There have been enough comparisons between China’s two great cosmopolitan behemoths Beijing and Shanghai that it would be quite useless for me to try to fill this space with my own thoughts. Then again, I’ve settled quite nicely into the useless existence, so I’ll proceed to purvey my own opinion on the matter, which even I myself regard as having the value of that 2nd toilet plunger we all have hiding in a closet somewhere.
My second night in Beijing, I accompanied Yukiko and Angela and their friend Shirley to Cash Box to meet up with some of Shirley’s friends. They turned out to be (in order of seating order away from Shirley) a former actress who currently worked PR for ING, the cinematographer for the 6th-generation Chinese director Jia Zhangke, and a business development manager for a Canadian company that sold flight simulators to commercial airlines. They were boozing around a half-full bottle of Black Label that would have looked very appealing to me had it not been for the fact that my body was completely falling apart.
I’m a big fan of Jia Zhangke, who has been making quite a name for himself on the international film festival circuit, and so I bombarded his director of photography with a series of questions ranging from the technical to philosophical, and sometimes the technically philosophical (i.e. if your Sony HD camera falls in a forest and there’s no one around to hear it, does that mean that Kierkegaard is a homosexual?). As the night wore on, the two gentleman progressively became more and more sloshed, and soon thereafter I was simultaneously promised a copy of Jia’s “Platform” with English subtitles while debating why Madonna should NOT be on the top of anyone’s one-night stand wish-list.
How does this really fit into the landscape of the Beijing vs. Shanghai debate? Aside from the fact that the acoustics at the Beijing Cash Box are infinitely better than the one in Shanghai that is our post-Guandii staple, it’s hard for me to imagine intersecting people with such diverse arrays of backgrounds and experiences and professions, an apt example being the one above. Shanghai is much more of a hub for commerce, fashion, entrepreneurship, and superficial trendsetters; ultimately, the impulse to merge into the culture of the rich and ravenous weeds itself into the fabric of easily impressionable lives, such as the one owned by yours truly. My impression of Beijing, however, is that of colorful art and culture that could give a shit where it stacks up in the grand scheme of materialism.
Last night, Steve and I went to go see Nicole at a dive called Nan Jie. Nicole, she of the Beijing upbringing but current Shanghai location, was vibrant as usual, but it was odd to see her in a bar so grungy and so full of dodgy looking patrons to match the haphazard graffiti splattered along the wall. After introducing himself, steve asked her: “So, do you like Beijing or Shanghai better?” She responded, “Shanghai, because I’m so materialistic.” This bull-headed embrace of desire, baser instincts, and looking-good is what I both love and loathe about Shanghai. People who live there feel that they are the center of the world, and at this point, that’s not too far off the truth.
The reason I love coming to Beijing is because I can go to a place like Nan Jie, or to Bookworm, and feel like I’m back in San Francisco, with both the elite and the proletariat wrestling with each other to get a rack of cheap shooters, or wading in an ocean of books while pretending to enjoy their cucumber salad. While pockets of substance no doubt inconspicuously thrive in Shanghai, it requires more gumption and verve to be unique, to stand out above the mass.
Of course, as Yukiko so adequately pointed out, the reason I gush about Beijing may be because I live in Shanghai; her and Angela claim that they think Shanghai is a much cooler place. I guess I can only shrug and be comforted in the fact that in both magnificent cities, it’s easy to find a copy of “Wallace and Gromit” for a buck US.
