Pudong International Airport is a traveler’s dream: visually sleek, reasonably efficient, with a high-speed rail link (eight minutes to the center of Shanghai, an hour by car) and useful services including a business center, a post office, designer shopping past security (laptops out, but no demeaning checks for shoes or liquids), even sit-down restaurants near the gates. The airport at Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, serves as a reminder that you’re still in the developing world.  Debarking there is a little like arriving on St. Thomas, minus  the teal waters of the Caribbean just off the runway. There are jetways, but not for my Shanghai Airlines flight; we debark down an old-fashioned stair, like jet-setters of the 1950s and ‘60s. Baggage claim is considerably more efficient than at St. Thomas, but then, apparently a lot less luggage has been checked. My two overweight bags, Big Blue and Little Red, arrive together on conveyor belt in little more time than it takes to visit the ladies’ room.

                I’ve been told to look for my driver, here’s no one holding a sign with my name neatly printed on it, as there had been at Pudong. “Taxi? Taxi”? I hear around me. I shake my head and continue looking; my flight is an hour late, and I fear the driver may have given up. Then a wiry man holds out a piece of white paper in front of me and unfolds it; ragged printing in pencil spells out Diane. “Yes!” I say, smiling with relief. A cart materializes, and we set off to the far side of the parking lot. I settle into the back, on a Snoopy seat cover.

                My destination, Xiangtan, is only about 20 miles away, but of course I have no idea in what direction or how to get there.  We pass through the outskirts of Changsha, passing stores with names like Wal-Mart and Avon and a misspelled Michelin, and into what appears to be the city center, the driver intermittently chattering on an invisible phone. Just after one call, he pulls up at curbside and greets a chubby-cheeked boy of perhaps 8 or 9. To my surprise, the boy gets into the front seat, and then a woman I hadn’t noticed join me in the back, carrying a huge bag of oranges. We exchange ni hao’s.  “My boy,” the driver announces proudly, in English; he does not mention the woman. In my brain, Rosetta Stone Mandarin kicks in.  “Er zi. Tai tai,” I think without speaking. “Son. Wife.” 

                Since Big Blue and Little Red fill the trunk of the car, the woman and I sit through a traffic bottleneck jammed into the car, she with her shopping, I with handbag on my lap and laptop case at my feet. When we finally reach the highway, the woman pulls an orange and hands it to me. “Xie xie!” I respond politely, but I am unsure if it’s meant for now or later. I hold it in my hands for a while, then slip it into my laptop bag. When the woman pulls out another orange and begins to peel it, I decide, “Oh, why not?” and follow suit. The rind is thicker than those on the easy-peel clementines I enjoyed at home all winter, and my thumbnail makes slow progress. The woman smiles, hands me her neatly peeled orange, and takes back mine. “Xie xie!” I can’t section it neatly without spurting juice all over the car, so I bite into it like an apple. My fingers are sticky with juice, and I lick them clean.

                As we arrive at my destination, the enormous campus of Hunan University of Science and Technology, she reaches into her bag once more and hands me another orange – a parting gift, and a start toward the next day’s breakfast. Welcome to Hunan.

                I never really mastered reading kanji – the ideographic characters borrowed from Chinese –  when I was studying Japanese a dozen years ago, but one character I do remember is dai, or big.  It consists of two vertical strokes, joined at the top and curving out to the sides at the bottom, with a single horizontal stroke crossing in the middle. It is meant, I believe, to look like a person with arms stretched out; think of a fisherman measuring the one that got away. That character – in Mandarin, da – is the one I’ve noticed the most this last week, all over Shanghai and now in Hunan province.

                In Shanghai today, everything is big – but specifically, the Pudong section of the east bank of the Huangpu River. When I last walked along the Bund 25 years ago, none of Pudong existed. It was an area of farmland glimpsed across the river through the haze, with perhaps just a few signs of the  construction boom to come. Today it is dominated by a cluster of futuristic skyscrapers, most noticeably the 100-story Shanghai World Financial Center, a shapely glass monolith with a large square hole at the top, and the Oriental Pearl TV Tower — shades of Berlin Alexanderplatz, but with two “pearls” on its slender tower, to Berlin’s one. Street-level Pudong also feels a bit like Berlin, specifically, Potsdamerplatz, with its wide streets, open plazas and chunky post-Wall buildings, but a good deal more deserted. This may not yet be a section of town where people actually live their lives, as opposed to conducting business, despite the high-end, high-rise apartment buildings already standing and seemingly increasing by the day.

                On the other hand, the relative remoteness served me well in my choice of hotel, the Novotel Atlantis Pudong. Its location, well beyond the existing business center, made my spacious 35^th-floor corner room a great bargain at $58 a night, compared to the luxury hotels across the river. Yes, they’re within walking distance of all the major attractions, which would have been nice. But a taxi ride from the Bund to the Novotel cost just over $3 U.S., no tipping expected, to cover what surely must have been the distance from Times Square to my apartment on 158^th Street ($25 the last time I looked). And there I had, almost to myself, a 50-foot semicircular pool overlooking the new Pudong – when I could see it, through the yellowish gauze of pollution that permeates the city even on a good day. The first morning, I awoke to find my 35^th-floor room completely fogged in, not unlike my brain after a 15-hour flight and a 12-hour sleep. (Both burned off around noon.)

                Shanghai is gearing up for its 2010 World Expo, opening in May. The fair’s mascot, Seaboy, could be Gumby’s little blue brother, and his walking stance and outstretched arms in many of the posters and sculptures ubiquitous around town give him, too, the form of the da character.  In this city, everything is going big. Even the approach to the serene 400-year-old Yuyuan Garden, a deliberately preserved warren of traditional shops and eateries that was packed with Chinese tourists just after Lantern Festival weekend, is about to go big when the glassy five-story Yu Fashion Garden opens this spring. And in the former French Concession, that dignified 19^th-century enclave morphed into an ever-so-trendy center for shopping (Shanghai Tang!) and nightlife, giant billboards proclaim some of the names likely to loom large in the city’s future: Cartier, Godiva and Coach.