Unraveling in Front of Me

I am on a bench and the woman in front of me is pacing happily. With each step, she smacks herself with both hands. She is repetitive and rhythmic, following a single rotation – hips, hips, thighs, elbows, shoulders, head - REPETE. Once her path reaches the grass at the pavement’s end, she stops, rotates and returns back onwards facing the other edge - REPETE. She holds an implacable face, but every so often lets her eyes stab over towards me. Each time, our glances catch and her upper lip pulls up awkwardly in a laughing smile, without revealing her teeth. It is strange to me that she comes here and performs such a ritual. To her, it is probably much more suspicious that I come, sit here and watch her do it.
She is regular fixture in Xiangyang Park. The small park tucks between skyscrapers in Shanghai’s Xuhui District. She’s working out, I think– an age-old rhythmic and meditative war dance combining the light cardio of pacing with the benefits of repetitively hitting yourself. There is a veritable army of regulars at this park: dancers, fencers, Tai Chi practitioners, Kung Fu teachers, gangs of singers, an unprecedented amount of walking body-beaters, a multitude of badminton players, many children, several homeless, a couple dogs and a healthy number of the elderly, who sit on the benches and watch it all.
I am not elderly but I do come here to sit and watch a couple of days a week, for a good hour or two. I feast my eyes on the curiosities occurring around me and wonder at the oddity of it all. To everyone else, this is just a Tuesday. But here I study their lives in silence. An old man sits with me sometimes. He shovels Double Happiness cigarettes into my lungs and lectures rapidly in Mandarin. He is my professor.
He taught me a good deal. At home a park essentially operates as a communal treadmill, as far as I see it. What’s different, for the Shanghainese it is true-to-life public space. They relish it and reveal their lives to me in their many uses. Some stroll in pajamas. Others, rebellious youth, sit, smoke and murmur. The many dancers span generations from young salsa-ing couples to old mums gliding through choreographed arm movements with music to match. In other districts, they take to the sidewalks. But here, they have public space. As the locals take advantage, so does the traveler. Indeed, wherever you find yourself a stranger, I say you walk outside and sit. Lean back. Maybe bring a beer. Absorb the scene and enjoy the classroom.