Dena

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Dena Rash Guzman Contributor -- Nevada

Dena Rash Guzman is a poet and disability rights advocate living in Las Vegas, Nevada with her family. Her work can be found in numerous publications including previous issues of Luciole Press, the One-Three-Eight and Words-Myth. She can be contacted at dguzer@hotmail.com.

An American in Love - Shanghai, May 2008

I make no claim at knowing China, or even Shanghai. I couldn't possibly. This was my second visit in one year, with my time spent there totaling about 25 days, and I experienced only slivers, edges. I saw enough to fall in love. China has run through my American life in strange threads, from these two wondrous visits, and in other ways I can't begin to explain. I could lose myself there, among tai chi practitioners spotted from the back of a motorbike ride in the early morning and dumplings and egg tarts and scents both heavenly and sickening and sacks of rice and smoking men on motorcycles and silk and fine fashion and puddles you don't want to step in and pretty girls on telephones and bars and old men adoring their wives or pet dogs and prostitutes and deeply treasured laughing babies coddled by sweet faced grandparents and street hawkers and jade and Louis Vuitton stores and gardens and taxis and Buddhas and all that unbelievably calm yet dragon-hot energy. So many of the Chinese people I encountered were so easy to smile and laugh, and so easily pleased by even the slightest effort to show respect or admiration or even just interest. It is a very international city and one sees plenty of foreigners as well, but sadly, many looked overwhelmed and dour in comparison. The best thing? In Shanghai, people love to look. They will gather to stare. It's okay to stare back. It's okay to observe each other's humanity. It was strangely familiar to me. I felt like I had never left from the moment I first arrived.

Dena with a parasol

1) Silver wings

This was my second flight to Asia, returning to Shanghai, PRC. I traveled there alone both times. I was told prior to my first visit that as you arrive via air, you don't see the city at all. It is a huge, tall city and you do expect to see it. Twenty million people, more than four thousand high rise buildings over eighteen stories high with many new rising each moment, but flying over, flying in, where is it? You don't really see it at all until you are smack in the middle of it and then, to really see it, try going up on a high rise roof. It does not end. Pictured are clouds that look Chinese to me, the embroidered edge of Asia, a calm sea, and floating on it, fishing boats and ships of industry. My friend said, "Everyone takes this photo." Yes, we all do. This one is mine.

2) Knick-knacks

At the curio markets, Mao memorabilia abounds. He is everywhere, smiling fat like a baby shining. He is even to be seen on alarm clocks, waving his little red book as a second hand behind his army of people marching tall and proud. Tick tock, tick tock.

3) evening bags, street scene

This was a dirty and dark street. A street behind a main street. We were thirsty and shopped out from the Mao Memorabilia (I had an alarm clock in my bag.) I remember waiting to cross a side street crossing the main street that runs somewhere in front of this back street, and the traffic was dizzying. Unimaginable human movement. Where were they all going? And to think that moment waiting to walk was populated by perhaps only a few hundred of those twenty million people who live in Shanghai. That traffic was a symphony composed primarily of people on motorbikes and bicycles and if it had been earlier, more of those bikes would have been stacked unimaginably high with goods of some mysterious sort, like ants at a picnic. Shanghai is a picnic in some ways.

4) market photo (first one)

I saw this on the way to the Natural History Museum. I don't know what all of those creatures were, or how one might prepare them for dinner, but they were cheap and plentiful. I would have tried most of it, if fearfully and with hesitation. I believe it was Anthony Bourdin who said something along the lines that the Chinese people have spent centuries mastering the art of making the most plentiful and cheapest cuts of animals and fish unbelievably palatable because economy necessitated it to be so, and one has to have a little bit of faith in that. It somehow beats a rib-eye from Whole Foods in terms of sheer genius. Still, I had one of the most finely prepared steaks one could imagine there in Shanghai. I am thinking of brunch at the Westin, specifically. Even if the food had been horrible, the opera singers and plate spinners and fan dancers and endless champagne would have made it a meal to remember.

5) monkey (photo #18)

Oh, this poor monkey. Just past the fish market a Chinese person, whom I was unable to identify as male or female, appeared out of nowhere jerking that monkey around by a rope on its neck. I heard, "Jump, monkey, jump!" I may have heard this in my head. Of all the things I saw in China, this was one of the most mind blowing and unexpected. My host gave the monkey's owner some coins and as we walked away made me laugh by saying, "That monkey probably just picked my pockets."

6) beautiful woman (photo #24)

I wonder that this woman will never know how utterly beautiful she was to me, washing vegetables there on the street. This is her life: mine, here in Las Vegas, is just somehow less colorful and palpable.

7) buildings (photo #39)

The architecture of Shanghai is nothing short of a riot. Old, new, ugly, beautiful, modern, shabby, all blended together like some sort of glass and concrete trail mix. These buildings looked as though they were in love. I didn't alter most of these photos, but I gave these two a blue aura because they wanted a blue aura.

8) country ladies (photo #40)

They were laughing because I was photographing them. I wanted to because they were clearly neither the typically glamourous nor the typically industrious Shanghainese women one sees from moment to moment. I love the braids. A few moments after we passed, however, I believe one of them sent the toddler to beg from us, where he nearly walked into a moving car. Traffic in Shanghai is a motorized ballet, chaotic and graceful, but really, a begging toddler could cause some issues. My host shooed him from us and the car as gracefully as one would bat at a naughty bee.

9) Pearl Tower (photo #49)

The famous Shanghai Oriental Pearl TV Tower as seen from the 31st floor hallway window outside my room at the magnificent Shangri-La Hotel. One can travel up to the top of it, but I had no desire to do so. It is such a beautifully gaudy structure that it was all I could do to look at it.

10) street (photo #51)

Another back street I but merely peered down after the curio market. The signs and lights floated just the way they do in this snapshot. They meant nothing and everything to me.

These are just a few of the hundreds of snapshots I took while there, and each of those has a long and specific memory attached to it. I could speak of each one for hours. Shanghai, with all its glories and agonies, is a gorgeous example of diversity and ingenuity, excess and poverty, the beautiful and the putrid, and most of all, of pure, unadulterated humanity. I don't know how to measure that in terms of right or wrong, political or personal. I know only how to measure it in terms of mystery.