Thoughts From the Bund

by T. Crepeau

As the people on foot, on bikes, pedaling trikes, on motorized scooters, in cars, harunkled about in every direction, outside the huge café windows, I was lost in the world of my own mind, sunk in a lavender and tryptophan coma, curious to see how I would find the world, find Shanghai, when I came to.

My consciousness swirled like the finely ground tea solids twisting on milk in my looking-glass mug. Little trails of the objects my gaze alighted upon followed my tracking eyes until they settled, bringing the world back into focus until I swung my head to look at something new. I closed my eyes and the effect continued. 

Traffic signals blink red-yellow-green throughout the world. There were things on the menu that I didn’t know existed. I couldn’t read their names when it was time to give my order so I just blathed something at the pen-to-pad tapping, severely shoed, perfectly still, perfectly waiting, youngish proprietress of the little shard of Shanghai café.

My Tokyoite host mother had arranged the trip. Host Father was on business in Shanghai, he had an apartment. “It would be good if you went to see him, see Shanghai,” was the rough equivalent of her patient Japanese. 

“Uhhh, lavender milk tea…please?” I managed to dimly convey, the soft corners of my dazed English at odds with the sharp, quick sawing of Cantonese pelting about the openness of the space, plashing like rainwater over every surface.

“Hot?” she asked, accentuating the word like a Harvard linguist. I replied in the affirmative, still turning over in my mind the consequence of my order. I was well acquainted with milk tea—it was the substance sold in bottles found in any convenience store throughout Japan. It was also the stuff that I added gum syrup to when it came to me on ice in tall, cylindrical glassware at any coffee shop in Ginza or Omotesando or any burg of metropolitan Tokyo. I also knew that lavender was a gentle shade of murasaki, but in this case, it was the strongly aromatic stuff that my mother dobbed in concentrated form on her pillow some nights when she knew she’d have trouble falling asleep. It was another cold, dusty day on the Bund, two days past Christmas, so of course when that word, delivered to me with that perfectly pronounced question mark, of course, of course I would like it hot. 

I have a knack for underestimating people or wanting them to be less than, or simpler than they are. I assume they and the experiences they’ve garnered throughout life are more limited than they are. Thinking this way makes life for me much, much easier to deal with, especially in those moments when the sheer complexity of things and my responsibility to them threaten to overwhelm. There, however, is nothing limited about people. The only occasions when my erroneous presuppositions are not erroneous are when I come across someone like myself, doing to me what I have a tendency to do to others, just for the sake of making life easier.

Such was the day, back on University ground – home in bleak February Minneapolis—that such an ass presented himself. I have a knack for forgetting names and this idiot is no exception, nonetheless I retain the experience, the memory of our interaction that day. It’s ironic that I remember this when I’ve forgotten so much of what I’d like to hold on to. This was years ago. Sometimes I don’t even recognize the people I’ve been.

I don’t know where I got the line, but it was suddenly on my lips and I said it so quickly and matter-of-factly that even I was surprised once the deed was done, as its effect lingered in the air for a gasp, before someone cleared their throat thus seeming to solidify its truth. During the moment my lips moved, curving the air exuding from my lungs into words – which in turn tumbled into a few fragmentary sentences, which before even the unspoken periods and rhetorical question marks were expressed, were already plummeting headlong as ideas – during that precise moment, my thoughts, my ideas existed. 
Their effect lingered in the quiet. 

In the minds of some of the hearers (expressly the young academic they were pointed at), in the dynamic hum that occurs between the ears, they continued. My words, bereft of sound, continued.
It happened in class, probably an English class which tend to get a little catty from overblown personalities (like my own) trying too hard to exert their vehement opinions. He, whoever he was, was drolly expostulating on and on again, just like he had the class before, and the class before, and just as he probably would next time, and the time after that until oblivion. It was his right; he had after all done the reading and paid his tuition. Whatever the subject: Keats, feminism, Derrida, the post-modern … people (even non-English majors maybe) seem too consumed by their own egos to accept anything outside their own brilliant headspace. Youth can be forgiven for it. I wonder what excuses the aged have?

I remember the moment for the sickened crunch I felt at what my words had done. I don’t even remember what they were …

The waitress has stopped to ask how the tea is. “It’s wonderful.” She walks away. For an instant I see a friend laughing easily across the table from me at a back alley tea house in Prague. She’s so beautiful. That moment is so far away from this place.

There are such times when a statement can almost be unsaid, can be retracted, can be sucked back into the bellows that birthed it. This was such a moment, and the fact that the words were allowed to stay, to stand in the stunned silence of the classroom, chin nobly jutted, only emphasized their gall, and the gall of me their utterer, my own chin nobly jutted, “Yes! I said it and am unrepentant, you mite, just you try to stand against the full force of my measure of you.”

And surprisingly he couldn’t, whoever he was, and whatever he is now; the moment was too precise, it cut too deep: it was the truth (to him). Maybe he was too young to know that there isn’t such a thing as truth, and that my measure of him, or anything, was as consequential as a breeze. He grew it into a typhoon and was utterly blown away. It was a Tuesday. Thursday he wasn’t in class, blowing wind. What are people made of? Am I just as fragile as him?   

Wherever I go I take where I’ve been. I wonder what I’ll take of this day on the Bund, the opulent Western-styled center of Shanghai, planted in the tumultuous ’30’s and flourishing in commercially branded form: mammoth neon signs flashing “BUICK,” “Samsung,” and “Nike” everywhere. It’s now late evening and the dark seems to turn on the neon even more. I walk past the ninth McDonalds I’ve seen that day with disgust … and straight into the fourteenth Starbucks. 

These days my friends tend to be those who’ve scratched their itch to travel and worried about paying for it later, after they’ve cooked their own meals in the mean kitchens of international student hostels, guest houses and rundown tenements operating either below any sort of official lodging standards or within the bounds of a state that doesn’t really have any. As I think of some of the places I’ve traveled to alone, I pray a silent thanks for the study abroad I’m living at the moment. I’ve been provided for in ways that I’m not used to in places so far from home. 

Not everyone who travels, whether lavishly or on a precarious budget, seems to appreciate the subtle phantasm that are far-away places … the wonder and complexity of places large enough to contain people’s entire lives, somehow existing twenty-four seven just on the other side of the same planet. Sure there are plenty of familiar things, and sure one can fool oneself into thinking that it’s all really the same, but often that’s just an excuse for not thinking about it enough. The world is wide and no two people’s experience of it match. Local life feeds each person, and there are infinities of “local.” 

I watch the cobblestones that flow underneath my feet. The warmth in the dead paper cup in my hand is fading. To my left a mass of fifteen-foot tall bushes is illuminated a surreal and exaggerated green. A park. Glowing in the night. Surrounded by tall buildings cake-topped in light. To my right a colonnade of retail shops lining the merrily-peopled boulevard. All things seem to compete to be more Shanghai than the rest.
The caffeine is now waging a winning campaign against the dwindling effects of the milk tea. I stroll, minding the uneven pavement, dodge all manner of bipeds, and futilely try to take in all the unfamiliar things and understand them. Something down in the corner of my vision taps at my pant leg. 
How to describe it? 

It wore tiny shoes and a pinched, dogged expression on its filthy smooth face. It was as dry and dirty as the Shanghai streets (which really are ubiquitously upswept and windblown). I cannot stress enough that it was not possible for the child to be more covered in filth, from the tips of his plastic-cup-clutching, pudgy fingers, each exclamation-point digit dotted with a perfect, teeny tiny filthy nail, down through his padded-coat-clad, coarse-wool-wrapped body, to his grimy-booted little feet, he looked like a discarded paper bag that had been socked and slid by the wind and the momentum of taxis up and down the unkempt public streets for an eternity, or the three or four years that he had thus passed on this little speck of universe, it being all he would ever know.

His equally squallered mother, standing twenty feet behind, wanted me to put a little something in his little cup as he chased after me, pelting my thigh with his little burden while straining up up up at me with a drawn and listless expression. She watched as I of course quickly freed a freshly minted one yuan coin from my jeans pocket, the jeans I had splurged on to tremendous satisfaction in Tokyo, and sunk it into his cup.  Days later I would remember his face, and think of the way he toddled after me, whimpering. What kind of scrawniness did the thick padding of his clothing probably hide? The thought filled me with an overwhelming compulsion to find him and give him a bath. I wondered what reason his mother had for taking advantage of her son’s innocence, and if, after long days of chasing after foreigners, if she loved him. Kiddo, there’s nothing I can put in your cup that will make it all better.

The cab back to host-father’s high-rise covered nearly twenty miles and cost eighty cents. I brought a pizza from the chain store near the lobby up to the gleaming two-bedroom. Host-father was working late – very late – so I’d have some space to absorb my own very long day. I pause at the mirror in the hallway and feel smug and lucky at the same time. Congratulations. You found a way to come and experience this far-away place. Who’d have thought you’d end up in a situation like this? I feel as if I’m winning at life which is a game of comparison. I think of all the people I’m doing better than and before my swollen head explodes, let out a little air by thinking of the people I have yet to catch up to. My older self shakes his head slightly at the juvenile version.

I’ve been the hinge in innumerable small instances, whether smiting someone on the petty field of learning (was everything in my homeland always a competition?), or not putting enough money in a cup. I’ve gained nothing by stopping to compare. All that’s happened is that I’ve stopped. I wonder what would’ve happened if I would’ve paused for the little boy, instead of giving him a token, permission to go on and leave him and his mother behind as quickly as possible. That would’ve been something. Instead I continued on, tired, and merely in an interstitial space – somewhere that isn’t anywhere – done with the day and heading home, clutching my own empty paper cup. 

…something down in the corner of my vision taps at my pant leg … it’s a small boy, obviously in need. I see his mother a short way behind us. I look at her and she grabs my eyes with hers. She is glazed and withdrawn. So is the boy. He is mewling something in a language I will never understand, still tugging at my knee. I place my hand lightly on his shoulder and feel the dirt and dust covering his clay-brown coat. He’s wrapped in it like a Christmas parcel. I come down to one knee and look into his face as I reach into my wallet. He grows quiet and assumes the expression of a little boy: slightly pouty, definitely tired. I give him everything I have because it’s what I can do. There goes my cab money. I stand up and look back towards mom. Somehow I know she’s doing the best she can. I nod to her and wave to the silent boy, in awe of his cup full of crumpled bills that I don’t even understand. I walk on feeling light and heavy at the same time, wondering how the heck I’ll get home.