City Malls, Mall City

Recently I feel like I’ve been touring a lot of shopping malls. It sounds really horrible, I know. But I didn’t exactly plan for it. I kept running into the reality of having to visit a mall for this or that – maybe a restaurant was there, maybe I had to get something for my camera, maybe I just needed socks. Whatever my reasons have been, I keep encountering the shopping mall. If my experience is any indication, shopping malls are just as much a part of life in Beijing as they are in the United States. And in a way, shopping malls make me feel at home, unfortunately.

Walking through a mall is somewhat of a paradoxical experience. Malls are both inviting and alienating, attractive and repulsive, salient and innocuous. I say innocuous because so many things are going on around you, acting on your senses, that you can’t possibly keep track of all of your physical surroundings. Standing in a shopping mall corridor is like walking through a video game; so many stimuli rush past you that you cant even keep track of details that would otherwise be glaring and obvious. From the outside, malls in Beijing are often nondescript, sometimes underground or incorporated into office buildings, but inside is a commercial funhouse of shining floors and attractive shops primed to receive the newfound wealth of the newfound wealthy.

As a customer you are selecting the stores and the stores are selecting you – they vie for your attention and you receive their messages about yourself and your world. And the messages people in Beijing are receiving – the messages they want to receive – are mostly about the romance of material things. Beijingers, like everyone, are being sold the intangible qualities rather than the substantive ones - the qualities that make things more special and you more special for having them.

Shopping mall culture, the culture of things for the sake of things, might signal things to different people, and I’m not prepared to say that it’s an indicator of anything besides a universal passion for newness. It’s unfair to cast the expectation of reverence of one’s own culture on any country that happens to be a couple thousand years older than the US. Besides, I'm pretty sure the Cultural Revolution shattered any hope that the refinements of traditional material culture could remain intact.

Without being too judgmental, I would still say that shopping malls are awful, but not because of what they sell. It’s the culture of shopping malls and the lifestyles that they create that I am resentful of, not the people who choose the new and vulgar over the old and elegant.