Shenzchen, China

Travel is one of my passions.  So, when my brother Mike floated the idea of accompanying him to visit his daughter who teaches in China, I jumped on the idea like —umm —white on rice.

During my pre-trip googling, I was surprised to discover that China, in terms of land mass, is about the size of the United States with another Montana stuck to it. Where the big difference lies is China is home to 1.4 billion people while a mere 330 million hang their hat in the good ol’ USA.  Shenzhen, where my niece Jenna teaches, is the 5th most population dense city in the world meaning there are 17,500 people per square kilometer. Or, about 8.5 times more crowded than the Big Apple.  Note to self:  Learn how to say “excuse me” in Mandarin.

Shenzhen is a place of high-rise, modern apartment buildings lined up like books on an ill-managed book case. Likely, available land dictated their locations rather than a master plan of urban design. It’s hard to believe thirty years ago, Shenzhen was home to about 300,000 people. That began to change radically when in 1980; it became China’s first Special Economic Zone, or SEZ, which opened to door to foreign investment and a flood of workers to the point where the population is rapidly closing in on twelve million.  To put things in perspective, if the city of Shenzen were a US state, it would be jockeying for a top five position for total population, closing in on the likes of Pennsylvania and Illinois.

My brother and I were easy to pick out in crowd: Tall, blond and confused.  During our first few days, we jokingly did a “white count” where we tallied our Caucasian encounters which never exceeded four.  Most of our time was spent wandering about; observing the culture while pointing out a handful of similarities and boatloads of differences, and watching people go about their merry lives in a communist nation.

A good place to observe a small slice of Shenzhen was to ride the metro which lo meins its way under the city connecting high rises to malls, people to ports, and tourists to places of cultural significance and KFCs.

 The Xiangmi stop (pronounced Shang-me) of the Shekou (pronounced Shee-Kuu) was smack dab (pronounced smack dab) in front of Jenna’s apartment.  Like all the other metro stops, its underground interior was covered in bright, white tile walls accented by back lit advertisements depicting happy Chinese people enjoying colorful and mysterious products.  The metro stops and trains were eerily clean and bright. If I happened to pop an appendix right then and there, I would have been perfectly fine with emergency surgery on one of the spotless train benches.

Regardless of the time of day, people moved about in a very respectful fashion; standing to the right on escalators allowing hurried passengers to pass, politely yielding to those disembarking and avoiding eye contact with strange visitors from a foreign land.

Often, small groups of middle-school aged girls boarded the train giggling; some dressed in uniform skirts, knee socks and colorful scarfs. A few chose to accessorize their ensemble with oversized black glasses with no lenses.  Evidently, the geeky hip look is an emerging fashion trend among the younger set. It looked more like a meeting of the Ugly Betty fan club if you ask me.

Because Shenzhen experienced tremendous economic growth over the past 30 years, it has attracted the younger, upwardly mobile new “middle class” of China.  Local statistics show that the average age in Shenzhen is about 28 years and that people between the ages of 20 to 29 make up 35.77 percent of the city’s population. Barely 1% of the population is over the age of 65. These percentages looked pretty spot on while riding the Shekou line.  The vast majority was young, fit, and well dressed.

Couples held hands, business types were transfixed to cell phone screens and mother’s carried babies like footballs; the baby’s legs spayed out, arms flopping hither and yon.  From my short time there, I never saw a family consisting of more than three people. Three decades of a one child policy has that kind of effect on the populace.

However, that might change.

This past February, the policy was modified to allow married couples “in which just one parent was an only child can also have a second baby. The previous rules allowed two children for couples in which both parents are only children. The old policy also made exceptions for China’s officially recognized ethnic minorities and rural couples whose first child was a girl or disabled.”  (New York Times, February 24, 2014).

After a couple of days off riding the metro, cultural differences that we first thought were odd became our new normal, just one of the advantages and disadvantages of travel. It doesn’t take long for new experiences to fade into routine fueling the need to continually search for the “new.”

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