Chongqing: Land of Impressively Accurate Boys
Chongqing was a great place. I think I’d really like to go back and get a better look at it. The fog that flummoxed the Japanese bombers was in effect until the final day. It’s very cool for a city to have so many views to show. Pity it’s an inferno in the summer.
Piracy in China. Also, fog.
The crazy thing about Chongqing is that it’s a mountainous city. It’s not really just that it’s in a mountainous area (it is), but it’s almost built in and on mountains. You’ll be walking along next a building and suddenly a gap will open up between you and the building and if you look down, you’ll see that the floor of the building right next to you isn’t really the ground floor, it’s more like the eighth floor, and you are walking on a sidewalk, but over the last 5 minutes or so of walking, it became an elevated sidewalk several meters above what may or may not be the ground down there. This ain’t no touristified Lombard Street.
What will really make or break the city for me will be how they handle the reconstruction. All major cities in China are going through a massive rebuilding period. I’m not so much worried about them tearing down old apartment blocks and such – Most of the ones I saw scheduled to be torn down looked more than a bit past their useful days, if not outright dangerous. I worry if they are going to be able to keep the neighborhood feel. I got the distinct feeling that, maybe because of the terrain, there were neighborhoods that meant more than an artificial division of the city. There were so many narrow winding streets. I wish I had taken more photos of these homey places, but frankly they were almost all in a pretty bad state. I hate to be the white tourist guy walking through taking pictures of a run-down place that people call home. I don’t like poverty porn.
Destruction in Chongqing
But that’s another interesting thing. Where Shenyang looked tired, beat down and listless, Chongqing seemed vibrant, active, and well, still pretty decayed. What I mean is that Chongqing and Shenyang seemed similar in that the buildings looked really run-down and falling apart, but in Shenyang, there were half-finished buildings where construction had been halted long ago standing next to partially destroyed buildings. In Chongqing, there was none of that. It looked like Chongqing had the investment money Shenyang didn’t. Buildings are coming down and going up all over Chongqing. In Shenyang, they seemed very still, preserved in whatever state they were when the last person left.
Buildings set to be knocked down (click through to the gallery to see a close-up of those red banners in the back. They're calling for people to chill about their houses getting taken away from them. Yes, the banners tell the people to "chill." It's a Chinese word. The Chinese invented chilling. Li Bai wrote poems about it.)
A slight digression on Shenyang: I’ve talked to two people who have said things are going really well in Shenyang nowadays. Possible explanations: 1) I’m completely wrong 2) things are going really well for the rich in Shenyang (both of the people I talked to were very well-to-do and didn’t seem very interested in regular folks) 3) After walking all over the town for two days, I only saw the run-down parts.
I’m partial to #2 myself. Shenyang has a long history of the elite doing quite well thank you very much.
Back to Chongqing. Another thing I noticed about the people there, and of Chengdu, frankly, is that the people I talked to (granted, mainly cabbies, shopworkers and the like) are pretty pissed, and they’re pissed at the government. I think I’ve only talked to one person who really touted the party line on everything, otherwise they were just going off on the not only the local but also the national politicians. They were using words like fraud and cheating and talking about fake elections and massive corruption and wasting of money. In Shanghai and Beijing, cabbies will talk generally about corruption or the “low quality” of Chinese people, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard so many stridently anti-government Chinese folks in China. Again, my sampling group was very very small, but still. Also, I saw a lot more protest banners that hadn’t been taken down. I only got a picture of the one (again, I’m too embarrassed to be a real photographer), but there were several. They generally call on the government to step in and get them a better deal from the housing developers that are tearing down their homes. Interesting stuff.
Banner chastising the government on a soon-to-be demolished building
I didn’t go to very many touristy places. I did see the Arhat Temple (remind me never to become an Arhat. They had hundreds of them in there and they were all really freaky – mostly lumpy heads, but also the bulging eyes, the ripped open chest to show a Buddha inside, the extra heads growing out of the back of their heads… Call me vain, but I’ll remain unenlightened.) I also went to a place called Ciqikou, which is about 40 minutes outside town (1.50 RMB for the scary rust-bucket bus). It’s an ancient (aren’t they all) town that’s famous for being the place where all the china got loaded on boats to sail down the river. It’s also famous for being where a lot of communist folks hid out during the war. It’s really a very cool funky place. I was afraid that I was going to be really turned off by how touristy it was, but actually it felt about right. I’m sure the racket and smell and renao of it all accurately recreated the town in its heyday. I always love those old twisty alleyways. It reminded me a little of the old town in Lijiang. Very nice place.
Ciqikou: touristy but very cool
Well, I’ll try to cut this short. I’m on the ship heading down the Yangtze right now and we don’t have internet access very well, so I’ll probably not be able to post this for a few days, but hey, if you’re reading this, then it’s already been posted, right? So hurray for that.
