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The Mobile Age: Part 3
And our own future more broadly, I find myself thinking, looking at Girard’s photography or around here in Xintiandi. Because in this setting, where people and cultural ideas and degrees of freedom swirl endlessly, none of us are distinctly nomads or refugees, settlers or prisoners. The diagram of our experience wouldn’t bisect neatly into four compartments (as in modernism) or even yield up that one nomad/settler hybrid (as in globalism) . Instead, our moment-to-moment experience in any one place becomes one of endless, complex combinations of those mobility experiences: mobile and rooted, in situations chosen or forced upon us, in settings intensely varied in cultural tone or entirely familiar. Our position shifting as if in an infinite sphere of experiences, with every sight, every sound, every word exchanged, every flavour.Certainly, the intoxicating flux of international culture that is the Shanghai expat scene seems to reflect this new reality. “Basically, any place is okay as long as you can leave,” Girard told me near the end of our conversation. As settled an expat as I will meet who yet betrays a trace of the prisoner/nomad axis with a crooked smile. “Nine years is an unusual length of time to have been here,” says Jennivine Kwan, echoing Girard in her own mixed feelings, her own sense of a potential plummet from freedom. “It’s the amount of time just before it’s too late.” Kwan’s experience of mobility is even more layered than is typical among expats here. Raised in Calgary by her Chinese parents, the 30-year-old, involved in the green building industry, adds the push and pull of an ethnic identity seemingly shared with her host country. Camouflaged by language and appearance, her cultural rhythms are tuned to the city in a way unavailable to most other expats I’ll meet, no matter how perfect their mastery of the Shanghai hustle or the four tones of Chinese language. But over lunch at a vegetarian mock-meat restaurant around the corner from the Shanghai Centre, Kwan candidly reveals the existential challenges for an outsider in a city going through change at this pace, no matter how insider you might appear. In fact, she reveals a slow-growing yearning to move, to leave. “The environment works on you,” she says, face to the window, her own features reflected against a sea of passing Shanghainese. “I bite my cheek a lot. People often say to me, welcome back to the motherland. I don’t say it, but the truth is, this isn’t my motherland.” Imprisoned or adrift? Or ultimately free? That night, I have dinner with a senior technology executive and come away with a parallel feeling. In Asia for over 10 years, he writes and speaks like a local. He negotiates our way into the busy Guyi Hunan Restaurant on Fumin Lu with a practised patience. “Smile and repeat,” he says, with a slightly weary smile, on the topic of negotiating in Shanghai. “Never become upset.” He bought a longtang house in Jinan himself. Gutted and architecturally reinvented. All Chinese tradition on the outside. All high-European modernism on the inside, concrete and tile and high-end appliances. Beyond place. “Yes, it is nice,” he says when he takes me to see the space later. We stand in his small high-walled courtyard behind the house. He even has a tiny lawn, an almost unheard-of luxury in Shanghai terms. Fifteen or 20 square feet of Kentucky bluegrass. “Of course,” he continues, “every time I find myself with nobody sitting around my dinner table, I have to wonder why I’m here.” |
