Chinese Box

By Randy Gragg
Photography by Susan Suebert

 

Chongquing: the Emperor’s new Facades

In a discotheque beneath the central square of what is now officially the largest city in the world, the future of China is washing down chocolate sundaes with red wine. The age of those scattered about the tables and dance floor is hard to gauge, but my guess is an average of about 17. More certain, given the lethargic, arythmic swaying of those few actually dancing, is that none understands the meaning of the growling rap refrain puls-ing over the speakers: “Shake that pussy; shake that pussy; shake that pussy.”

Translations of any kind between East and West are difficult here in the heart of southern China, but the haute Dairy Queen seems as appropriate as it is perplexing. Chongqing, better known to most as the former namesake of the Sino-fast-food brand, Chung King, and the last line of defense against World War II Japanese invaders, is now one of China’s new “economic enterprise zones.” It is, like Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai, a separate political entity where a more unbridled capitalism is allowed to flourish. With its new municipal boundaries outlining an area roughly the size of Austria, its population now exceeds 30 million. But the central city’s embrace of contemporary, mega-city urbanity seems as potentially dyspeptic as its teenagers’ mix of food, drink and ambience.

I write about architecture and urban planning in Portland, Oregon, a place that now seems far more than just half a continent, an ocean and an alphabet away. Back home, we ache and groan over things like people duplexing old houses, where curb cuts go, and whether new rowhouses should have their garages in front or back. When I once mentioned to a more worldly colleague my hopes of spending a few weeks in Siena to study its pleasing city center, she snorted, “You can’t be serious about writing about urbanism until you’ve seen the Asian city.” Given we Portlanders often bill ourselves as part of “the Pacific Rim” and futurists frequently suggest we will become, sometime in the next century, mostly Asian, I decided it was time to overcome both my acknowledged Italofilia and my unacknowledged Sinophobia and see what might be ahead.

It would seem by the attention we are receiving in this nightclub that my colleague Susan and I may be the first Americans to have ever set foot here. As has often been the case during our guideless days in China, communication has completely broken down. Susan’s attempt to order a scotch has unleashed a flurry of waitpeople for whom the only English words on the menu—the American-brand hard liquors—seem to mean noth-ing. One after another, they come, attentively puzzle over the sounds we utter and the marks we point to on the menu, offer vigorous nods and then go fetch another person to try to understand us. Meantime, I aim at something seemingly more possible—”pijo”—a word that, elsewhere in China, has often successfully conjured a beer. Alas, this has attracted my own set of tag-teaming waiters. But, finally, some drinks arrive like the bribes tentatively offered to an unfamiliar dog. Susan, overcoming the brief flummox, takes a gulp and says, “Dare me to go up there and dance.”

Dared, she strides to the dance floor and asserts herself in the middle of three boys whose dance steps recall the body language of pre-adolescents admitting to their parents they stole something. Medium height and kind of scrawny by anglo standards, in this company Susan inflates into pure, corn-fed Midwestern amazon, spinning and rotating her hips, trying to pull one of the young moons into her orbit. At last success. An intrepid dancer picks up his pace, swaying and lunging, but with what I suspect is less a meeting of her challenge than a parody of it. The few girls on the floor turn to stare at the Sino-Anglo pas de deux while most everyone arrayed at the tables turn from ice cream and wine chasers to stare at me.

Above the hijinx of the Chongqing underworld, the reality upstairs is still a work in progress. A vast stone-paved square is surrounded by half-built skyscrapers. Cell phones are in abundance cradled to the ears of smartly dressed 20-somethings, second in number only to the long bamboo sticks slung over the shoulders of a mostly older coolie class looking to be hired to haul stuff. A billboard-sized Sony Tron screen beams a steady and silent series of commercials and music videos. In the I-beam skeletons above, the glow of welding torches look like dying stars against the late night sky.

We take the elevator in a newly completed hotel to the “Jasmine Restaurant” where we encounter a spread of fresh food that makes a Las Vegas buffet look like a soup line: lobsters, whole fish, pink slabs of beef, vegetables and fruit served up by a battalion of steam-pipe-hatted servers clad in white. The scene might offer convincing subliminal seduction as a half-second jump-cut in a TV commercial for a luxury vacation. But as a trio of waitresses lunge to seat us in the empty restaurant, and the servers start excitedly sharpening their knives, I suddenly realize that the late 20th-century Chinese heaven has been completed but it’s still anxiously awaiting occupants.

This is the new Chongqing, rising on a hilly spit of land at the fork of the Yangtze and Jiang rivers. Though the steep array of hills is still dominated by grimy tenements serv-ing the city’s traditional industry—steel and motorcycle manufacturing—the Pittsburghian old Chongqing is being replaced by a building boom of hotels, shopping centers, condominiums and office buildings modeled on Shanghai’s built-in-a-day busi-ness district, the Pudong. Only instead of being erected on rice paddies, it’s going up where people currently live.

Imagine all the ‘80s-era American towers—the steel-and-glass bar graphs of the junk bond boom—airdropped into a middle-sized city and you have the general feel of where Chongqing is headed. But even the famously unplanned urbanity of a city like Houston looks like Seaside, Florida next to this as the new towers turn their backs to the adjacent neighborhoods with windowless walls 10 floors in height. The overall effect recalls an early scene of “Brazil” when the day-dreaming hero is blocked from his maiden in distress by an array of rocketing monoliths.

For someone steeped in the speculative capitalism of the West, the remaking of Chongqing is an enigma. But the logic is tethered to a very different notion of time. Velocity—the developers’ mantra of the rapid turning over of real estate into income-generating enterprises—is not the guiding force here. The government only leases the land. Bank-rolled by Hong Kong and Singapore investors, the buildings going up are for an economic boom still in the future. Only when even more things in the world are made in China—and, moreover, developed in China—will most of these buildings even be occupied, much less turning a profit. But the cheap labor to build them is here now. So, in a couple of generations, or maybe just one, when the Chinese are designing com-puters and marketing sneakers instead of just making the parts, when a healthy portion of China’s 1 billion population become not just laborers but also consumers, on that day, the profits from these buildings will be, at the risk of understatement, big.

With this in mind, the new city center collects in a strangely soothing portrait of patience. The magnitude of change becomes geologic, the gleaming new development seeming like nothing more than one tectonic plate sliding over another. Perhaps this is why the only artifact preserved from what of old Chongqing stood in this newly paved area—an area one developer’s sign promotes as “the new Times Square”—is a petite monolith built in 1952 bearing a clock.

Above: Downtown Chonquing. Photo by: Randy Gragg