Story by María Garcia Juanes📍Madrid
It was already well into the semester. The sun began breaking through the clouds regularly and daily temperature started to rise announcing that the summer was near.
I didn’t anticipate the date was going to be that good from the messages we exchanged on WeChat. We used WeChat because it was the best way to communicate in the country, and Whatsapp didn’t work without a VPN.
I had just come back from the most wonderful weekend in Huangshan, the Yellow Mountains. My Finnish friend and I had been climbing an interminable number of stairs carved in the rock for two days, fueled only by instant noodles and water. The hostel where we shared a room with eight other people, all of them Chinese, was quite high up on one of the peaks. The views from it were spectacular, with sunsets of intermingling shades of orange and blue. The experience was challenging and we had muscle pain for a week. But reaching the top of Celestial Capital Peak, way above the clouds, after ascending through almost completely vertical steps secured only by a feeble rope was well worth it.
I came back with the feeling that I could do anything after that, so I decided to go on a date with one of the guys from the exchange program I was in. He was handsome, with big green eyes under thick eyebrows and a wide, permanent grin.
We met on a stretch of grass near the Power Station of Art, a contemporary museum located just along the Huangpu River. He brought wine, a walnut and cheese deli salad, strawberries, and other snacks to have a picnic. I recall being instantly caught up in our conversation, but I can’t remember a single word spoken that day. A few glasses of wine later, I feared that the date was coming to an end, but he extended his hand to help me to my feet and announced that he wanted to take me somewhere special.
We got out of the metro at West Nanjing Road and took two Ofo, China’s then signature yellow rental bikes. Shortly after, we arrived at what seemed like a narrow alley. I couldn’t discern much in the dark, but the site seemed to be under construction. The area was definitely closed to the public by a metal fence, but he motioned for me to follow him through it.
Right beyond was the most magical place, I thought then, in the entire world.
The sun was already gone when we arrived, but it didn’t matter because the city itself exuded so much light. The whole of it seemed to extend before our eyes: our private show of flickering lights. We were on a part of the river I didn’t know was accessible, with views of the Bund on one side, the Peace Hotel standing proudly in it, and the flashy financial district on the other. We stood there, resting our elbows on the railing overlooking the river in silence, in the middle of it all. Opening two Tsingtao beers we toasted to its immensity.
To this day, I am still not sure how to return to that same place. What I remember is the particular overwhelming feeling I had, because it had also been there when I saw the city’s skyline for the first time a few months before…
It was the day after I arrived in the city. I had just turned the corner of East Nanjing Road on my way out of the metro when my heart skipped a beat. We had spent half of the day before purchasing cheap bedsheets and the other half jetlagged in bed. But now, as my heart came to a halt and then started beating strongly against my ribcage, I felt a different kind of dizzy. I made my way across the street and towards a skyline I had seen repeatedly, but only on screens and photographs. People coming in and out of buildings passed me by like a blur. I had arrived at the Bund. It was like witnessing snowfall for the first time. I never thought a city could take my breath away like that until I arrived in Shanghai. And the city was only just beginning to amaze me.
Not long ago marked exactly five years since the direct Madrid-Shanghai flight that I took in 2017. Shanghai was the first place in my life that represented a new beginning away from everything I had grown up surrounded by. It was full of promises. As I looked over at the little screen located on the seat in front of me, watching the virtual plane cross the line connecting Europe to Asia, I was already loving my new reality.
In my mind, the events of the first weeks get intertwined.
It was orientation day and we were meeting people from a myriad of countries, hosting lunches and dinners with them at our little student flat that had tacky orange couches. There was a big party organized by our university in a club named M2, where glass pitchers filled with a mysterious orange drink flowed constantly into the room, and music blared so hard from the speakers that it made our chests thump. I liked to look out of the window in the taxis we took back to our place, hypnotized by the city lights passing by like blurred multicolored brush strokes. We had a Chinese flatmate who liked to order pungent tofu meals and always helped us unclog the toilet whenever we forgot that the pipes didn’t work well. We changed the moldy shower curtains and went to Walmart to buy a 10kg sack of rice so that we had something to eat in case we needed to lower our monthly expenses. We learned the right proportions to drink the best soju with beer. We thought grocery shopping and cooking ourselves would be cheaper and soon discovered it was not, so we began ordering fried rice and noodles from the store downstairs on a regular basis. We sometimes liked sitting on the pavement outside the student building to eat them, or to wait for the food trucks to park on the opposite sidewalk so we could treat ourselves to delicious spicy enoki mushroom skewers. We had a local “buddy” appointed by our university who had a Chinese name but liked to be called David. We realized that most Chinese people did this, and once had a teacher whose WeChat name was “Mike Wosawski”. We used to laugh until we cried.
From the apartment we stayed in, we had to walk more than twenty minutes to reach the nearest metro station, Jiangwan Stadium, but distances were always long in Shanghai. We went down our street and then took Daxue Road, a bustling street full of cafés, restaurants, and stores. Some exchange students complained about having a culture shock, not enduring the amount of contamination in the air, the constant dodging to avoid being spit on the streets, and the stress of using the metro during rush hour. But I felt fascinated by it all. I still remember vividly the particular smell of the street we lived on, like that of something being boiled. And, in fact, there was always a boiling pot outside a store close by, where they sold transparent eggs and what seemed to be tiny animal organs behind a glass counter. Even at Walmart, you could see food that was hard to imagine in Europe, like black ducks wrapped in plastic or packs of chicken feet sold as snacks. But despite my first impression, I enjoyed the food greatly, even when we made fun of not being entirely sure about what was inside our hotpot when we went to Haidilao.
We tried to see as much as we could of the city on those first days. We visited the Shanghai Museum in People’s Square and walked around rows of ceramics, bronze sculptures, and items made of jade. I didn’t believe it until I saw it, but every weekend in People’s Square Park Chinese mothers actually opened their umbrellas on the floor and displayed their son or daughter’s pictures and information to help them find a partner. We tried the street food waffles at Yuyuan Gardens, getting lost in its narrow streets, bridges, pagodas, and swarms of tourists. We had picnics at Century Park, took the metro to the financial district and walked around the skyscrapers, visited Jing’an Temple, Longhua Temple, the Jade Buddha Temple. All temples. We went shopping at the AP plaza ‘fake market’ under the Science and Technology Museum and got ourselves glittery Stella McCartney bags. We went on a day trip to the nearby city of Nanjing to visit the temples, and then to Hangzhou, where we crossed the West Lake by boat and were captivated by the carved statues of Feilai Peak.
The only reason we couldn’t afford to get too tired exploring during the day was that the city was bustling at night. We would go for fancy dinners at the French Concession, a neighborhood with a European vibe and architecture, or discover what turned out to be one of my favorite restaurants in the city, Lost Heaven. Just because we were “westerners”, we could get into many of the best clubs for free. Sometimes even drink for free. And even though this never seemed fair to me, I ended up forgetting about it as I spent the most surreal nights dancing on the rooftop of Bar Rouge under the watchful eye of the Pearl Tower in front of us. Or at M1NT club, with its shark tank at the entrance (which I probably wouldn’t be ok with now), where one of our friends who worked for an online fashion magazine won us a free bottle of Gray Goose on a draw. Or at Roxie, Shanghai’s lesbian bar, ordering drinks under the bras that hung from the counter and pretending we knew how to pole dance, emerging only when the sun had already been out for a while. This was the actual city that never sleeps!
We developed a passion for KTVs — or karaoke establishments. The first time my friends proposed going to one I pictured a crowded bar with a stage, where strangers stared at us while we drunkenly spilled our drinks to old classics. The KTV we went to was on one of the highest floors of a building located near North Sichuan Road. As soon as the elevator doors opened and I saw a reception counter flooded with heart-shaped balloons, I realized that I couldn’t have been more mistaken. The entrance led to a dark corridor illuminated by red lights with doors on each side. It was hard to tell if we were actually on a karaoke place or if we had made our way into a kinky sex club by mistake. We rented a room that was just for ourselves for two hours, which then turned to four and then six. The next day I had lost my voice almost completely. It was one of the nights that bridged us from fellow exchange students to friends.
Our go-to place, however, was usually the Mexican bar located within walking distance of our student place. La Bamba. Looking back, I can still picture all of us sitting on one of its long wooden tables, ordering cheap gin and tonics and quesadillas.
All good stories began in La Bamba.
There was a particular time that I was sitting at one of its tables with my friends when two guys wearing leather jackets sat on the table opposite ours. The one I could see from where I was sitting was tall, with hair that fell to his shoulders and tattoos covering the whole left side of his body. He vaped constantly, and every time he laughed at one of his friend’s jokes, columns of smoke escaped out of the corners of his lips. Suddenly he looked straight at me and I turned my gaze away. Somehow, I had his number at the end of the night, and two days later we arranged to meet.
He was waiting outside the bar next to a motorbike, holding out an extra helmet for me. I didn’t know much about him or where we were going, but as I held tight to his waist and took in a breath of night air I couldn’t care less. His apartment was small and messy. Inside, we vaped and shared stories for hours. He talked fondly of the place he had grown up in Russia, and of the kids that he taught basketball to. He had a map of Shanghai covering the entire wall in front of his bed and, pointing at it,
he asked me to put my finger where I lived. The next time I visited that apartment, there was a red pin on that same spot. We never met again.
I did meet the guy from that great first date, though. I took him to have dinner at Lost Heaven and convinced him to come with me to Bar Rouge afterward. From the left corner of the rooftop, we could see the Peace Hotel. He knew I was obsessed with it. Days later, walking down East Nanjing Road we reached the elegant entrance to the hotel and he stopped in his tracks. “Want to get in?” he asked, smiling. We went past the revolving doors and towards the elevator, acting as if we belonged there and knew exactly where we were going. We took it to the highest floor we could reach, to an empty meeting room and a bar framed by big window panes. Or that’s what I remember. It was not as magical as it had seemed from outside, but I loved the feeling that anything was possible during those days.
In this landscape, final exams arrived. I caught a massive cold that annoyed everyone around me in the library, so my roommate and I went to study at our secret private spot. It was higher up in the building, and the room was empty except for a few cardboard boxes, a piano, and two long tables behind a wall. I hadn’t played the piano since I was fourteen, but after the release of the movie “La La Land”, I had learned how to play parts of a few songs. So while my friend created summary after summary of every subject, I played the intro of “City of Stars”. Surprisingly, the days we spent locked studying in that room were fruitful, because we both got really good grades.
The last few days in the city, when we began to realize that our time in it was coming to an end, were hectic. We went up the Shanghai Tower, the highest skyscraper, to contemplate the city from above the clouds. We walked around the M50, a cool and creative district full of art studios that were open to the public, looking for exhibitions that offered free champagne. We had a goodbye picnic with our lovely Chinese “laoshi” — or teacher, in English — in the grass outside the university campus. We visited the labyrinthine streets of Tianzifang outside Dapuqiao metro station, a great place to get lost. We attended house parties in our friends’ flats, sitting all together on the terrace, passing packs of chips with strange flavors, and drinking soju with beer. The last night in La Bamba I hugged my friends, the people without whom the city wouldn’t have shined so bright, and cried. Deep down I knew it was the last time I would see many of them.
On the very last day, I took my roommate, the “we” of this story and my rock throughout the experience, to the metro at Lujiazui, in the district of Pudong. We walked towards one of my favorite spots, the walk of Binjiang Avenue along the Huangpu River, and sat on a bench to watch the sun set over the opposite shore. As the sun went low, and our time there came to an end, we made a promise to the city: there would be a chapter two to our story.
