A few days ago while I was in Beijing, I was exploring the book swap shelf at the hostel I was staying in and I stumbled upon a book which at first glance I thought was a memoir or novel. It was named ” Growing up in Samoa” written by Margaret Mead. The name sounded familiar but I didn’t know it well. I explored the backcover and the multiple introductions and discovered that Mead was and continues to be a famous historical figure in the field of American anthropology and this was her first book, which was written after she spent a year ,in the 1920’s, living on mutiple Samoan islands. The book immediately made me self- reflect . I thought about what I was doing in China, ” research”, in a sense some kind of anthropology, yet I realized how little I knew about the history of the field of American anthropology : its origins and how it has developed. Curious to learn more, I explored the first few pages of her original introduction and stopped at a quote which spoke to, in an interesting and maybe ironic way, an experience that I had when I arrived in Shanghai. In describing the setting of her research and the daily life of those she was living with, she wrote about them, ” Her whole material environment was different.”
After my arrival in Shanghai Pudong Airport back on June 10th, I had a grabbed a taxi, I had then easily arrived to my hostel which had both wifi and hot water. I then left to explore the city by using an easily navigable subway system. My initial reaction was of similarity not difference. I observed in those first few days how I hadn’t yet felt the initial waking up- alert and aware, feeling that I normally have felt upon in arrival to other countries where I have traveled. In some of these other countries, I have existed the airport and often been surrounded by taxis and tuk- tuk drivers who would often be calling out to me. I would make my way to one eventually and probably after some bartering and debating about the price be on my way. In Shanghai I lined up in a well organized and regulated taxi line and the taxi had a meter.
As those first few days passed, I considered how I felt that the familiar material environment I was experiencing, sheltered by ability to notice and to see difference -to see maybe even my idea of “culture”. I then questioned myself on this. I began to wonder if it had just been an idea somewhere, a vague assumption I held of “research” , that ” research” meant an entirely different material environment like the one Mead spoke of, one held in opposition in some sense to my own – and I began to wonder if I assumed the “developed” therefore was not a place for “research: was I assuming that the “developing” world was the only setting for research and the only place that held easily accessible “culture”. I found myself reflecting on these assumptions and questions which are clearly biased in that of course there is “culture” present in the “developed” places as well and my inability to recognize this immediately due to the visible similarities between Shanghai and a place like New York comes as well from failing to always recognize and to remember to deconstruct “the culture” which is present in my own society or failing to simply see it and define it as such, because it is so familiar. Yet I found that these thoughts reiterate things I have thought of before but I have felt them kind of work through me again in this setting.
I am still wondering and thinking over this feeling of ” waking up” that I have had in other countries, when the material environment with which I interacted was so different. It has made me consider much more the ways I relate to the material world and how I feel in spaces which are constructed and designed differently and my feeling of familiarity or foreignness towards them. A part of the similarity, being this similar material environment, or “the developed” infrastructure which I experienced in Shanghai leads many people to think of Shanghai interestingly as “not real China” .
In Shanghai and throughout China, many people have said to me about Shanghai, ” That it is not real China”, when I ask for more explanation of this they explain it is “modern” ,”developed”, “rich” and an “international cosmopolitan city”. If you have only been in Shanghai you have never really been in China is the message I have continued to be given.
Throughout my first five weeks in China, which were primarily spent in Shanghai , I continued to try to come to terms with the fact that Shanghai- “not real China”- would be serve to make up a large part of the “field” that was to be my “field research”. Of course as a student trying to learn and study about migration, development, and life in China in general, this that one’s field is not the “real china” is the last thing one wants to hear. I had been partly resisting facing the reality that Shanghai would somehow be a part of my research because I also wasn’t sure I was ready to face its scope and size- the largest city in China . A fact that also reveled the innate contradiction that Shanghai is simultaneously ” not real china” but it is the city in China with the most Chinese people living in it and also the city with one of the largest populations of rural to urban migrant workers.
This theme of contradiction has continued throughout my initial and ongoing observations and experience in China. Not in any way do I to intend to generalize but if there was one large feeling that I have gathered from the time I have spent here so far, it is the huge change the country has and is going through and the opposites which define it; a communist past and a present which it ranks it as the fast growing economy globally in a capitalist world , the spaces and the statuses of the rural and urban, the village and the city- China and “not real China”. The enormous transformation of China that is merging these opposing spaces and in some ways- these pasts and presents- is occurring largely through development which in Shanghai can be seen everywhere through the common landscape of bulldozed brick buildings and cranes constructing concrete skyscrapers. The labor which constructs this skyscrapers and most construction in Shanghai is one form of labor which is often done by migrant workers from the countryside, symbolizing well the strong relationship between development and migration.