China is a strange destination in many respects. Just when you think you have a handle on things, it turns around and slaps you in the face. As much as anything, it's China's ability to confound that has drawn me back here for a second helping.

It's not a country that's filled with a host of beautiful, easy, crowd-pleasing delights. Many of the Big Sights here can come across as over-managed, or almost 'theme-parked' in their execution. There's frequently an over-abundance of concrete (including concrete made into 'trees') and scores of bizarre gift shops and opportunities to have your photo taken dressed up in fake imperial garb.

Coming up with definite and precise reponses to things here is hard. Instead, I find that my responses to things are frequently divided and full of conflicting emotion. In Shanghai's Old Quarter, for example, there's a fakey-fakey style shopping plaza that's been constructed for the delight of domestic and foreign tourists in the style of Ye Olde Chinese buildings.

The place is packed to bursting point, and offers all manner of funfair delights. You can pay 2 kuai to get fish food to feed the fat orangey carp that swim lazily in the pools at the centre of the complex, or you can shell out instead for a 'fruit kebab' that's been dipped in boiling toffee. Domestic tourists are out in force, happily supping hot soup out of the plastic straws that protrude from their freakishly oversized 'tang bao' (soup-filled dumplings).

Every fibre of my being wants to dismiss this place, if I'm honest. I think it's tacky and nasty and just touristy gunk.

We have our fill of what we can stomach, and then we wander off away from the shops selling cheap paper cuts and polyester Chinoiserie fabric.

We are looking for the 'real China' of classic residential hutongs and tumble-down backstreets filled with washing lines. And just a few streets away, we find that world. Windows are broken here, but boarded up with plywood or age-old newsprint. Washing does flap disconsolately in the breeze, and battered kettles are filled from communal taps.

One elderly woman is outdoors carefully washing a 2L plastic bottle that once held cooking oil, preparing it carefully for its next incarnation as a storage vessel of some other sort.

The decay here is 'beautiful' - exactly the sort of thing you'd see in a coffee-table book on China that might rest easy in designer livingroom at home. The hutongs are stunning, and it's easy to see why there's such an outcry among Westerners and certain Chinese about how rapidly these communities are being pulled down and destroyed. I feel that too.

But it is also true that the homes here look dark and cold. Very aged people are out in the street using taps and washbasins that their own homes lack. Life is not easy, or soft or comfortable. There's a fairly high degree of hardship here - and it seems truly 'tacky' to try to romanticise that for the sake of a few beautiful black and white photographs that can be shown off at home.

Interestingly, though the rooms are tiny, and open right onto the street, EVERYBODY has a TV tucked inside their not-so-private space. The TVs are decrepit and smallish, but they're all switched on, and they provide the only bit of dancing colour and sound and movement in an otherwise tough setting.

There are no Chinese tourists here, despite the fact that they're thronging just streets away, but I do see two other Westerners wandering the atmospheric laneways. I can see that they're looking for the same experience we are, and everybody avoids everybpdy else's gaze so we can go back to pretending that we're solo voyagers in a land of wistful strangeness.

Andrew and I stop at a row of shacks that are operating as mini-restaurants. A trestle table holds an array of about 15 dishes, and we point at the ones we want. An assortment of five or six options plus rice costs 60 cents AUD.

The food's great: very simple homestyle cooking, but it's absolutely stone-cold. Sitting out and exposed to wind at around 5c celcius is not going to keep dishes warm for long. The coldness destroys a lot of the taste and palatability, but we plough on. It's best not to focus too much on the greyish water that's swished over our plates before the food's piled on, either ...

After we're done, we wander back to tacky tourist land. I still don't like it there, but I'm reminded that I need to keep my judgementalism about what's 'worth seeing' and 'unspoilt' and 'beautiful' somewhat in check.

China does that to you somehow - throws your assumptions back in your face, and leaves you whistling into the wind, without much idea of where you started or why.