Day 92--In port, Kobe, Japan

22 November. 33°18’ N, 135°50’ E. Speed= 11 knots. Course= 247°

We’re sailing toward Kobe at a blistering 11 knots, scheduled to arrive at 7am tomorrow. Bob and Maria Chapel have been traveling overland between Tokyo and Kobe, and will rejoin the ship in the morning. Then Maria will go to Kyoto, and Bob I’ve-seen-all-the-temples-I-want-to-see Chapel and I will board a bullet train for the 75-minute trip to Hiroshima. We’ll spend our last couple of days in a non-US port visiting the site of the first city to have suffered an atomic attack. I imagine it will be sobering. It’s on my bucket list.

Back to Shanghai.

Shanghai

I think I said this already, but visiting Shanghai is visiting the future. We docked on the northwest side of the Huangpu River, about a half-mile north of the Bund district, which is the old financial area of colonial Shanghai. The Bund riverbank is lined with buildings from the ‘30s and ‘40s that look a little like the older buildings that line Grant Park in Chicago. Behind the classical façade rise the steel, brick, and glass skyscrapers of the newer Shanghai.

But the newest skyline of Shanghai is on the south bank of the river. Jim and Shamim were in Shanghai on their honeymoon in 1987, only 9 years after Deng declared that China had suffered enough years of poverty and that the time to make money had arrived. In ’87, the south bank of the river was nothing but rice paddies. Today, the south bank resembles the waterfront of Hong Kong: high-rise buildings of every style, from retro art deco to ultra-modern avant garde, each one trying to outdo the other in height, curves, glass, and lighting. And dominating the skyline of the south bank—the Pudong region—is the Oriental Pearl Tower, which looks a little like a giant toothpick that someone had used to spear two enormous olives. Each olive contains several hundred hotel rooms. It all looks like a scene out of the old Flash Gordon serials I used to watch at Saturday matinees in Birmingham, Michigan. “Ming the Merciless” was the inscrutably Chinese villain in those 20-minute episodes. I imagine that politically incorrect character is still lurking the towers of Shanghai.

My first job after docking was to try to reach Jesse Xia. Jesse is president of Anderson’s Asia/Pacific region and would be my host for our FDP on Monday the 16th. Don Finkle, Cousin Nancy’s husband, had told me about the challenges Jesse and he had faced setting up their joint venture with the Chinese company, Power Dekor, and I thought seeing the operation and hearing the stories firsthand would be a good experience, especially for my business comm. students.

To my amazement, my cellphone worked in China even though the country is on a different system than the CDMA cellular system of the US. After several false starts—probably expensive false starts—I finally reached Jesse, who invited me to join him for dinner that night. I accepted, of course.

Next, I bundled up in sweater and UM windbreaker and headed out into the streets of Shanghai. The weather was chilly—probably in the high 40s Fahrenheit—but dry, so I was comfortable as I walked out the entrance to the dock area and was immediately accosted by vendors trying to sell me “Rolex watch, very cheap.” My destination was Nanjing Road, the famous shopping district of Shanghai, about a half-mile away. That half-mile was a maze of construction as the city prepares to host next year’s world’s fair, Expo 2010. So I negotiated through the traffic and over fences until I finally turned north onto Nanjing Rd.

I spent the next 3 hours walking down Nanjing. The street and stores that line the street could have been in any large city in the US. Except, of course, that the signs were written in large Mandarin characters. But the store windows were full of mannequins dressed in the latest Paris fashions, furniture and appliances of the latest designs, and brand names one can see on store fronts along 5th Avenue in New York or Boul Mich in Chicago: Gucci, Tiffany, Prada, Rolex . . . they’re all in China.

About an hour after leaving the ship, I was getting hungry, so I walked into a restaurant that looked inexpensive and inviting. I walked down to the main dining area, a MacDonald’s-looking place with many plastic tables and chairs and several walk-up counters. I stood in line and, when I got to the front, pointed to a couple of dishes on the menu that looked pretty good: noodle soup and a plate of dumplings. The woman taking my order was very helpful and escorted me to a table, where she apparently told a young waitress what I had ordered. After a few minutes, the waitress delivered my meal, including a Tsing Tao beer, and it was every bit as delicious as it had looked in the pictures. It is possible to get a good meal anywhere, I’ve learned, as long as you can smile, point, and look just a little hapless. I’m good at all three.

After lunch, I continued walking up Nanjing Road, which now had become a pedestrian mall, packed with people out doing their Sunday shopping. I learned that stores are open in China every day, Monday thru Sunday. And the Nanjing mall was as crowded as a US shopping mall in the weeks before Christmas.

I walked through a pedestrian underpass and came up into People’s Park, a green, grassy, tree-lined stretch that began where the pedestrian mall ended and continued 3 blocks or so to the ultra modern J.W. Marriott hotel and condos. Across the street from the hotel was a Starbucks, where I stopped and ordered a latte, the first latte I’ve ever had. True. Not bad, though I prefer just plain coffee. I walked back to the Radisson Hotel to finish the coffee, and, as I sat down on a wall lining the sidewalk, out of the hotel walked Jim and Shamim. They had checked in that morning and planned to stay there until ship time Monday evening.

Seeing them was a nice surprise, and the three of us walked back down Nanjing toward the river until they had to peal off to visit a museum. I continued back to the ship.

Jesse said he’d pick me up for dinner around 5:30, and, by the time I got back to the ship, it was already close to 5. So I quickly showered and changed clothes. Jesse pulled up at 5:30, and we headed to the French containment area for dinner.

From the mid 19th century to the mid 20th, various European countries had occupied China under the pretense of controlling the opium trade. During those years, each country claimed various sections of Shanghai and, in fact, all of China. And the colonial powers had left their marks. The old French area contains elegant old buildings and tree-lined streets that reminded me more of Newport Beach than Paris, and, of course, excellent restaurants.

Jesse took me to a Chinese-cuisine restaurant, where he ordered an assortment of very tasty dishes, including spicy beef, a deep-fried-and-spicy sea bass, tiny spring rolls, hot and sour soup, rice, and some prune-type fruit desserts. We sat on a balcony in the restaurant looking down on a wedding reception being celebrated on the main floor. The bride was beautiful; the food was delicious.

I returned to the ship about 10pm after Jesse drove me around the breathtakingly beautiful sights of Shanghai at night. It certainly rivals Hong Kong. In fact, Shanghai prides itself in fast overtaking Hong Kong as an economic powerhouse in China. I believe it.

On Monday, twelve of my students joined me on the faculty-directed practicum (FDP) visiting the mall where Anderson Hardwood Floors and Power Dekor maintain their joint-venture Shanghai showroom. Anderson and Power Dekor had invited the press to cover our visit, so we were treated like visiting dignitaries as we entered the huge mall that looked like a cross between Chicago’s Merchandise Mart and Orange County’s Fashion Island, the very upscale mall in Newport Beach, California, where we used to take 2-year-old Haley for a relatively inexpensive meal in their food court.

Jesse and Mr. Gore, a VP from Power Dekor, were wonderful hosts, having first treated all of us to lunch at the largest buffet restaurant I’ve ever seen, then making us feel like a part of Obama’s contingent—the President happened to be in Shanghai at the same time—with television and magazine reporters covering the event, banners welcoming “our dear American friends” outside and inside the mall, and even an “honored guest” boutonniere for me as the “distinguished professor from University of Virginia.” I was interviewed by the Chinese Financial Times broadcasting network and by a reporter from a local home décor magazine, who was very interested in how I decorated my house. I promised to send her pictures, particularly of the Anderson flooring in my kitchen and family room.

The presentations by Jesse and Mr. Gore were excellent, reinforcing much of what we had been talking about recently in class about the Chinese culture and way of doing business. But the mall itself was the star of the day. It’s one of several like it in the Shanghai area. And its 5 to 7 stories house individual stores displaying every conceivable home product, from bathroom fixtures to kitchen appliances, to dining room, living room, and bedroom sets. All of it top-of-the-line stuff. We didn’t see many patrons in the mall, but it was a Monday afternoon. Jesse told me that the mall is packed on weekends with Chinese families who are now gaining enough income to furnish their apartments and decorate them with the latest, most expensive styles. I took many pictures and videos. Again, only pictures can tell the tale.

We returned to the ship by 5pm—an hour before ship time—and found out that our departure from Shanghai would be delayed 18 hours because of bad weather in the East China Sea. It was already raining and cold in Shanghai, with winds blowing strongly out of the north. So as faculty and staff bundled up for a restful night on board the MV Explorer, many of the students headed out into the cold and rain for their bonus night in China.

The next day at noon, we untied from the Shanghai pier and headed down the Hunagpu River to the Yangzi and out into the sea for the short voyage to Japan.

As I think I said earlier, anyone who doubts that the 21st Century will be the century of Asia and, especially, China, should visit Hong Kong and Shanghai. The human rights record of China is poor. But what they’ve accomplished in the past 30 years is incredible. An example: 10 years ago, Shanghai had no rapid transit system. In the next 5 years (completed in 2004), they built an ultra modern, 15-line subway system on 3 levels that runs throughout the city. Meanwhile, it took the city of Los Angeles at least 10 years to build a single 10-mile, above-ground people mover from downtown LA to Long Beach. And the Big Dig in Boston still isn’t completed after . . . what? . . . almost 20 years.

Of course, China has the advantage of a very low-paid, huge workforce, and a centralized government that says “jump,” and the people reply, “of course.” At least they do today. Still, while the U.S. is debating over a watered-down national health plan (the Chinese abandoned their plan in the late ‘70s and are now reinstating it for all 1.3 billion citizens) and whether to spend stimulus money to rebuild crumbling bridges and roads or to cut taxes for people already earning more per capita than 99% of the rest of the world, the Chinese are building the new century. We may not like their political system. But that system is unlikely to change as long as the Chinese people continue seeing their living standard rise nearly every day. The people on the streets in Shanghai look very well fed.

Read Thomas Friedman’s “Advice from Grandma” op-ed in the Sunday(?) NYTimes.

More on the Japan stop when we’re enroute to Hawaii.