for those not in shenzhen, you are probably blissfully unaware that 4 typhoons have landed nearby over the past several weeks. this means it has rained almost everyday this month. and not little tiny avoidable raindrops, but heavy raindrops that blow horizontally and thus bypass even the largest umbrella. so i haven’t been able to get out and take pictures.

i have, however, been wandering around some of shenzhen’s new hotspots and am struck, once again, by the difference a decade makes. it really is a different era here from ten years ago. yesterday, i saw the latest harry potter in a small, intimate theatre with 40 fat reclining sofas (and mediocre popcorn. the children next to me had the sense to bring kfc.) today, i went to yoga class in wonderful studio with truly wonderful teachers, some who have practiced in india. i then had dinner with a friend and her son at a japonese restaurant. if memory serves, ten years ago i avoided movie theatres because they were often haunted by men who watched with a date chosen from the ladies lined up outside the door. there was no yoga anywhere. and we ate mostly cantonese food; sometimes food from other parts of china, but ten years ago, the cuisine had a definate regional bent.

it’s as if suddenly all the talk about building a global city has come true. the socialist dreamers who came in the 1980s and early 90s have successfully built a city for a middle class that has only recently emerged.
indeed, all the recent cultural activity is no doubt part of this massive yuppification of shenzhen.

or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that those socialist dreamers have built a city for their children, who really do belong to a different world. it is however an open question as to why they belong to a different world. friends who look to japan and korea say it’s possible to be both traditional and modern; china has failed because of socialism. at lunch two days ago, a friend (now in his early 50s) said that people born after 1970 don’t have any tradional characteristics. he blamed the cultural revolution for cutting off contemporary china from its roots. that’s why, he said, china is modernizing like this.

like what? i asked.

without history. shenzhen is the perfect example of new china because it doesn’t have any culture or history. but it’s not even the best copy of the west. china is a fractured (分裂) society. we have no standards to guide us. japan and korea, he continued, have managed to preserve tradition and modernize.

his comments made me re-think the question of master narratives. not the fact that master narratives are imaginary and therefore not real in a material sense. after all, rarely does reality conform to what we think. but rather the fact that without a master narrative it’s hard to make value judgements; why is x better than y? tradition seems to me a legitimate answer to that question. socialism once provided another answer. today, my friend is trying to figure out what happens when all the master narratives have been shown untrue; what can the people believe? how will they recognize the good life? and in what kind of world is shenzhen a desired way of life?