New York may be the city that never sleeps, but Shanghai doesn’t even sit down, and not just because there is no room. Things move fast in this town which is both new and old, Western and Eastern, Adidas and Adidos, Adadis, Admimas, Daiads, and Odidoss. Blink, and another lane lined with hundred-year-old shikumen—each a home to handfuls of families—is bulldozed. In its place, here comes a high-rise rising higher than the one put up yesterday, a clothesline and an illegal satellite dish poking out from each window (a twenty-eight-hundred-square-foot four-bedroom, four-bathroom rental at the luxurious Richgate: $8,572 a month). Shanghai has the world’s fastest intra-city train, largest skateboard park, longest laundry chute (running from the Hyatt hotel’s eighty-seventh floor to its basement), and, based on my observations, the least number of seat belts. Look up. The assorted finials on the tops of skyscrapers will make you think of a bottle opener, a Jell-O mold, a crown roast, a bamboo steamer, a chuppah, a Möbius strip, a snake that’s swallowed some golf balls, the Eiffel Tower, Lady Liberty’s headpiece, and the spiny back of a stegosaurus. Don’t breathe! The air is smelly with garbage juice. The sun, if visible at all, seems dimmer than the full moon on a hazy night. Need more light? You can see everything better after dusk, when the lunatic neon is switched on. Sh-h-h. High-school students are taking the college-entrance exams. No honking or construction work within a hundred metres of a testing site—by local ordinance.
Shortly before leaving for Shanghai, I e-mailed a friend who lives there and asked if she wanted anything from the States. “No need,” she wrote. “Chances are, any item you would bring from there is made here.” I packed light and carried a big duffel. I knew I wouldn’t be the first to pillage this town, but, unlike the British East India Company, I wasn’t planning to pay with opium. (In 1850, it was about as valuable as gold.)
What I did have in my wallet was the American greenback, and, despite its flume ride vis-à-vis the yuan, the Chinese have made sure that their wares remain affordable. A triple strand of freshwater pearls at Lily’s Pearl Store (First Asia Jewelry Plaza, Room 3021) cost me 85 yuan, or roughly the same as you’d pay for three tall mochas at Starbucks.
The Chinese are no slouches when it comes to capitalism. After the death of Chairman Mao, in 1976, the Communist slogan “Look to the Future” (“Xiang Qian Kan”) was morphed by the people into “Look to the Money,” because the words for “money” and “future” sound the same but are written differently. (During my visit, the dollar could be exchanged for 6.9 yuan, and that rate is used here, rounded to the dollar. By the time you read this, however, Americans might be better off bringing along opium instead of cash.) And here’s something that would have pleased Deng (Show Me the Money) Xiaoping. During my stay, I was asked three times if I was related to Groucho—not one inquiry about Karl.
“You can do business with them,” Helen Noh, a Korean who lives in Shanghai, said, referring to the Chinese. “But you should realize that, in the end, they are always going to win.” Noh, who represents designers like Diane von Furstenberg and Donna Karan, and I were at an open-air antique market on Dong Tai Road, surveying the booth of a shirtless, Buddha-shaped man who relentlessly chanted the phrase “old, very old” and then gestured to a box of twenty identical sparkling teapots. Or did he mean us? Anything more than a century old is marked with a red seal and cannot be taken out of the country without an export license, but that wasn’t a problem at this man’s booth. While I wandered off to another nook and admired a delicately embroidered red shoe no longer than five inches and supposedly worn a hundred years ago by a full-grown woman ($26), Noh negotiated with a vender over the price of a swatch of vintage fabric. Haggling is expected in all but the swankiest of shops and can lead to a discount as high as seventy or eighty per cent. After a bit of dickering, Noh acquired seven beautiful pillow-size pieces of hand-dyed appliquéd cotton for $406, about sixty-five per cent off the sticker price.
There are markets for everything in Shanghai, including crickets. These come in varieties meant for competitive fighting (gambling is illegal in mainland China, but nobody tattles) and for keeping as pets, but probably not for sneaking through customs (405 Xizang Road; $1.45 to $14.50 per bug, but some fetch more than $1,000). There are markets for birds, fish, and flowers, as well as entire streets dedicated to light fixtures, buttons, adhesive tape, silk, hair products, and toilets. Actually, toilets take up several streets.
I visited a three-story indoor fabric market (South Bund Soft-Spinning Material Market, 399 Lu Jia Bang Road) with Lin Lin Mai, a Kewpie-doll-cute twenty-eight-year-old with an eighteen-inch waist, a perfect pageboy haircut, a dot of hot-pink rouge on each cheek, green racing stripes on her fingernails, and a tattoo representing a crop circle on her back. Mai’s company, Jellymon, designs clothing, urban collectibles, record albums, posters, and art installations. She has also consulted for Nike and Coca-Cola and wants to start a cosmetics line.