by Danielle LeClerc
Slow jazz notes slink over from the bar behind me. Smudged at the margins by stripes-on-paisley beats from other restaurants along the darkened strip. An available taxi cruises lazily up the street in perfect tempo with the singer’s sad, soulful words. Her voice cracks on the chorus, some stuff about a last night together.
The sauvignon blanc is dry and woodish on the roof of my mouth. I swallow, and lick my lips a little longer than is strictly polite. Mosquitoes drift by from time to time, back-lit by candle light, and I draw my legs up onto the chair, crossing them under me to save my bloody ankles. I can already feel the skin beginning to prickle and swell. Headlights catch in my wineglass, drawing my attention. I tip the alcohol against my lips and a single, cold bead of condensation rolls down the stem, curving along the glass base, and plunks on my ankle. I shiver in the wet, ripe heat.
Reach for a cigarette, “Shanghai”: the brand is a boast in red, splashed across a gold box. English on one side, Chinese on the other. It’s etched with images of the Pearl Tower, the World Financial Centre, and Jin Mao. Collectively Lujiazui; the same part of town in which I am now sitting. This is Pudong, only 15 years old. So much cleaner and more modern than Puxi, on the west side of the Huang Pu river. It still has its wet markets, bicycle delivery men, and watermelon-slash-cell phone-vendors, just fewer of them. Modern is a relative term. But it has none of the twisty lanes crammed mouth to mouth with apartments on top of shops on top of restaurants. None of the surreal bar districts, flaming in regurgitated Koolaid neon shock; no old trees casting leaf patterns on 1930s brick work in the ginger coloured street lamps. No soul. I order more wine. Continue reading…
