Shenzhen is a gleaming metropolis only one hour from
Hong Kong, and a must-see for all travellers passing through the Crown Jewel.
Firstly, Shenzhen is not really that Westernized -
a reason that tourist guides sometimes use for giving it a miss.
The incredible warmth, generosity and hospitality
of many in this New City is typically Mainland China.
The go-that-extra-mile sort of service to be found
in both hotels and restaurants portrays the high spirits and ambition to be found all over the New China.
And then, for those who just want a day or two in
the area, the shopping bargains are unparallelled. These extend to things unseen at first such as services - computer work,
printing and publishing, photography services, beauty and health care treatments.
The city lacks any sort of traditional artistic
or historic base, which is why most tourists make a bee-line for Xian and Shanghai and Beijing.
The most prominent tourist sites are still the group
of fabulous theme parks around Shennan Road which make it a good destination for young children!
There is Mini-China, which reproduces all famous tourist
sites in microcosm. I have never seen this, preferring to wait until I see them in reality.
There is a Disneyland type of park, which features
Pirate Towns and Wild West Villages, and always a touch of Shenzhen luxuriousness - a Water Park for adults to have sensual
hydro therapy treatments, and which is accessible without passing through the children's areas.
My very favourite - and I recommend this village to
everyone with a camera - is the excellent Folk China.
Looking at the folk villages, built to the correct
scale, and respresenting every last minority peoples of China, I thought how Western democracies once used words like
peasant and primitive and backwards to refer to these peoples, as I am sure many ambitious and
urban Asians view them as well.
I thought ot the tiny, cramped and over-priced apartments
in cities like Vancouver, Canada, where I am now stuck, facing onto noisy downtown streets where the last of the needle-users
and pr--titutes refuse to be driven out by high-powered real estate developers.
I wandered around the unexpectedly handsome and large
wood houses, with their high ceilings, and gorgeous red flowers bordering wide doorways, and thought to be a
folk person in China living a long time ago might not have been such a bad life!
Still, the housing that many young professionals live
in here is quite attractive. About at an equal level with what I have had in Montreal, and far superior to what I see
in Vancouver. They share roomy three bedroom apartments, bordering on private gardens, fronted by noisy streets filled
with every convenience for the urban shopper.
The public transport, like all over Guangdong Province,
is versatile, plentiful, and reasonably priced.
The eating places are stellar, from the cheapest junk
food to the gourmet palaces favoured by my richer students.
Her citizens are overly curious about the Crazy Foreigner,
and typically helpful, considerate, and generous with their time, their advice, their dinner invitations, and offers of help
with Mandarin language problems.
Shenzhenites are a people on the go, who still have
old world charm, the time to help a friend a need.
In the end what I like the most about the city of
Shenzhen may be different than what the New Chinese are most proud of: its modernity and its stupendously rich and accomplished
business class.
Though it is certainly an offbeat and unusual place,
with a population ratio that features way more young people, way more educated people, and way more truly bright-minded people,
than the Average City, what I love about the place is its sense of the potency of the emerging middle-class in the New China.
Thousands of citizens throng the streets and the markets
nightly, pushing young kids in strollers, buying computer software, buying ESL cassettes, buying vanilla ice cream cones.
The exuberance of an economy that suffered for so
long, through not much fault of its own, and that has now been miraculously revived, through the energy of its own people,
its organizational sense of its federal government, and the trustfulness of foreign investment, percolates through the
crowds, and gives us all who pass through here a cautious hope for the future.
Arielle Gabriel
Vancouver, B.C., Canada*
*I hope I will make it back to Asia before the Great
Water Disaster I dream of submerges this city!
