After Beijing, I took a sleeper with my friend Zack to Shenzhen, where he currently teaches English, and spent a little over two weeks in Southern China, exploring the three regions of Guangdong, Guangxi, and Yunnan. It was my first time travelling below the Yangtze River, and it is a part of the country very different from what I am used to.
Chinese southerners speak a different accent of Mandarin, a non-rhotic form that drops the syllabic r that the Beijing accent (among others) is famous for. They pitch their tones differently as well, and in many areas don't even speak Mandarin: Guangdong in particular is where Cantonese dominates—the region was known as Canton before the 20th century. Thus, my status as an outsider felt more prominent to me during my time here, as the linguistic gap widened ever so slightly. Even if people couldn't tell that I was an American, as soon as I spoke they could tell from my accent that I was travelling from the north.
When we got to Shenzhen, after the sleeper from Beijing to Guangzhou and a subsequent high-speed rail transfer, all sweaty and covered in grime from the heat and humidity of the rainy season, it was much to our chagrin that we discovered that, while Zack was away in northern China on vacation, his bathroom was subjected to extensive renovations that weren't gonna be finished until the end of the summer. Thus, there was no shower or toilet, and all of the walls were torn up, with a little pile of rubble neatly arranged outside of what remained of the bathroom door.
He immediately contacted his boss about the renovations, and was told that he had been assigned a temporary apartment in Buji district, roughly forty-five minutes away by public transport. We journeyed over and had one of the most Kafkaesque, frustrating bureaucratic experiences.
Where did security go?
Our first issue was finding the actual building. It took us the better part of an hour circling around the same block and exhausting all the different ground level entrances, confronting multiple security guards with a recorded message on Zack's phone and double-checking with his contact again and again exactly what the specifics of the apartment complex looked like only for us to realize that the entrance was the very first place we had checked and already written off.
Afterwards, we followed the instructions we were given and headed to the sixth floor, which was empty. We double checked and bounced between different offices on the fifth and eighth floors for another hour before the building administrators told us that they didn't have keys to the specific unit that was mentioned to my friend, and we were sent back to the sixth floor at the very end of the night to collect keys to a different apartment.
The debacle finally over, we inspected the unit and the mess that the previous tenants had left, noticed that the water wasn't turned on and notified the apartment manager, and enjoyed the view from the balcony for a bit before heading out to dinner.
Zack chillin on the balcony the next day.
The rest of our time in Shenzhen was much more relaxed. We spent a few days just wandering around the area, going to local bars where I was able to have Mexican food for the first time in months ("Mexican" more than Mexican), and exploring the new locale, only to find ourselves taken aback by how the gulf between the lifestyles of the well-off and the destitute was as narrow as a single street between adjacent neighborhoods. Less than five minutes from the roaring streets and skyscrapers and subway stations was a slum of ersatz alleyways and crumbling construction.
One day we pointed out a mountain from the balcony, and the next day we went and climbed it. We also made the trip to Hong Kong, possibly the craziest place on Earth, and stayed there for a night as I hastily downloaded a VPN, my resolve to abstain from social media finally at its end. We had dim sum there the next morning, and that night, we we made it back to Shenzhen, we bought a good amount of beer and were inspired to watch some Wong Kar-Wai.
Our final night, the last day of July, before we headed westward towards Guangxi, we met some locals at dinner, and they had a long extended conversation with us that bounced from topic to topic to topic. We talked about the importance of making international friends, the NBA and the LeBron vs. Kobe debate, how American women viewed Asian men as potential romantic partners, Eminem's status as a rap legend, and so on. They added us on WeChat, paid for our dinner, and bought us many rounds of beer. We stayed in the restaurant till about thirty minutes after closing, and they still wanted to take us to a nightclub afterwards. Unfortunately, I had to leave at 9:30 the next morning to catch my train, so we called it a night there, marking the end of my time in Shenzhen.
The Shenzhen TV tower that we climbed to.