Riding the Iron Rooster

Shanghai is an old brown riverside city with the look of Brooklyn, and the Chinese—who are comforted by crowds—like it for its mobs and its street life. It has a reputation for city slickers and stylishness. Most of China's successful fashion designers work in Shanghai, and if you utter the words Yifu Sheng Luolang the Shanghainese will know you are speaking the name of Yves Saint-Laurent. When I arrived in the city, there was an editor of the French magazine Elle prowling the streets looking for material for an article on China to be called "The Fashion Revolution." According to the Chinese man who accompanied her—whom I later met—this French woman was mightily impressed by the dress sense of the Shanghai women. She stopped them and took their pictures and asked where they got their clothes. The majority said that they got them in the free market in the back streets or that they made the clothes themselves at home, basing them on pictures they saw in Western magazines. Even in the days of the Cultural Revolution, the women workers showed up at their factories with bright sweaters and frilly blouses under their blue baggy suits: it was customary to meet in the women's washroom and compare the hidden sweaters before they started work.

Because Shanghai is a cosmopolitan city and has seen more foreigners—both invaders and friendly visitors—than any other Chinese city, it is a polyglot place. It is at once the most politically dogmatic ("Oppose book worship" "Political work is the lifeblood of all economic work"—Mao) and the most bourgeois. When changes came to China they appeared first in Shanghai; and when there is conflict in China it is loudest and most violent in Shanghai. The sense of life is strong here, and even a city-hater like myself can detect Shanghai's spirit and appreciate its atmosphere. It is not crass like Canton, but it is abrasive—and in the hot months stifling, crowded, noisy and smelly.

It seemed to me noisy most of all, with the big-city all-night howl that is the sound track of New York (honks, sirens, garbage trucks, shouts, death rattles). Peking was rising and would soon be a city of tall buildings, but Shanghai had been built on mud and was growing sideways and spreading into the swamps of Zhejiang. All day the pile drivers hammered steel into this soft soil to fortify it, and one labored right outside my window with a cruel and dominating noise that determined the rhythm of my life. Zhong-guo! Zhong-guo! It affected the way I breathed and walked and ate: I moved my feet and lifted my spoon to Zhong-guo! Zhong-guo! It orchestrated my talking, too; it made me write in bursts, and when I brushed my teeth I discovered I did it to the pounding of this pile driver, the bang and its half-echo, Zhong-guo! It began at seven in the morning and was still hammering at eight at night, and in Shanghai it was inescapable, because nearly every neighborhood had its own anvil clang of Zhong-guo!

I walked the back streets in order to keep away from the traffic and the crowds. And I realized that it would be dishonest to complain too much about noise, the pile drivers and the frantic energy, because on my first visit to Shanghai I had felt it was dreary and moribund and demoralized. Why was it that they never knew when to stop? Even the back streets were crowded, with improvised stalls and houses that served as shop fronts and markets set up in the gutters, and people mending shoes and bicycles and doing carpentry on the sidewalk.

Towards the Bund—Shanghai's riverbank promenade—I saw a spire behind a wall and found a way to enter. It was Saint Joseph's Church, and the man I took to be the janitor, because he was so shabbily dressed in a ragged jacket and slippers, was the pastor, a Catholic priest. He was both pious and watchful, soft-spoken and alert—it is the demeanor of a Chinese Christian who has been put through more hoops than he cares to remember. The church had been wrecked during the Cultural Revolution, daubed with slogans and turned into a depot for machinery, and the churchyard had been a parking lot.

"Sacramentum," the priest said, pointing at the flickering candle, and he smiled with satisfaction: the consecrated Host was in the tabernacle.

I asked him why this was so. Was there a service today?

No, he said, and brought me to the back of the church where there was a coffin with a white paper cross stuck to it. He said there was a funeral tomorrow.

"I take it you're busy—lots of people coming to church."

"Oh, yes. And there are five churches in Shanghai. They are always full on Sundays."