I left Shanghai last Friday morning. I left behind the 50-cent egg and dough cakes from the closet-sized shop around the corner, the dangerous midnight taxi rides, and the inexpensive pirated handbags marketed by overzealous old women. As my morning taxi sped past a sign touting “Intelligentized design” and Hello Kitty themed roadside knickknack shops, I began to realize how much I would miss this place. I was on my way to the train station, heading for the capitalist powerhouse of Shenzhen. Going only on hearsay, I feared the worst.

Up until 1979, Shenzhen was the middle of nowhere: the Chinese Kansas. Farmers milled about, carrying buckets to and fro and singing peasant songs in a lovely tenor. I would have loved to visit such a town in such a state, to experience life in the Chinese countryside. But along came Big Business. The Chinese leader Deng Xiao Ping, realizing the benefits of a province directly adjacent to the British possession of Hong Kong, decided to bend the rules a bit and allow foreign investment in a supposedly Communist territory. He called his creation “Socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

Falling on the heels of Chairman Mao’s failed reforms, his project helped to kick-start the Chinese economy, by essentially surrendering to capitalism. The result was a city with more skyscrapers than temples, more Pizza Huts than roadside food stands, and more cars than bicycles. Shenzhen, or so I had heard from a friend, was a “Wenhua ShaMo,” or literally, a cultural desert.

My first impressions, on arriving, only confirmed this observation. I devised a new phrase to describe Shenzhen: “America with Chinese characteristics.” Behind a thin veneer of Chinese identity lies a Western core. Against my better judgment, I ate McDonalds last night. Chanel, Prada, and Gucci bags pop up in the most unlikely places. And cars actually obey traffic signs.

Thoroughly disenchanted with the cultural prospects of this Western megalopolis, my mind wandered back to the train ride I had taken from Shanghai to Shenzhen. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, this train ride is one of the most Chinese experiences I have encountered in China.

There was quite a bit of culture clashing from the outset. My three coworkers and I each happened to have three bags — a backpack, a smaller bag for electronics/medicine, and a larger bag meant for a two-month stay in China. This just so happens to be three more bags than the average Chinese person travels with, with a girth three times larger than the average Chinese train hallway can accommodate.

We bumbled down the narrow corridor, made all the more narrow by the large number of train passengers sitting along the sides of it. Our foreignness was almost painful. But out of the blue, there came our savior: a man with extraordinarily disheveled hair, a tattered white polo shirt with flowers on it, and a large cigarette package sticking out of his pocket.

The man took it upon himself to help us pack away our bags, assuring us that placing them in the rooms of the other passengers was not a problem. As a coworker and I lifted the bags to place them in the overhead compartments, he urged us on with Communist sayings about the value of hard work and cooperation. I quote: “The Great Leader Chairman Mao teaches us: Working together, the proletariat can accomplish anything!”

We settled in, ready to take naps, but our guardian followed us into the cabin, and began an epic conversation. In the course of roughly 10 hours, we learned from this animated man the following things: to marry women in Shanghai requires a dowry consisting of cigarettes, flowers, a large leg of ham, expensive tea, a fruit basket, and potent alcohol; MSG is actually good for your health, and fried food helps to keep the brain alert; women from northeast China are inherently better at soccer; and learning English is a lot like butchering a pig. In speech heavily laden with Communist undertones, the man laid down his personal view of the world, all the while taking up a large portion of my already small bed and shaking the bunk with his profuse laugher.

Though he exited the train before we went to bed, my coworkers and I soon made the acquaintance of our unnecessarily loud bunkmates, more out of necessity than genuine friendliness — their talking continued on into the wee hours of the morning. At 4 a.m., having awoken us with loud fist pounds on the table, they taught us how to play a Chinese card game called “Run for Your Life.”

Sitting here, now, in Shenzhen, in a high-rise apartment complex with air-conditioning, I may as well be in Cincinnati. But make no mistake, Shenzhen is a Chinese city. I will be here for perhaps two more weeks, and in those weeks, I will make every effort to explore its Chinese identity. I may not find another man so skilled at prolonged and yet culturally-authentic chatter, but I will surely look for him.