Shanghai Tan

You must have heard of the idea of “tell me which books do you read, I’ll tell you who you are“? You can apply the same idea to food, fashion, music, and how about a bookstore? Some tourists will invariably go to a bookstore everytime he/she visits a new place. Taking a walk in a bookstore is like having a quick bus tour of the city, you get to see the landscape and people, the architecture and culture, the history and legacy, the vitality and variety of the people, and so on.

Yesterday I went the the bookstore in my neighborhood, it’s name is Shanghai’s city of books [上海书城]. It’s a chain of very large bookstores found in every corner of the city. This one is a four stories and is considered small by their standard. I went to buy some books for my nepheus, and ended up staying 3 hours in there.

Shanghai's City of Books at Zhong Shan park	There are many history books in the bestseller section, as well as psychology for daily life, finance, western literature translated, a bit of fiction and personal health.
Tourism books are also very popular at the main entrance of many bookstores.	There is no comfortable sofa or chair in this bookstore, but that doesn't seem to bother many people.

From a bookstore, you can see from the bestsellers section what are the favorite subjects of the locals, which books the store is promoting; who are the popular authors, are they an autority figure of their respective domain or are they just anybody writing to everybody? The price of the book tells how much knowledge is accessible to the lower class of the society. The quality of the print and cover tells if people appreciate books. The variety of subjects tell if the people are open-minded. The customer base tells if each generation is eager to acquire new knowledge or prefer to just sit back and relax. For instance in North America older people love to read books, while youngsters prefer to read magazine, watch TV, watch movies, play game or hang out. In China, old people prefer to stay home watching TV and watching after their grand children, hanging out at the parks with neighbors, cook for their family, but few of them actually go to bookstore to buy books. Beside, many of them have bad vision, and some of them were not properly educated because of the long period of war during a good part of the past century.

Ancien Chinese literature

To boost national pride and bring prestige to Chineses’ cultural heritage, the central government is currently promoting ancien Chinese writings, such as ancien philosophies, literature, thinkers, heros, etc. In North America I don’t see a lot of books in the bestseller section trying to translate Aristotle or Socrates or Descartes’ writings to modern language for the ordinary you and me, but in any bookstore in Shanghai, there’s a pile of books, very accessible in term of price and display, that focus on explaining ancien writings to modern people. Actually ancien Chinese text written 2500 years ago, where Chinese philosophies and thinkings reached its highest climax, are very condense and difficult to understand. You can easily take 2 lines of text and write a full page about it.

This is a series of affordable books of many popular ancien Chinese literature.

Chineses probably have the largest set of idioms among all the languages of the world. Half of these Chinese dictionaries are devoted to explain each of those idioms and their sources. We have 3 words, 4 words (most common), 5 words and 7 words.

The set of books at left side are specially made for those who will go to a job interview at any government agency, they must pass the exam of various subjects, such as communication, information management, finance, law, governance, etc. It's like passing a driving test, but 10 times more difficult, although I wonder how did all of them become so dumb once they were accepted... There must be some shortcut I assume.

To my surprise, there were many teens in that section as well.

English learning

In every bookstore, there’s invariably a large section devoted to English learning. Actually I must say it is language study. However, when looking closer, I realize that in that section, 70% are for English language studying, 20% are for Japanese, and 10% for all the other languages combined. It’s amazing the variety of material for English learning available here. The English language book publishers must have made a fortune in China! There are all kind of books for all kinds of students, and tape, video, interactive DVD, anything you could or could not imagine, for teaching English. I was looking for a Chinese-French dictionary for my sister, and there was like, one selection (I wouldn’t call it a choice). For Chinese-English, there were more than 20 choices!

The language study section is a big section in most bookstore.	The whole rack in front of me and the one after it are for English language study.
This is another rack, the left side is for business English, the right side is for master level English.	Anoter rack, the 3 columns at right are English-related dictionary (and a bit of Janapese), the left column is for all other languages combined.
These are audio tapes for English listening lessons.	This is for high school English learning material.

I’ve bought a small booklet that has the most commonly used English sentenses for different daily situations, with pronounciation using mandarin words. It really is very very funny to read out loud, my girlfriend could hardly understand what I’m reading until I show her the actual English sentense… For example:

“Our – beef – steak – is – very – good.”
[ao wo - bi fu - si dai ke - yi si - wei rui - gu de]
[傲我 逼夫 斯呆可 衣斯 微瑞 顾德]

“Is – this – table – occupied?”
[yi si - re si - tui bo - ao ke you pai de]
[衣斯 热斯 推博 傲可油排德]

I also bougth one for French, for Japanese and for the Shanghai dialect.

Kid’s section

I was also pleased to see the variety of learning materias for kids of all ages, and the kids actually adore them. I saw a mom asking his kid to go home several times, but the kid replied to his mom to walk around and come back later! It certainly is good to see kids reading books rather than having their finger stucks to the game controller or TV remove control, I know because my nepheus are like that… Some kids seem to sit there all day long, one book after another, while the adults are becoming impatient.

The kid's section is always busy.

Don't disturb me!

Price, variety and quality

The average price of a book is lower or equal to the price of a MacDonal combo meal, or a Moccachino at Starbucks here, rarely does a book cost more than that, unless it’s a special edition or like a dictionary. In terms of variety, any book that directly criticizes the current ruling party isn’t welcomed, anyone trying to assemble a large group of people that could potentially cause harm to the ruling party is quickly turned down, but beside those, everything else is alright. So I’ve seen The World is Flat of Tom Friedman (in Chinese of course), The Tao of Warren Buffett, Jack Welch’s Winning and Leadership, can you get more capitalism than that? How about the American revolution and the French revolution? No problem! Harry Potter? Lord of The Ring? Star War? No problem! Well, you get the picture. In terms of quality, it’s not as good as books from Taiwan or Hong Kong yet, but it’s definitely acceptable.

So, to wrap up, here’s my selections: one book for me (about an old Chinese philosopher, Zhuang Zi [庄子], translated to modern Chinese), 8 books and 25 CD/DVD for my nepheus (cartoon, vocabulary, stories, basic language, etc)! All in simplified Chinese and mandarin of course. Someone asked me to bring some cantonese books for her baby, it’s impossible to find one here, too bad. Mandarin is the way to go, believe me!

My shopping basket.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 26th, 2007 at 7:49 am and is filed under Shanghai Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.