traditional Chinese culture

Last semester, I ended up buying a bunch of plastic roses — though I am a fan of real flowers, because they have soft, juicy petals and light fragrance. I need lively and photosynthetic plants to remind me of breathing in city life. When I came back to my dorm room weeks ago after winter break, I was not surprised at all that my plastic roses were still “thriving.” Since I pretentiously put them in the vase with rainwater and nutrients solution, there wasn’t even much dust on them. I used to buy real roses, a bunch per week. But my change to plastic roses was not a result of grief from their withering, but rather my roommate’s complaints about their rotting and stinking before I had time to buy a new bunch the next weekend! 

Nevertheless, roses are beautiful, especially the red ones. They remind me of life, turning from blush to crimson, and then from cherry to bricks, lastly to mahogany. Megacities like Shanghai, on the other hand, are usually made of grey and boredom, especially in late winter. The sky is a polluted grey. Buildings are constructed with grey reinforced concrete. Roads and bridges, cars and ships, blacks and white, shuttle into shades of grey. That is the city we live in. However, as the famous fashion designer Bill Glass once said, “red is the ultimate cure for sadness.” Red, I find, can treat your urban syndrome. It can pull you out of your regular day and pressure, and bring you surprise and energy — if only you walk in the city.

I walk in the afternoon of early spring in Shanghai. A web weaved by utility poles and wires envelops the city — a huge electric system. Every ten or twenty steps, a pole rises up from the ground and points towards the sky, accompanied by a fat metal utility box, cube-like in shape. These poles are painted with red and white stripes at eye level to warn people not to knock into them when gazing at their phones, while the upper reaches of the poles remain cement gray. There, because of the untouchable height, they have lost all color, free from the scar-like inky advertisement stamps that clutter their bases. One aged, leaning pole is tied to the tree beside it by wires, not very tightly, yet tight enough to pull it from falling. This camphor tree, a typical sight in Shanghai, became unusual somehow, its dark green leaves thriving through gaps among shadows of tall buildings and firmly rooted itself in the soil, a guardian of the city. A tiny patch of grass thrives next to its foot too, thanks to the sunbeams that just barely reach it. The long, thin, soft green leaves stretching all directions seem to be yawning this late afternoon. Life in the city is remarkable! You know that is true, if you have ever tried to squat down and observe the mosses and weeds squeezed between tiles and buried by cigarette butts–the greenest and lively things you can find in a city!

Aside from the electric system that threatens you from time to time and the color green that gives you hope and cheers you up always, something else catches your eye in city life. Lanterns with yellow ribbon spikes are hung from the eaves upon the grand mall entrance, one on the left and another on the right. Behind the windowsill, huge intricate and exquisite Chinese knot-like chuanghua patterns —a traditional Chinese art created by cutting delicate and symbolic patterns out of red paper for blessings. Though the Lunar New Year’s Day has passed, we still stay in the range of xiaonian—people celebrate the new year for the whole lunar first month “zhēng yue”!

Red appears everywhere. A few telephone booths on the streets contribute their part. Clearly, not one booth still functions—all out of electricity. But the chart nailed on it with handwritten ticks shows that specific staff clean and disinfect them every two days. It confuses me. I have no answer. I bet no one in Shanghai still holds anything called an IC card, whose full use is to be plugged into slots and make phone calls to another booth. Perhaps they just work as the “Queen’s Guard,” fully armed and dressed up, fervently defending the city from nobody at all. But I am still a fan of the telephone booth. Look at the red brackets and railings which firmly hold the clear glass, under an also red pointy roof — somehow a little faded, given to the traces of time. If it is raining, what a romantic scene it would be!

 I wandered into a community for the elderly, and I immediately immersed myself in it. Red flowers swim in the sea of bushes, some lift their heads for a breath or a leak of sunshine, some shyly bury their heads under twigs as if we cannot see them. I know nothing about gardening, but I guess that is at least some relatives of azalea — nine fuchsia petals and a plate of yellow stamen — exactly how a typical flower looks! They are dominant in numbers and color, spreading themselves all over the bushes — many are blooming generously, and many are dropping petals too. So the soil was covered by a thin quilt. I’m reminded of a couplet by the 19th-century poet Gong Zizhen: “The fallen red is not a heartless thing, it turns into spring mud to protect the flowers.” (落luò红hóng不bú是shì无wú情qíng物wù，化huà作zuò春chūn泥ní更gèng护hù花huā） Immediately, this poem came to me and encouraged me before I got upset about nature’s metabolism. My mind wandered around, imagining the poet Gong Zizhen reciting it next to me with hands behind his back. He looked aged and exhausted, almost at the end of his life. As a poet and an official of the late Qing Dynasty, he was well aware of the difficult situation he and the country were facing at the same time. As the First Opium War started in 1840, Gong wrote this set of poems just one year before, on his way back home after retiring from officialdom to reunite with his family. He was beset by many illnesses already and died in 1841—full of worries for the future of the country’s destiny. But what shows up among the three hundred poems is hope and indomitability, just as what he said about the “fallen red.” Even in the present day, in this COVID era, we may still be encouraged by this spirit of toughness and dedication from those sacrifices — the “fallen reds.” A flower falls and grows. Life comes and goes. Red circulates as petals, blood, sun, hope, and direction. 

In the city, sometimes there is not as much red as in the countryside and nature. Compared to the masses of grey, red prefers to exist as small dots or thin line-like, as a swaying flame lighting up your heart. On my way back home, I see a pair of red sports shoes, worn on the feet of a rickety old man mincing along with the help of his cane. The foamy soles of his shoes had been squeezed under his weight into many wrinkles and were severely out of shape. But that red seems to give him energy and strength to walk further and further. I lift my head up. Three rusty fire hydrants stand in a line at the corner of the street. A traffic sign with red trim and a red slash over the horn, warns people not to honk. On the road, the stream of brake lights flickering behind vehicles becomes a flowing river…

 Color plays a major role in our lives, as Amy Butler Greenfield states in her 2005 book A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage and the Quest for the Colour of Desire: “humans see the world in a cascade of color, with eyes that can distinguish any single shade from more than a million others. As a species, we prize color and attach great significance to it.” When we see an item or a scene, color always catches our attention first. Then we like to interpret colors into deep meanings — that seems like human nature. But, of all those colors, red has the strongest power, as Greenfield notes: “throughout much of the world, red represents events and emotions at the core of the human condition: danger and courage, revolution and war, violence and sin, desire and passion, even life itself.” Gong Zizhen is far from being the only poet to celebrate red, as famous verses from Robert Burns, Alfred Tennyson, and Emily Dickenson attest. We genuinely feel the vitality of red, and how red changes our life. Such great verses left us with deep impressions of the power of red in a literary form, for hundreds of years.

Recently, the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics just ended. And the mascot panda “Bing Dwen Dwen” was the most popular star last month. So people come up with a Brain Teaser: how can a black-and-white panda take a color photo? And the answer is to take pictures when they laugh as they stick out their tongue – then red added by smiles makes everything different. Red can symbolize passion, love, enthusiasm, hope, rebirth or rage, danger, shyness, etc. What if we make it simple: the roses, utility boxes, lanterns, chuanghuas, telephone booths, sports shoes, etc., are all just the smiles of the city!