#15 - Shenzhen

May 1st, 2008

It’s the only frontier of humanity left in the world. The new wild west. Whenever I go there, it feels like I’m in Denver circa 1890. I can’t prove that this is really like the old wild west, but the energy here is crazy, frenetic, and never ending. There is a Shenzhen beat. Every store selling clothes, every car stereo, every disco, and everyone’s cell phone ring tune is the same never ending 120BPM beat. You hear that beat in the distance as you go to sleep at one in the morning. Everyone is driven by that beat, whether they’re putting on street side monkey shows, begging for change, or selling kitchen utensils on the side of the road. Or driving to the stock market. There is a lot of money here, by anyone’s standards. I usually go to Shenzhen from Hong Kong via the checkpoint at Lo Wu. One river separates the two places, but they are different worlds altogether. I like coming back to Hong Kong, looking at down town Shenzhen as I walk down the bridge over the river, wondering if I’ll ever do that again.

The place I go to is not within the foreigner’s friendly enclave in the SEZ. It’s just outside the SEZ. I sound like a Lonely Planet writer bragging about the “real Shenzhen.” It doesn’t matter, as this isn’t their kind of place. Nothing, even the people, is older than 30 years. The Lonely Planet aside, I did get to see the unfiltered Shenzhen; the Shenzhen where there is no Hooters restaurant. I’ve been at a table in a hot pot restaurant where sheep’s brains were ordered, I’ve been to private parties in the back of discos amongst the cavernous expanses of rooms in the basement, I’ve been to a market beneath the Guanzhou-Shenzhen high speed railway where they sold everything from a chicken, I’ve been there during Chinese New Year and swapped red lai see packets of 20 yuan notes, and I’ve seen the nightly waltzes amongst families in the courtyard of an apartment complex.

Being there for Chinese New Year was interesting. Every building had people shooting fireworks from the balcony of their apartments. I went on the back of a bike to get to the place I was staying for supper with this very laptop held in front of me while people were shooting fireworks from every direction. In the evening, I noticed a family walking in a parking lot in front of the balcony I was in. A little girl lit a firework, panicked, and the firework ended up skidding along the ground towards a parked car. Of course, after the light show was over, the car alarm went off.

“Okay… I’ll go back inside now.”

Entry Filed under: Cities