As most of you know, our family lived in Shanghai for a few years to accommodate my wife’s new job at the time.  It was an amazing adventure for our family every day, but there were certain moments during our stay that stand out to me more than others.  Over the coming weeks, I’ll dip back into these stories and share them with you from our time in China.  Today, I’ll tell you about my brush with death (from anxiety), bad fashion, and American super-fans at a famous tourist attraction during our first month in Shanghai.

It was the middle of winter in Shanghai when we moved into our apartment.  Between the jet lag, the culture shock and the winter weather, our first month in the city was basically spent indoors.  We had prepared for this before our arrival;  we bought bulky jackets and thermal layers to wear, but having the right gear doesn’t mean you brain is ready to accept the change of actual winter temperatures.  Having lived in Southern California most of my adult life, winter meant occasionally wearing a sweater or a hooded sweatshirt when the temperature dips below 70 degrees for a few hours.  Shanghai weather mirrors the same weather patterns New York seems to have:  cold, windy weather in the city with some snow from time to time.  I had the right gear for the weather, but mentally we saw the outside as ‘cold’, so we burrowed in our apartment for the first few weeks.

Finally, after being holed up in our place for several days in a row, my wife could stand it no longer, and orchestrated a sightseeing excursion for us to take as a family.  She decided to take us to see the famous Shanghai skyline along the Bund, and then go to the top of the Oriental Pearl Tower to see the city from the top of the building.  If you have ever seen a picture on TV depicting Shanghai, you’ve probably seen this area I’m talking about;  it’s the city’s financial district, built up with huge skyscrapers that border the banks of the Huangpu river.  Even if you don’t remember the details of the buildings there, you’ll certainly remember the look of one particular building:  the Oriental Pearl Tower:

It stands out among the other business buildings along the river…

…and it hosts thousands of tourists daily, from school children all over the country, Chinese citizens in the inland areas coming to see life in the ‘big city’, and Western tourists on their guided bus tours (this ends the portion of my post sponsored by the Shanghai Tourism Board and Chamber of Commerce).

Anyway, our family felt that this might be a good place to start our exploration of the city we would be calling home, so with some help from the desk staff in our apartment complex we hailed a cab, gave our taxi driver directions in our garbled Mandarin, and off we went.

A little back story before I proceed further.  Before arriving in China, I had read articles about the rapid growth of the country, and that because of the demand for housing and business space being high,  the construction industry was cranking out buildings as fast as possible.  To that end, I had also read about how these construction companies sometimes regarded things like ‘building codes’ and ‘workplace safety’ as optional.  There were stories of workers dying because of lax safety standards, buildings falling apart because ‘counterfeit’ cement had been used, even a maglev train track support, newly built in Shanghai, crumbled after a few weeks of use, causing disaster for passengers and the village it was traveling over.  The rule of law in China is subjective to whoever is ruling on a case at any time, so there was no reliable check and balance system when it came to inspecting these buildings or holding these crews accountable to make sure these buildings were safe.

Upon arriving in China, my firsthand account of the construction standards in my neighborhood only seemed to confirm what I had read.  Everywhere I walked in the city I saw crews working on various projects using some ‘unconventional’ methods.  Buildings under construction several stories high covered in scaffolding made from bamboo stalks.  Men smoking around welding tanks and torches.  Open manholes near work sites with no signage or netting to prevent someone distracted by their smart phone from plunging into the street.  None of these observations made me feel confident about ANY building in Shanghai—and I was about to go into a building built in the 1990’s, 1500 feet above the ground.  Needless to say, I was a bit anxious about our trip to the Tower.

Our family arrived at the tower and proceeded to buy tickets to get to the observation deck, which was near the top of the tower.  After a short ride in the elevator, we got out and made our way to the windows to see the view of the city skyline below.  Only then did I find out that a portion of the observation deck had see-through glass floors that you could walk on.  My mind immediately leaped to “HELL to the NO” as I stopped short of the glass floor section.  After all that I had seen and read, I was sure that the floor was probably held together with second-rate Super Glue, or that the floor was actually Saran Wrap and NOT actual glass.  Either way, I was not about to test my theory of how shoddy the construction was in China by putting my body weight on something that might just disintegrate and plunge me straight to the tour groups gathering below.  I could just see it:  the ‘glass’ floor cracking, my body hurtling to the ground, and just before impact I will hear one of the Chinese locals say ‘ Pfft..Americans think they’re so much better that the rest of the world.  Look at this guy, he thought he could fly!”.

My kids, of course, have no such fears at this stage of their lives, because they think they are invincible and that they’ll live forever.  Both of my kids decide to RUN out onto the glass floor, terribly excited to see the ground beneath their feet.  Since I am not a completely useless parent, I creep to the edge of where the glass floor starts and try to talk the kids back to the safety of the carpet.

Just then a Chinese couple approached me, wearing matching garish American flag sweaters (they looked like something from the Evel Knieval Collection, circa 1975), and ask if I can take a picture with them.  This was a new thing we had yet to get used to, where Chinese people visiting from small, rural provinces would visit Shanghai, run into fair-skinned blue-eyed people and immediately want to take a picture with them.  To this day I can’t wrap my head around the reason why someone would want to take a picture with a complete stranger—I suppose its similar to when we go to the zoo and ask the kids to pose in front of the elephant in the pen behind them.  And yes, I just compared myself to an attraction at the zoo.  Anyway, not wanting to disappoint my new American ‘super-fans’, I agreed to the picture, assuming it would be where I was standing.  That is when the young man took me by the arm…and lead me to the glass floor deck.

I immediately began to sweat, and the first thought in my mind was ‘So, this is how I die.  Either this glass floor, secretly made of cheap plastic and held in place by chewing gum, gives way and sends me and my Uncle Sam enthusiast to the ground, with his stupid sweater flapping in the wind like Old Glory at a baseball game…or my heart gives out from stress and I die in the arms of my new Chinese friend while he sings our National Anthem in broken English.  Either way, I did not see this coming”.

Miraculously, neither of these things happened.  I managed to pose with my new buddy and even manage a smile, but with one hand wrapped tightly around the railing, just in case:

He said ‘thank you’ and the couple went on their way.  I gingerly walked off the glass floor, collected our kids, and exited the tower.  Ever since that day, I would often look up at Pearl Tower when I was in the area and think “How did I survive that?”, while secretly hoping that a stiff breeze would, just at that moment, push the Pearl Tower over into the river, so I could feel justified about the building safety issues I had ginned up in my mind.