The Jing’an Temple dates back to the year 247 CE, but its present premises weren’t constructed until 1216, during the Song dynasty. There’s a small mall to one side and underneath is a metro station. The temple was at times abandoned and then became a plastics factory until, in 1983, it regained its original religious dignity. Since then, the surrounding district has come to be known by the name of the temple, and its streets and parks are dominated by towers so golden they appear to be plastic, huge stone lions made in serial mold, and an almost nine-meter-high Buddha in the lotus position made from fifteen tons of pure silver. One morning, I decided to go inside to view the Buddha and did something very unusual for me, something I hadn’t done in decades: I prayed. I tend toward atheism, but the majesty of that statue brought me to my knees.
It took an effort to lower myself onto the prie-dieu. For a week, I’d been finding walking painful. My legs and feet were swollen. I returned to my room in the Skiline apartment hotel and called Haiyan, one of my hosts, begging him to take me to Huadong Hospital—an affiliate of Fudan University—on Yan’an Road, six or seven blocks from my hotel and the temple. After a needless fright—the youngest of the doctors wanted to remove my gallbladder—that same afternoon, in a mix of Wu and English, I was told I was suffering from a chronic but not particularly serious condition that in Spanish would be known as fiebre linfática, a condition that—whether I liked it or not—would torture me for the rest of my life.
From the outset, that trip was marked by failed plans and bad luck. I was supposed to fly out from Monterrey on September 1, 2017, but it seems there was a scratch on my Border Crossing Card, so I wasn’t allowed to travel to the People’s Republic of China via the United States; it took five days to get another flight, changing in Vancouver. I’d been in Shanghai for a couple of weeks when earthquakes struck various parts of Mexico, including Tepotzlán, the town where my youngest son lives. For my family, it was merely scary, but Sept. 19 became a national tragedy. Then, at the end on the month, by which time I was already confidently exploring that Asian city on foot and by metro—from the working-class neighborhoods stretching west to Suzhou, that prestigious Venice of China, to the tall Longhua Pagoda in the south—the fever that was sending my legs into meltdown made its appearance. The doctor prescribed steroids and ten days’ bed rest.
It isn’t easy to be ill in a distant country whose customs and language you don’t know. For over a week, with the sound down, I watched Chinese Super League soccer games on TV (the coach of Shanghai Shenhui had, by then, dropped the monster that is Carlos Tévez due to disciplinary issues) and a Japanese series dubbed into Mandarin; I reread—I’m unsure if this was to wallow in depression or to bolster my moral fortitude—The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles’s novel about a Western couple traveling in the Sahara after World War II, thrown off track by typhoid and madness; and I existed on a diet of instant ramen noodles, pork jerky, fried rice, and some nauseating snacks consisting of boiled eggs steeped in green tea: that was all they had in the Family Mart on the corner. My evenings were spent spying on the buildings on the opposite side of Yuyuan Branch Road: one was an apartment complex in which the residents spent their whole time laundering clothes and hanging them to dry on the balcony; the other was a massage parlor, where the extreme nervousness of the clientele allowed one to imagine tantalizing stories.
The first thing I did when I was allowed to leave my bed was to take the metro (three stops north of Jing’an on Line 7) to Putuo to visit the Jade Buddha Temple. I was perhaps unconsciously thinking of drawing a line under my illness. I wasn’t feeling particularly enthusiastic about the trip; many of the travelers I’d met in Shanghai, plus what I found on the internet, warned that the temple was “no big deal”: they classified the Jade Buddha as a minor work. I wondered if I was wasting my time, but even so, was glad to find myself in an ungentrified neighborhood, with all its dangerous foods, enigmatic fruits, and barbers installed in the middle of the street with nothing more than a pair of scissors and an old chair.
By a stroke of luck, I arrived there in cynical mode; that meant the sculpture of Prince Siddhartha was an even greater surprise. As the temple had been undergoing reconstruction for over a year, I’m not certain if all the travelers whose opinions I’d been offered—either in person or virtually—had actually seen the piece: there are at least two other jade sculptures in the temple, one small, the other larger in size. The statue in question is contained in the modest, you could say intimate, space of an altar near the quarters of the student monks (Jade Buddha Temple is the home of an active Buddhist college). None of the travelers’ tales I’d read or heard mentioned the chants—not unlike the Tibetan variant—that the student monks intone around the clock, so that whenever you visit that small chamber, their mystic voices can be heard in the background. The Jade Buddha is one of the most delicate pieces of oriental art I’ve ever laid eyes on; in my opinion, it is at least comparable with anything I saw some years ago in Tokyo and Kyoto, in addition to others in Shanghai. It isn’t its size or the richness of the materials that makes viewing it a moving experience, but rather the delicacy and simplicity of the lines, the serene expression on the Buddha’s face as he says farewell to the world. I visited the chapel at least four times and saw every mortal soul there in tears. And of course, it is a big deal: you can’t leave Shanghai without visiting the Jade Buddha.
A few nights later, my brother Jorge flew in from Yokohama. We arranged that I’d pick him up at his hotel in Pudong and drive him across the Huangpu River to the Bund and the Peace Hotel, where the oldest jazz band in the world plays.
Everything mentioned in the paragraph above requires an explanation.
My brother Jorge and I grew up in a town in northern Mexico called Ciudad Frontera. Our childhood was passed in poverty. With time, I dedicated myself to literature and he went into business: he moved to Japan two decades ago, is now vice president of a small security company in Yokohama, and is married to Rie Toyofuku, a Japanese woman with whom he has three children. We’ve met on very few occasions since childhood. When Jorge heard that I’d be in China for two months, he did everything in his power to visit me there. In the end, he was only able to take one night off work; he flew into Shanghai on a Sunday and returned to Yokohama the following morning.
Shanghai is split in two by history and a river, the Huangpu. The old city, comprising Jing’an, People’s Square, and the seats of institutional power, plus the traditional Chinese neighborhood and the former British and French consulates, is on the west bank. The jewel of this is the Bund: the historical center that was an economic hub in the days of the Opium Wars and is notable for the glamor of its neoclassical and art deco architecture, brought to China by European pirates with exquisite taste.
On the eastern bank of the Huangpu is the Shanghai equivalent of Manhattan: Pudong, the most important financial district in Asia, with its gigantic intelligent buildings covered in lights and screens in Blade Runner style. Here, the core of the future China is embodied in the Orient Pearl Television Tower, the Jin Mao building, the Shanghai World Financial Center, the cyberpunk aesthetic of its elevated walkways, and a hundred other premises and feats of splendid nano high-tech engineering along the length of Century Avenue. Particularly at night, there’s something entrancing in the way Pudong (until the early nineties, little more than an area of wetland) and the Bund exchange gazes over the waters of the river. It’s like a mirror in which Asia, Europe, and the past and present of the human race look each other in the eyes through the contact lenses of technology and architecture. Rather than an Eastern city, Shanghai is the cosmopolitan product of an economic war that China began by losing but in which it has now drawn level.
The Peace Hotel is located at 20 East Nanjing Road, half a block from the Huangpu River and the promenade from which tourists view the multicolored lights on the buildings of Pudong. Once the property of a French banker, it’s a luxurious art deco edifice whose legendary jazz bar has, since the early twentieth century, hosted such luminaries as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. What remains of that now is the Old Jazz Band, a combo of brass, drums, and piano whose members—with an average age of eighty-plus—have spent their lives playing in that same venue and at one time were listed in The Guinness Book of Records as the oldest jazz band on the planet.
The lobby of the Peace Hotel is a minor miracle of decadence. From the carved wood, beveled glass, screens, and skylights to the silver flatware in the breakfast room and the copper faucets in the bathrooms, everything speaks of a sumptuousness that might be slightly ingenuous but is never uncomfortable. The darkly wine-colored mahogany bar is packed with badly dressed tourists and impeccably outfitted waiters weaving quickly between the tables. The maître d’ asks if we have a reservation: of course, we don’t. Luckily there’s a small table available in one corner from which we can just glimpse the unexpected ineptitude of the combo and the extraordinary outfit of the female vocalist: an electric-blue Charleston dress, a black veil covering her eyes, a corsage . . . She interprets songs that I gradually recognize as the grand legacy of Eastern lounge divas: popular music from the thirties and forties.
Jorge and I sit down, almost hidden, at the far end of the bar. He orders a whisky and I ask for a gin and tonic. The ambience is so seamless that I suddenly feel transfixed by time, as though Oscar Wilde and Paul Bowles or some unknown disease with a nineteenth-century name—fiebre linfática—were about to be transported through the door. Our drinks arrive. We hear the first bars of “Plum Blossom,” a song by Li Xianglan. My brother proposes a toast:
“To two poor kids from Ciudad Frontera who never even imagined that life would find them together in a Shanghai bar.”
Not a bad toast. I clink my glass with his and think that we might never meet again. Outside, it’s raining. The night is still warm, but in a few days the first Siberian winds will descend on Shanghai: summer will end abruptly, giving way to fall. 
Julián Herbert was born in Acapulco in 1971. He is a writer, musician, and teacher, and is the author of The House of the Pain of Others, Tomb Song, and Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino, as well as several volumes of poetry. He lives in Saltillo, Mexico.
Christina MacSweeney is an award-winning translator who has worked with such authors as Valeria Luiselli, Daniel Saldaña París, Elvira Navarro, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Julián Herbert, Jazmina Barrera, and Karla Suárez. She has also contributed to many anthologies of Latin American literature and has published shorter translations, articles, and interviews on a wide variety of platforms.
Illustration: Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo
