April Article: Shenzhen Is A Star In The New Asia

I first felt overwhelmed by the city, with its mammoth highways resembling the North America I had left in search of something more exotic.

It became more tender, friendly, and comforting as I explored the city by neighbourhood by neighbourhood, settling on the area of Nan Shen.

I lived one of the exotic lives a WQestern woman could ever hope to lead in Asia: the lyrical poetry of a happier dream combined with hustle-bustle of a rural village transplanted into downtown China.

My apartment occuplied the entire fourth floor of a five story house, and miraculously had windows on all four side - thirteen tall windows, letting light pour into a spotlessly white walled home with equally gleaming white ceramic floors.

The light just balanced the shadiness caused by other village homes pressing so closely to our building that there is a name of this in Chinese - you can reach out your windows and almost touch the other neighbours if they reach out of their homes.

With six rooms to decorate, I chose traditional Chinese wood furniture, dark brown wood, polished and gleaming, and bamboo plants, and jasmine bushes with hundred of scented white blooms.

The area was called The Village, and my neighbours were among the most unusual a woman ever had anywhere - dirt poor and honest Chinese farmers who had been handsomely compensated by the city government of Shenzhen when the urban council purchased their land for contracting the inevitable skyscraper upon fifteen or twenty years previously.

I could not help but think of the way the Western media throwns the phrase Asian corruption around, when I saw how fairly these poor families had been paid - enough money to live well upon the rest fo their lives! And in China, that means the whole family as well!

The landlady who owned the home lived on the ground floor, and though we communicated by hand gestures and drawings, she and her immiediate family of fifteen or twenty relatives, were fine representatives of China - hospitable and patient with the changeable person that I sometimes am.

Walking out in the morning, I would head out of the village gates - this is a village within a neighbourhood, with its own gated police even! - and cut through back streets to a a Chinese Coffee Shop which drew me in like a magnet with the blinding neon sign

There I ate delicate breakfast pastries filled with pistachio or black bean paste, served by cheerful and perfectly groomed girls attired in green suits.

I worked on my lesson plans - though those who hate me as a teacher, probably do not think I do lesson planning - I do!

I would go to the stationery store next door, where I purchased lovely large notebooks, with plasticized covers - not too cheap - three dollars each, and not perfect-bound.

These books with their romantic photo covers of ancient telephones and roses in vases were of much interest to the Chinese, worrying unnecessarily that I would be one who wrote unhapppy things about their Beautiful China.

The problems of Shenzhen are typical of all big cities: crime, long distances spent on crowded buses, loneliness for the bright young office workers who come from aLL China missing the casual warmth of their hometowns.

My enighbourhood was typical of other areas, fast food restaurants where the nutritional value of the food was higher than many so-called good places in my own country - The fish and chicken killed the same day! The vegetables arriving in the city markets only the night before that I ate them in the cafe!

For only one dollar, their junk food included corn picked niblet by niblet, green beans with almonds, a variety of fish and chicken, and often a free bowl of delectable barbecued peanuts.

And for an extra forty cents, washed down with an ice-cold - yes, they are catering to all our food habits - Tsing Dao beer - one of the best light beers on our planet.

Just in my area, I had a huge library, albeit in Mandarin, a few huge cybercafes, parks both small and large, a police station where the police were mostly kindly to many of my bureaucratic oversights,

housing supplies stores where I bought huge wicker laundry baskets for only two dollars each - to use to store clothes and ESL toys.

For good meals, the area teamed with middle-range places with white tableclothes and all my favourites - Shanghai brown noodles, dumplings, corn with pine nuts - and upscale coffee bars with high ceilings, wicker swings, and live piano bars.

At night, the markets in the back alleys supplied computer software, the latest films on DVD, and CD Roms featuring stars as seemingly unknown to China as Ray Charles.

It is also unfair to criticize Shenzhen as the countfeit capital as almost all the beautiful clothes I saw there were the Real Thing. And at prices so low I could not believe the price tags.

These shops are often small and it is hard to write down their locations for others, as I just know them by walking around with my Chinese pals.

You have to know clothes and to know how they are made to understand that many of the designer clothes I saw in China and Macau and Hong Kong were the Real Things.

I could tell these sweaters would sell for much more in the West by examining the stitching at the necks, finished by hand. Of course, it is boiling hot in South China most of the time, so I had this discovery to enjoy to myself.

In my own neighbourhood I found a few wonderful stores, I remember a raw silk cerulean blue wraparound shirt and watermleon linen shorts that I bought for a few dollars each.

I never got back to a Chinese silk jacket and dresses store opposite from Carrefour in Nan Shen that I intended to recommend to other women there.

Made In China will come increasingly to be a less humourous phrase, as everything in the world seems to be made more and more in China.

Apart from the food, the clothes, there are the mysterious Chinese pharmacies with their pungent medicinal scents - promising improved health and delivering on their promises.

And I miss the places in Shenzhen that I remembered as places where the good people of Shenzhen entertained me so thoughtfully and so graciously.

The flowers market as Spring Festival where Sabrina and I carried too many flowers in our arms, and called on our cell phones for Mr. Gao, a computer genius tycoon, to come and rescue us with his car.

The Computer Market, teeming with alert young Chinese professionals, where Daphen and her husband and her brother welcomed me at their weekend computer stall and then became close friends.

The huge offices of the Bank Lady, or Cecilia, a vice-president of a major Shenzhen money exchange, who had not one secretary but a row of twenty girls all sitting neatly at their computers! Our last of many meals together was a delicate and excellent feast of New Chinese cuisinerie - small red caviar eggs in a lightly tossed vegetable salad was just the opener.

And Jack Qiang, a romantic and handsome telecommunicates expert, appearing at my door in a Tommy Hilfiger jacket borrowed from his father, telling me he had had to suddenly leave his car and all his clothes in California! Our first date was at Coffee Language where I could not take my eyes off his face.

Then there is the friend I call Trillionaire, or Chinese Tycoon. In no other country of this world, other than New China, could you find a wealthy man so generous, so refreshing in his boyish ways.

Gordon, a small and dapper lawyer, who handles more than 55 corporations, and is commencing an office in London, England, won my heart as a friend by telling me you are a wonderful teacher!

Every time I had a problem he was there, and he miraculously passed through borders using some VIP entrances, and he registered me at a hotel, I did not even to have show my passport.

He even said of the Old China, I liked many things about life then, while being frank and honest about the hardships of dire poverty.

Taking me to a 5 star restaurant, he waved to all the rows of European cheeses, fresh salmon, prawns and oysters, and cakes with whipped cream, and acted liked a child on Christmas morning.

Your friends are my friends, he pledged, and if they need any help, why I will help them too. And he did, with information about crossing SAR borders and changes in the laws recently.

Yes, there are more good things to be said about the New China than negative, and I hope I will contribute more one day than just so many happy memories.