When people heard that I was going to study abroad in China, they joked: “Oh you are going to study at home.” I laughed with them. But I knew in my heart that my experience in China would be more than “living at home” because I have not been living in this country for more than eight years now. As I spent the majority of my teenage life in America, many of my memories for the country had faded away as days went by. Thanks to the Gallatin China Fellowship, I was able to come to Shanghai this summer and pick up my childhood memories with the local people here. Yes. People.
I was prepared to see a lot of people here because my childhood memories of crowded Shanghai streets were still in the back of my mind. However, little did I know that there were way more people here than I could ever imagine, especially in the Century Avenue metro station near NYUSH campus and the Hongqiao railway station. The Chinese idiom “people mountain people sea” (人山人海), which is equivalent of “a sea of people”, seems to be the perfect way to describe the crowd scene. You can get a sense of what I am talking about from the photo below.