The insoluble pancake

I’ve just returned from two weeks on the eastern edges of the eurasian continent, a few kilometers from the shores of the East China Sea. Shanghai. From there it’s still possible to return to Paris without crossing water, but only just. I spent two weeks there to work with my friend Martin who has been there for three months with the astronomy group at Shanghai University — I thought this would be a good opportunity to visit the city and to get some work done far from the distractions of Paris (which at the end of my stay I began to miss a little I have to admit). It’s my second visit to China, although on my last visit I only spent a day or two in Beijing, the rest of my time was in remote provinces like Xining and of course Tibet. So this time I’ve really had time to see the city and experience daily life here.

Shanghai has had a long a turbulent history and has a very different ambience compared to the crypto-Stalinist streets of Beijing. Foreign powers competed for influence there in the beginning of the 20th century, and streets in the French concession area are surprising — one could almost be standing in a street somewhere in Europe, if it were not for the signs in Chinese. Some of the architecture reminded me of the older building you see in the city centre of Victoria, Canada, not surprising really as they were constructed at approximately the same time, beginning of the 20th century.

When I was there with Martin we spent most of our time in the University area, leaving from time to time for forays into the Bund in the evening. There are many expatriates in Shanghai (someone told me there are more than 100,000 Germans there alone) and this has led to the creation of many expensive restaurants whose clientele is almost exclusively foreign as a consequence of their prices — which are still only comparable to an average restaurant in Paris. There really is an incredible range of prices between al the different restaurants we ate at from the University canteen where a bowl of noodles are 50 cents to restos in the bund and downtown area which are perhaps ~30-50 times more expensive, even more. Everything can be bought in Shanghai, including tins of Illy coffee, for the price of ~14 meals at the university canteen.

I had terribly bad luck with the weather whilst I was there. The first two days it was unseasonably warm, and I complained constantly to Martin that I had brought the wrong clothes (he had told me to be prepared for cold.) The monday after I arrived the temperatures dropped steeply and it started to rain, and continued to rain for almost a week without interruption. I said to my friends: is this Shanghai or Manchester? One morning we left the apartment (I stayed in a spare room in Martin’s apartment) to see flakes of snow floating down from the sky, an almost unheard of event in Shanghai. So I dug my gloves and scarf out of the bottom of my bag. But this wasn’t enough! It turns out that most of the buildings in Shanghai have only air-conditioners for heating, which can blow warm air as well as cold. So that makes the air nice and warm, but leaving the office in evening I found that my bag was still cold from the morning walk to work. The corridors and toilets were likewise unheated, so a trip to the bathroom resembled an arctic expedition. A day or so after I left, temperatures returned to normal, back to ~15 degrees again.

We ate extremely well indeed. Luckily Martin’s friend Ye was ready to accompany us to restaurants near the University, where there were was in general no English menu and no-one who spoke English. It’s exactly as I’d heard; there is an incredible diversity in Chinese food which from the west is hardly apparent at all. Like Italian food, there is a great many different dishes from different regions of China which is almost unknown in the west, where it’s essentially Cantonese food we eat. We ate a lot of Szechuan meals, returning at least twice or three times to two restaurants near the University. The best dishes were very spicy but not overwhelmingly so — the flavor of the dish was not completely overwhelmed by tons of chilli peppers. Normally we were the last people to eat; most people eat early in Shanghai, at around 7-8pm. In most cases there was perhaps only one or two other tables occupied. In one restaurant we lingered perhaps too long and the waitress brought us the bill, without us asking for it, but then fair enough, it was late… as we left, we saw the entire staff of restaurant trooping up the stairs to the restaurant’s upstairs tables, carrying steaming woks filled with food — they were anxious that we should leave so they could eat their dinner themselves.

(These are some guys making dumplings near the Jade Garden part of town…)

One evening, ploughing through I don’t know how many bowls of excellent food, I remarked that ‘life sure is tough under communism’ and indeed from the privileged viewpoint of the centre of Shanghai that certainly seems the case. Most of these restaurants only opened in the last twenty years. But now they are certainly doing well. And while the quality of the food in the expensive foreigner-friendly restaurants in the concession was excellent, one is more than anything paying for the location, the subdued lighting, the attentive service. At the Szechuan resto around the corner looking carefully one evening I found that all the restaurant’s cigarette butts had been nonchalantly swept under our table…

Characters in Haruki Murakami’s novels tend to spend a lot of time at the bottom of deep, dark wells or in the depths of forests. After a lot of staring into darkness they usually discover that what they thought was a wall really is in fact a door leading somewhere else. I thought a bit about this the other day when I was at the “Luxembourg” train station here in Paris to see the astronomical images that my friend Mr. Seagull has prepared as part of an underground exhibition which will last six months. (Attentive readers will recognise Mr. Seagull as a regular commentator on this column). Six enormous images have been affixed to the cavernous walls of the Luxembourg metro station, printed out using a special process which can make bright coloured images which can last six months in an environment as hostile as a Parisian metro station where hundreds of thousands of people pass every day.

The images, which are really doors of course, lead further and further out into the Universe, starting out with the rocky Martian landscape seen by the JPL rovers and finishing up with a swathe of the distant Universe as it was seven billion years ago as imaged by the MEGACAM camera on the Canada-France Hawaii Telescope on the island of Hawaii. The image was processed by computers of the TERAPIX project — also underground, in the basement of the IAP. A kilometre or so south of this platform.

Standing next to the images I could see the ancient light dissolve into pixels. I took a few pictures from the other side of the platform. Here is one — but you should go yourself. Or pay careful attention as you pass through the station. Historians of Paris will know that it’s only very recently that one could actually travel through the Luxembourg station. For greater part of the station’s hundred and ten year history it was actually the terminus, the last station on the ligne de Sceaux. That north end of the tunnel was a wall. Now it too leads somewhere else…

This time I’m on the misty blue waters of the Inland sea, on a ferry between Hiroshima and Matsuyama. My conference starts tomorrow. To the left and to the right of me are many small forested islands; ahead in the distance on the horizon I can see a vague outline of coastline.

I’ve just spent on day in Hiroshima and one day exploring the Island of Miyajima. Miyajamia is famous for the beautiful red torii of Itsukushima shrine and Hiroshima is famous for — well, you know what Hiroshima is famous for.

I visited the area around the Peace Park, where the monuments and museums are, the afternoon that I arrived from Kanzawa. My hotel’s sole virtue was that it was very close to the Peace Park, but it was a much less interesting place than those “minshuku” that I stayed at in Kanzawa and Nikko.

The museum in the Peace Park documents in a fairly balanced way the events which lead to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima; there were a lot worse things which could be said about why the allies decided to destroy a Japanese city as opposed to a German one which were left unsaid.

The museum has a large collection of artefacts recovered from the city, lunch boxes with the remains of carbonised food inside, watches stopped at the exact instant of the bombing. For each of these items, their story is detailed, the human life that was extinguished with the object. The effects of the bomb were described in unflinching detail. Only five photographs were ever taken in the city on the day of the bombing, I learned, by a journalist who entered the city that afternoon. He could only take those five photographs before he was overcome by emotion and horror, paralysed by the apocalyptic sight before him.

I spent a few hours in the museum, listened to all the audio commentary, looked at all the exhibits. Then I left for the park and walked to the cenotaph in the centre of the park. Standing before the memorial for the victims of the explosion, a curving, undulating arch, one sees in a direct line under the arch the burning flame, the flame that was lit that day in August in 1945, and beyond that charred structure of the “A-bomb dome”, one of the few buildings left standing after the explosion. It was only at that instant that I realised, fully, that those events described in the museum didn’t happen in some abstract place far away. They happened here, on the ground I was standing on.

Some comments I’ve read try to contextualise the deaths in Hiroshima by saying, for example, that one one night of bombing in Tokyo many more people lost their lives. But in Hiroshima so many people died in the instant the bomb exploded. 70,000. In five seconds every building with a kilometre of the fireball were annihilated. Such terrible destructive power had never been seen before.

At the same time, horribly, it was treated as a scientific experiment. In the instant before the bomb was dropped, people reported seeing several small white parachutes falling from the Enola Gay. These were in fact radio transmitter probes designed to measure the atmospheric pressure in the vicinity of the bomb site. After Hiroshima had been selected as a target for a possible atomic bombing, no conventional bombing was carried out over the city so that the effects of atomic bombing could be better understood.

Hiroshima, thankfully, bears the weight of it’s terrible history very lightly. A beautiful warm ocean breeze permeates the city, and the evening the streets are buzzing with life and activity. I ate in two fine “okonomiyaki” restaurants both evenings I was there, a local speciality comprising many vegetables and seafood fried on a hot-plate before the customers. I am sure people ate okonomiyaki in Hiroshima on that day in August, too.