Summer in the City of To-morrow

Some years ago I encountered the claim that New York is the only real city that America has. It was in something written by Joseph Heller, but I forget exactly what. Since then I've had this special affection for delirious screeds about what exactly constitutes a Real City, and based on that, what cities make the list. I agree, with Heller, that New York qualifies, but San Francisco and Los Angeles ultimately do not. I have never been to France, but from what I've read, I'm inclined to believe that Paris is a Real City. Asia is full of Real Cities: Tokyo and Osaka are exemplary, China has Shanghai at the very least, and even a neglected and seemingly second-tier burg like Taipei passes muster.

The Real City's a slippery construct. In the past, over the course of many rants, I have claimed that a Real City needs to speak many languages, it must be traversable by foot, it needs open spaces where complete strangers pass each other in proximity, it needs cheap ethnic food and well-patronized libraries and good mass transit and bohemias rising and decaying and a music scene with history. Now, this sort of play of arbitrary definitions and inanely nerdy categorizing is usually no better than food for lazy thoughts, very much a close cousin to conspiracy theory or classically ludicrous Internet kerfuffles like whether the USS Enterprise would win in a cross-dimensional dogfight against an Imperial Star Destroyer. In general, the exercise operates on a combination of pseudoscience, the highly selective application or liberal manufacture of fact, and pure farce. As such one can invent all kinds of criteria for what a Real City is, but the label in turn might only signify its criteria, i.e., it's no more than the sum of its parts. Which of course limits the whole conversation, then, to a geographical hipness war, viz., I Would Only Ever Live In A Real City or I Come From a Real City ergo My Shit Is Hot, etc. etc.

I'm still tempted to think that there is a worthy substrate to the idea of a Real City, something like the essential antipode to everything that's invariably lamentable and bad about cities, say squalor or loneliness or slums or violence. Maybe the Real City is about the spirit of public life that brings people of different ethnicities and classes to share the same everyday places, about the juxtaposing of different cultures and the creative stimulation that comes as a result. It might be about the things we feel that we lose when we move out to the suburbs, where we demand to own our own spaces and to dictate the disposition and mien of our neighbors.

It's awful crude, but my favorite Real City heuristic goes like this: go look around on the streets near where you live, sometime close to midnight on a Tuesday maybe, and see if there are people walking around. If they are doing more than just hurrying home, if they're eating or talking or squabbling or working, then you're in a Real City. A Real City has to be alive at night, and this is not the same thing as having nightlife.

I haven't actually been in Beijing long enough to determine whether it's Real or not, although it seems impossible that it wouldn't be. That said, it was a little surprising to discover that it's pretty hard to find a place to eat right in my neighborhood after 9 or 10PM, which is about as decisive a failure of the Night Heuristic as is humanly conceivable. The solution for late dinners or evening snacks has been ready-made junk, most often cup ramen of Asia-grade heft and sophistication. On one unfortunate evening, after a canceled dinner appointment and a late work day, I elected instead to brave the McDonald's that sits immediately outside of my apartment complex.

As far as I can tell, the Golden Arches never close in this city. Once upon a time in China, fast food was a cherished piece of middle-class exotica, one you could feasibly enjoy on a first date or as an occasional spoil-yourself treat. Now, with the young generation thoroughly jaded to pop consumption and overall food prices high enough to restore the X-with-fries value meal to its proper place at the bottom of the prepared-meal totem pole, fast food mystique in urban China is all but dead. The corner McDonald's at 11PM has in Beijing the same ghastly iridescence and grimy melancholy that it would in any given location in North America. The "diversified" menu, a mockery of the product localization that so fascinates fans of globalization, is just about the only thing that reminds you that you're in China.

I forced upon myself a 鲜蔬足尊牛堡, a food item whose name utterly thwarts my attempts to translate it into English. It's marketed as a kind of New Millenium McDLT, prominently advertising the freshness and quality of its ingredients in its title, but is structurally most similar to a Big Mac, with a spicier special sauce, a larger patty substituting for the Mac's second micropatty and central disc of carbs, and cucumber slices instead of pickle. It tastes, as it was engineered, like McDonald's.

As any junk-loving expat will attest, one minor distinction between the US and Asia at large is the latter's inability to grasp and subsequently celebrate the excess of fast food, which I think primarily comes to fore in the fact that you are given one (1) standard packet of ketchup regardless of the quantity of fries you have ordered. For a sole packet of ketchup to suffice, even for an order of Small Fries, a diner would have to alternate between dipped fries and unadulterated fries, or simultaneously consume multiple unadulterated fries with a lone dipped fry. It almost makes me think that even as Asian fast food customers enjoy receiving ketchup with their meals, they do not actually use it.