Rubble in the Streets

Living in my new apartment for about a month now, I have developed a sort of evening routine, especially with respect to dinner. I exit the subway near the restaurants instead of near my house, partly because I'm hungry and partly because exit near my house may be the only stairway without an escalator near it in Shanghai. I usually then grab either Kung Pow chicken or noodles, sometimes Sichuan food, to take back to my apartment so that I can eat my dinner while watching a bootleg movie. This lovely ritual repeated itself most nights, seemingly poised to continue until I left China. Until last night when I discovered a dark street full of rubble... the restaurants were all gone.

When I walked upon the string of restaurants last night, staring down a street usually dark save the punctuation light emitted by the restaurants, I noticed the street was darker than usual, less vibrant. The closer I got I could see the street was filthy, littered in garbage and debris, however that's no different from any other street in China so I pressed on unalarmed until I began to see empty cave after empty cave. The restaurants had deserted me.

The building is perhaps just more than football field long, with perfectly square openings 10 yards wide next to each other. Above each shop is a small window on the second story, but I've no idea where the entrance to the second level would be, I've only seen the front of the building. But walking past the empty shells I noticed that I'd never really looked at the building before at all. Like a luxury garage for an eccentric billionaire, each restaurant could have been an individual garage for a Humvee, or a Cadillac. The building wasn't so old, maybe 30 years, but certainly lacked character with bleach white walls and large, clumsy gates blocking every entrance. I realized the families who ran and owned these restaurants likely lived above them, in those tiny rooms with one window above the shops. Yet I felt like nobody but me would miss this building, these restaurants. Although I strangely felt guilty, as though my last blog post had been a sort of premonition, I didn't feel concerned for the inhabitants.

I had been asking students about what happens to old buildings this week when one explained that she expects her parents house will be torn down soon. I asked if they would be upset, after all the place they had lived for years was being pulled out from under them. She said no, they were offered money or a place in the suburbs, which most people chose then sold for even more money. They expect it will happen, the building is old so they just wait for someone to want to tear it down and build a new one. Nobody seems concerned, so I guess I won't be either.

Buildings, things come and go in China, its just the way it is. Another student explained that Chinese history is cyclical, with one dynasty ebbing away into another, and another, and another. Revolution is part of the culture to some degree, nothing is really made to last.