddies and softens the green
Beginnings in willows. Everything’s as bare
As the English I teach, and few of my words glisten
Clarity in the minds of my students.

The teenagers remain as barren as those branches
Inking the canals outside. I turn to slapstick
And mimicry to enthuse – and their laughter is not laughter,
But the sweet surprise in a gust of rain, here,
Then gone. A scent is left that lacks the burden
Memories often have. It weightlessly shoves into the heart,
And the students’ faces become more than faces. They open
Like hands that rub the cold off fingers and cheeks.

Rain, laughter, faces … words are memories,
Except for here, ambling by a river after I’ve taught,
Where washing women, boats and willows
Are reflections chiselled from the waters’ bronze,
Changing and blurring before these words can come.
Blessed am I in this moment, on this walk
Through a quietness housed only in itself.

Exit back onto Lujiabang Lu, this skyscraper-shack street and the smart red-bricked building where you teach (image 197). What you’ve just walked through, read through, is a bible of stories, storied into every stone, every crevice of Huining Lu.

You wish others could see what you’ve seen. You doubt what you’ve seen. Which is why you often go back to Huining Lu and environs, have had to write this.

You heal back into this other place, this school on Huining Lu, as you turn around from the classroom window view tousled with trees and a solitary figure in the distance (picture 198), to see your students smiling lovingly at you. You wonder how you deserve their love, their like of you and your buffoonish way of teaching.

For your story, storied in the streets and buildings, the parks and countryside of two faraway South African cities, the mountains of both, the names of their places words fragrant with fynbos, perfumed with the mud and pollen trudged up from solitary walks; words like secrets mouthed near ears, a child to her mother: Cecila Forest, Platteklip Gorge, the Magaliesberg, Eastern Transvaal, Outeniqua, Drakensberg, Cedarberg, Cape Point, Otter Trail … remember when we … and those times when we could only see the stars above the praying branches of pines, stars as clear as a mist of breath on a window…

The stories you’ve left behind, that you’ve turned your back on, that country and its dismal politics, tales so different, so utterly alien to these deep city Shanghai children. The stories are slowly fading there, fingerprints and nose-prints on a window half a world away, and somehow blooming here, a haunting absence in presence, fulsome with their own bitter-sweetness, their copperplate hues.

* See my slideshow of Huining Lu (road) and environs