daytripper

It's been several months since I started my Hong Kong sojourn. Only on Thursday did I manage to cross the border and step foot into Mainland China.

This was not one of my typical trips. I had mentioned to a friend how I hadn't yet made it into China. "Funny you should mention that", she says. She needed to get some shopping done in China, and she definitely didn't want to go by herself. So she proposed that I accompany her on her planned trip to Shenzhen. I saw this as a win-win situation: she could get what she called "moral support" for her shopping, and I could get my first glimpse of China with someone who has been there a few times before.



Shenzhen, I should note, is not your typical Chinese city. Twenty-five years ago, Shenzhen was a farming village on the border with Hong Kong. Then the national authorities proclaimed the village a "Special Economic Zone", where socialist rules would be relaxed in order to encourage foreign investment. And voila! The Chinese version of Tijuana is born! Instead of rice paddies, new factories were planted. Instead of shacks for peasants, new concrete towers were built to house the millions of migrants who flocked to Shenzhen. And like Tijuana, Shenzhen also has plenty of, um, "entertainment" to lure visitors from across the border.

Just one hour after leaving Central HK we arrived at Lo Wu, a border crossing immortalized in literature. After clearing PRC immigration, we strolled to the main commercial plaza in Shenzhen. Visiting this place was the main reason for my trip -- and the main reason my classmate needed my "moral support". She literally could not walk more than two steps without someone shouting "Missy manicure!", "Missy need shoes?", "Missy you buy jewelry?". She tried to say "No thank you" in English and Cantonese, but that only made things worse. These people would then follow us, sometimes repeating their sales pitch, occassionally asking me "You want-ee watch? DVD? Memory card? Watch?". (Touts in HK neither hound pedestrians as aggressively nor use such bad English.) It took us quite a while to find a store where we weren't hounded at. And once we got to the actual shopping -- my classmate needed to have couch coverings sewn -- it was (almost) enjoyable. The owner served us tea while we flipped through booklets of cloth patterns. Since my classmate's husband couldn't come along on the trip, I had to play the part of her husband (i.e. 'bad cop' vs. her 'good cop') during the bargaining. Very strange.

After shopping and lunch, my classmate had to get back to Hong Kong. This gave me a little time to do some sight-seeing in Shenzhen on my own. I did my patriotic duty as an American and stopped off at a neighborhood Wal-Mart. I then hopped on the Metro to Lychee Park, which houses the main tourist attraction in Shenzhen: a billboard of Deng Xiaoping!



You can learn a lot about a city by visiting its main tourist attraction. In Paris, you can pay people to take a picture of you in front of the Louvre. The equivalent locale in Manhattan is Ground Zero. In Hong Kong, it's the harbor. In Shenzhen, you can pay people to take a picture of you in front of a billboard. (The slogan says "Adhere to the policies of Deng Xiaoping for a hundred years!" Ooh, catchy!)

Feeling underwhelmed by the cultural side of Shenzhen, I decided to walk back to the border crossing. It was a different side of Shenzhen I saw in that hour-long walk: ordinary stores, normal eateries. Twice, I saw women (one with a baby) eating straight out of a garbage can. I lost track of the number of People's Policemen I passed. No one offered me fake watches or shouted "Hey mister!" at me. A group of women outside a beauty parlor did shout "Lou saai!" (roughly equivalent to "boss" or "pal" in Cantonese) at me, but I kept walking. Right before dark I made it back to the border crossing. It was an enjoyable day, and I was left wanting to return and see more of China.