Emptying the Haunted Air

Zhabei at night. Not pictured: My nonexistent photos of Nanjing Road

I’m eating at a little KFC on Fuzhou Road, mainly because I felt nervous about drawing too much attention to myself at the busier one on Nanjing Road. There are a few Westerners here, possibly for similar reasons. Walking down Nanjing Road, you get waylaid frequently by street-peddlers. They swoop in, making a respectable attempt to match my brisk walking pace, and all seem to offer the same thing: watches and iPhones. Presumably these are stored inside their coats, but I will never find out for certain, because of all the things I could buy off a chap in the street, watches and phones are the least appealing. Perhaps if one of them was offering old Super Nintendo games, I might be inclined to peruse their coat pockets. Instead, I simply mutter something that means “Don’t want”, and walk on.

I walked all the way down Nanjing Road tonight. I’m not terribly interested in shopping; I derive little pleasure from the indecision. In any case, my apartment is too small to fit anything else at the moment. So I just walked and looked at the enormous advertisements, the crowds of happy shoppers, and the distant buildings fading into the smog. A skyscraper that is invisible in the night if not for the neon-blue lines that join each of its vertices. All the while keeping track of the astonishing Tomorrow Square as a geographic marker. I walked all the way to the riverbank, found that it was inaccessible for some reason, then walked down to Fuzhou Road and headed back towards People’s Square.

And I found myself in a KFC. One of the first things I notice, aside from the fact that the burgers taste the same as in Australia, is one of those employee propoganda posters on the window to the street. ‘一起工作， 一起快乐!’ Work together, happy together. It’s not at all some Communist credo. I’ve been taking note of these posters in fast food chains in Australia for a few years. They’re clearly not for the staff who, consciously or not, regard the pairing of the words team and work as nothing more than corporate speak. The posters are just marketing, and are unremarkable in this sense.

The thing that strikes me is how the face of consumerism is so similar between these two, vastly different countries, right down to the smallest details. All this advertising, the brands and the familiar images are possibly the main reason I have felt at home in Shanghai. I can decode the semiotics of commercialism on Nanjing Road as easily as in Sydney.

At the same time, this familiarity worries me, for it exposes my profound ignorance and gullibility. Everyone knows KFC, McDonalds and Apple are global empires; they, as corporate entities, can’t escape it. I didn’t know that LJ Hooker, Century 21, Boost Juice, and dozens of others were all the same. But there they are, feeding off the crowds at Nanjing Road. And I realise that, however much I have regarded my cynicism as a Palladium against the effects of advertising, it’s clearly had a lasting impact on me.

All the ads (whose early 90s iterations I seem to remember best) must have resonated in a personal way. However, for me to assume that their products are uniquely Australian, when all commercial sense should indicate the opposite, implies something else entirely. Successful advertising doesn’t just appeal to one’s personal tastes or moods. It resonates in a part of us that sympathises with that elusive thing called national identity. It’s the part of myself that I find most irrational and cumbersome. The reason, perhaps, that I have found myself in Shanghai, of all places. But it is also a part of us that is impossible to resist or escape.

So I just finish my Zinger Burger, and return home.