Three images from Shanghai are burned into my mental retina: the attack of the 50-foot clam, the Shanghai Museum, and the view of Pudong, the giant commercial district on the other side of the Huangpu River. There are others, of course, like ones from the super-luxury Waldorf Astoria Shanghai on the Bund. The Bund is the river walk that makes this city of 23 million in eastern China so cosmopolitan and yet so oddly familiar. The Bund certainly casts an afterglow.
I encountered the clam in Zhouzhuang, a “water town” an hour and a half bus ride east of Shanghai, on a sweltering day in early May. A woman was squatting riverside shucking this creature, the size of a dinner plate. I assume she was prying it open for food, but no way would I eat something so yellow, so large and so viscous. Call me a queasy Westerner, but that clam looked like the hellspawn of pollution, a child of a Zhouzhuang tributary where packed tourist gondolas plied excremental water.
I was the only trade journalist in a press trip that brought a half-dozen reporters to Shanghai to publicize the first Waldorf Astoria hotel in Asia and its cuisine as well as the new direct flight between Shanghai and Los Angeles from American Airlines, our business class carrier. The airline and hotel were excellent, the city even more fabulous than I recalled from an earlier, far shorter hotel-related trip there in November 2007. Unfortunately, the atmosphere was cloudy even when the sun was out.
We arrived days after a dust storm originating in northern China made the air less breathable than usual. For a good part of our May 5-9 stay, the sun shone and the air was relatively clear. But the industry driving this exciting country also is coarsening the atmosphere, rendering the sky glaring and harsh. The inexorable rise of a middle class buying cars in record numbers, cars that clog the highways and cloud the air, irritates no matter how much money the government pours into transportation infrastructure.
At the same time, prosperity is sweeping China, at least from what I saw. In Shanghai, the Bund seemed fresh and spiffy, largely thanks to Expo 2010, which persuaded city fathers to put their best face forward under the motto “Better City, Better Life.”
Our hosts from Hilton and American Airlines scheduled many interesting events, spanning the visit to the old “water town” of the monster clam – apparently, this “Venice of China” is a mecca for in-country tourists the government is encouraging to travel – a tour of the Bund with a knowledgeable Bund historian, and a stop at the site of the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, where pictures were forbidden.
