It hit me outside the shopping mall next to Jing’An Temple.
We had crossed the street and suddenly found ourselves among a small crowd gathered around a tent-pavilion for Tissot Swiss watches.
A larger-than-life Nicole Kidman and a flawless Asian model looked down at us from their respective window displays as we craned our necks through the crowd pulled closer by the rhythmic beat spilling out of the pavilion.
Then we realized what we were looking at— and laughed hard.
Inside the tent a posse of tiger print-swathed shirtless male models flaunted their wrists in time to the suave Mandarin of an emcee.
Where am I?
I’m in China right now?
It had taken three days for that revelation to sink in and when it did it was entirely different than I had expected it to be.
When I hopped on the plane at LAX (with a dream and my cardigan) I couldn’t have told you what I expected to find when I stepped off again 17 hours later. It probably would have been some vague notion of street-side dumpling vendors and seas of bicycles. But however hazy my expectations may have been I guarantee fauxhawk-sporting Chinese models weren’t in the picture.
Of course I had read all about how China was booming and had been told that Shanghai was a very international city. What I hadn’t realized was that “international” translated to a trendy local populace with a penchant for Tissot Burberry and Ferrari.
What’s more I had assumed that the realization that I am living in China for a year would arrive with a wave of intense culture shock. But there I was standing in what could have just as easily been Rodeo Drive or 5th Avenue in the heart of consumerist America— culture shock was no where to be found.
At least that’s what I thought.
I suppose I should confess at this point that I hate the idea of being a “tourist.” The way I see it I have more than enough posed pictures and overpriced souvenir trinkets to last me a lifetime.
Don’t get me wrong— I love to travel I just want to be more than a spectator wherever I go. Ultimately I came to China on the preconceived notion that I would be forced out of my comfort zone. While some might view culture shock as an unfortunate consequence of being abroad I find the prospect of encountering the strange new and unfamiliar exciting.
So I set out that morning eager to learn and immerse myself in all things Chinese only to end up confused and somewhat miffed at the general lack of what I perceived to be “Chineseness” around me.
Where were the shady dumpling vendors? The bumper-to-bumper bike traffic?
It wasn’t for a few days that I began to notice the small things. The patches of crumbling buildings and mountains of trash tucked away between glistening high rises. The shrunken legless girl laying on the pavement with a tin can as high heels click by heedlessly. The blood stain on the road where an old woman was struck down by a taxi.
I’m in China right now.
And suddenly there it was— culture shock had arrived not in the tsunami wave that I had anticipated but rather in a slow tide that snuck up and took me by surprise.
Clearly I had underestimated this city with its strange synthesis of the old and the new the modern and the traditional the thriving and the suffering— the growing pains of a country in the midst of rapid change.
It has been a week now since I first arrived at Pudong airport and crossed into what has become my new home. And I can say more definitively now than I could have when I left Malibu that I have no idea what to expect of this year. After one week I’ve learned more than I’ve ever known about China and at the same time never been more confused about the country. When culture shock comes it rushes in like a flood.
One thing I do know for sure though is that I can’t wait to dive deeper.