For the most part, I will let my pictures speak for my time there. Despite the haze that engulfed the city in the second half of my trip once the rain quit, Shanghai was a visual feast for a western eye, particularly due to the Asian habit of building their skyscrapers with more colorful lighting and artistic design than the modernist rectangles that dominate American cities. No traveler’s life is complete without a nighttime walk along the Bund, the road along the Huangpu River where the European colonial style old city faces the skyline of the Lujiazui financial district, all of the latter having risen in the last thirty years. There is also an excellent city museum with four floors stuffed full of Chinese artifacts as old as four millennia and a street food scene with all the dumplings and pork buns you can eat. It helped tremendously to have my daughter with me, not only for the Mandarin she was able to speak with drivers and waitresses but also for her ability to pay for virtually everything with her phone (reimbursed by me later with cash). China is an extremely wired country, more so, I think, than America, and it was a common experience on the subways to see virtually everyone in the packed cars staring down at their phones.
One other image I’ll share, unfortunately impossible for me to capture on camera, was upon taking off from the airport on a Saturday afternoon to return home. Once the plane reached the ocean, the window seat I had reserved allowed me to see more container ships than I could begin to count waiting to get into the world’s busiest port, extending as far as I could see at over ten thousand feet above the water. It was a reminder of the massive economic engine that China had become within the lifetime of my daughter’s generation and an indicator of what might happen to the rest of the world if the virus continues to grind the nation to a halt.
As for my daughter, she is now currently stateside waiting out the crisis. I’m grateful she is out of harm’s way for the moment, though there’s always the possibility that the coronavirus will follow us here. After seeing reports in the New York Times and elsewhere about what has happened in Wuhan, the epicenter of the crisis, I hope to goodness that we’re spared that fate.
– Chuck Strom
