A Shanghai-tened Reality

On some days you hear “Watch, bag?” enough times that if just one person mixed it up—“Bag, watch?”—you’d follow them into any questionable alleyway, up any set of narrow stairs, and into any dank, faux-Louis-Vuitton-filled room. But on most days, you don’t need to be reminded of the overwhelming pirated-goods market in Shanghai; you need to be convinced that anything here is real.

The first week you spend in this former marshland, which was transformed into a financial capital seemingly overnight, can only be described as a sustained shock. This has nothing to do with the pregnant mother trying to sell you Japanese bondage porn (illegal in China) or the two armless men who like to circle a block known for its expat bars. The shock comes from everything appearing Western and yet being just different enough to always keep you on your toes. And so, for fear of becoming a sleazy expat who takes everything at face value, I have held my nose, dived into the smog, and tried to find an authentic experience in a city that’s about as real as Vegas or Dubai.

“This is my lowest price, I can go no lower, I could be killed, I cannot feed my family for any lower price,” the owner of a shop once said to me with tears welling in her eyes. I looked at the knock-off shoes I was bargaining for, sighed, and paid the price she was asking. As I walked away, I turned around to watch her and her co-worker giggle with excitement. I had been had.

The scene above played out in a market typical of Shanghai: four- or five-floor “malls” filled with hundreds of fake-stuff-stalls, selling everything from North Face to Abercrombie to Coach to print shirts with lazy translations (one read, “Let’s Do The Dancing Team Beach Volleyball”).

After the first week, these pseudo-Western products all begin to fade into the rest of the novelty that is Shanghai. I love that I bought the entire James Bond collection compressed onto three DVDs, but I’ve been trying to find something under the pirated, superficial materialism that has saturated far too much of Shanghai.

In my search for authenticity, I quickly found a group from whom, collectively, one should never seek advice: expats. These men and women come from all over, and are united by their love of Shanghai (which gives you reason to pause). The expats—seemingly unsuccessful at life and love in their home countries and normally conspicuous at night as they troll the bars with cocky smiles and Hungarian hookers—love Shanghai because Shanghai loves them and their money. They’re another frivoulous aspect of a frivolous city.

I have come close to finding the real Shanghai only when walking through a food market alley, and it has led me to believe that the further you can get away from the development that China so highly touts, the closer you can get to something you’ll want to remember. There were not only fruits and vegetables for sale but also frogs, turtles, eels, ducks, chickens with their heads cut off, and exotic items that words can’t do justice.

I was strolling through when I saw a vendor pull a live snake from a bag, gut it, and hand it to a paying customer, who then headed to find some fresh onions for his reptilian dinner. There was nothing fake about that moment, and for some reason, I feel much more comfortable in Shanghai having seen it. Chinese beer tastes better to me now, I can hold my chopsticks with more confidence, and when a patch of sweat appears under my arm in the crippling Shanghai heat, I feel more like a real person.

The Olympics have brought about an increase of inauthenticity instead of a respite, as performers lip-sync through the opening ceremony, athletes compete with performance-enhancing drugs and equipment, and the Beijing police fake smiles for the tourists. Luckily, after my time in Shanghai, I feel immune, and it isn’t because of the 100s of fake DVD’s that I’ve bought, the amount of bargaining I’ve done, or the number of times I’ve been scammed. It’s because, when that snake kept moving without its head, I suddenly felt very far away from home, and that feeling was very real.

The other day, a friend of mine told me about riding on the back of a motorcycle taxi after work. I asked him if it was worth it, and his response said a lot about Shanghai. “It’s really fun,” he said, “but I couldn’t figure out where to hold on.”

—Columnist Andrew F. Nunnelly can be reached at nunnelly@fas.harvard.edu.