Spring 2006

Personal observations of everyday life in China's most dynamic city

    China’s rapid modernization and economic advancement is nowhere more evident than in Shanghai, the massive port city on the country’s eastern coast. An important cultural, financial, and industrial center since the 19th century, it languished under Communist rule until the government authorized its economic redevelopment in 1992. In a scant decade and a half, it has become China’s largest and most developed city. It is the financial and trade center of China. Its port is the world’s busiest. The landscape of the city changes almost daily as old neighborhoods are razed to make way for modern housing developments and former rice paddies become business districts with ultra-modern skyscrapers.
    Last summer, a group from Sewanee visited the city with an eye for what impact those changes are having on an individual and personal level. Funded by the Freeman Foundation and led by Scott Wilson, associate professor of political science and director of Sewanee’s Asian studies program, five students spent five weeks walking the streets and alleys of four main Shanghai neighborhoods, each with a distinct character: Maoming Lu, known for its nightlife and youth culture; Meiyuan Lu, a middle-class area near the new financial district; Rushan Lu, a housing development built on land used for farming through the 1970s; and Fuzhou Donglu, an older commercial and residential district. The group talked to neighborhood residents in their homes and to people on the street to gain a sense of just how Shanghai’s development has affected their daily lives. They captured these conversations on videotape (resulting in a 45-minute documentary entitled The Changing Face of Daily Life in Shanghai) and in indelible memories.
    For Sewanee magazine, I asked each one of them to recall a conversation or a moment that made a particularly vivid impression. Their responses provide a glimpse into the everyday lives of individual people in one of the most dynamic areas of our world today. — Laura Barlament

‘A Lot of Opportunities’

    Many of our interviews in Shanghai were arranged by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. For these interviews, we would go (with a translator) to people’s homes. To get a different view of a neighborhood, however, we would just walk through the streets and see who would talk to us. A lot of the time I would walk around by myself; we found that people would more often initiate conversation if we didn’t stay in a group. My language skills weren’t good enough for me to do a serious interview by myself, but if the person I was talking to had a lot of patience and a good sense of humor, sometimes I would get interesting information through casual conversation.
    I sat down one hot afternoon in a small patch of shade on Renmin Street and was soon joined by a young man. I said hello in Chinese, and we struck up a conversation. The man was from Sichuan province in southwest China. He told me that Shanghai was very different from the small town he had come from. “It is much busier here,” he said, “and the food isn’t as good.” He didn’t think it was all bad, though: “I like McDonald’s; I had never eaten there before I came to Shanghai.”
    “Shanghai is a very rich city,” he continued. “There are a lot of opportunities — that’s why so many people come here to find work.” That was readily apparent — even as we were talking we watched a group of migrant workers doing construction work on a new office building.  — Jean Anne Babin, C’07

‘We Are Like Brothers’

    Our time in Shanghai gave us a broad array of experiences. We squeezed through residential alleys hidden between shops and boutiques. We clambered up dimly lit, creaky wooden staircases and crammed ourselves into tiny run-down apartments. Hours later, we would enjoy the modern luxuries of Western-style bars that only expatriates, foreigners, or Chinese businessmen and bureaucrats could afford. We tried to resist when retired couples insisted on showering us with gifts of China’s most expensive teas, and we had conversations in the park with eager students, young and old, learning English. We stuffed ourselves with the watermelon and piping hot Oolong tea that every household offered us, and we shared lychees (a delectable fruit) and conversations about the meaning of life with some of Shanghai’s poorest.
    One of the most powerful interviews for us was one we conducted off a side street along Renmin Lu with three poor men on mopeds. When we asked them about what they think about the effects of development on Shanghai society, one man replied:

    Moments like this opened our eyes to the complexity of what we were researching. Some people expressed contentment with Shanghai’s rapid development and optimistically anticipated the future, while others revealed to us the experiences of those who are left behind. When our time in China was over, many of us were just starting to see how much more we wanted to learn from the people of Shanghai. Yet, in the short time we were there, we immersed our-selves into Chinese society on a level far deeper and more intimate than any of us had ever imagined. — Christina Kwauk, C’05, and Adriana Zimova, C’05

Food and Friendship

    Whether I was conversing with the Shanghainese at the local basketball court or receiving help from a calligraphy store clerk, they were always genuinely interested in my life, just as I was in theirs. Of the many experiences and friendships I will not forget, one man’s friendship will indelibly remain in my memory. Every evening strolling back to the hotel, I would pass a smiling man grilling sticks of chicken feet and beef outside a seamy karaoke bar. The first few times I passed by, he made a point of smiling and saying hello in heavily accented English. After a few nights of passing greetings, I decided to buy a stick of beef. We both struggled with a foreign language as we sat and discussed our homes, families (he was expecting twins very soon), and American movies. Making less than five U.S. cents a stick, he was not reaping many of the benefits that were available with the economic development in China. Nonetheless, he was one of the most cheerful and amiable people I have ever met. — Marcus Murphy, C’07

Home Sweet Home

    On one long, busy day, we interviewed four families. They had a variety of living arrangements. One family lived in a house with only two rooms, the bedroom and the kitchen. Their child used to sleep on the floor, but now they have an attic where she sleeps. Some of the apartments were accessible by a flight of stairs just wide enough for one person at a time, and then we would squeeze into the apartment and manage to find places to sit. Another, more affluent family, living around Maoming Road, had a two-story apartment.
    Although even the big houses were small by my standards, many families explained one of the biggest advantages of economic development is the increase of available space in their homes. “First, the whole family lived together, me, my husband, my two daughters and my parents-in-law,” said a woman in her mid-60s. She continued to explain that because of the economic reforms, her grown daughters can now afford to live on their own.
    An elderly couple were able to give us an even longer view of life in Shanghai. She grew up in Shanghai, and he was from Nanjing. They met through relatives and started corresponding, but they first saw each other on their wedding day in 1948. The country was still recovering from the destruction of World War II. “Although my wife had a house at that time,” explained our host, “she had six brothers and six sisters, so we had to move out and rent a house. [It] had nice arrangements. When we had our third child we moved into a house with 15 square meters [about 160 square feet]. … We had no bathroom, only a night stool. We could not take a shower when we wanted, but when we took a shower we had to fill up a big bucket with water. When we moved to our second house our son was already in primary school and our younger daughter was in secondary school. Our second house was 18 square meters [about 190 square feet].” — Adam Moran, C’05

City of Dreams?

    We originally intended to focus on the lives of neighborhood residents, but my interest drifted increasingly to transient people: migrant workers and prostitutes. These two populations epitomize the contradictory nature of China’s economic reforms and its social consequences. In Shanghai, a city of approximately 13 million official residents, another four to five million people, called the “floating population,” live without long-term resident permits. Migrant workers fill vital roles in China’s new economy by working in construction, sanitation, or even foreign-run factories. Prostitutes may not be vital to China’s economy, but they soak up cash from various strata of China’s population and foreign visitors.
    I wanted to understand the dreams and life chances of these marginalized groups. Migrant workers – most of whom were men – maintain a tenuous relationship to their households in villages far from Shanghai. They typically return once a year, handing over their surplus earnings. Although they live in near squalor in Shanghai, job opportunities in the city are much better there than in their villages. When asked about their “dreams” during interviews on park benches or while squatting next to busy commercial areas, many migrant workers related that they had no dreams. “I do not have any dreams for my sons – I’m just a migrant construction worker,” said one man. “People who are bosses and get rich can have dreams. Where I come from people do not have many educational opportunities. We cannot afford the high tuition charges. Without an education, you cannot get ahead. If you are a migrant worker, you don’t have a chance.” To have dreams (usually of getting rich), you have to be rich, a circular logic that underscores the long-term struggles of migrant workers. They deal with their difficulties by suppressing their dreams and by working in cities to save money for the dreams of future generations.
    The two prostitutes whom I interviewed could not have been more different from each other. One came to Shanghai from Wenzhou, a rural township in a neighboring province that took the lead in capitalist development in the 1980s. She fled her abusive husband who was a drug addict. In Shanghai, she peddled sundries at a stand in a local market, but the store failed. Penniless and in debt, she began working for a “massage parlor” where she tried to make enough money to pay off her debt, support her child, and pay rent to the parlor’s owner. The second prostitute came to Shanghai from Guangzhou, a major city near Hong Kong. By day she sold cosmetics in a department store, a very good job by Chinese standards. At night, she walked the streets of a nightclub area that catered to foreigners and China’s nouveaux riches. She planned to save her money to buy her passage to Hong Kong, where she hoped to really strike it rich.
    Interviewing Shanghai’s itinerant population revealed the complexities of China’s new market economy. Each of the people I interviewed was better off in some ways, but social advancement came at a heavy price. Migrant workers fractured their families, faced harassment from the local population, and worked longer hours and for less pay than Shanghai’s permanent residents. Prostitutes used their bodies to cater to the beneficiaries of China’s economic takeoff to get ahead or just to get by. — Scott Wilson

About the authors: Jean Anne Babin, C’07, is a psychology and political science major. Christina Kwauk, C’05, is working on a master’s degree in social science at the University of Chicago. Adriana Zimova, C’05, is participating in the Asia Pacific Leadership Program at the East-West Center in Hawaii. Marcus Murphy, C’07, is majoring in Asian studies and environmental science — natural resources. Adam Moran, C’05, is a sales and marketing representative for Hermitage Hardwood in Cookeville, Tennessee. And Scott Wilson has taught comparative politics, political economy, and political theory at Sewanee since 1994. They are continuing their collaborative work begun in Shanghai; in January, they presented a panel, “Shanghai Neighborhoods in the Midst of Modernization,” and previewed their documentary at the Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies in Atlanta.