Strangers In A Strange Land, Day 1 (Cont.)

Our trip into Shanghai from Shanghai Pudong Airport in our Buick minivan-for-hire (lacking any markings or signs of regulation, we could not really call it a “taxi”) began well enough. As his companion dozed and the four of us tried to sort through the competing effects of fatigue, nervousness and excitement, the driver goosed his minivan up to 140 kph (abut 85 mph) on the sparsely populated freeway. Reason had clearly taken leave of my fatigue-addled brain; there was nothing about a speeding, borderline derelict Buick in the hands of a Chinese taxi driver that gave me cause for immediate concern.

Free at last from the airport, first impressions presented themselves rapidly. The air was the unhappy gray of smog, the likes of which I had not seen in many years. Chinese drivers, as I would confirm on a daily basis for the next several days, regarded painted lines on roadways with the same amount of respect they afforded to pedestrians, which is to say, none at all. Cars would routinely straddle lane lines, ready to jump into whichever lane moved more quickly. A final first observation, which would also be confirmed every day of our trip, to my continual astonishment, was that I had never seen so many large apartment buildings in my life. Along the entire distance of the freeway and as far as the eye could penetrate into the murky haze, the landscape was defined by apartment buildings. Every one of them was at least eight stories tall, and they were inevitably grouped in sets of four or more. Just as inevitably, laundry hung out the window of every unit. Mile after mile, apartment buildings the size of dormitories dominated the view. It slowly became clear how one city housed 26 million people.

Eventually, the haze yielded the distinctive bottle opener shape of the World Financial Center, a skyscraper proudly proclaimed to have the highest observation deck in the world. Seeing what I surmised to be the downtown financial center of the city in the distance encouraged me that we were headed roughly in the right direction.

Shortly thereafter, we exited the freeway and found ourselves deposited in the legendary Chinese traffic we had heard about from many different sources. It is thick, it is noisy with incessant tooting of horns, and it is chaotic to Western eyes as cars, motorcycles, scooters, bicycles, pedestrians and old men pulling wheelbarrows all vie for the same piece of tarmac.

With a few minutes of travel on the surface streets, however, I sensed that there was order within the chaos. Perhaps not order by an American’s definition, but certainly an order of process within its own system. Chinese traffic is like a school of fish or a wheeling swarm of sparrows. Consider the school of sardines on display in the huge kelp forest exhibit at the entrance to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The huge swarm of innumerable fish flow together through their tank around and through all obstacles, then switch direction in a flash of silver, all moving as if they were a single organism. Biologists have made careers out of studying the group-think that informs and controls the complex collective movements of these massive, multi-unit groups. A sociologist, or perhaps a traffic engineer, could do just as well studying Chinese traffic patterns. The traffic does not go fast, but it also does not stop. Drivers change lanes on a whim and are accommodated, even where the laws of physics would appear to dictate that a merge is impossible because two solid objects cannot occupy the same place at the same time. Yet, a couple of toots of the horn later, the lane change is accomplished. Slower or stopped vehicles are overtaken in this way. Pedestrians wander into traffic and are ignored. Half a car length of space between cars is an open invitation to a merge from the side and a beep from behind. I quickly determined that I should keep my legs and arms as inboard from the sides of our car as I could; I could not believe that a rearrangement of our sheet metal was anything but inevitable and imminent.

After narrowly avoiding piling into the back of a disabled vehicle in our lane in a dark tunnel by merging one lane to our left that was already occupied by another car, we made a turn onto another street. Just as crowded as the thoroughfare we had left, the street was a curious mix of upscale stores and auto dealerships and tiny restaurants and businesses that defied description. Unfortunately, judging by our driver’s sudden lurch for his telephone, it also appeared to be the wrong road. After conferring with someone I assume was the man who scanned my credit card, who had a somewhat less vague idea of where we were headed, our driver decided that he needed to make a U-turn to go back to the main thoroughfare we had just left. Alarmingly, he decided he needed to make that U-turn RIGHTNOW. Thankfully, there was a gap in the two lanes of traffic coming toward us. The fact that the gap was about two car lengths, followed by a massive tour bus trundling along at the speed limit bothered our driver not a whit. As a passenger on the right side of the vehicle with a bus bearing down on us, it bothered me many whits. Confirming my newly developed theory about Chinese traffic functioning like a school of fish, the bus somehow did not compress my side of the minivan into my lap as we made a slow U-turn immediately in front of it. Horns sounded; yelps of alarm from our part of the minivan may also have been emitted. Because we were not killed by that single maneuver, we figured we would be perfectly safe for whatever else our journey held in store for us.

Returning to the main thoroughfare, the landscape soon turned a little more luxurious, and less stridently urban. We turned onto a wide boulevard (which I later learned was the very Hong Qiao Lu we were seeking) lined with trees and nicer homes and hotels behind walls. With no objective reason to do so, I sensed that we were nearing our destination. I had seen pictures of Greg and Kate’s place on their blog, and knew that they were in an orderly, attractively landscaped community of medium-sized houses. It felt like we would find such a place nearby.

Indeed, the driver was starting to doublecheck the street address and peering out the windows looking for the numbers. I did the same, and realized that we were in fact quite close. Unfortunately, as we drove slowly in the right lane, we drove past the entrance to the community we sought, which was completely hidden from the road. The driver realized this and knew he had to make a U-turn RIGHTNOW. From the right lane. Across two lanes of traffic in each direction. Once again, out of a sense of self-preservation, I looked at the floor of the minivan until the maneuver had ended without terrifying screeches of rent sheet metal. There may have been involuntary gasps of terror; they may have come from me.

At long last, we found ourselves at the address we have been given. All we had to do was convince the white-gloved, uniformed Chinese guard refusing admittance to the taxi that we belonged there. I saw, down the lane ahead of us, a narrow glimpse of the flowers and houses I had seen in pictures. We had to be in the right place. Somehow, the combination of our taxi drivers insistence and our tired, fish-out-of-water appearance convince the guard to allow us in. Sort of. The guard walked all the way to the designated address, our Buick following dutifully behind. I was immediately relieved to see, in the open garage, some children’s toys and other items that seemed to me, intuitively, to be Greg and Kate’s stuff. We jumped out of the minivan as the guard knocked on the door. A Chinese woman, presumably our friends’ housekeeper, answered, and had no idea who we were. I smilingly pleaded with her, trying to convince her that this was indeed Greg and Kate’s place. All the while, the taxi driver was hurriedly unloading all of our bags onto the driveway; whether or not this was the right house, this is where we were going to stay.

Finally, the best news we had all day. The woman disappeared into the house for a moment and returned bearing Greg and Kate’s wedding picture, a picture I had seen countless times in our days together in Fresno. I knew that ability to gain entrance to the house depended on my ability to convince all of these fine Chinese folks, none of whom spoke English or knew who in the world (literally) this motley band of white people was, that I knew the people in the picture. I nearly jumped for joy at seeing the picture, my sincerety in recognizing my friends nearly palpable. Maybe it was not so much acting as genuine delight in seeing the familiar picture of my friends, but it seemed to relax everyone. Suddenly, everyone was smiling, even the guard. As we thanked the driver and sent him on his way, the housekeeper went back into the house to call Kate. She put her on the phone with Cheryl and let us into the house, arrived at last. In a kind gesture, she also turned on the television to the Discovery Channel so the kids would have something to watch. Meanwhile, Cheryl and I went outside to relax in the backyard while Kate returned from a shopping trip she had taken with a neighbor, completely unaware that we had arrived in the country.

Before long, everyone arrived home, the tale of our ordeal was described with much laughter, apologies were made and quickly accepted in the best humor, and we headed out to dinner directly across the street… at a Texas ribs restaurant. Under strict instructions to order my burger well done because the Chinese proprietors did not really understand how to cook ground beef, we enjoyed a very comfortable, familiar meal as we started to fade.

At last, finally with our friends in their comfortable home, we settled down to sleep. Thirty six hours after we left our home to begin our journey, and forty eight hours after we arose to go to school and work on that day, Day One of our vacation was over.