But where I always feel kind of like I'm at home is in church. Even in Communist China. Guess we all know that religion is not exactly dead or driven underground (it is, only to some extent) and it was easy for me to find a Catholic church to attend.
The mass, as some of us would know, is generally the same all over the world, so even if you attend one in some other language, you know what is going on and even what is being said for a large part of the mass. That's what I mean by feeling like you're home.
It turned out that the info I got from the Internet about mass times was outdated. We arrived at Good Shepherd Church expecting an English mass. Well, they didn't have English masses there anymore, were were told by this group of kindly elderly ladies who descended upon us. They got us to sit and rest and phoned another church to find out if there was an English mass there, which there was. One of the ladies said she would take us there -- a half hour walk away. I wasn't about to walk for half an hour in the cold so we took a cab with her and she insisted on taking us right into St Peter's International Church.
There was another thing about the mass that was so familiar too - the largely Filipino choir. One of the features of the Filipino diaspora must surely be their contribution to music ministries, if not all over the world, at least in various parts of Asia. There is something about Filipino singing that just lifts the spirit and I have also experienced that in Malaysia, Hong Kong, Japan...
In the end, we forgot to take a picture of St Peter's. But we do have this picture of the Xujiahui Cathedral, which is a local church (as compared to St Peter's, which is 'international'). If you see pictures in the newspapers or footage on TV about Catholics in Shanghai, it is very likely that this is the church you see:
I hear that the celebration of mass there is truly fervent. I've never been to a local Chinese church but I would really love to. Maybe some other time. Anyway, this Xujiahui church is worth a look at as a part of Shanghai's religious as well as historical landscape. It harks back, of course, to the days of western 'occupation' or presence in Shanghai. It was built very early in the 20th century and so it is very much like churches of the same era you would see in Europe - grand and majestic, and with those enclaves along the sides of the church. The church art in there is also something to gawk at.
Still on the topic of religion, I will say again that religion isn't at all non-existent in still-Communist China. That Nanjing restaurant we went to (above MacDonald's), for example, is a halal restaurant.
We walked past a Muslim Association building along the way too, and I learnt that there are some 20+million Muslims in China. So it's not as though you are not allowed to practise your religion in the open. I think.
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