the beach

I took a trip to the beach on Saturday with Jaris and Andy, which sounds like it would be quite simple since Shenzhen is a coastal city. Unfortunately it's a pretty large coastal city with a very limited beach selection, so it took over 2 hours of bus/metro-hopping to get there.

One cool thing about the bus ride out was that we went by some of the huge Shenzhen ports. I read in a travel guide that if Shenzhen were its own country, it would have the 11th largest volume of trade in the world. It's one thing to read that, and another to see the mountains of containers piled up for shipping, ready to make their way across the world. When I studied in Belgium, one of my favorite professors explained the US-China trade deficit: "What does China ship to the US? Containers full of labor-intensive products. What does the US ship to China? Well, they ship back the containers." This of course isn't totally true but nevertheless it was sort of cool to see what these huge containers actually look like; sort of a concrete, real-life representation of international trade.

The beach was quite a bit like many beaches across the world - sand, ocean, vendors. A few differences: many women go fully clothed to protect against getting tan, which would place them on a lower social rung; kids walk around naked at an age that would never be acceptable in the US; and the water is far dirtier because of the lack of pollution regulation. And of course the reaction to our presence was quite a bit different in ethnically homogeneous China than it would be elsewhere. Jaris and Andy were playing catch with a football while I was attempting to body-surf, and both immediately became spectator sports. Not only that, but when I would catch a wave into shore, people were actually cheering. I'm going to have to pull some pretty weird stuff in the US if I want the same kind of treatment when I return...

the beach in Shenzhen, with Hong Kong visible in the background

It's so strange to have people photograph, stare, and talk about you openly; even if you stare straight back at them it seems that the rudeness does not register. In the book I'm reading now, Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China, the author writes that "daily life for me in China was that of a zoo animal." He wrote this about his experience in 1981, which makes me think that perhaps things in this country are not changing as rapidly as everyone seems to think...