The
Park Hotel in Shanghai is right off of the People’s Park. Like all buildings in Shanghai that were built in, say, 1934, the building is mournful, haunted. I walked by it tonight with a friend on
the way home from dinner and we went inside. The lobby is a grand feeling of tight, Deco elegance. This is where Song Ai Ling came to
play. This is what Mao Dun had in
mind when he wrote “Midnight.” And upstairs, there is, to this refurbished
hotel’s credit, small museum.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Hotel_Shanghai
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Hotel_Shanghai
Now mind you this wasn't’ the only place of substance I’d
visited this evening on my stroll about my temporary new neighborhood. We started
out around sunset trying to find a place to eat. In my mind is the Shanghai of 1993, where we would could have
their choice of restaurants offering excellent jia chang cai or family story cooking. The dishes would be varied and delicious, the beer a bit
warm and invariably there’d be some great fried or steamed dumplings. There’d be a host of predictable
staples like and a few exotic things like snails and crayfish. The lighting bright, the table cloths old.
When I lived here 20 years ago it was out in Pu Tuo District
at the city’s premier teaching college, The East China Normal University, “Hua
Dong Shi Da.” Out the campus back
door was a small alley with ten or more restaurants all cobbled together. And that food was the first time
in my life I’d really had what is commonly referred to as Chinese food. Whatever I’d had in New York or San
Francisco prior to this was a poor facsimile.
Us foreign “experts” would pile out back there and order up
a table full of food. Eight, ten
dishes and we’d set about eating most of it. And then bill would arrive, and we’d have spent about twelve dollars to
feed some 10 people. The bar bill
might have set us back another four kuai or so. It was all rather
straight forward to 节衣缩食[1] which was good, because we had so little to
spend.
These days, when I’m free in Shanghai and set out to find an
informal, authentic place to eat, I usually search in vain. Most places have gone up market and
differentiated themselves with a silly interior and food that is rarely memorable. So the eight RMB General Cao’s Chicken that
was symphonic back-in-the-day, is currently made with Macadamia nuts instead of
peanuts and is five times as expensive for 40RMB with a splendid, mouth watering picture of this dish in the
menu, right back in the section he’s hoping you don’t default to quickly, without
having ordered something absurd and extravagant. In the old days I don't think it occurred to anyone to put pictures in menus.
We were looking and we had to look for a while. Down off the main street after walking for nearly twenty
minutes we spied something. I recognized he
characters for “family style” as we strolled on by one small place, down in the basement. This will do. I had a bowl of excellent eggplant,
reasonable greens, and iron-cooked platter of friend beef. The waitress was from Fujian. This I discerned after trying to speak
with her in Mandarin for a bit.
Back behind us four guys for whom “Miller Time” started just about two
hours ago, who sounded louder and drunker than they probably really were. And the bill? I was pleasantly floored when I
was told it was a cool $15.00.
After finishing, we walked along a much busier street with a
few dozen such places that beckon for more discovery in the next few days, right up to the side of
the Park Hotel. Built in 1934 right
over the racetrack at the time by a competitor to the Cathay Hotel, this was
the tallest building in Asia upon its completion. Designed by the y the Slovak-Hungarian architect László Hudec
it was an inspiration to the city at that time including the young architect
who saw it there, I. M. Pei.
One of the things that most struck me, walking around the
museum on the second floor was that there was, essentially not even any
window-dressing mention of how the building was or was not used, how the
interior as well as the view out to the race track was stripped and paired down
by the CCP when the took over the city.
These halcyon days no longer need to be profiled as glorious but they
are generally mentioned, somehow.
The Park Hotel, simply ignored “liberation” and just about anything up
until it is refurbished long after I first lived here in town.
Sitting here getting ready for bed, I’ve got a bit of music
playing out of my phone. The innovative
pianist Andrew Hill’s first album with Blue Note from 1964, “Black Fire.” The tune is one I hadn’t known called "Pumpkin", which features the then young Joe Henderson shedding confidently. The internet here, away from home is
sluggish, and the VPN software service I’m using is choppy and frequently
drops. So I can’t stream music
easily. Glad that I have this on
my phone, and, finishing this entry at 12:26 AM, I’m glad I haven’t written
about Andrew Hill before.
Putting him on to listen to, from my phone, was random and now, highly
utile, as otherwise, I'm pretty tired.
No comments:
Post a Comment