Blog Entry

China Diary — Shanghai

This post is essentially born from the reading of China Diary, a diary written by Former BBC Beijing correspondent Tim Luard, who has not visited China for 25 years after his first visit. My interest was elicited by merely the title of his first entry: Arriving in Shanghai. To be maybe more precise, the word “Shanghai” basically caused me to read his diary.

Shanghai, which is now the most dynamic financial center in China, is also my birthplace. However I have a very strange emotional attachment with this city. Although it was my birthplace, but I rarely lived there. Not long after my birth, I was taken back to Bengbu, Anhui, where my parents lived, and I had spent my remaining years in China living and studying in Bengbu. So I never considered myself an authentic Shanghainese, maybe not even a Shanghainese.

During those years, often I spent my summer and winter vacations in Shanghai at my grandmother’s house, and played together with my cousins. But it never felt like home, it was strange to me, and I was a stranger in the city. Nevertheless I cannot deny that there is an emotional attachment in me with the city. Strangely, I am very curious about the changes that Shanghai has gone through in recent years, and I take a little bit of pride in me for being born in this city, even knowing the fact that most Shanghainese would probably consider me a foreigner and outsider.

Tim Luard’s writing is forthright and simple. He narrates what he sees and hears in Shanghai, and leaves the rest to the readers. Some passages I would like to share with you, so forgive me for quoting long passages. The following is from Tim Luard’s second entry Shanghai shoeshine:

A girl of about 12 approached me with two – a Rolex and an Omega.

She wanted $15 for one, $20 for the other, or $30 for the pair.

We passed an elegant shop selling identical-looking watches for well over 1,000 times that, but, having no interest in buying a watch of any kind, I kept walking.

Ten minutes later she was still at my side, her prices having come down to eight and six dollars respectively.

Her parting, desperate shot was five dollars the pair.

As I headed for the sleek new metro station in the now partly pedestrianised main shopping street, Nanjing Road, two other, only slightly older girls approached, selling not watches but themselves.

In his second entry, he also told us about the shoeshine man from Guizhou.

Like most of the other street sellers, my shoeshine man was originally a poor farmer who had come to try to get a share of Shanghai’s economic miracle, but was still struggling to get by.

He had been here for 12 years, he told me, visiting his wife and children in faraway Guizhou just once a year, at the Spring Festival.

I have no concrete reasons for choosing and sharing these passages. I simply felt touched and moved when I was reading them. Maybe when you read these, you will understand what I mean and what I felt.

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