Catshanghai

I love these pictures!

See this link.

Contrast this with Will Richardson’s recent impressions of Shanghai.

And then there is the old part of Shanghai, the “real” China, the part where a restaurant may be a couple of chairs and a table on a street corner where people can sit after buying some type of meat or fish on a stick that’s been barbecued on a makeshift grill built on to the back of a 30-year-old bicycle. A place where people dry their clothes and their linens on lines or fences or poles…anything that works. A place where you can buy these large, loud crickets housed in clay pots or small, bamboo cages and then enter them into some type of insect cage match for sport. A place where in almost every dimly lit storefront or window you can see people selling and bartering during the day, and lazing about, smoking cigarettes, playing cards or board games at night. A place where elderly couples stroll slowly along the sidewalks while half-crazed scooter drivers and cyclists weave in and out among them. A place where, according to Jeff, blocks of people may be “removed” overnight, their homes razed with amazing speed to make room for new big, Western buildings. A place where you can fill yourself up on really good dumplings for a dollar or less.

I was really impressed by Will Richardson when he came to Shanghai at the Learning2Cn Conference. His comments made me realise that writing for a group blog is not always good for your own writing, because you end up losing your voice in the quest for the lowest common denominator. He said that writing a blog is very personal and the best examples of the genre have a clear identity and voice. If you are not true to yourself when you sit down to write a post then the it is not as good and people will see through it anyway. Omitting the “I” does not guarantee that your writing is honest and water tight. I think I wrote my best posts when I was only writing for myself rather than for any external audience.

Looking at the photographs and reading Will’s blog post helped me wake up to this special situation that I find myself in China. When you have been here for a while, it is easy to take all the mad observations for granted. I do not blink anymore when I see overladen bicycles, homicidal taxis or young children defecating on the pavement. I think that’s a problem, because everything should feel fresh and new all the time whether you have lived in a place for a week or for three years. It is always good to see your place from an outsider’s point of view even if you’ve become relatively numb and seasoned.

I reckon I should get a copy of Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind to stop me from going on auto pilot as I continue to rack up years in Shanghai.