The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Where you are, itÕs still yesterday. But as I sit in my hotel in Shanghai, China, 13 time zones ahead of you, and look out the windows at the endless forest of skyscrapers around me, making any other large city IÕve ever been in look tiny in comparison, IÕm wondering if this really just might be the future. This is my first trip to China and I am totally and completely amazed by what IÕve seen here. Shanghai is the face of China that the government here wants you to see. Amazingly clean for a city of approximately 24 million people, it is growing so incredibly fast that even people who live here are constantly shocked by the new construction going up. IÕve spent a large portion of my first few days out walking the streets in different areas of the city. First was Shin-tan-dee (not the actual spelling), a fully restored (by a Canadian, I might add) old part of Shanghai that is now home to many trendy restaurants. Then, only a few blocks away, I went through parts of the Old City itself. This is China, how it used to be, and still is, in many rural parts of the country. Tiny blocks of homes two stories tall. Buildings joined together by mazes of back alleys. Old ladies cutting up meat on the streets and even older men sitting outside on chairs playing checkers. And everywhere you look, people on their cell phones. During another part of my day, I wandered through two buildings side by side, one seven stories tall and the other five, that sell nothing but computer parts and software and have entire stores just filled with mice. The cell phone is the unquestioned king in this part of the world. Everyone has one. Even outside the smallest homes I saw today, tiny places with sinks outside on the street for washing dishes, I saw people on their cell phones. And while itÕs great that they can also make phone calls, IÕm beginning to suspect that all of Asia is run by text messaging. Not only that, but most people have phones on which they can listen to music, watch television shows they download from the Web, and that they can use it for a whole host of other reasons. Even if you live in a very small, very poor neighbourhood, it seems a cell phone is one thing that most everyone has. This place is also king of the knock-off market. While I donÕt know how many times today I was offered a Rolex, I could buy almost anything tech-related on the streets of this city. A girl in a shop was willing to sell me a 120 GB USB memory stick today for around $8. The problem, of course, was that the Sony logo stamped on it was completely faked. IÕve been told that some of them are great and might actually work, but some of them donÕt work at all. China is also the worldÕs king of the DVD copy market. Announcing publicly that they are battling the theft of millions of dollars through the copying of DVDs for re-sale, I ran into possibly a dozen stores today that sold nothing but copied DVDs and CDs. I couldnÕt have bought a legal copy of a movie even if I wanted one. But the most amazing part of the day happened completely by chance. Walking through the old neighbourhood, an older lady looked up at me from her chair and said hello in Chinese. When I answered back, she looked at another lady standing next to her and said something to her in a long string of Chinese. Telling me to wait, one of them disappeared down one of the tiny alleyways and came back with yet a third lady who spoke enough English to ask where I was from. After my answer of Canada, she again told me to wait and disappeared again. This time she came back with a younger lady who turned out to be 21 and who spoke crystal clear English. After a few minutes, she proceeded to say that she had been going to university in San Francisco for two years and was actually headed back to the U.S. on the weekend. This was a small world. Here I was in Shanghai, standing in an alley barely wider than my shoulders, talking to four generations of Chinese women as they all rallied around me and told me about their lives, the difficulties they were having living in a tiny apartment without any running water or heat, and turning, around what did I see? The oldest lady of the group, holding up her phone so she could get a picture of us all together. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
