Have you seen this chair?
Help me preserve a small piece of Old Shanghai
One of the reasons I like my part of Shanghai is because it feels old and lived in. It’s got character. One of the reasons I don’t like my part of Shanghai is because it’s being knocked down, one beautiful brick building at a time. It makes me sad — and I’m not even one of the thousands of longtime residents being displaced in the name of “progress.” Every day — well, every day I actually make it out of my apartment/office — I walk past an old man in a stocking cap who sits alone on a ratty chair next to one of the narrow walkways that lead into one of these labyrinthian longtang neighborhoods. His days consist of little more than resting on his cane and watching the world go by, a popular avocation for the elderly on Madang Lu. Yesterday, I saw him fiddling with his dentures. I always try to say hello to the man. And he always looks a little startled, giggles and then says hello back. I wonder when his house will be demolished. I wonder when he’ll get shuttled out to the suburbs to live out his years. I wonder if someone will say hello to him out there. I hope so.
My friend Henry grew up in in the apartment I now call home. During a visit last year, he looked out the window of his former bedroom — it’s on the 13th floor — and remarked how dramatically the view had changed. He used to see nothing but tile roofs. The tile roofs are still there — some of them, at least — but they sit in the shadows of tall apartment buildings. No doubt more of these uniformly ugly creations are on their way. Every morning I wake up to two sounds: construction and destruction. Odd how they often sound the same. Henry has lived abroad for nearly a decade and now makes his home in Atlanta. He appeared visibly frustrated by the fact that those who seemed most interested in preserving Old Shanghai were foreigners. Henry said 10 or 20 years from now — maybe sooner — Shanghainese are going to look upon a homogeneous mass of high-rises and wonder: “What have we done to our city?”
If I had a lot of money — and plenty of governmental guanxi — I’d buy an entire city block of these old neighborhoods and fix them up, preserve them. I don’t have a lot of money. I don’t even have a little money. So my preservation of Old Shanghai must start on a slightly smaller scale — a $3.75 wooden chair.
04.09.2005, 2:12 AM · Observations · Comments (11)