At the start of 2001, the twin towers stood confidently in lower Manhattan, Iraq was languishing in the back of the news pages (Afganistan was out of sight and out of mind) and Bush-the-younger could still get away with calling himself a “uniter, not a divider.”

The clearly-starting-to-teeter US economy was the main source of domestic anxiety, and our foreign policy was heavily focused on China.

Now Iraq, and the war on terror, have stolen the headlines for over three years. But our appetite for this is starting to wane, and the press is starting to look beyond the Middle East once again.

The May 9 issue of Newsweek featured the special report, China’s Century as its cover story. Around the same time, the June issue of the Atlantic Monthly hit newsstands, featuring the provocative headline, “How We Would Fight China” and a serious-looking chinese sailor on its cover.

The two reports make good companion pieces.

The centerpiece of the Newsweek report is Fareed Zakaria’s, Does the Future Belong to China? It’s a lightweight (well it’s Newsweek, so yeah) survey of the obvious, but still an interesting read. It spins post-1979 China as the remarkable result of nuanced and carefully-planned reforms carried out by leaders who smartly shifted Chinese policy away from communism without damaging Maoist nationalism.

The two pieces in the Atlantic are a little gloomier, as suggested by the cover headline. They focus on the chess (or go?) match an asian cold war would surely be, characterized by naval standoffs, mid-air confrontations and diplomatic catfights.

I began to imagine the plot of a war satire set fifteen years from now. Our next president, in his (or her?) second term, decides to respond to one embarassing standoff or another – and also put a halt to China’s rapidly-improving military capabilities – by waging a preemtive war. We’re several years into it, in the story I imagine, and it’s looking more and more like a stalemate.

Perhaps we’ve taken Shanghai and even Hong Kong – with the help of Japan, Australia and Singapore, but Europe has abandoned us, and the support of Singapore and the Aussies is starting to look pretty shaky.

At home in the US, things are more polarized than ever. California might as well be its own country.

On the ground in China, our troops don’t like what it feels like to be the agressors on foreign soil.

That’s the backdrop. Now I have to come up with a story.

Monday was Tracy’s birthday, and we spent the morning wandering through the Yu Gardens and Market. It was in the Yu Gardens that we suddenly saw all the foreigners and tourists that had been conspicuously absent in our previous wanderings around the city.

As the Lonely Planet book opined, the Yu Gardens presented sort of a Disneyland version of Chinese dynastic culture, but there were lots of pretty little nooks and niches and some nice photo ops…

me & tc	“rockery”

For Tracy’s birthday dinner, we took a taxi to a Japanese restaurant called Shintori. Minimalist but somehow welcoming, it was a really beautiful place to share a meal.

The experience of Shintori begins before you enter the place. The entrance is tucked into a hard-to-find little alley. A winding path of pebbles and concrete slabs, lined with upward-pointing halogen spotlights and tall, tall bamboo, it’s unmistakeable once you spot it. The door is a huge, dark steel panel with no discernable knob or handle. As you reach out to touch it, it silently and weightlessly pivots inward.

The restaurant has a spacious, open layout – tall, three-storey concrete walls surrounding large ebony tables on the ground floor. One storey up is a a narrow mezzanine, with smaller tables along the walls, looking down.

The welcoming effect is partly thanks to the kitchen, which is in full view, in the back.

Tracy and I shared an incredibly mild and buttery filet of cod, cooked in a dark miso sauce, along with a salad and an assortment of sashimi. We sipped a delicious dry sake and a couple of beers. For dessert, we ordered a divine (to use Tracy’s word) green tea tiramisu. Before it arrived, I excused myself to go to the washroom.

What I was actually doing, however, was asking our waitress if the restaurant wouldn’t mind doing something a little special with our dessert, for Tracy’s birthday. The waitress – who was very shy – arrived a few minutes later, accompanied by two of her colleagues. They held out the tiramisu, which was adorned with a small candle, and proceeded to sing an extremely sweet and shy rendition of Happy Birthday. I wanted to hug them.

It was the perfect way to end the tourist portion of our trip to Shanghai, and it left us with a much better impression of the city overall. In my next days’ wanderings, with and without Tracy, I found myself able to look just a little deeper and really enjoy the Shanghai I was now seeing – a city known for its dumplings, sci-fi architecture and beautiful people…

flying a kite	junior fashionistas	sci-fi shanghai	dumplings

In all my experiences of international travel, I’ve been able to get by in English without too much difficulty, and where I’ve had trouble with English I’ve generally been met with very accommodating, apologetic service. And so, as a native English speaker, it’s hard to walk through the world without a little cultural arrogance.

A hundred and fifty years ago, England held a global empire achieved through its military might. More recently, as the British empire collapsed, the US was in the process of solidifying a global empire achieved through its commercial might. English is now the de facto business language of the world, and the world has pretty much resigned itself to this fact.

Except for China.

China is already big and powerful enough to begin to impress its own language and culture upon the world. It seems clear that this trend will only deepen in the forseeable future, and it’s probably a good time for the world to start learning mandarin.

It’s a really valuable experience to travel in a country where English is not only not spoken, it’s not all that relevant. It’s really interesting, and humbling, to wander in a country where my culture hardly seems to matter at all. That’s not to say American culture is absent. The Nike swoosh is ubiquitous, People’s Square is adorned with Pepsi street lamps, and there are KFC joints everywhere. In a way that’s difficult to articulate, however, these seem as invisible and foreign as I felt as I wandered the city.

As one of my commenters said many posts ago, the American heyday is past, and China is the New Black. Even as I write this, the BBC is reporting the results of a recent global poll that asked whether present-day China has a “positive influence on the world”. 49% said “yes”, compared to only 38% who said the same about the US.

We saw nothing interesting about the architecture as we walked through the French Concession district of Shanghai, and our language issues persisted.

There’s literally an English-speaking façade here in the sense that storefronts, billboards and even highway signs display messages in both English and Chinese. You might see a place called (in English) “Such-and-Such Tea House and Bakery,” for example, but once inside you find there’s no English on the menu, and the service staff are unable to understand the English word water or even the word tea. And they certainly don’t go out of their way to be helpful.

Tracy is a vegetarian. We ordered vegetable fried rice for her at a tea house and tried to confirm with our waitress that it didn’t contain meat. She absolutely did not understand the question, however, so we didn’t press the issue. When the dish arrived, it had little bits of bacon in it, and we tried to demonstrate to our waitress through ad hoc sign language that Tracy couldn’t eat it. I picked a piece of the bacon out of her rice with my spoon, pointed to it and then pointed to Tracy while shaking my head and sort of waving my hand back and forth in an apologetic but “negative” way. The waitress didn’t understand our attempts at all. She frowned and simply walked away. A minute later, we called her over again and showed her a line of Chinese from the Lonely Planet book that supposedly translated to “I am a vegetarian.” But she was having none of it. She shook her head and walked away for good.

A short walk later, we wandered into some kind of street bazaar in, where I bought a coat, and together we bought a collection of warm hats. The hawkers there were the most aggressive I’ve encountered in Asia, especially the shoeshine guy who squirted black polish on my shoes while I wasn’t looking and then demanded I pay him to wipe it off.

We spent all our cash at the bazaar, so we had to hit an ATM before we could hire a taxi back to the hotel. We joined a long queue of people at the first ATM we found, but when we tried to withdraw cash, it subtly refused us. I say “subtly” because it actually presented us with a menu labelled “Please select one of the following services:” The friendly service it offered was “Exit”. The second ATM just froze at a blue screen and threatened for several minutes to eat our cards.

Unwilling to risk a third attempt, we decided to hail a taxi, knowing we couldn’t pay the full fare back to the Westin. When we arrived at the hotel, however, we were only a few renminbi short, and the driver was nice about it.

The hotel was a welcome relief, and we even discovered a working ATM next door. We rested up a bit and then met in the lobby for our next excursion – to a gallery called Art Scene Warehouse. The business card and the magazine we were carrying told us the gallery closed at 8pm, but when we arrived at 7:25, they told us they were closing in five minutes. We hurried through the massive space, but they shut the lights off before we were able to see everything. They didn’t seem to be in a hurry to leave, though, because they engaged us for a friendly 20-minute chat at the front desk as we were on our way out. Somehow a 20-minute chat was fine with them, but they couldn’t leave the lights on for an extra 30 seconds. Whatever.

Things began to take a better turn at dinner, after we discovered a nice place called Chatea. The only “Shanghai” moment came when I asked the waitress for something with which to crack the giant lobster claw that came in my soup. She had me put the claw onto a small plate, and she wandered off to the kitchen. Tracy thought she disposed of the claw – as if it had offended me – and we had a laugh about the luck we were having in Shanghai.

The truth is, though, I was a little heartbroken about the claw, because it looked really tasty, so when the waitress actually brought it back I smiled like a five-year-old.

Shanghai has not felt warm since we arrived, in any sense of the word. It was 5° C last night, and I woke up to a bomb blast.

Well, not literally.

Just before I went to sleep last night, I was flipping through the TV channels. On one of them was some kind of hotel announcement, which I ignored. Except that the word “blasting” caught my eye. I switched back to the channel, and read that the construction site across the street would be doing some blasting at 6:30am, on each of the next four mornings.

Even with the warning, it scared the #@$*! out of me the next morning. I jerked awake, heart pounding, and my brain went through a succession of “thunderstorm… no, bomb… oh right… blasting.”

At least it got me moving early.

Today, Tracy and I visited the Shanghai Museum, a windowless and somewhat gloomy modern structure housing an amazing collection of Chinese bronze and ceramics, as well as a decent collection of jade, calligraphy, painting and textiles.

After the museum, we hailed a taxi to Frenchtown in search of good shopping and the fascinating mix of architectural styles described in the Lonely Planet book. Getting there proved to be the first bit of trouble. We showed the taxi driver our map and pointed to the neighborhood, but taxi drivers in Asia seem to have a lot of trouble with the concept of depositing you at a general location or even a specific street corner or block (as opposed to an actual building).

Eventually, he agreed to take us to a hotel in the neighborhood we were seeking, and we set off on foot from there.

I’m in the chilly city of Shanghai this week, in a neighborhood called the Bund. I’m here with my colleague and good friend Tracy, at the Westin, which may very well be the most beautiful hotel I’ve ever stayed in.

The lobby of the Westin Shanghai is designed around an amazing illuminated glass staircase by Color Kinetics, and the centerpiece is an elaborate Chihuly sculpture.

As for my room, I honestly got lost in it for a second, trying to remember where I’d set down my bags. It’s full of mirrored surfaces and more like a suite really, with a small office and living room in addition to a spacious bedroom and bathroom.

We’ve encountered a serious language barrier here, which we didn’t expect. With a population of over 16 million, Shanghai is China’s largest city and its most densly populated. It’s a major world commerce centre, and the Bund is its business district, so we assumed we’d no problems getting by in English.

When we went out in search of dinner, however, we wandered into a series of restaurants offering nothing discernable to non-mandarin speakers. Even after watching other customers for a few minutes, we couldn’t even tell whether there was table service or whether we were supposed to order at the counter. Forget about trying to read the menu. The manager at one place was able to scrounge up a menu in English, but then when we tried to order, they didn’t have anything on it.

Eventually, we were shepherded away by a young guy representing a tea house on the third floor of a shopping complex. A big – but somehow still cozy – place. I had a steaming bowl of noodles, and Tracy had a plate of wine-sauce-pickled sliced fish. We ordered Tsing Tao beer and asked for water.

Our waitress didn’t understand the English word water, and we didn’t know the Chinese, and that’s the way it looks like it’s going to be in Shanghai.