Zac O’Yeah follows his nose around Shanghai to discover the country’s alter ego, and its ancient links to India
A cock and two ducks strut about on the pavement in front of a restaurant. Ah, the Chinese obsession with freshness: These ingredients are so brutally fresh!
The supermarket where I pick up groceries during my Shanghai sojourn follows the same game plan: Buckets and trays are full of swimming eels, meditative turtles craning their necks at customers, croaking toads, and crabs (their claws tied) waiting patiently. Until suppertime. It suddenly feels as if my knowledge of Chinese grub before I got here—fried rice, fried noodles, cornstarch and MSG gravies—amounts to nothing.
Take Chop Suey. I discovered, to my consternation, that it isn’t Chinese at all, but was invented in San Francisco around 1888 for the American palate. Although its name stems from the Cantonese jaahp-seui, meaning ‘mixed odds and ends’, it is very rare in China. I never encountered it, but I heard “American” Chop Suey is served at restaurants near foreign embassies, where it is appreciated by the less adventurous diplomats who wish to eat Western-style Chinese food. Western style? So, what’s Chinese-style Chinese food like?
Flashback Time
When I’d just landed, Shanghai appeared impenetrable without a Gold Credit Card: Its streets lined with upmarket restaurants (where you had to reserve an entire room for much-too-lavish banquet dinners) and too many shops—the global protocol of sameness you’d expect in any international city. What the Chinese wear is decided not by Mao, but by Zara, H&M, Tommy Hilfiger, Adidas. You get Starbucks at almost every street corner, and a huge Ikea warehouse looms by the Inner Ring Elevated Road that encircles downtown. “Do you have Ikea in your country too?” a Chinese friend asks, proudly. Later, I walk past a boutique selling Bentley cars, and begin to wonder: What am I doing here? Where is China?
I came looking for something I could connect with and relate to—the China of my dreams, perhaps—but had ended up in a giant, futuristic, Shanghai-sized shopping mall. While you can’t, despite claims to the contrary, see the Great Wall of China from outer space, it is said that Shanghai—6,300 sq km in area, half a kilometre in height—is the only man-made thing visible by the naked eye from the moon.
It’s a surreal experience to be a Flaubertian flaneur in a city growing so fast that it happens right before your eyes: A pavement one day was dug up and turned into a building site by the time I returned to the spot.
Skyscrapers are the in-thing: The more the merrier, the higher the better. Soon, China is going to have more of them than even the US, the motherland of skyscrapers. Some 687 skyscrapers will be inaugurated in China over the next few years; even the smallest rural town wants one, whether it needs it or not. And Shanghai, with its futuristic riverfront skyline hitting the clouds, is skyscraper dreamland. It’s been featured in Michael Winterbottom’s sci-fi flick Code 46 probably because (a) it indeed looks like a cyberpunk movie set, and (b) it affords us a glimpse of the world’s possible megacity future.
The Uighurs, ancient pastoralist Turkic speakers, are one of the almost-forgotten links in Asian food habits: Between Chinese, Middle Eastern and Indian. Out of the Chinese population of over one billion, these Sunni Muslims number about eight million; they look a lot like the other Chinese, but are conspicuous thanks to the men wearing knitted skullcaps and wispy beards, and their tasty barbecue.
The name sounds curiously familiar when he speaks it. Indeed, when it is put on the table it turns out to be a Chinese non-veg version of south Indian rice soup, kanji. In Shanghai, it has been made into luxurious seafood porridge, if you can believe it. My friend ladles it on to our platters. “This is the stuff.” An unexpected Indian link slapped right between dumplings and lotus stem preparations.
(This story appears in the 09 August, 2013 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)