Why You Should Never Stay in Shanghai's Red Light District

I’m not sure when it first hit me, but it was around the time I discovered someone’s shit lying in the hallway outside my room: Shanghai’s a mess.

My foray into the depths of Shanghai began, innocently enough, at a summer opportunities fair in the Gutman Library. It was the winter of my freshman year, and among the Wall Street firms and nonprofit organizations giving their best summer sales pitches, one option stood out: a summer program that paired 30 international college students with seven-week internships in Shanghai. Perhaps I wanted an escape. Perhaps it was the picture of the Shanghai skyline that did it. But for whatever reason, I applied for the program. A getaway, I reasoned, could never hurt.

Six months later, I was staying in a hotel in the heart of Shanghai’s Red Light District. The lights dim, the corridors dirty, and the rooms reeking of “noodles, sweat, and fart,” as one reviewer on TripAdvisor put it, the New Asia Hotel wasn’t your standard three-star hotel. We returned from nights out to find stray cats wandering the hallways. Pimps offered us prostitutes in the lobby, and, when we declined, pestered us through the elevator and up to our rooms. My coworker Juan had some linen stolen from his hotel room, with the staff reception being no help. And on one occasion, as previously alluded to, we found shit lying in the hallway.

After living in the city for a few weeks, I discovered the only rule in Shanghai: There are no rules. It’s difficult to distinguish news headlines from horror stories—KFC’s Ice Dirtier than Toilet Water; Tainted Milk Powder Kills Children. In Shanghai, you can trample children on the subway if a seat opens up. You can steal someone’s taxi if you jump in the back seat before he does. And don’t even bother standing in lines.

In my head, I had an understanding of how the rest of my time in Shanghai would play out. Maybe I had seen too many movies, but I figured this would be one of those stories where the protagonist finds himself in an undesirable situation and, only after removing some negative aspect of his personality, begins to enjoy it. Yet as the days dragged on, this possibility began to disappear. Shanghai wasn’t any more bearable.

One day, whether due to the triple-digit temperature or to my coworker finding himself the victim of a $150 scam, I finally broke. Almost on a whim, a few friends and I bought tickets to Beijing, about 800 miles from Shanghai, and decided to spend a weekend there. Our expectations weren’t high—we had started to refer to Shanghai as Shanghell, and we were already toying with puns for Beijing. We were unprepared and departed without a plan, treating our voyage not as a visit to Beijing, but rather a three-day respite from Shanghai.

Or not. When I arrived in Beijing, I wasn’t sure whether to hail a taxi. It was customary in Shanghai for taxi drivers to swindle tourists by driving around in circles, and my wallet wasn’t deep enough to cover much more than a one-hour trip to the city center. But lacking other options, I headed to the taxi stand and summoned the next car. I sat down in the front seat, and before asking for my destination, the driver greeted me in his broken English and offered me a cigarette. Shocked by this display of human decency, I declined by using the phrase I had been trained to use for turning down scammers in Shanghai: wŏ bú yào. The nicest gesture I had received from a stranger in months came from a taxi driver who offered me a cigarette. Welcome to Beijing.

After a brisk taxi ride, I arrived in the city center. Something about Beijing felt inherently different. It wasn’t any cleaner or less polluted than Shanghai, but Beijing reverberated with a certain energy that was nonexistent in our previous city. Instead of busy streets and loud expanses, there were hutongs, picturesque clusters of narrow, pedestrian walkways that were impossible to associate with anything besides 1940s China. There was no loud music or obscene displays of wealth, just calmness and a richness of culture.

We spent the first day walking around Beijing. The air had cleared up, and we toured Tiananmen Square, which, although the site of a certain event in 1989, is the world’s third largest city square. When we got lost in the hutongs, a group of locals were eager to point us in the right direction. They smiled when they talked, eager to hear what we thought of their city. And no one ever asked me if I wanted a prostitute.

We saved the Great Wall for the final day. Though most tourists visited Badaling, a sight on the Wall that was open to the public and featured large crowds and unnecessary entertainment like zoo animals, my friend Austen and I decided to visit an unrestored part of the Wall that wasn’t officially open to the public. We had read about it on some sketchy blog we found on the later pages of a Google search result, and after a train ride, two buses, and an hour-long hike, we reached our improbable destination.

I experienced an indescribable awe that day. It wasn’t quite like reaching the top of a mountain, where part of the joy is enjoying the view from a height you worked so hard to conquer. Rather, I was treated to the sight of nothing but a crumbling wall stretching on for miles and miles. Things were calm; my phone was off, and we had nothing in our pockets besides a bit of cash and some snacks we snuck with us from an all-you-can eat breakfast buffet. For two hours, maybe three, the Great Wall of China belonged to us—two tourists trying to get away from Shanghai.

I eventually returned to Shanghai, which, surprisingly enough, hadn’t improved while I was away. But I didn’t care as much. I was able to recognize the group of amazing people, both international and Chinese, I had the opportunity to spend seven weeks with. There are still some leftover mysteries from that summer, however. I don’t know why I decided to go to Beijing that weekend, much less why I was in China in the first place. I still don’t understand certain Chinese customs, and my Mandarin is no better than it was before I visited. Yet I was fortunate enough to learn one important truth: Sometimes you need an escape. Sometimes you need to get away.

Just don’t go to Shanghai.

Keyon Vafa is a sophomore in Leverett House. He hasn’t found any shit yet in Leverett’s hallways. Thanks, Dorm Crew.