When we go from home to work, to school, to the market, we walk at least a mile a day…. [I]f each time we walk down that street as if it were the first time we had ever seen it, if we see afresh and with new eyes, without succumbing to the blindness of familiarity, we will have done something like walking ten thousand miles, without even sailing the four seas. — Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang), “Seeing with the Streets”
I hope to repair certain important connections burned through by artificial speed, by inattentiveness. I walk, as everyone does, to see what lies ahead. I walk to remember. — Paul Salopek, “To Walk the World”
On Monday, February 7, 2022, one week into the Year of the Tiger, I sat face-to-face in three consecutive seminar meetings with a dozen New York University Shanghai freshmen each. Of the 36 students participating, only one couldn’t join in person, Zooming in from hotel quarantine.
NYU Shanghai on February 9. On March 10, instruction went remote. By March 28, Pudong was fully locked down; Puxi followed on April 1. At the semester’s outset, only one of 36 Writing as Inquiry students had to attend remotely, seeing this on her screen. She would join us in person nearly three weeks later, just before lockdown.
Photograph courtesy NYU Shanghai
Outside, through plate glass windows, Shanghai Tower soared in the middle distance above a thicket of lesser skyscrapers. The world’s second-tallest building, Shanghai Tower is a gleaming exclamation point punctuating a skyline so sci-fi that, back in pre-pandemic times, it served as cinematic backdrop for a string of futuristic features and high-tech thrillers.
Beyond the skyline, the Huangpu River laced its way between our section of Shanghai called Pudong (the east bank of the Huangpu) and the west bank, called Puxi, home to the old Shanghai of the Bund, the former French and International Concessions, the temples and gardens of the Old City, and an ever-decreasing number of brick lanes and “stone gate” shikumen-style courtyard homes surrounded by advancing ranks of residential high rises and glass-clad commercial hubs.
The 21st century faces off against the 20th across the Huangpu River. The Lujiazui skyline at night updates Shanghai’s reputation as Mo Du, the Magic City. The nickname dates back to the 1920s, when the Bund (right) symbolized the city’s embrace of modernity.
Khaliun Enkhbold
SIGNS OF CHANGE Xinyu Liu writes about a neighborhood in the vicinity of Madang Road that in its basic outline would have felt familiar to Shanghainese writer Eileen Chang eight decades ago. Today, Liu notes that a “red banner with bright yellow words hanging between two trees reads ... The earlier you sign, the more benefits you’ll receive, policies always stay the same, advocating that residents sign demolition agreements” and relocate from “where they were born and raised and have lived for decades.”
Xinyu Liu
The pandemic, to be sure, was out there. We all felt it. Unlike most of my previous NYU Shanghai classes, usually composed of a roughly even mix of international and Mainland Chinese students, these students were all PRC passport holders, aside from one from Mongolia and another from Taiwan. Most of our international students, unable to return to China or stuck in quarantine, were taking classes online or spending the semester in New York.
Nevertheless, we had reason to be optimistic at the prospect of spring in an open city. After all, Shanghai had been spared a major outbreak, shielded by China’s tech-powered regime of surveillance, tracing, and quarantine policies that, for many of us, had come to mean little more than the occasional donning of a mask and flashing of a health code before entering the Metro, a mall, or the university’s Academic Building. Though international travel was difficult—in particular, reentry into China after going abroad—getting around China was more or less back to what passed for normal, and had been so since the summer of 2020.
So, on that hopeful Monday, I explained that we would take advantage of a partnership with Paul Salopek and slow journalism advocate Don Belt to turn our Writing as Inquiry course—a freshman requirement—into “Walking as Inquiry.” We would use Paul’s city walk series as a model for our own city-mapping project. (Our prime classroom model would be Paul’s walk through Kolkata, India, though, later, during lockdown, we also visited his project’s urban rambles through Tbilisi, Georgia; Jerusalem, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; and Baku, Azerbaijan).
Paul Salopek meets with NYU Shanghai students in the fall of 2021 before returning to the Yunnan-Myanmar border to resume the Out of Eden walk.
Photograph courtesy NYU Shanghai
We’d slow down. We’d take frequent breaks from our various electronic devices in favor of pens, paper, close observation, memory work, and conversation. We’d walk Shanghai’s streets and lanes and mall concourses and parks and canal-side paths, looking, listening, observing, noting, describing.
But first, we’d begin the semester’s reading with an essay about walking in Shanghai written some 80 years before by the quintessential, 1940s Shanghainese writer Eileen Chang. In that first class, we began reading it on paper, and annotating it by hand, in preparation for our first round of city walks.
Only after having consciously observed and noted specific details of the city, its people, and their doings, would we turn to our tech to digitally record, map, post, and share our stories of urban exploration.
That was the plan.
On March 18, the lane I live in with my family in the former French Concession was sealed off. Neighborhood children immediately began decorating. The walls came down 66 days later, on May 23.
David Perry
As it turned out, we’d have just short of a month to explore the city under open skies before being relegated for the rest of the spring—along with most of the rest of the city’s 28 million-some residents—to apartments, compounds, dorm rooms, parents’ homes, and, for some, long stretches in hastily assembled centralized quarantine “cubicle hospitals” known as fangcang.
In the early going, many students and faculty lost countless hours to the challenge of getting food and water as a lockdown that was initially to have run for four days stretched on for weeks, a month, and yet another month. At first, uncertainty about what the next moment might hold was nerve-wracking. Test positive or be identified as a “close contact,” and you might end up sealed inside a fangcang. Might you lose a beloved pet? Run out of medicine? Run out of drinking water? And at any moment day or night megaphone-wielding volunteers in white hazmat suits could issue the call to report to a neighborhood outdoor testing site with dozens, scores, or hundreds of others, depending on the size of the building or compound. (Videographer Christian Peterson-Clausen’s ongoing Lockdown Stories video interview series is one among many documentation projects covering the paralysis of China’s economic capital; Sixth Tone’s lockdown Memory Project is another.)
Some Shanghai residents were locked down for two months, others for three. Yet others, living in smaller, less-regulated buildings were never truly locked down, even while many, in strictly managed high rises, could only leave their apartments for mass testing. At NYU Shanghai, a large contingent of faculty and international students escaped the city as soon as they could, despite steep hikes in flight costs. Remaining students were supplied with the basics in their dorms, but not all students live in the dorms, and the early weeks of lockdown scrambled course plans, undid schedules, and made it hard to get any classwork done. Outdoor fieldwork on any project to record stories on foot was, of course, impossible.
One thing we’d have plenty of, however: screen time.
On March 18, the lane I live in with my family in the former French Concession was sealed off. Neighborhood children immediately began decorating. The walls came down 66 days later, on May 23.
David Perry
As it turned out, we’d have just short of a month to explore the city under open skies before being relegated for the rest of the spring—along with most of the rest of the city’s 28 million-some residents—to apartments, compounds, dorm rooms, parents’ homes, and, for some, long stretches in hastily assembled centralized quarantine “cubicle hospitals” known as fangcang.
In the early going, many students and faculty lost countless hours to the challenge of getting food and water as a lockdown that was initially to have run for four days stretched on for weeks, a month, and yet another month. At first, uncertainty about what the next moment might hold was nerve-wracking. Test positive or be identified as a “close contact,” and you might end up sealed inside a fangcang. Might you lose a beloved pet? Run out of medicine? Run out of drinking water? And at any moment day or night megaphone-wielding volunteers in white hazmat suits could issue the call to report to a neighborhood outdoor testing site with dozens, scores, or hundreds of others, depending on the size of the building or compound. (Videographer Christian Peterson-Clausen’s ongoing Lockdown Stories video interview series is one among many documentation projects covering the paralysis of China’s economic capital; Sixth Tone’s lockdown Memory Project is another.)
Some Shanghai residents were locked down for two months, others for three. Yet others, living in smaller, less-regulated buildings were never truly locked down, even while many, in strictly managed high rises, could only leave their apartments for mass testing. At NYU Shanghai, a large contingent of faculty and international students escaped the city as soon as they could, despite steep hikes in flight costs. Remaining students were supplied with the basics in their dorms, but not all students live in the dorms, and the early weeks of lockdown scrambled course plans, undid schedules, and made it hard to get any classwork done. Outdoor fieldwork on any project to record stories on foot was, of course, impossible.
One thing we’d have plenty of, however: screen time.
Students recovered and turned early-semester city walks into stories of a Shanghai that had very recently seen better days. Though our class project cannot be made fully public, we hope that it models possibilities for future, perhaps public-facing, collaborations between NYU Shanghai students and the Out of Eden Walk project.
Photograph courtesy David Perry
Back on that early February Monday, as that last class of the day came to a close and most students made for the door, a small group approached me with additional questions about what the semester held in store. Where should they walk? How would they know what to pay attention to? How would they know what to write about? I told them that we’d find out. They’d discover their subjects as they walked. Writing and research projects would grow out of their discoveries. The important thing, I added, was to get started right away: We’d be doing a group walk the following week. Aside from a few comments about the cold, wet weather (Dress warmly! Wear comfortable shoes! Bring an umbrella!), they were eager to begin.
The room emptied, and sound from the lounge area outside the classroom mingled with the low roar of the city. If memory serves correctly, I called out to one last student as she made her way to the door, “Don’t worry! You’ll figure it out along the way!”
The 1946 cover of Eileen Chang’s Chaunqi (“Romances” or “Legends”), co-designed by Chang and her friend Yan Ying. Chang writes that her sketch of a quasi-cubist woman is “out of proportion, like a ghost ... a modern person, curious to peep in” on a Qing domestic scene. Chang’s writing explores tensions between modernity and tradition that shaped and warped her time—tensions that many students suggested in their own writing have taken new and perhaps even stranger forms today.
Confucius Second-hand Book
Shanghai has long been home to people “tempered by the high pressure of modern life,” as Eileen Chang observed in 1944. That pressure has driven Shanghai’s people—whether native Shanghainese, migrants from elsewhere in China, or expatriates from around the world—to value speed. Chang herself put it best in the 1947 preface to her first collection of stories, Chuanqi, which she wrote in the wake of the disaster of a brutal Japanese occupation and during the ongoing chaos of civil war: “Ah, indeed—get your fame early in the game! Get it late, and the pleasure’s lost its punch…. I have to hurry: faster, faster, or it’ll be too late!"
The book’s title, usually rendered as Romances, could, as translator Karen S. Kingsbury notes in her introduction to a collection of Chang’s short fiction, Love in a Fallen City, easily be translated as “Legends,” very much in the sense of “urban legends.” This too bore relevance to our semester project: Several of the students—especially those from other parts of China—made it clear that Shanghai was, to them, Mo Du, the “Magic City,” famed for its glamor, prosperity, and cosmopolitan sophistication. One recurring theme in the semester’s writing had to do with a kind of disenchantment with the popular image of the Magic City and a slow reenchantment, one that emerged from careful attention to everyday life on the streets, with their migrant workers and armies of commuters and rough edges in place of a filtered, curated presentation of bright lights and fancy sights.
The 1946 cover of Eileen Chang’s Chaunqi (“Romances” or “Legends”), co-designed by Chang and her friend Yan Ying. Chang writes that her sketch of a quasi-cubist woman is “out of proportion, like a ghost ... a modern person, curious to peep in” on a Qing domestic scene. Chang’s writing explores tensions between modernity and tradition that shaped and warped her time—tensions that many students suggested in their own writing have taken new and perhaps even stranger forms today.
Confucius Second-hand Book
Shanghai has long been home to people “tempered by the high pressure of modern life,” as Eileen Chang observed in 1944. That pressure has driven Shanghai’s people—whether native Shanghainese, migrants from elsewhere in China, or expatriates from around the world—to value speed. Chang herself put it best in the 1947 preface to her first collection of stories, Chuanqi, which she wrote in the wake of the disaster of a brutal Japanese occupation and during the ongoing chaos of civil war: “Ah, indeed—get your fame early in the game! Get it late, and the pleasure’s lost its punch…. I have to hurry: faster, faster, or it’ll be too late!"
The book’s title, usually rendered as Romances, could, as translator Karen S. Kingsbury notes in her introduction to a collection of Chang’s short fiction, Love in a Fallen City, easily be translated as “Legends,” very much in the sense of “urban legends.” This too bore relevance to our semester project: Several of the students—especially those from other parts of China—made it clear that Shanghai was, to them, Mo Du, the “Magic City,” famed for its glamor, prosperity, and cosmopolitan sophistication. One recurring theme in the semester’s writing had to do with a kind of disenchantment with the popular image of the Magic City and a slow reenchantment, one that emerged from careful attention to everyday life on the streets, with their migrant workers and armies of commuters and rough edges in place of a filtered, curated presentation of bright lights and fancy sights.
On the evening of March 30, I managed one last supply run before the hard lockdown began. The sight of testing tents and da bai (“big white”) remains ubiquitous even now, after the city has opened up. Residents must have tested within 72 hours of seeking entry to public transportation, businesses, and office buildings.
David Perry
Chang’s sense of urgency notwithstanding, I enlisted her work in the name of slowing down, of practicing close observation—of “seeing with the streets,” as Andrew F. Jones puts it in his translation of a 1944 Chang essay.
In the essay, which students began reading in class on Day 1, Chang meditates in a discursive stream of sharp-humored prose on “things worth looking at on the streets,” from neon-lit, Western-styled mannequins in shop windows that she sees as a “kind of street art,” to “bystanders by the side of the road” grousing at being held up by a wartime blockade, to “a boy about ten years old” squatting over a curbside cooking fire and singing “a song about roasting gingko nuts.” Here’s the irony: Despite her admonition to “hurry: faster, faster…!” Chang’s writing presents readers with rich descriptions that could only come from the mind of one who knows how to slow down, stop, look, and listen.
We took Chang’s advice to “hurry…!” and began our experiment in slowing down right away, gathering for a group walk on Valentine’s Day. It was cold and grey, but we weren’t fair-weather tourists or wanghong-conscious trend-chasers eager to post selfies from social media hot spots. We were observers seeking to engage with Shanghai and its people precisely as they may to be found at the moment of encounter, rough edges and all.
In addition to “Seeing with the Streets,” I’d introduced the students to the basics of psychogeography and the “algorithmic walk.” For us, the storytelling algorithm was a series of left/right turns generated by flips of a coin: “Heads” meant “right,” “tails” meant “left.” Despite the quasi-academic armature of these concepts, the idea is simple. By breaking the habits and patterns that typically direct us through cityscapes, we might experience the streets in unexpected ways, questioning our own assumptions and biases along the way.
One student from the nearby city of Suzhou, Zixuan Huang, wrote about his experience of doing the walk in a short essay called “Collage City,” borrowing architectural historian Colin Rowe’s and Fred Koetter’s term. Zixuan wandered into an aging xiaoqu (housing compound) named Bamboo Garden New Village and gained a new perspective on our neighborhood of Lujiazui:
“The style and distribution of the buildings were rather old-fashioned, at least by Lujiazui’s cutting-edge standards . . . countless intertwined cables hung three meters high outside, connecting buildings with utility poles. The windows with metal bars, the quilts swaying gently on the metal clothesline poles, the rusty metal security doors, the stray cats and dogs wandering in the small square . . . seemed to rewind the time to ten years ago when I was playing with my friends in my hometown neighborhood.
“At that moment, I felt that after I walked into this place, everything slowed down, and even stepped back.
“If what I saw on Weifang Road made me doubt whether I was in Lujiazui, then everything here in “Bamboo Garden New Village” left me no hint that I was in Shanghai, at least not the Shanghai of promotional videos, travel brochures, and influencer social media posts. I couldn’t hear the cars roaring down the road. I couldn’t see tall buildings blocking the sky. I couldn’t smell the scent of disinfectant or floor polish spreading from inside the office buildings. I couldn’t feel the intense pressure that Shanghai’s fast rhythm had exerted on me day and night…I felt like Alice entering Wonderland, completely isolated from the real world.”
Our Valentine’s Day walk kicked off near a pair of phone booths—obsolete and overlooked objects that caught the attention and imagination of several student writers.
Zixuan Huang
The walk experiment sparked similar insights and feelings in other students as well, establishing a thematic and conceptual tension that surfaced in much of the work the students would go on to produce, and which Zixuan summed up as well as any:
“Assume that we erase Shanghai’s history and demolish all the old areas, making Shanghai the “utopian” city with only newly built skyscrapers. At that time, the name “Pudong New District” will make no sense, because when there’s no “old,” how do we define “new”? When there’s no depth of time, how does the city maintain its cultural treasure? When there’s no distinction, how do we compare to discover beauty?”
Several other students, who, with an average age of perhaps 19, have lived their entire lives in the 21st century, noted how quickly the old “new” has become a new “old.” For instance, we began our group walk, by chance, near a pair of phone booths, and a number of students reflected on these apparently antique remnants of the early-mid 2010s. Doris Zhang riffed on the appearance of the color red in an otherwise rather gray February streetscape:
“Red appears everywhere. A few telephone booths on the streets contribute their part. Clearly, neither booth still functions—all out of electricity. But the chart nailed on one with handwritten ticks shows that specific staff clean and disinfect them every two days. It confuses me. I have no answer. I bet no one in Shanghai still holds anything called an IC card, whose full use is to be plugged into slots and make phone calls to another booth. Perhaps they just work as the “Queen’s Guard,” fully armed and dressed up, fervently defending the city from nobody at all. But I am still a fan of the telephone booth. Look at the red brackets and railings which firmly hold the clear glass, under a red pointy roof — a little faded, given over to the traces of time. If it were raining, what a romantic scene it would be!”
Zixuan too noted the anachronistic anomaly in a city that we generally experience as being fully wireless, 5G, and cloud-based. He also includes a note of appreciation for the quaint phone booth:
“I caught sight of something I hadn’t seen for a long time: a pair of red telephone booths. I thought that telephone booths were already out of date, so it was rather surprising to see them in Lujiazui. I walked up to the booths, feeling curious, and found a white paper printed with this message: “Service temporarily suspended.” I didn’t know how long that “temporary” suspension had lasted, but I could tell from the dusty screen and rusty keys of the telephone that the booths had long been no more than relics from the old times. Anyway, I was glad they were still there.”
Another student named Junye Chen, like Zixuan, found occasion for remembrance, blending his individual memories with a nostalgic account of collective experience:
“When everyone has a mobile phone, the telephone booths hidden in the streets and corners are mostly abandoned, unremarkable and dusty. The bright red paint on these two was faded, and the service was suspended.
“However, such lonely figures on the street accompanied by plane trees can arouse many people's memories… When communications were not very developed, public telephones were an essential medium for long-distance communication. Pick up the receiver, insert a coin or IC card, silently recite the number you know by heart, press the metal buttons on the telephone, and wait anxiously or calmly for the beep sound. It seems more ceremonial than a one-touch dial from the address book in a smartphone. A red phone booth carried people's expectations, anxiety, and sadness.
“I still remember that mobile phones were not allowed in junior and senior high schools, but there were public phones in the corners of the campus. We could call anyone we needed to using our student ID card as long as we knew the number. But whether it was for a real need depended on the individual. After all, every evening study time, even if the playground was empty, there were always shadowy figures in the telephone booths, staying for half an hour.”
Our Valentine’s Day walk kicked off near a pair of phone booths—obsolete and overlooked objects that caught the attention and imagination of several student writers.
Zixuan Huang
The walk experiment sparked similar insights and feelings in other students as well, establishing a thematic and conceptual tension that surfaced in much of the work the students would go on to produce, and which Zixuan summed up as well as any:
“Assume that we erase Shanghai’s history and demolish all the old areas, making Shanghai the “utopian” city with only newly built skyscrapers. At that time, the name “Pudong New District” will make no sense, because when there’s no “old,” how do we define “new”? When there’s no depth of time, how does the city maintain its cultural treasure? When there’s no distinction, how do we compare to discover beauty?”
Several other students, who, with an average age of perhaps 19, have lived their entire lives in the 21st century, noted how quickly the old “new” has become a new “old.” For instance, we began our group walk, by chance, near a pair of phone booths, and a number of students reflected on these apparently antique remnants of the early-mid 2010s. Doris Zhang riffed on the appearance of the color red in an otherwise rather gray February streetscape:
“Red appears everywhere. A few telephone booths on the streets contribute their part. Clearly, neither booth still functions—all out of electricity. But the chart nailed on one with handwritten ticks shows that specific staff clean and disinfect them every two days. It confuses me. I have no answer. I bet no one in Shanghai still holds anything called an IC card, whose full use is to be plugged into slots and make phone calls to another booth. Perhaps they just work as the “Queen’s Guard,” fully armed and dressed up, fervently defending the city from nobody at all. But I am still a fan of the telephone booth. Look at the red brackets and railings which firmly hold the clear glass, under a red pointy roof — a little faded, given over to the traces of time. If it were raining, what a romantic scene it would be!”
Zixuan too noted the anachronistic anomaly in a city that we generally experience as being fully wireless, 5G, and cloud-based. He also includes a note of appreciation for the quaint phone booth:
“I caught sight of something I hadn’t seen for a long time: a pair of red telephone booths. I thought that telephone booths were already out of date, so it was rather surprising to see them in Lujiazui. I walked up to the booths, feeling curious, and found a white paper printed with this message: “Service temporarily suspended.” I didn’t know how long that “temporary” suspension had lasted, but I could tell from the dusty screen and rusty keys of the telephone that the booths had long been no more than relics from the old times. Anyway, I was glad they were still there.”
Another student named Junye Chen, like Zixuan, found occasion for remembrance, blending his individual memories with a nostalgic account of collective experience:
“When everyone has a mobile phone, the telephone booths hidden in the streets and corners are mostly abandoned, unremarkable and dusty. The bright red paint on these two was faded, and the service was suspended.
“However, such lonely figures on the street accompanied by plane trees can arouse many people's memories… When communications were not very developed, public telephones were an essential medium for long-distance communication. Pick up the receiver, insert a coin or IC card, silently recite the number you know by heart, press the metal buttons on the telephone, and wait anxiously or calmly for the beep sound. It seems more ceremonial than a one-touch dial from the address book in a smartphone. A red phone booth carried people's expectations, anxiety, and sadness.
“I still remember that mobile phones were not allowed in junior and senior high schools, but there were public phones in the corners of the campus. We could call anyone we needed to using our student ID card as long as we knew the number. But whether it was for a real need depended on the individual. After all, every evening study time, even if the playground was empty, there were always shadowy figures in the telephone booths, staying for half an hour.”
Vicky Chen writes of “the charm of a Friday night” when “everyone seemed joyful and in conversation with a partner or friend.” Vicky adds that she took this picture on “the last day I dined out before the lockdown in Shanghai.”
Vicky Chen
After the first week’s group walk, the students enrolled in the “Slow or Nothing” course ventured out on their own. As March began, the goal was to build on the lessons of the previous three weeks: to realize that any given neighborhood in Shanghai could reward the careful observer with plenty to write about. After students had found individual initial sites and possible subjects—ideally by walking until they came across something as unexpectedly arresting as those phone booths or a working class housing compound like Bamboo Garden New Village—they would then revisit, research, and eventually conduct interviews to include the voices of Shanghai’s people in their final stories.
That was the plan.
Sadly, they managed only one solo walk and a single draft before the Omicron variant pulled the plug on the city. Our city mapping project appeared to be a lost cause.
Xinyu Liu writes: “A street vendor in a dense living area in Pudong experiences a sharp decline in the number of customers as pandemic control tightened in Shanghai. No one approached this booth for more than five minutes, so the vendor took out her phone to kill time.”
Photography by Xinyu Liu
And yet, in two weeks before the total city lockdown hit, students had ranged far and wide throughout Shanghai. Some sought to see the familiar in new ways, whether it be a visit to Starbucks, a day in a park full of dogs and kites, or on a stroll down a fashionable street in the former French Concession.
Others went farther afield. Yuanhe Guo went all the way to Sheshan in the far west of the city. He ascended the modest “mountain” of Sheshan (118 meters/387 feet), topping Shanghai’s highest point of elevation, which is home to the Jesuit-built Sheshan Basilica and Observatory and is surrounded by golf courses, a botanical garden, and resort hotels. Yuanhe made his way back downhill to explore Happy Valley, a theme park that he knew from his youth which is now struggling to compete with newer, larger theme parks.
Far in the west of Shanghai, Sheshan, the city's highest point, overlooks Happy Valley theme park.
Yuanhe Guo
Ricky Wang explored Jing’an Park in the center of the city. Within sight of the renovated Tangmi Buddhist Jing’an Temple, featuring a distinctive gilded quartet of lions overlooking West Nanjing Road from atop a massive stone pillar, the downtown park is a popular spot for open-air dancing and music. Ricky shot video of an elderly saxophone quartet playing Kenny G’s “Going Home” while nearby, a middle-aged Mayday (Wu Yue Tian)-inspired band belted out Xuwei’s “Blue Lotus.” Meanwhile, on a park bench, a lone singing-saw practitioner performed Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” Observing that most younger Shanghai residents “simply tap the ‘play’ button on their smartphones and put on their headphones for a so-called ‘immersive’ music experience . . . lost in their own sound worlds,” Ricky wonders: “[W]hat would happen if we could all come together and enjoy music in public? Perhaps we can, and will.”
A man sits in Jing’an Park playing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” on the singing saw, within his view of Jing’an Temple’s gilded rooftops and one of central Shanghai’s numerous shopping malls. Beneath the temple and park, three metro lines converge. Video by Ricky Wang.
Out of Eden Walk
Student Alex Zhang, observing children in a mall jumping around inside “a house of trampolines,” found himself reflecting on the nature of play, which he associates with walking, learning, and writing in new and inventive ways, ways that he felt had been largely missing in his education:
“According to a typical exam-oriented education mindset, which sets test scores as the goal of studying, the word “play” means “not studying.” In China, the concept of ‘play’ is generally treated with bias or stereotypes—many people think it is just a distraction from work and has nothing to do with gaining knowledge . . . [but] the kids supplied the missing parts of my definition of ‘play’: ‘engagement’ and ‘interaction,’ even ‘a way of study’ . . . Inspired, I tried to interpret ‘walk’ differently and learn from the kids.”
Liu Younian, walking near the NYU Shanghai dorms, took note of a “middle-aged lady [who] sat at a treadle sewing machine” outside a brand-name clothing shop “absentmindedly chatting with two men.” Reminded of her grandmother’s sewing machine, Younaian wrote about how much things had changed since her grandmother’s youth. Today, she writes, trend-conscious consumers, tired of fast-fashion brands, will pay a premium for ostensibly handcrafted clothing: “Merchandisers now use ‘handmade’ as a marketing tool by linking it to craftsmanship and individual taste and discernment of the kind previously reserved for the wealthy.” This contrasts starkly with the sheer necessity that led her grandmother to make clothing by hand. Younian’s grandmother, born in 1947, tells her:
“Most families, even those living in the city, couldn’t afford ready-to-wear clothes. I grew up wearing my mother’s handmade clothes. After I got married in 1969, I saved 120 yuan to buy a ‘Butterfly’ brand sewing machine, which I used to make all the clothes for our whole family. When your mother was a child, she would wear my handmade clothes to school. Other kids were always envious of her because I have great technique. I still keep the machine and even now, sometimes I need to use it.”
Liu Younian's encounter with an old-fashioned sewing machine on a street near her dorm led her to interview her grandmother about her own machine.
Liu Younian
Coco Hao, like many of her classmates, felt the bittersweet pull of traditional Shanghai lane life:
“Opposite my old high school on Shanghai’s Yongkang Road stands the Yongtai neighborhood. I walked past it every morning when I was in high school, but it was not until I entered college and had more leisure time that I went in and explored.
“Unlike many of the recently built neighborhoods in Shanghai, whose residential buildings have dozens of floors and are well-equipped with parking lots and grocery stores, old areas, like Yongtai, lack such amenities.
“The day I visited was a peaceful and quiet afternoon; bicycles and cars were dispersed along lane walls instead of in garages, drying laundry hung right above the alleys, and residents sat and chatted in the afternoon sunshine. Everyone seemed to enjoy the environment and the slow living pace. Despite the lack of modern amenities, I would feel honored if I could live in such a neighborhood with fairy-tale serenity. “Thinking about the possibility of living in such a place after graduation, I researched similar old neighborhoods online, thinking that perhaps I could move into one after I save enough money. Disappointingly, such areas are increasingly hard to come by, as the number of old neighborhoods in Shanghai shrank by around 60 percent from 2000 to 2008. By now, in 2022, even more of these urban fairylands have been replaced by modern high-rises.”
A shady lane. The Yongtai neighborhood on Yongkang Road in the former French Concession. Many such areas have fallen to the wrecking ball.
Coco Hao
Qiaochu Wei turned an encounter with an admonishing sign into a reflection on the role that language plays in shaping—and sometimes erasing—identity, culture, and the character of a city:
“How can popularization of Standard Mandarin—Putonghua—and simplified Chinese characters help to build up a more civilized city? . . . For me, standardized language does contribute a lot in the making of a modern city, but it might be at odds with the idea of a city being more civilized.
“A modern city needs a standardized language to enhance its efficient communication. In this era when we worship being fast and productive, dialects and different characters are an obstacle to effective communication. For example, if news is broadcast in different dialects, it will cause some people to miss out important information, and will, to an extent, slow down the process of the entire social development.
“Promoting Standard Mandarin is also conducive to the harmonious development of the city, as Shanghai locals tend to discriminate against immigrants based on the obvious differences between the Shanghai local dialect and other dialects. [...] Shanghai locals, excessively obsessed with their identity as natives, are often prejudiced against immigrants just because they speak dialects other than Shanghainese.
A shady lane. The Yongtai neighborhood on Yongkang Road in the former French Concession. Many such areas have fallen to the wrecking ball.
Coco Hao
Qiaochu Wei turned an encounter with an admonishing sign into a reflection on the role that language plays in shaping—and sometimes erasing—identity, culture, and the character of a city:
“How can popularization of Standard Mandarin—Putonghua—and simplified Chinese characters help to build up a more civilized city? . . . For me, standardized language does contribute a lot in the making of a modern city, but it might be at odds with the idea of a city being more civilized.
“A modern city needs a standardized language to enhance its efficient communication. In this era when we worship being fast and productive, dialects and different characters are an obstacle to effective communication. For example, if news is broadcast in different dialects, it will cause some people to miss out important information, and will, to an extent, slow down the process of the entire social development.
“Promoting Standard Mandarin is also conducive to the harmonious development of the city, as Shanghai locals tend to discriminate against immigrants based on the obvious differences between the Shanghai local dialect and other dialects. [...] Shanghai locals, excessively obsessed with their identity as natives, are often prejudiced against immigrants just because they speak dialects other than Shanghainese.
"Speak standard Mandarin, write proper Chinese characters, and try our best to improve the city's literacy."
Qiaochu Wei
“. . . However, when it comes to building a more civilized society, standardizing languages can actually be counterproductive.
“The dominance of standard Mandarin, to some degree, is equivalent to the elimination of local dialects and the culture hidden within it. For example, a survey in 2010 indicated that “62.6% of primary school students use Mandarin as the first language at home, but only 17.3% of them use Shanghainese to communicate with their parents.”
The view of Century Avenue from the NYU Shanghai library.
Zixuan Xia
Student Morui Yu, like her peers, has the future on her mind. Comparing Shanghai to a cyberpunk world envisioned by American science fiction writer William Gibson, who famously stated that "the future is already here—it's just not evenly distributed,” Morui finds the future breaking out all around her:
“. . . multimedia lines constantly float, forming ripples and shapes, serving for advertisement, contemporary decoration, or simply without purpose. Prismatic neon lights fragment on the dimetric glass windows of the academic building, along with the reflections of street lamps, trees and passers-by. These windows don’t emit light, but the complicated reflections make them communicative art for realistic and virtual images interwoven in inanimate carriers.”
Other students wrote about Ferris wheels turning atop shopping and the rusting remains of abandoned share bikes, about public housing and generational changes in Chinese drinking culture, about art installations and walking to the bank in the spring rain, about delivery drivers and street food, and much more, opening multiple paths into a city that, as we returned to their drafts later in the semester, helped ground many of us amid the turbulence and loss of lockdown.
Throughout our “Slow or Nothing” narrative experiment in Shanghai, the writer Eileen Chang remained our inspiring if ghostly guide.
One of her essays in particular seems apt. Its original title, “Seeing with the Streets,” has a history, as students, who read both Jones’ English translation and the Chinese, were quick to inform me.
In translating the title’s four characters—道路以目, dàolù yǐ mù—Jones takes a literal rendering (“the road by eye”) and transforms the “eye” into the act of seeing in a way that works nicely with Chang’s approach to writing about the city. The walker (the viewer, the writer) does not subordinate the streets to expectations, judgments, or prejudice. Rather, one allows what is actually there to inhabit, shape and direct one’s walking, seeing, and writing. The city moves (and moves through) one as much as one moves through it.
But dàolù yǐ mù is also an idiom—a chengyu—that goes back to tales of the ninth-century B.C. in China.
King Li of the Zhou Dynasty, a despot said to have overtaxed his subjects to the breaking point and dispatched spies to root out and eliminate resistance. Dàolù yǐ mù means to exchange furtive looks, to gesture with the eyes, perhaps to warn of danger or signal a way out, or to send a flash of recognition and common cause when direct speech is too dangerous.
Published when Shanghai was occupied by the Japanese military and administered by a collaborationist government, Chang’s use of the idiom renders the city’s streets a site of crisis, tension, and danger as well as one of solace, community, and unexpected moments of pleasure. In a Shanghai occupied by the Japanese, administered by Chinese collaborators, and home to numerous patriotic resistance networks, Chang could hardly have chosen a better title.
The wall coming down on May 23.
Klaire of the synthpop duo, Guji
What makes the essay so powerful for me, however, is how she gestures beyond the crisis of the moment and finds firm footing in the everyday life of a city that had endured waves of trauma, and that would, nonetheless, resist, persist, and move on.
One mark of Chang’s genius as a writer, I think, lies in her ability to weave texts alive with the ambiguities and ambivalences of real life, and then, suddenly, to perceive moments of decisive clarity that arise from the swirl of possibilities. In “Seeing with the Streets,” one such moment occurs when Chang describes how a military blockade—a fengcheng 封城, which also translates as “lockdown”—detained her one day:
“On my way to market, I happened to run into a military blockade and was detained in an area just yards from home. So near, and yet it might as well have been the ends of the earth, as far as I was concerned. In a sunny spot, a servant woman tried to force her way past the lines, struggling as she shouted: ‘lt's getting late! I have to get back and make dinner!’ Everyone in the crowd broke into laughter. A Cantonese ice peddler sitting on the curb told her son ‘They'll let you to go if you need to see a doctor but not to cook dinner.’ Her voice was so deadpan, so solemn, so very satisfied with all and sundry that it sounded like a beginner's foreign language textbook. But for some unknown reason, her voice was somehow unsettling, as if there were something more to what she had said than might seem on the face of it.”
Chang would find opportunities for dramatic blockade scenes in her fiction—notably in a 1943 short story translated by Karen S. Kingsbury as “Sealed Off” and in the denouement of her 1974 novella Lust, Caution (adapted for film by Ang Lee in 2007).
Of course, Shanghai in 1943 is a long way from our students’ Shanghai in 2022, and the point here is not to force a facile comparison between historical eras. Rather, it is that the writer who pays close attention to the textures, contexts and subtexts of everyday life can do extraordinary things with what she gleans. And too that historically traumatic times happen while everyday life, of necessity, persists, and that we may emerge, together, from such times with valuable stories to help us through the next round of crisis, and the next after that.
In her 1947 preface to Chuanqi (“Romances”), following her admonition to hurry: faster, faster, or it’ll be too late! Chang writes that “our whole era is being pushed onward, is breaking apart already.” Some 75 years later, for many, these words ring as true as ever. So perhaps we must hurry again, and yet, too, slow down: look and listen with renewed attention and urgency, account as best we can for what we see, and, step by step, find and share new ways to move on together.
David Perry is the creative writing coordinator in the Writing Program at NYU Shanghai and a clinical associate professor in the Writing Program. Learn more about David and his work at his website or follow him on Twitter.
The wall coming down on May 23.
Klaire of the synthpop duo, Guji
What makes the essay so powerful for me, however, is how she gestures beyond the crisis of the moment and finds firm footing in the everyday life of a city that had endured waves of trauma, and that would, nonetheless, resist, persist, and move on.
One mark of Chang’s genius as a writer, I think, lies in her ability to weave texts alive with the ambiguities and ambivalences of real life, and then, suddenly, to perceive moments of decisive clarity that arise from the swirl of possibilities. In “Seeing with the Streets,” one such moment occurs when Chang describes how a military blockade—a fengcheng 封城, which also translates as “lockdown”—detained her one day:
“On my way to market, I happened to run into a military blockade and was detained in an area just yards from home. So near, and yet it might as well have been the ends of the earth, as far as I was concerned. In a sunny spot, a servant woman tried to force her way past the lines, struggling as she shouted: ‘lt's getting late! I have to get back and make dinner!’ Everyone in the crowd broke into laughter. A Cantonese ice peddler sitting on the curb told her son ‘They'll let you to go if you need to see a doctor but not to cook dinner.’ Her voice was so deadpan, so solemn, so very satisfied with all and sundry that it sounded like a beginner's foreign language textbook. But for some unknown reason, her voice was somehow unsettling, as if there were something more to what she had said than might seem on the face of it.”
Chang would find opportunities for dramatic blockade scenes in her fiction—notably in a 1943 short story translated by Karen S. Kingsbury as “Sealed Off” and in the denouement of her 1974 novella Lust, Caution (adapted for film by Ang Lee in 2007).
Of course, Shanghai in 1943 is a long way from our students’ Shanghai in 2022, and the point here is not to force a facile comparison between historical eras. Rather, it is that the writer who pays close attention to the textures, contexts and subtexts of everyday life can do extraordinary things with what she gleans. And too that historically traumatic times happen while everyday life, of necessity, persists, and that we may emerge, together, from such times with valuable stories to help us through the next round of crisis, and the next after that.
In her 1947 preface to Chuanqi (“Romances”), following her admonition to hurry: faster, faster, or it’ll be too late! Chang writes that “our whole era is being pushed onward, is breaking apart already.” Some 75 years later, for many, these words ring as true as ever. So perhaps we must hurry again, and yet, too, slow down: look and listen with renewed attention and urgency, account as best we can for what we see, and, step by step, find and share new ways to move on together.
David Perry is the creative writing coordinator in the Writing Program at NYU Shanghai and a clinical associate professor in the Writing Program. Learn more about David and his work at his website or follow him on Twitter.