[caption id="attachment_35720" align="alignleft" width="422"] Shanghai street scene[/caption]

My little group of professors and researchers was taken to a traditional shopping area outside of the Bund. Narrow streets, no more than pathways in some cases. Small venues their fronts open to public. It takes you back in time when whether East or West small shops open to the street were the norm. Shopkeepers standing in the small spaces displaying their wares. Out in the street it was quite crowded with people moving and talking back and forth.

Walking with me is a neuroscientist at Duke University in Singapore whose name is Po-Jang, but who is universally known as Brown. He is a handsome Chinese man in his late thirties or early forties.  We just kind of connected when we met and naturally drifted off by ourselves. We  have been talking about nonlocal consciousness, when he turns to have a brief conversation in Chinese, and I really focus on the people in the street. It was at that point I realized I had not seen a single fat person since I had been in Shanghai. Not one.

From that point on I took particular note of this and in my entire two weeks, walking all over the city, and spending hours in a large conference center, with several conferences each running to hundreds of people in simultaneous operation, never once did I see a fat person. It was a startling different visual experience than in the U.S. where as long ago as 2010 two out of every three American adults was overweight or obese, as were one-third of those aged 6 to 19, with obesity increasing year by year.

I want to be clear what I am saying here. These people are not thin because they don't get enough to eat. I didn't see anyone in Shanghai who looked hungry, and I was approached by a beggar only once in two weeks. No. This has something to do with the diet, exercise and, I suspect, the fact that foods are much less engineered, and laced with additives.  Whatever, the Chinese as a people look fit, where Americans increasingly look ill, their systems woefully out of whack.

Personally, I’m a bit over 6’2”, so fairly tall in the non-basketball player range. The average male height in the U.S. is 5’9.5.” For women it's 5’4”. I’m used to being taller than most people, but the difference is usually not that great. In China men average 5’6” and women 5”1.5”. I stand out, but that doesn’t surprise me, I expected that. What does surprise me is how well dressed everyone is. We Caucasions are the worst dressed folk on the street. I only had a chance to see Shanghai, and I am sure that in different parts of the country things look different. The same could be said in the U.S.

But the teenagers and millennials in Shanghai often look like models out of magazines. They wear more upscale versions of the international interracial look that dominates today’s stylish young. It comes off the internet and is seen in ads and on cable series. There is almost no noticeably “oriental clothing,” much less than say Viet Nam. It is all Western, down to the stylish canvas and leather shoes. The Chinese like the Japanese put more attention into detail than is true in the West, and demand a higher quality. The difference between China and Japan though is I don’t see in Shanghai the kind of cult dress that is so prevalent in Japan. I only see one girl dressed in the pedophilic erotic little girl costumes you see in Tokyo. The young people here would be at home in L.A.

I have no gift for languages. I am slightly ashamed of that, but am buoyed from depression about it by Winston Churchill and Jack Kennedy, who didn’t speak anything but English either. It gives you a strange gift. Travelling in a country where you don’t speak the language and even the hand gestures are foreign conversations that would normally pull your attention drift into background noise and you notice other things. This is made doubly true when almost no one you see speaks English. In almost any European country you can get by in English. There’s always someone who has some small command of the language, and many who are quite proficient. Not in China. Very few have English. It is a specialized skill, not a common practice. I did learn “hello,” “thank you” and “please” as I do to every country to which I go, and even hotel employees who one might expect to speak some English have little more than my Chinese vocabulary.

Because people were shorter looking up a street what I mostly saw were the tops of heads. They were all black. When I went into shops I noticed everyone had the same dark brown eyes. It made me think: What is it like to live in a country where everyone has the same color hair and eyes? It isn’t that people all look the same, they don’t. There is enormous variation in China as there is in the big metropolitan areas of the U.S.. Shanghai and New York are much the same in that regard.

The variation in China is actually greater than in any single European nation. The Republic of China founded in 1911 was conceived of as a single nation bringing the five major ethnic groups under one flag, and the communists have held to that commitment.  The Han who have more reddish skin, the Manchus who are more yellow, the Mongols, who are thought of as blue, but are really just a darker brownish red with sharper features, the Hui who are whiter, and the Tibetans who are thought of as black but are really like the Mongols a deeper brownish red in skin tone, but with much rounder softer faces. Racial variation is as much a part of China’s history, as the Black, Hispanic, Caucasian and tribal indigenous populations are the pillars of the United States. Racial variety is not the point I am making though. It is that except for some Tibetans, almost everyone has the same color hair and eyes. Think about that a minute.

In my view, anthropologically it has had a powerful effect on the collective consciousness of the culture. China may have five races, but there is no question it is a “we” culture where the United States is an “I” culture, and understanding the difference is essential to understanding China, as well as understanding ourselves. [more tomorrow]