Shanghai Rhythms       
        
By Yihong Ni

	With stuffy ears and fourteen plus hours of flight food, I was finally here in my native city, at once familiar and foreign.  How different is this city from the one sketched vaguely in my memory?  My thoughts were interrupted as we were met with a rush of greetings from relatives.  With many feelings inexpressible, we claimed our luggage and headed home with family, across the Huang Pu River into Shanghai.

	As we rode home, I discovered incongruities between memory and reality.  Shanghai had changed.  In the diminishing light of sunset, among veils of suspended dust particles, workers toiled at construction sites.  Sweat streamed down their faces while we kept cool inside the air-conditioned car.  Was this the city I once held dear?  Later that night, hearing the cadence of familiar voices joking and sharing anecdotes, I knew I was home, but the rugged faces of the workers remained in my mind as an unfamiliar part of my native city.  
My first few days back in Shanghai were at once exhilarating and disconcerting. With over fourteen million people, Shanghai is a city of energy and action.  People are everywhere, going about daily business and chores in countless directions.  

	The imperceptive eye sees merely Shanghai's accelerated pace, towering international corporate offices, fancy shopping malls, alluring bars and dance clubs.  What the imperceptive eye misses are the daily rhythms of most of Shanghai's people.  And in saying "Shanghai's people", I mean anyone living in Shanghai (no matter where they came from) because Shanghai is incredibly diverse and accepts people with all kinds of hopes or goals, from all over the world.  To experience Shanghai's daily rhythms means to look beyond facades and stereotypes.  Shanghai's daily rhythms are multifold.  Shanghai is much more than an international financial hub.  Shanghai's vitality is nourished by deeper resources.  Shanghai's roots are planted firmly in the culture and history of China.  No matter how much foreign interest may influence Shanghai, the city still strongly breathes in the Chinese values of family, friends, and scholarship.  From an outsider's perspective, Shanghai's dominant rhythm might seem rapid in tempo and impersonal in tone.  I was at first stupefied by the whirlwind of activity, but certain qualities of this bustling city revived bits and pieces of an earlier time, a flicker here, a flash there, faint and fleeting.  And so in chasing these lightning bugs of my childhood, I was soon drawn to the slower, more intimate, and unpretentious rhythms of daily life.  

	In the early morning, Shanghai stirs with a multitude of fresh activity.  Children, wearing their red school scarves, take buses, bike, or walk to school.  Vendors set up their wares for sale along the sidewalks; shop owners welcome their first customers of the day.  A few elderly residents emerge onto the sidewalk from alley doorways and greet each other good day before walking their grandchildren to preschool.  The sounds of running water are interrupted by an occasional splash from a washing tub.  On the stovetops of small street-side eateries, breakfast buns and pot stickers sizzle.  Their savory aromas drift through the morning air and whet the appetite of passersby.  By seven in the morning, streets are fully awakened to eruptions of honking.  Buses, bikes, cars, and pedestrians fuse into one giant mass of congestion.  When no traffic policemen are present, anyone who has the skill to cut in front, honk a way through, or walk the yellow and white lines has the right of way, understood.  Such skill is a necessary part of the daily commute. 

	Although the daily commute is aggressive, I saw a close relationship between people in Shanghai.  People voluntarily gave up their bus seats to the elderly and to parents with infants.  Children receive particular care, even in the turbulent traffic.  Even taxi drivers slow down at the sight of small children darting through the streets.  These family-like relationships in Shanghai are not consistent with many stereotypes that label Shanghai.  The surprising closeness in Shanghai, even among strangers, refutes the stigma cast on Shanghai (reminded of The Scarlet Letter?).  Shanghai has been labeled as a notorious city of corruption and depravity (these labels are a direct result of several foreign invasions throughout history).  As a port city, Shanghai was vulnerable to corruption.  Remember the Opium Wars?  Remember the Japanese invasion that began long before and later coincided with WWII?  Those events have unjustly cast a dark shadow on Shanghai's history.  So move beyond the stereotypes of Shanghai (or else wander aimlessly in a cocoon of fallacy and ignorance).  Shanghai is a strong and resilient city.  I discovered that family ties are strong in Shanghai.  Nearly everyone had a cell phone, so it seems technology has found a permanent place in people's lives, but beyond the pizzazz of newness, people use their wireless technology to do something they've been doing for ages, keeping in touch with family!  Conversations were about which aunt to expect for dinner tonight, when to bring the children to visit great grandfather, when to pick up nieces and nephews from school, or where to buy fresh vegetables and meat.  Although Shanghai is such a large city with so many people, the sense of community is very strong, close, and familiar. 

	Shanghai's strong sense of community is complicated by rapid economic development.  Under heavy population pressures, Shanghai's job market, although expansive, cannot accommodate every worker.  In the shadows of new skyscrapers and upscale shopping centers, many people still live in difficult conditions like those decades ago, and many people are without stable jobs.  While on a bus in traffic, I saw a mother and her two young children, no more than six or seven years old, firmly holding her hands, standing on a street corner, selling bags of fruit.  Would these children go to school some day?  Another time, having just stepped out from a restaurant, I saw a boy running down the street, selling flowers.  Following alongside one couple, he pushed the flowers close to their faces and asked them to buy the bouquet.  The man shook him off.  The boy reluctantly returned to his "boss," who threatened him with a beating.  Was this boy one of many Oliver Twists?   (part 1 of 2)