From my Tingzijian

Two recent developments have transformed the way I live in Shanghai. The changes have been coming on for a while, but lately they’ve picked up speed and suddenly reached a critical mass, and their convergence has turned things upside down. What’s up?

(1) The dizzying expansion of the Shanghai Metro system. To give some perspective: the system opened in 1995. By the time I arrived in 2004, there were two downtown lines that crossed, and an outer ring line in operation. I rode the Metro often during the years that I was lucky enough to live next to a stop and work at an office on top of a stop on the same line. But I hardly rode it anywhere else. Since I couldn’t read Chinese characters, the bus system was largely unintelligible when I first arrived, and I occasionally used it just to ride around and see where I ended up, not to reach a particular destination.

To get around, I relied on a sack of files of mingpian, namecards of businesses, that I handed out to taxi drivers and, eventually, to our own driver, so that they could read the address. (I and my friends routinely picked up stacks of mingpian from restaurants and businesses and shared them with each other; one entrepreneur sold “taxi rings” of useful mingpian.)

Today Shanghai’s metro system is the world’s longest. Just since last December, four more lines have opened (or is it five?) and another is imminent. (By 2020, there are supposed to be something on the order of 22 lines.) All of downtown is crisscrossed with subway lines, stations, and  trains — and even chairs within the stations — all color-coded to help everybody figure out where they are.

the new Line 10 -- the lavender line

At the moment, the new stations are so clean you could practically eat off the floor. And even the “old” stations are being renovated and made accessible with elevators.

All of a sudden, it seems, everybody in Shanghai is trying to figure out where we can go and how to connect to get there. I might add that most of my trips cost 3 or 4 RMB (US$.45 – .60).

It’s impossible to resist making comparisons. Back when I left my home in Washington, DC, in ‘04, there were rumblings about maybe connecting Dulles Airport, our international hub, with the DC Metro system by light rail or somehow. So far, all we’ve managed to build is track to take passengers from the main terminal out to the gates.

(2) The icing on my cake is Explore Shanghai, an app with a map of the subway system that I’ve recently added to my iPhone. Wherever I am, I can ask it to locate the nearest Metro stop and it will list the top ten — all with directions and distance and line #. It will calculate the route and fare between two points and tell me when the first and last trains run. Let’s see…. from Hongqiao Airport to Pudong Airport will take about 90 minutes and cost 8 RMB (a bit more than $1), all on the newly expanded Line 2). Heck, the thing will even pronounce the name of a subway stop aloud, but of course I won’t ever need that feature to ask for help from a passerby– my tones are now so good (ha!).

Whoohoo!  No more scheduling my life around when my husband is using the car, or planning my outings to give our driver adequate notice.  No more worries about whether I’ll be able to get a cab home in the rain if I go out to dinner on a Friday evening. (Unless we stay out past 10:30, when the system closes — they have GOT to extend the hours!) Gosh, with the opening of the new Line 9 stop about two minutes from my house, an old friend who had stopped coming to our knitting group meetings because she lives too far away in the suburbs has suddenly reappeared! And my shoulders are soooo happy to consign the weighty sack of mingpian files to the back of the closet.

Now that the future has arrived, could this funny feeling that’s bubbling up possibly be spontaneity?

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Coming up next: so what do you see when you step out of the ultra-modern subway system? My experiences riding it around over the weekend….