By Xu Xiaomin

One of the privileges of being a reporter of a national newspaper is that you get the chance to spend time in different cities around the country. The longest time I have stayed in any city other than my home-town Shanghai was Beijing, where my paper is headquartered.

But I hesitated when my editor asked me to put my strong feelings about Beijing, not all favorable, in words. I have already written enough to have convinced my distracters that I am a typical snooty Shanghai woman who has an ingrained bias against anybody and anything outside the boundary of China’s most cosmopolitan city.

Let me say this upfront: I am neither snooty nor bias. Instead of taking on the impossible task of telling a good tale of two cities in less than 600 words, I am going to narrow it down to my favorite topic: men, or, in this case, Beijing men.

On this particular topic, I feel obliged, as a native Shanghai person, to tell these Beijing yemen, or tough guys, as they like to call themselves, that they are no tougher than their Shanghai counterparts whom they love to dismiss as hen-pecked sissies.

When I was younger, I was led to believe by the books I read that these Beijing yemen were humorous, idealistic and unrestrained, all qualities that were lacking in Shanghai men, who appeared to me then to be serious, circumspect and excessively practical. Those books were, of course, written by talented Beijing writers who were largely responsible for shaping the macho image of the yemen, often at the expense of the Shanghai men.

My girlish impression of a Beijing man was a cultured person of strong built with the confidence to pursue his dream with little regard for what others thought or said. That was the man of my dream for many years.

But the image of a yemen seems to have deteriorated, at least in my perception, in the ensuring years. The independent-minded cultured yemen has since been recast in the crude commercial society as a kind of boring man as their Shanghai pals, who give up their characters and dreams under huge pressure of the modern city. But the Beijing yemen still dresses himself as a typical chauvinist who takes pride in getting into a fight anywhere and any time at the slightest provocation.

One Beijing guy glorified himself as a modern yemen: “I am a born brawler ready to take on anyone. When people see me coming, they better cross to the other side of the street. Yes, that’s me, the yemen of Beijing.”

In my latest two-week stint in Beijing, I was disappointed to see that many young men in Beijing were going out of their way to model themselves after the abominable yemen. More than once had I found it safe to cross the street to avoid rowdy groups of intoxicated yemen staggering out of restaurants or bars and shouting loudly in the street. In those times, I confessed that men in my hometown are comparatively more gentle and women respected.

Oh yes, those yemen like to talk big but they usually achieve little. One of my Beijing friends who studied oil painting frequently boasted that one day, his works will be displayed in the national museum. But I have never seen him ever taking up the brush. He was too busy in the much more mundane chore of earning a living.

Shanghai men have learned that empty talk will gain no credence in this no-nonsense commercial town. Their down-to-earth demeanor may seem boring to some people. But I am beginning to appreciate it more and more.

The silent battle between the two metropolitans is never ending. As the two biggest cities in China, people of the two places seemingly born to be competitors. Beijing people seemingly are tolerant with all the provincial people except Shanghainese. They are willing to laugh at Shanghai men’s shrewdness and tenderness especially in the face of a Shanghai woman. “Shanghai men would prefer to quarrel for a couple of hours instead of solving the dispute in a quick fight,” my Beijing friend said. The highest appraisal a Shanghai man can get in Beijing is “oh, you really don’t look like a Shanghainee.”

To those yemen who think they are more manly than Shanghai men, let me remind them that China’s top two sports stars, Liu Xiang and Yao Ming, are both native Shanghainese.