In Praise of Pu-Jersey

If you look at a Map of Shanghai you will see that the city is bisected by a river.  The geography is much like New York with the Hudson River separating the City from New Jersey. The NYU campus sits in the heart of Pudong, which is the newest section of the city and is directly across from The Bund and the historic part of Shanghai. Our apartment is even deeper into Pudong on the other side of Century Park.  The side that is not Pudong is the place that people think about when they talk about Shanghai with its beautiful neighborhoods such as the French Concession, Puxi, and Xintandi.  No one ever really talks about our side of the river….they just stand on the Bund and take photos of those amazing buildings. (See photo below, which shows the view over to Pudong.)  Our side of the river is referred to as Pu-Jersey by the Shanghainese who rarely venture over to Pudong for anything.

At first I understood their feeling and I felt somewhat beleaguered.  After all, I heap as much scorn as anyone about “the bridge and tunnel” folks who cross into Manhattan for great bars, amazing food, and exciting nightlife.  Like all New Yorkers, I am pleased when they had back to their side of the river.  And now, I find myself on the wrong-side, the Pu-Jersey side, of Shanghai.  At first, I thought that I would just take one of the myriad of cheap ways to get to the other side — taxi, super-cheap Uber, or Metro — and spend my time there.  But, I have come to reject that as a strategy for living here and enjoying it.

If you want to know the real China, then I suspect I am more likely to find it here in Pudong.  I will go over to the French Concession when I am craving a great cup of coffee, cheese, a martini, or a burger.  Anything you want can be bought there for a fairly steep (New York) price.  In Pudong those items are not really to be found unless you head into one of the fancy malls.  Pudong instead is BladeRunner territory with huge (6-10 lane) boulevards that do not encourage walking.  As someone who goes out walking everyday in Brooklyn to do my grocery shopping I found this very distressing.  But one day we walked towards the back of our building and into the block and found a little paradise.  (See photo below)  It turns out that these super blocks are filled on the inside with communities of apartments, parks, schools, food venders and groceries.  No one walks on the big boulevards because all of the community life is happening on the inside of the block.

Here is what I love about my block:

1) Old men smoking cigarettes and standing next to the glass covered bulletin boards that hold the daily newspaper.  They all stand around, read and talk.

2) All the kids in the park with their grandmas, who are clearly their caretakers.

3) The people doing weird-chinese-style “exercise.”  I can’t explain it, but if you walk along a New York park on the lower east side you know what I am talking about.  Also there are just people who stand around and move vigorously to get exercise.

4) The fruit vendor who has the most adorable kids who like to laugh at my Chinese and practice their english with me.  She sells the most amazing oranges (the size of golf balls and taste like candy) and strawberries.  (And I am pretty sure they are not organic, but I have gotten over that.)

5) The food vendor who sells dumplings for breakfast.

6)  The food vender who sells Dan Bing for breakfast. (Click Here to watch the video)

7) The cutest dogs with down jackets on when it’s cold and rain visors when it rains.

So, I may or may not be able to experience all of this in the fancier ex-pat area of Shanghai…I doubt it.  But now that I have managed to find my way around to the subway, a grocery store and can easily get the basics I am pretty happy to be over here in Pu-Jersey.

Teaching Wittfogel and Worster in China

A couple of weeks ago I taught a chapter in Donald Worster’s Rivers of Empire along with a selection from Karl Wittfogel’s essay on Chinese despotism in which he outlines his theory about the hydraulic society.  (For those who don’t know, Worster’s book has been a classic taught in Environmental History for years.  Worster himself, along with Bill Cronon, Richard White, and Carolyn Merchant were at the forefront of Environmental history almost 30 years ago.)  Frankly, at this point I didn’t think there was much I could learn from teaching Worster again (for maybe the 15th time).

One thing I have had to adjust to while teaching here is the amount of reading I give the students.  About 1/3 of the class are Chinese and one half total are not native English speakers.  These kids are all super smart, but reading takes them a very long time and they have trouble grasping all the complexities and subtleties of a text.  So, I have only been assigning 30 pages or so per class.  The result, however, is that I have to reread the text with a completely fresh set of eyes and have found myself reading very carefully pieces that I had not read that closely since graduate school.  My experience with Worster was eye-opening.

The first thing I noticed is that on page 7 Worster basically gets away with erasing Indian interaction with the environment of the place we have come to think of as the Central Valley in California.  It’s breathtaking really to go back and read the romanticism that Worster ascribes to that place in the pre-capitalist world.  He lovingly details John Muir’s encounter with the Valley and clearly laments this lost ideal.  Now this is all fine, but the passages negates any kind of agency on the part of Indians. Worster falls into that age-old trap of romanticizing Indians.  To be fair, once the reader is inside the book and on to the chapter about local economies in the pre-agrarian state, Worster’s work is much more nuanced and Indians take on a much more complex facade.  But, in the introduction, which is one of the most elegant pieces of writing I teach, Worster takes the easy way out with Indians.

What the students focussed on for quite a bit was Wittfogel’s life narrative.  A leading intellectual and communist in Weimar Germany, Wittfogel very quickly came under the scrutiny of Nazi Germany, was rounded up and eventually placed in a concentration camp.  Only after the intervention of colleagues in the U.S. was he released and allowed to migrate to Columbia University, before ending up permanently at the University of Washington.  What also struck the students about Wittfogel was that when he wrote “Hydraulic Society” he wrote from such a perspective of obvious bias.  Although Wittfogel had been a Communist, with the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact in 1939, he began to have his doubts about 20th century communism and the influence of what he called “asiatic” culture. By the 1950s, Wittfogel was an avowed anti-communist and was a vocal opponent of Mao’s China after the defeat of the Nationalists in 1949.

The students, and particularly the Chinese students, felt that his discussion, evidence, and tone about what he saw as despotic asiatic hydraulic societies could not be trusted. They felt the piece exhibited a basic lack of Chinese history of the period.  They, of course, are not the first to make such a critique as other Chinese historians have made the same claim. I also gave the students a section from J. Richards, The Unending Frontiers a counterbalance. Richards argues that local communities and warlords during the Mughal Empire were really much more responsive to their own water needs and maintaining the balance with the empire’s demands for tribute.  This follows in similar work on Egypt by the Yale environmental historian, Alan Mikhail.

And I have to agree.  They were so articulate and methodical in the way they pulled apart Wittfogel’s observations and consequent theory and played it off what they had learned from both Richards and Mikhail, that I was so pleased.  But, also a little uneasy…what now to do with Worster?

So, since Worster builds his thesis in Rivers of Empire on his use of Wittfogel’s ideas about the Hydraulic Society, does that then undo everything we love and respect about the book? I hope not and the trick will be to get the students to not let their reading of Wittfogel taint the future discussion of Worster as we get into a discussion about irrigation in the West.  So, that’s my pedagogical challenge for the next few weeks.

But I am so pleased to have been sitting in this particular place and teaching this particular topic.  I have seen the big canals and some of China’s water systems and am looking forward to my trip to see Three Gorges Dam in May.  But, I have also seen Hoover and Grand Coulee Dam and it seems to me that democracies, even as flawed as Worster reminds us they are, do a pretty good job of creating their own “Hydraulic Societies.”  It may be time to disassociate that term from the terms despotic and Asiatic.  The more interesting question for us may be instead to just focus on what kinds of capital, state power, and community buy-in are necessary to build these terrifying, but-oh-so-useful, infrastructure projects.  Stay tuned…..

The Weenie Mobile and Life Partying

People have asked me to describe a typical day.  We are living in a high rise called the Grand Pujian, or as my colleague Molly called it “The Not so Grand Pujian,” which is a high-rise in the Pudong district. In reality it is quite fine.  We have a beautiful 2 bedroom apartment on the 15th floor and if the air ever clears up we will be able to see downtown.  The staff is lovely and so kind to all of us lost-looking academics.  The one down side is that there are students here, so it gets a little noisy on weekend nights and it’s a drag to see them in the gym.

One of the best parts of the day is taking the shuttle to work, or as I call it, the “weenie mobile.”  The folks living at the Grand Pujian with us are all visiting faculty.  A few, like us, are from NYU-NY but most are from around the world.  There is a cohort of Israelis, and then a smattering from France, Germany, Brazil and other places. Most are in the sciences or math.  Rick and I and a couple of others are the few rarities in the humanities.  It is fascinating to get on the bus in the morning or at the end of the day and hear everyone’s  stories about teaching or eating, etc..  Sometimes the mathematicians just talk about equations.  Rick never did study abroad in College and so I think he is right to describe this experience as Study Abroad for Professors.  We are all forced into a really fun, but somewhat uncomfortable, set of circumstances and it is interesting to watch everyone react.  We are often a rather over-privileged, picky, and particular group of people who are not used to not getting their ways about everything.  I often pity our Chinese “handlers” who have to deal with our endless questions and requests.  They deal with us with such grace and politeness.

Being here is odd and throws me off guard often.  On one hand, it is like any other big city in the world as it is modern, efficient, and so safe (ok that last one is not like most American big cities.)  On the other hand, the inability to communicate with almost anyone on the street or in a restaurant is exhausting and unnerving.  We constantly rely on the kindness of strangers to make sure we get fed and get us to where we need to be.   Last night, a young lady took pity on us as we walked through the food stalls at (I kid you not) a food mall called “Life Partying.”  There were just too many choices and none of it was written in English.  She grabbed us, sat us down, and ordered for us.  It was delicious and cost us about $10 total.  I am constantly so thankful and appreciative.

Even teaching is different and, I would say, more intense here.  The faculty who are permanent NYU-Shanghai are all terrific and embarking on the rather amazing enterprise of teaching here full-time.  I admire their adventurous spirit, as it is a difficult place to build a career.  The students are impressive and I will refrain for a bit before making comparisons to NYU-NY students.  Unlike NYU-NY this place is much more interactive and inter-disciplinary.  Because there are so few of us and there is only one dining space we eat with the students and with each other.  There is also a sense that most people should attend most of the talks and so I find myself engaging with scientists and social scientists both intellectually and socially.  Add that to the sheer internationality of the place and you get a sense of how incredibly stimulating the experience is.  It’s a nice change of pace from the anonymity of New York.

The downsides, of course, are the constant worries such as that the VPN will stop working or the air will be too awful to venture out or you will have ingested one too many weird things in a given day (my issue, not Rick’s or anyone else’s, frankly).  But those are all issues for other posts.  But, for now, let me just say that I end each day being blown away by the intensity of this place and ready to get  8-10 hours of sleep.

Airpocolypse

I just downloaded a new app called Airpocalypse, which I had read about in a New York Times article last week. It measures the AQI (Air Quality Index) of Chinese cities and provides grumpy commentary as the number rises. Notes such as “Meh,”  “Could be worse,”  “Different Day, Same Air” and “Really, China?” are meant to build camaraderie among the ex-pats who are appalled that people live in this.   The app turned out to be useful as the app that NYU directed us to does not automatically give you the most accurate AQI and instead gives you the one that the City of Shanghai (and therefore the CCP (Chinese Communist Party)) wants you to use.  The American Consul and Airpocalypse routinely post the AQI at double or triple what the City of Shanghai posts.

Ironically the article appeared on the first day that I faced an AQI (Air Quality Index) of over 200.  (See photos below of the sunrise from our kitchen and my newly acquired air mask.)   To give you a sense of comparison, a bad day in New York or LA is 60.  While 200 seemed overwhelming to me and I did see people wearing masks, its not really until it reaches the 250+ range that officials start to worry.  At that point NYU considers closing school…we don’t have snow days we have AQI days.  So, how bad is it?  I find that it burns and you can almost taste the air.  Rick deals with it by getting up at 5:30 in the morning to go running before the AQI gets up towards 100.  I just stay inside.  We have an air cleaner for the bedroom and the air in the NYU building is extremely clean…better than my office on the Square.  And I will ride the bus to work both ways and avoid the 2 mile walk, which I would otherwise do just to get the exercise and see the neighborhood.

I am sure I will have much more to say about the AQI as this will go on for a few more weeks if not months until the weather warms up a bit.  But one observation that I do note is that wealth and access allow us to escape the worst aspects of the air quality and at the same time make it worse for others.  We take cars or busses (that emit carbon) to avoid walking in the air.  We run an air filter all night to protect us from the air quality.  But that filter runs on electricity that is being drawn from some coal fired plant outside of the city (thanks Andrew Needham for reminding of this all the time) or is drawn from energy produced by some dam far away.  In the meantime I see thousands of Shanghaiese riding their bikes, walking their children to school, and going about their business.  A few wear masks, but most do not.  So, I am left thinking about the real costs of pollution and who actually has to carry those costs.

Shanghai sunrise from Pudong

New air mask issued by NYU. Packaging suggests that it is also used by coal miners.

The Angry Grape

So everyday I am reminded just how difficult it is to learn another language.  I know I will never ever be able to do more than learn a few words that will help me navigate this city more easily.  Mostly I just rely on my friendly face and the kindness of strangers to help me get by.  It makes my experience to much less than if I could learn the language, but I am resigned.

What I do try to do is make contact with Chinese scholars and students who will share a meal with me, take me shopping, and just talk about China.  Today I had lunch with just one such generous person, Iris, who teaches U.S. urban history at a nearby university.  Her English was not perfect, but oh so much better than my non-existent Chinese.  She wanted to talk about scholarship and novels.  Her most favorite American novel is “The Angry Grape.”  I, of course, had never heard of this novel but nodded politely as she talked about the characters…a family of strong spirit who had lost everything and were traveling across the American West.  After a few minutes, it finally dawned on me that she was talking about the Joad family in the Grapes of Wrath (aka The Angry Grape.)  

I did not laugh or smirk once I figured out what she was talking about…I just engaged.  But as I thought about the conversation, which was really interesting I was just reminded about the difficulty of language.  Chinese is so much more difficult and nuanced than English and perhaps that is why I feel so daunted about even trying to learn.  I am constantly thankful for my new friends and colleagues who make the effort that I cannot…to reach out and learn a new language and engage in a way that I cannot.

The Chinese Ellis Island

This morning was spent in the bowels of Chinese bureaucracy getting medically cleared for my resident work visa.  Mind you, I had already run around New York getting cleared by my own physician with all the up to date vaccines, an ekg, blood work and a chest x-ray.  Not to mention the paperwork.  But none of this was of any use as it was all rejected by the medical staff and I spent all morning redoing the process.

It was a humbling experience as I took off everything from the top up and paraded around with all the other foreigners with forms in my hands as we got (and I kid you not) tested for color-blindess, eye sight, a sonogram, a chest x-ray, blood work, and blood pressure.  My colleagues were outraged at the treatment and a few refused, although not sure what good that did as they will just have to return if they want to stay and work.  I had been warned by Rick of the process and so willingly went through it with as much good nature as I could muster.

But I could not help but think about all the immigrants who entered the United States through Ellis Island, Angel Island, or crossed the U.S. Mexican border only to be surveyed by U.S. medical personnel for fitness.  I was nervous and I have nothing at stake.  Would it really be so horrible if I was found unfit and sent back to my very comfortable job and apartment in New York?  But, for the majority of immigrants this process is stressful, humiliating, and very high stakes.  As Americans, we are very rarely if ever treated in such a bureaucratic and anonymous manner and it was striking to me.

 

Opening Thoughts

So this blog is just my random thoughts about living in China for a semester.  I have never visited here before and so am completely new to the region, culture, and political atmosphere.  I am teaching at NYU-Shanghai a course called “The History of Water.”  Over the next five months, I will try to post photos and thoughts about living and teaching here.