Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

I wander into a dense crowd of middle aged folk, hundreds of them, mostly women, and most are displaying a piece of paper with a set of vital statistics on it – height, date of birth, education, salary. Is it some kind of job market? No, the print outs remind me of classified ads. It takes me to a minute to realise what’s going on – it’s a marriage market; they’re arranging dates for their kids!

A couple of people carry folders of names, presumably they are middle men to the process. Very few of the ads have pictures attached. These people know what’s important, it’s all about getting your little emperor or empress married off to someone of suitable status who’s not too short, and they’re not going to let looks come into the equation. How very organised and rational. Because obviously people left to their own devices over these issues are apt to let such trivia sway them.

There’s a Chinese expression, ‘nan ren bu huai, nu ren bu ai‘ which means, if he’s not a bad boy, a girl won’t love him. I imagine these parents, after their daughter’s bought home a couple of outlaw bikers (or the Chinese equivalent), deciding to take things into their own hands. I wonder how much the kids are privy to the process? I can’t imagine anyone being particularly happy about the thought of their mother walking around a marriage market with their stats on a placard.

I’m in Renmin Park, which is two minutes walk from my hotel. It’s very attractive and I appreciate it a lot as the city has few green spaces. Rocky paths twist betwee shady groves, and above the tree tops you can see some of the more whimsical skyscrapers. Architects here try to make their tower block stand out by giving them decorative roofs. It’s like an accountant’s Christmas party – all po-faced corporate slickness then boff, a silly hat.

So there’s one building that has what looks like a UFO on its roof, another seems to have had a meteorite crash into it, and I have previously mentioned that the Marriot by my hotel looks like nothing so much as Saruman’s castle off Lord of the Rings.

And there are some bizarre structures inside the park too. Behind the meddling parents is a new art gallery with glass walls, then there’re a trendy bar/cafe on an island which is three storeys of Arabian fantasy, with Ali Baba windows (you can smoke a hookah pipe on the terrace) and next to that is the stolid old racecourse clubhouse, built by the British in the 19th century, and behind that is the aforementioned Saruman’s castle – so you can look out from a bamboo grove and see, in overlap, artsy post modernism, Arabian fantasy, old fashioned British stolidity, and corporate brutalism.

This is not uncommon. In architectural circles ‘Shanghai skyline’ means a dog dinner. And they just keep on building. High rises sprout like mushrooms, like nowhere else on the planet, the greatest spurt of construction in human history. Pudong, on the east side of the Huangpu, was all paddy fields a couple of decades ago. Now, it’s kilometre after kilometre of new build and boulevards.

This isn’t tourist Shanghai – there’s nothing to do here, I only went to get my visa renewed at the new police station – but it is quite an intense experience because so unreal. I got a cab back and we drove for ten, fifteen minutes along almost deserted streets lined by architectural statements and bloopers and Pudong seemed like a scale model of itself; I felt like one of those photoshopped people that architects put in their drawings to give a sense of scale.