Shanghai Revisited

"Where did that come from?"  "That wasn’t here the last time I was inthis neighborhood."  "I never thought I’d see something like that in thiscity!"  Return visitors like me continually say these kinds of things uponarriving in 21st-century Shanghai, and you might think that local residentswould grow tired of hearing such comments from us. But they don’t seem to--perhapsbecause they say similar things themselves when they come back to Shanghai aftershort trips to other places.

I certainly heard remarks of that kind from the American computer gamedesigner with whom I chatted pleasantly throughout much of the flight thatbrought me to Shanghai last March, and with whom I continued to talk during thelong cab ride we shared from the airport to the old hotel just off the Bundwhere I stayed.  He had been living in Shanghai for several years and justreturned from a short trip to the US.  Learning that I hadn’t been to thecity for three years (a long time to go between visits by local standards), hewas excited by the opportunity of pointing out new things to me.  But hewould periodically switch abruptly from saying "I bet that wasn’t here whenyou last came through" to asking himself "when did that get built?"

Before our plane landed, I had gone back over my long mental list of thingsthat had made me do double takes during earlier return visits. I remembered, forexample, the sense of shock I had in 1996 when I went to the Bund and lookedacross the river to Pudong (East Shanghai) from the restaurant on the eighthfloor of the Peace Hotel (called the Cathay when it opened in 1929).  WhatI saw was not the relatively undeveloped district devoid of tall buildings thatI had seen on both my previous stays in Shanghai (a year-long one in themid-1980s and a short return trip in 1988), but a giant construction sitedominated by a then-new landmark, the soaring syringe-like Pearl of the OrientRadio and Television Tower.

I also recalled how, when I came back three years after that for my nextvisit, I did a double take (or, rather, several of them) when I took my firstlook at the sleek new public library on Huaihai Road, in what had once been thecity’s French Concession. The building was unexpectedly impressive, but othersthings about it surprised me even more than its elegance and escalators. One was that patrons had open access to 1940s issues of a Nationalist Partynewspaper that, while doing my doctoral research in the old public library inthe 1980s, I had spent weeks trying to find and then get permission to consult.Another thing that surprised me, as someone whose images of Shanghai were formedin the 1980s, when the only representations of historical figures you saw inpublic were big statues of Mao and smaller monuments to lesser revolutionaryheroes, was the effigy of a kindly looking Confucius standing in the Library’sback garden.  Two final things that were unexpected, but which fit with thelocation in a district under French control from the 1840s through the 1940s,were that you could buy a passable croissant at its café and a variety of worksby Parisian literary critic Roland Barthes in its bookstore.

Going down my mental checklist, I thought of a variety of sights that hadsurprised me during the four visits I had made between 2000 and 2004.  Irecalled doing a double take when I saw how the Yu Garden district, a part ofthe city that long predates the Opium War (1839-1842), had been theme-parked,transformed into a place where, for a fee, you could ride in a faux Imperialpalanquin or be pulled along in a faux rickshaw.  And I remembered doingdouble takes each time I noted how many more skyscrapers had sprouted up on bothsides of the river but especially in Pudong, where the Pearl had gone fromlooking in 1996 like a lonely sentinel of the space age to seeming, as it doestoday, just one particularly strange tree in a futuristic forest.

After completing that review session on the plane in March, I vowed whilestill airborne that this time I would have a return visit free from doubletakes.  I would leave expectations formed in the 1980s on board when Iexited and keep in mind what I had seen during my previousturn-of-the-millennium return visits.  I would also remain cognizant ofthings that I had read about since last visiting in 2004.  For example, Iwould not be surprised if, while in Pudong, I passed the construction site forthe World Financial Center, for I’d seen reports that work on this structure,slated to become the tallest building in the world, had finally begun.

Sharing the taxi ride into the city with the computer game designer gave memy first inkling that I might find it hard to keep my vow of remainingnonplussed by Shanghai.  If he was struck by how much the city had changedin a few weeks, what chance did I have to remain blasé when coming to themetropolis after an absence of three years?  And, sure enough, on each ofthe days I was there in March, I wondered, at least once, whether my eyes aredeceiving me.

One early double take came during a nighttime stroll along the Bund.  Iwasn’t surprised to see an Armani store in one of the neo-classical buildings(I’d read about that opening), nor to see chic rooftop bars on the top of acouple of these structures (I’d had a drink in one during my last visit), norto be accosted by beggars (there had been none in the 1980s, but a few by 1996and more each return visit since then).  The sight for which I wasunprepared was not even the lights skittering up and down the tall Aurorabuilding across the river in Pudong, as I had seen that before and been remindedwhen I did of how Hong Kong looked in the 1980s.  What took me aback wassomething on the water itself: a barge slowly making its way up and down theriver, carrying no cargo other than what seemed to be a flat screen televisionscreen of enormous proportions, a floating billboard with moving imagesadvertising various products.

Another double take moment came in Pudong when I went up to the eighty-eighthfloor of the pagoda-like Jinmao Tower.  I was prepared for the things Iwould see when I looked down from there, even though I had never before been upto its indoor observation deck, as I had seen photographs taken from thatvantage point.  I was not ready, though, for the sight that greeted me whenI stared straight ahead out of one of the windows: a group of constructionworkers being hoisted up and up, seemingly straight into the stratosphere. I had known that the World Financial Center was being built in the same part ofPudong as the Jinmao Tower, but I hadn’t realized that the two skyscraperswould be so close together that I would be able to make eye contact with thepeople working on its upper floors, one of whom, upon noticing me getting readyto take his picture, flashed me a smile and gave me a V for victory sign withhis hand. 

A third March double take moment took place in a bookstore rather than in askyscraper or on the street.  I was not surprised by seeing books for salethat provided tips on opening your own bar or café, nor did seeing ones thatpresented Confucius in a positive light or showcased the works of Westernliberal philosophers catch me unawares.  After all, I had been seeing themon for sale in places such as this for more than a decade.  What did haveshock value were the contents of a book whose title (translated into English)was "The Red Guide to Shanghai," with the color understood to refer to the hueof the Communist Revolution.

One of this book’s early paragraphs begins with a rhetorical question: "Whatcolor is Shanghai?"  It then answers by saying that most people think of itas a "blue" city, since this color is associated with the sea and the flow ofcosmopolitan influences.  The author then proceeds to remind readersemphatically that, while the port may indeed be blue, "Shanghai is also anothercolor: red!"  The rest of the book is devoted to showing how visitors cangain a deeper appreciation of this fact by visiting certain sites that havedirect links to the rise to power of the Chinese Communist Party, such as themuseum devoted to the First Party Congress, which is located in what was oncethe French Concession.

What took me aback about the book was not the route it proposed, sinceChinese guidebooks outlining a "red" tour of the city were commonplace back inthe 1980s. It was rather the assumption that the author made: that a journeythrough Shanghai oriented around revolutionary sites would be a very unusual onefor any Chinese tourist to take.  It was, he took for granted, somethingthat only visitors with a somewhat eccentric point of view would think of takingon their own, hence the need to provide encouragement and special guidance.

The double take moment from this trip that will probably stick with melongest, though, was not any of these, but rather one that was reminiscent of whatMargot Fonteyn experienced almost eighty years previously, when seeing theneo-classical buildings lining the Bund, as a globetrotting Britishtwelve-year-old, she apparently exclaimed: "But China looks more like Englandthan America did!"

My recent Margot Fonteyn-like moment occurred when I made my way to the YuGarden district, en route to the great flea market there on Fengbang Road, whichI go to each time I am here to buy from and haggle with vendors selling books,maps and magazines dating from Maoist times and the final decades ofShanghai’s century-long incarnation as a partially colonized treaty-port. I angled south and west from the Bund, following a route I had taken many timesbefore, and without sparing them any special thought I walked by tall buildingsand under freeway overpass that had had no place in my remembered Shanghai ofthe 1980s.  This was natural, as I’d seen them on early walks down thisroute taken in 1999, 2000, 2002 and 2004.  What stopped me in my tracks wasone thing I had never seen before.  It was a big wooden gate, that ran fromone side of the street to the other, which was topped by a faux tile roof,adorned with carving of Chinese lions, and had characters reading "Yu GardensShopping and Tourism District" emblazoned upon it in bright golden calligraphy.

I did a double take because I knew that this archway reminded me of somethingI had seen in another city, but not in any Chinese metropolis.  At first, Icouldn’t put my finger on which urban center it brought to mind.  Then ithit me that I’d seen something just like it in San Francisco.  The gateis a dead ringer for those that cue visitors in to the fact that they are aboutto enter America’s most famous Chinatown.

Back in the days of Fonteyn’s childhood trip to Shanghai, when it was adangerous but exciting city characterized by sharp divides between rich andpoor, some local foreigners jokingly used the term "Chinatown" to refer to theYu Garden district.  I can’t imagine, though, that any of them expectedthat the day would come when the latest architectural import from the West toChina would be a faux Chinese gate like this one.  That curious gate, whichstands in a city that is experiencing all of the thrilling and worrisomefeatures of breakneck capitalist development, will have pride of place in themental checklist of Shanghai sites that made me do double takes that I will runthrough on the plane when I make my next return visit to that metropolis ofsurprises. 

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is the author of China’s Brave New World--AndOther Tales for Global Times, which has just been published by IndianaUniversity Press. A Professor of History at the University of California,Irvine, he is currently completing work on Global Shanghai, 1850-2010 forRoutledge’s "Asia’s Global Cities" series.