the decade of the mall rat

Having two weeks off before I begin traveling around China to see family is nice in that without morning classes to worry about I can get out of my corner of Shenzhen and make sure I’ve actually become familiar with this place and how it works. They say Shenzhen doesn’t have “culture,” but surely something must have developed? Yesterday as I was wandering the subway, I found a little piece of what might be something: a corner of the subterranean hallway where a few boys still in blue school uniforms were spinning and breaking on the smooth tiled floor, laughing as they videotaped each other and heedless of passerbys, curfews, or no-loitering laws.

I was moving through the Metro system to get to COCO Park, which I’d heard a lot about from the other expats but had never actually visited. Other CTLC teachers will laugh at me, but after I got there did I realize that COCO Park is actually not a park. What is it? Of course, another mall.

On malls in Shenzhen: if you have nothing to do on a weekend and you’re in the mood for exploration, at some point (if not for the entire duration of your day) you will spend time in a fancy Chinese mall. Despite being surrounded by the monolithic concrete slabs of apartment buildings (which if not for lack of trying would look like a run-down Bauhaus) or towering glass monsters of office highrises (something you only see in downtown Futian District anyway), malls in Shenzhen have an otherworldly, transportative feel to them. Even their names establish them as microcosmic self-focused entitites separate from the rest of the world around them: “Garden City” and “Coastal City” are the two closest to me. Their interiors look like some kind of surreal hybrid of Final Fantasy palaces and Dale Chihuly glasswork – an organic kind of modernism made with curved glass and smooth steel. The Beverly Center in Los Angeles looks pretty bad compared to these places.

Interior design is big here (go to any bookstore and that section takes up half the store), possibly because the Chinese might be conscious of the dreariness that a badly aging Communist aesthetic of functional minimalism wrought out of concrete and cement bunker buildings. But two things are still lacking: a sense of warmth and common sense. After hours of wandering through “ritzy Chinese malls” (as Hunter once described them) I got pretty tired of the superficial wow factor of being able to see through every wall and surface, as well as wondering which way to turn to get from one place to the other (I walked in circles following the arrows for bathrooms for a while). One thing that I haven’t seen much of in even these fancy megaplexes is wood. I might be more sensitive to its use in both architecture and aesthetics because I come from the Pacific Northwest; I don’t know. The malls are quality stuff here, but without the wood I can’t help but think that they feel a little cold. The obvious emphasis on form over function (the art is more important than your need to go to the bathroom!) doesn’t help that feeling.

At one point I finally extricated myself from the COCO Park maze and took a step out towards the street. I took a look around to see if there was something I could walk to outside of the confines of COCO Park’s artificial garden, but there wasn’t really anything for a long distance. Shenzhen seems to be unique like that: it’s so big and so spread out, that unlike most claustrophic Chinese metropolises each COCO Park that you come across ends up feeling a little bit like an oasis. Especially for China’s emerging upper middle class, for whom these malls must be playgrounds: while I use the term “Chinese mall,” the only thing distinctively Chinese about them is their location. Every shopping space is like a door to Western capitalism, whether it’s a fancy jewelry shop or trendy clothing outlet, and there is almost as much writing in English as Chinese sometimes. I’m also invariably able to stop at a Starbucks to check my email every time. It’s always a different Starbucks, but it’s Starbucks nonetheless.

I’ve accepted the Starbucks-es of Shenzhen as just something to not quibble over too much when arguing about authenticity, but the Coldstone Creamery that I found in COCO Park got me distinctly weirded out.

But what also struck me with ill foreboding while I sat at the Starbucks stirring my green tea latte and reading my English book was that I seemed to be doing inventory of Chinese malls like this every other day on my own. If the Chinese mall experience is meant to be a social one, then of course my impressions and analyses aren’t worth as much when I’m going to them so frequently by myself.

Edit: The grammar in this post is kind of atrocious, I know, but I dashed it out in a hurry. I might or might not fix it later.