I’m taking a day off today to catch up with various projects, including, I hope, this blog. I’ve already posted some things from our April and May magazines today. I’ll never post all of it, but I’d like to start posting the big features, at least.
May has gone by so quickly — it’s been an eventful month. My friends are having babies left and right, I was in my own sort of labor–on our biggest domestic edition of Newsweek Select as well as travel writing for ThingsAsianPress– and Adam arrived in Shanghai. But it’s been a beautiful month. For May holiday I got back into my yoga hard core and went out to Red Town’s Shanghai Sculpture Space again and did a lot of experimental cooking. The weather is not too hot, not too cold, and there’s that sense of the city’s revival. In my tiny alley complex, the neighbors’ potted plants are in full bloom. The opera singers next door have clearer pipes, less mottled by winter rain, and even the resident tuba player seems to have a bit more oompah. Little birds rest on laundry poles, the smell of tree buds enchants.
This is a refuge. Outside of this complex, they’re tearing down all the old alley buildings to make room for the extension of Xintiandi-type retail shops and the new subway line. For months, I’ve watched as people have been forced from their homes. They stand outside dejected with packets of yellowed newspapers and bunches of withered onions. Sometimes they argue with the cops that cruise through on their motorcycles, but for the most part they have slowly all drifted away. Even the man who lived across from my complex who I spoke with in December who said, “I’m not leaving this shop until they give me an explanation for why I have to move on.” His family had owned a small sweater shop in the space for a decade. I wonder if he ever received the explanation for which he demanded.
Today I think I’d like to go speak to the people left in this neighborhood and learn more about their stories. More on that in the future then.
Leave a Reply