It is a place for the rich and the poor, the adventurous and the timid, the entrepreneurial and the intellectual, the accomplished and the aspiring.
It is Shanghai.
I went there for college in 1985 and left the city in 1993 to come to the U.S. The city left an indelible mark on my being. Although not thinking of it at the time, I now consider those eight years one of the most beautiful periods in my life, and the city my second hometown.
My first hometown of Zhejiang Province provided me with memories of blooming trees, majestic mountains, and clear flowing rivers. It also made me cherish the close bonding of neighbors who knew each other for generations, the summer evenings of children playing and chasing each other under the star-studded sky.
My second hometown Shanghai, on the other hand, taught me the endless possibilities of a huge metropolitan city. It was there that I tasted foods from all the provinces in the country, met people who became my lifelong friends, and learned to deal with selfish calculating girls and uncaring ungentlemanly boys. It was also there that I got to know what dating was, met a boy who later became my husband.
Zhejiang made my childhood. Shanghai shaped my youth.
I love reading Lisa See’s New York Times best sellers like Dreams of Joy. Shanghai under her pen was a dazzling paradise of night clubs, dancing, fashion, and fun. But that was in the 1930s and 40s, before the new China was established. I was not yet born.
The Shanghai I knew started in 1985, when I went to college.
Shanghai: First Impressions
In the beginning, I did not know what to think of the city. Everything looked and felt grey: the sky, the buildings, the people. The place had too much cement and too little green. Buses rumbled through the streets. People squeezed inside like sardines.
(Huai Hai Road in 1980s. Image Credit: David Gleit)
The water had a strong taste. Later I learned it was chlorine. It took me a quite a while to get used to it.
I also did not care for the people, especially the older women patrolling the streets and shops. When they saw us eating snacks just purchased from nearby shops, they followed us. As we walked, laughing and talking, they waited till some of the sunflower seed shells or sweet rice cake wrappers were dropped on the ground, then they descended on us, triumphant, demanding a fine for littering. We considered them psychomaniacs who could not bear to see others happy. Why could they not warn us beforehand? Each fine cost us the equivalent of one lunch in the school cafeteria. We disliked them with a passion.
In retrospect, I had a lot of respect for these women. They were typically retired factory employees paid pennies to do such jobs. My older-self, like the later years in college and graduate school, could also appreciate the help they offered. More than once had I been tapped on the shoulder and told: “Little sister, put your purse in the front and zip it!” They probably prevented many incidents of pickpocketing. But that appreciation came years later.
I also did not like how snobbish the people were. When we asked for things in Mandarin, the store clerks were often rude and indifferent. Even inside our college, where the majority of the students came from outside of Shanghai, in the cafeteria, if we said “two ounces” in Mandarin to the person doling out rice, we would get a tiny amount. The same words spoken in the Shanghai dialect resulted in a generous portion.
Pretty soon, many of us learned to speak Shanghainese so we could deal with the locals more effectively, but we joked about these things in our dorms.
Another joke we had was when we told the locals we were going home, their reaction was often, “Oh, so you are going back to the countryside!” Egocentric, even when uttered in good nature. In their eyes, Shanghai was the city, and the rest of the nation was all countryside, and all people, except maybe those from Beijing and Guangzhou, were country bumpkins.
Yet, over the years, as I resided in Shanghai, I gradually fell in love with it. Since then, I have visited and lived in many places in China and around the globe, yet, every time I go back to this place, it makes me feel at home and reminds me of the reasons behind my fondness.
Safety
In 1985, Shanghai had a population of seven million, making it the largest city in China. It shared many similarities with New York, but with a much lower crime rate. In fact, despite its tremendous size, now at twenty-four million, Shanghai is still one of the safest cities I have ever lived in or visited.
During the eight years I was there, homicide was rarely heard of. The only thing we had to worry about was pickpocketing, which might occur in shops or streets but which had not happened to myself or people I knew.
(Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Xu Hui Campus. Image Source: image.so.com)
My college, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, had its main campus in Xu Jia Hui, a busy populous district. After our evening study, my dorm mates and I often went to the stands near campus to have a bowl of steamy hot dumplings or bean noodles in chicken soup. Some days, we walked to visit friends in nearby colleges after dinner and came back around ten or eleven. No one thought it unsafe to be out at that hour. I actually enjoyed those evening walks under the cool brilliant moonlight and the dreamy yellow glow from the streetlamps. No homeless, no beggars, no ogling or whistling from men. We were never harassed.
In the recent decade or so, with the rapid growth of Shanghai’s economy, more migrants poured into the city. They contributed to its vibrant life but were also blamed, especially by the locals, for the rise of crime. However, the rates are still remarkably low.
People
I always believe people are the souls of a place, and they make it what it is. No exception in Shanghai. Over the years of my residence there, I found that the shrewd, the loud, and the obnoxious were a minority, and that most Shanghainese possessed many admirable qualities.
My college professors, cafeteria workers, library staff, shop employees, cobblers on the streets—I had hardly met anyone who treated their work lightly. They did everything in their power to perform their jobs well.
And most of them were also considerate and kind.
One time, I went to visit a high school friend in Tong Ji University, which was across town. In the evening, about 10:30, I came back to the Bund, a popular waterfront near the center of the city, to switch buses. To my dismay, the last bus heading towards my college had already left.
Being a poor college student, a taxi was out of the question.
A traffic police station stood in the center of the Bund. Two policemen sat there, talking. I knocked on the door and inquired if there were other buses going towards my college.
No, that was the only one.
“You can take a bus to Ren Min Square and change to Bus 44. That goes to your campus,” one of them said. But then, upon checking, they found the bus heading towards Ren Min Square had also left.
“How about this, my buddy here will be off in five minutes. He can take you to Ren Min Square on his bike,” the man said.
The other man nodded.
A few minutes later, I was sitting on the back of this off duty traffic police officer’s bicycle. We rode through the evening streets. He deposited me in the station. He did not leave until my bus started.
How many police officers would sacrifice their off-work time, late at night, and give rides to people who have missed their buses?
(The Bund in Shanghai. Image Credit: Elizabeth Haydon Keithcart)
Another time, years later, in one of my visits back to Shanghai, I went to a bookstore that specialized in textbooks and related materials. Because we did not go back often, I wanted to buy books from several grade levels and for different subjects, Chinese, math, science, etc., so my children could learn these subjects in the next few years. I probably put more than two dozen books in my cart.
The store clerk, an older man dressed in immaculate white-shirt and dark trousers saved me several hundred yuans that day. Most store employees would want their customers to buy more things, needed or not. Not he. Probably wise and frugal with his own money, he could not bear to see me waste mine.
He found several duplicates, which in my haste and because I had so many, I did not realize I had.
Because he was familiar with most of the books, he also helped me eliminate things of similar contents. I saved more.
Seeing that I bought materials for extra reading, he searched the shelves and got several other books that children in China loved to read but of which I had no knowledge. “Some teachers use these in their classrooms. Your kids might like them too,” he said. He was right. Some of those became my children’s favorites.
Openness
Among all the cities I have visited in China, I have to say that Shanghai is the least tethered by old customs and rules and the most open. It is an immigrant city, historically a fishing village. A metropolitan city with some of the best colleges in the country, it also absorbs the best minds.
For me personally, Shanghai opened my mind to the world beyond China. It was there that I met my first wai jiao, foreign teacher, a young, shy, smiling blonde from America. She taught us conversational English. It was also there that I met a British Council teacher from England. He was tall, handsome, reserved, speaking with a BBC accent.
It was also in Shanghai that I started to read original English novels, not the abridged versions sold in general bookstores. In our college library, I found A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. My English had been good, but before freshman year, my reading was mostly in Chinese. I had read translations of many world classics, but never in their original languages.
A Tale of Two Cities became my guide into English literature. I was drawn into a world I had never entered before. To be sure, some of the words were unfamiliar, and some plots were strange. Neither my vocabulary nor my knowledge of English and French history at the time was sufficient to comprehend all the details, but that in no way hindered my wonder and fascination.
In a college and city where I hardly knew anyone and had only a few acquaintances, my freshman year was mingled with homesickness and uncertainties about the future. Charles Dickens provided me with comfort and excitement. He became my number one favorite non-Chinese author. From that point on, I was hooked and plunged forward.
I went on to read almost every single non-abridged original English book in our library, thus becoming familiar with most of the works by Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, and James Joyce. In later years, American Literature books also started to appear. I devoured them all.
( A Tale of Two Cities Book Cover. Image Credit: openlibrary.org)
Had my college not been in Shanghai, even if it were also a top one in the nation, I suspect I might not have had the same good fortune. Cultural Revolution ended in 1976. The door to the outside world had barely opened a tiny crack in the early 1980s. In 1985, while the rest of the country was still immersed in the Cultural Revolution rhetoric and looked askance at anything smelling capitalism, the colleges in Shanghai, including mine, had already acquired a lot of books from other countries. For that, I am forever grateful.
Conclusion
People and place interact in mysterious ways. I lived in Shanghai for eight years, and from that point on, Shanghai lived in my veins and became part of my essential being.
My memories keep it in my dreams. Although no longer fluent in the dialect, each time I returned to this ever-growing city, I felt like home-coming. Many of the familiar old buildings have been torn down and replaced by new ones, but the vibrancy and the energy stayed the same.
It will always remain my second hometown.
If you like this essay or have any comments or suggestions, please let me know! I would love to hear from you.
All of us have a place that is dear our heart. I would love to hear your story. Please share too!
(A version of this blog appeared in medium.com)