in which I go to Shenzhen

What better way to celebrate a multi-entry visa (unlimited trips in for the next six months) than to use it, right? So it was a lazy sunday afternoon (I slept in), and I figured, well, why not?

It turns out that, adding in time to pass through customs and immigration, it takes the same amount of time to go from campus to Hong Kong island and from campus to Shenzhen. I learned some other things too:

1. I can't read simplified Chinese (jiantizi) for shit. Seriously. I guess I didn't really try that hard to learn them when I was taking 51A, back like more than three years ago, but still, I was stunned at how few simplified characters I could actually identify. I gotta ask the putonghua department here to make me a crib sheet or something, cause without the characters that are different in simplified, my level of Chinese-language comprehension drops from "one and a half semesters" to "next to nothing".

2. The only thing that's keeping me sane here, trying to learn Canto after knowing some putonghua, is that *nobody* in HK uses putonghua. So I think I've just kind of layered the new pronunciations and grammar (especially particles) over the top of the putonghua vocabulary I can remember. Result: in Shenzhen, people on the street may speak one dialect, or they may speak the other. Some may speak both, but conduct business in one or the other. I cannot form a SINGLE SENTENCE without using some awful unintelligible combination of both. Simple sentences in putonghua that I tried came out with a Cantonese "la" on the end. And I don't have the vocabulary to say anything of substance in Canto, so I slip in putonghua words. Basically, I felt bad for anyone trying to communicate information with me. But at least I didn't expect them to speak english, because they generally didn't.



3. I spontaneously found and ate at Din Tai Fung Shenzhen. It was pretty good--better than the Hung Hom one here, but nowhere near as good as the Arcadia one. The waitress was very nice, though, and tried to be understanding when I asked her dumb questions in my Canto/putonghua garble. ("Xiao jie, zhe shi wei jing ma?" "Bu shi. Shi [something I didn't understand]." -- I tried to ask if the shaker of off-white powder in the condiment tray was MSG. But I think she said it was sweetener of some kind... is that the "la" in "suan la tong"?)

4. The people who did speak english mostly tried to sell me prostitutes. Apparently, *everything* is cheaper in China or the regulations aren't as strict (probably because unlike HK, it's all illegal, so it's all under the table) or something, because there were more than a few people standing on the street in the neighborhoods by the train station selling people. One exchange:
middle-aged woman who I would call "auntie": "Siu je! Siu je! M-goi, siu je?" ["young lady! young lady! excuse me, young lady!"]
me: "?" thinking, oh, the gender-neutral pronoun in chinese and all the trouble it causes. wait, that's not a pronoun...
lady: "young girl, you like? siu je?"
me: "uh, miu-a" [I don't want it at all]
lady: "haha, hou, hou, miu-a" ["good (impressed), (that I'm using a Canto expression)"] "siu je a?"
me: "miu-a." and then I walked away, with her following me. And then I hurried up, and she stopped. I though, well, that was really weird, but I guess at least she spoke to me in Canto, not english...

This other guy came up to me later in the afternoon and engaged me in English. "Hi, how are you doing?" to which I replied, "Fine, how are you?" And then he followed with, "You like girl for set? Young girl?" I was confused, and then remembered that Cantonese speakers, especially, but native Chinese speakers in general don't aspirate final consonants enough. "Uh, bu yao" ["I don't want it"]. He laughed, too, at my Chinese, but at least he didn't ask again. I feel like when telling people off or bargaining, switching into my bad Chinese makes it clear that I want my point to be taken seriously--like I'm clearly making more effort to indicate how much I don't want the thing, so they shouldn't keep badgering me.

5. Shenzhen is like the biggest city you've never heard of. I was looking at the almost-entirely-brand-new skyline, and imagining a show on TLC or something:
"Project Shenzhen": competing teams of architects have ten years to build enough housing and services for seven million people. Go!!!!
And the result looks something like what Shenzhen actually looks like: a lot of new stuff, no real master-plan, oh, and seven million people.

6. Hong Kong is so so so different from China in the aesthetic qualitative way it feels. Not just the HK island expat-filled part, because that's obvious. If Shenzhen is (as I've read) indicative of the new developments in China, it's different than anywhere I've been before ever. Eight-lane streets running between skyscrapers but only one-and-a-half metro lines. Tons of buses but even major streets are poorly lit from dusk onward. Enough haze to make vivid sunsets, which isn't so different, I guess.

7. It's only the second place I've been where english is not the first or second most-common language. In Shenzhen, it's putonghua and Canto--most people seemed to know at least a little of both, but not necessarily anything else. While most people in Moscow didn't know any second language, so it was pretty communication-hostile, I'm pretty sure english was second. So: the only other such place was Lake Balaton, where, since neither Patrick nor I spoke any German, we had to do our best with Hungarian everywhere.

Compared to Shenzhen, trying to speak Canto in Hong Kong feels like cheating, because you can be 80% sure that your listener will, if the need arises, be able to switch to english.

I want to go back (so much more to see). Compared to excursions around the HKSAR, every minute there felt just a little bit precarious and adventurous.