Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

I’m on the balcony of the Captain Bar. It’s on the Bund, which is the strip of fusty colonial architecture, the old headquarters of the great merchant houses and opium traders along the west bank of the Huangpu. And I’m looking across the river at the skyline of Pudong. A decade ago the area was mostly paddy fields and now it’s a parade ground of skyscrapers. They’re normally illuminated at night, and it’s an impressive slice of the urban sublime, but now, because it’s golden week, the stops have been pulled out and they’re lit up like pinball machines.

The giant puppy projected across the face of one of the taller buildings is replaced by a tropical fish, then Van Gogh’s sunflowers. Other buildings flash huge Chinese characters. In the river, pleasure boats are strung with neon.

Unlit, working barges sail past. With a bugle at the back and a long low profile in front, low in the water, they look like the heads of giant crocodiles.
K is telling me about her adventures in gay clubs. Apparently, gay guys go to Beijing, lesbians to Shanghai. Accordingly, the joke is that the women in Beijing and the men in Shanghai are rubbish.

She works from the five star Westin hotel and tells me about the Malaysian owner’s legendary namecard, which he only gives out to the especially favoured. It’s a full size card copy of an American dollar bill, but for a billion dollars, with his head at the centre.

I’ve been to the Westin, I took shelter from a rainstorm on one of their huge sofas. Two cellists were playing. Very posh Chinese hotels usually announce themselves with either a fountain or palm trees in the lobby. The Westin has both. It’s like the lightshow; in Shanghai, more is more.
M is annoyed. He has to go to home and has discovered that it will cost more to transport his cats than himself. Talk about animals inevitably leads in China to, what exotica/family pets have you eaten then? K is unrepentant about the dogs she has consumed – smelly but good. M was put off by a visit to a village where they breed them for the table.

I tell them about the dog I ate with some Koreans. They told me it was brown dog – better than black dog but not as good as yellow dog.

I can see into ‘M on the Bund’. Though I will write about what it is like to eat there, stating prices and specialities and waxing lyrical about the view and the tasteful décor, I know I will never eat there. And I will write about many such wonderful restaurants, for there are many such extravagant places here, run by celebrity chefs, and I will never eat in them either. I will press my nose against the glass, wondering what it would be like to toss a few hundred quid down on a bottle of wine, and people who do that will use my maps and helpful directions to help get there.

We go to a twenty four caff in a mall for crayfish, xiao long xia – little dragon shrimp. A craze for them is sweeping the city. The procedure begins looking off-puttingly medical. You put on plastic gloves and bib, and are given a shining metal bowl. And then the trays of crayfish arrive, like shrimps but bright red and bigger, and a lot harder to get into, you have to really pull and shred for the scrap of meat. You drop the eviscerated remains in the bowl and soon the gloves and bib are covered in sauce.

And when you’ve filled your bowl – and in my case, lap, and the floor and tabletop – you pick back through this massacre, pluck out the tail ends and suck on them, or break the hard claws open and pull out the shreds inside. M says you have to put out of your mind the rumours that these things live by sewage outlets.

He tells us that one of his Chinese colleagues went to a town famous for its vinegar and came back with souvenir test tubes of the stuff for everyone at work, and they were all drinking it neat and saying how nice it was, and he was expected to join in. He says it was gross, who wants to drink raw vinegar? So he covertly let it dribble out over his desk. But he was found out because of the swarm of flies drawn to the sticky patch.

My lips tingle. I don’t know what they put in the crayfish sauce but I’m definitely buzzing. It’s like the Limca highs I used to get in India, a fizzle of well being. Limca is a soft drink and I used to wake up in the middle of the night craving it. I stopped drinking four bottles a day when I discovered that because of its chemical content it was banned in every country except India.

And while this buzz lasts K challenges everyone to eat a chilli from the tray. They’re a good size, the size of a finger. Double dirty dog dare, she says. She’s from Zimbabwe via America and her accent is appealingly mid-Atlantic, but I don’t know which continent she picked that phrase up from. So we eat out chillis and then of course regret it, as the chilli tingle becomes a burn, and sweat is prickling on our foreheads and we have red faces and bulging eyes and none of us can speak for about a minute.

I try to walk home, get lost, and have to get a cab. And that’s a pretty typical Shanghai night out, I guess.