The English poet William Blake, reflecting on the nature of life and our experience of it, wrote in “Auguries of Innocence”:
To see the world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wildflower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand|
And eternity in an hour
Blake used a series of metaphors to imply the act of finding new great value in small plain things. However, in our fast-paced society, how often do we find a moment to stop and “see the world in a grain of sand” or “heaven in a wildflower? We are more often than not driven by our tight schedules than by our curiosity about little things in our daily lives. For many, some “classic” activities like wandering outdoors, whether in a field, in a forest, or on the city streets, and stopping to enjoy the views along the way, have become luxuries.
Fortunately for me, my NYU Shanghai writing professor introduced me and my classmates to the idea of an “algorithmic walk,” whose route is structured randomly. He set us up to conduct the walk during a class, then sent us off on our individual ways. Were it not for the walk, I wouldn’t have noticed a lot of things that I would never bother to take a glance at in past days. I’m grateful to the walk for freeing me from my daily routine to embrace the unknown side of Shanghai with no distraction and presenting me with a more rational and comprehensive perspective to appreciate the city.
Our school’s main academic building is located on Century Avenue in Lujiazui. Lujiazui is the central business district of Shanghai, best known for its super-tall skyline, and Century Avenue is Lujiazui’s most impressive street. We, however, didn’t start our walk on Century Avenue. Instead, we set off from the intersection of Songlin Road and Weifang Road, two smaller side streets, which are only a few hundred meters behind NYU Shanghai. I tossed a coin six times to decide my route for the walk — heads meant “take a right turn,” and tails meant “take a left” — and began walking along Weifang Road.
At first, I felt like I was immersed in a world of grey. On each side of the grey tarred road lay a grey sidewalk, on which was a line of bald grey trees bending in the chilly February wind; beside the sidewalks stood dumpy grey apartments with huge pieces of oil paint already fallen, exposing the rough grey of the concrete.
I found it hard to precisely relate the road with Shanghai, let alone Lujiazui, one of the most energetic economic centers of China. I didn’t see myself as a newcomer to Lujiazui, because I had been studying here for more than half a year. But what I saw here dramatically contrasted with my previous impression of Lujiazui, with its gleaming towers and brightly lit streets full of expensive cars.
With this puzzling me, I looked down at the sidewalk. Cracked and mottled bricks showed signs of manual repair. Moss grew in the cracks.
I huddled in my leather coat and walked on, then I caught sight of something I hadn’t seen for a long time: a pair of red telephone booths. I thought that telephone booths were already out of date, so it was rather surprising to see them in Lujiazui. I walked up to the booths, feeling curious, and found a white paper printed with this message: “Service temporarily suspended.” I didn’t know how long that “temporary” suspension had lasted, but I could tell from the dusty screen and rusty keys of the telephone that the booths had long been no more than relics from the old times. Anyway, I was glad they were still there.
I followed my algorithmic route and entered a neighborhood called “Bamboo Garden New Village.” There was no bamboo and no garden in it. It was just a normal neighborhood that seldom captured pedestrians’ attention. I Googled (using our school-provided VPN) and learned that “in Shanghai, the old residential areas built nearly after the founding of the People’s Republic of China and in the early days of reform and opening-up were generally named ‘xx New Village’” (translation mine).
The style and distribution of the buildings were rather old-fashioned, at least by Lujiazui’s cutting-edge standards, and the very things that underlined their ages were the countless intertwined cables hung three meters high outside, connecting buildings with utility poles. The windows with metal bars, the quilts swaying gently on the metal clothesline poles, the rusty metal security doors, the stray cats and dogs wandering in the small square…seemed to rewind the time to ten years ago when I was playing with my friends in my hometown neighborhood.
At that moment, I felt that after I walked into this place, everything slowed down, and even stepped back.
If what I saw on Weifang Road made me doubt whether I was in Lujiazui, then everything here in “Bamboo Garden New Village” left me no hint that I was in Shanghai, at least not the Shanghai of promotional videos, travel brochures, and influencer social media posts. I couldn’t hear the cars roaring down the road. I couldn’t see tall buildings blocking the sky. I couldn’t smell the scent of disinfectant or floor polish spreading from inside the office buildings. I couldn’t feel the intense pressure that Shanghai’s fast rhythm had exerted on me day and night…I felt like Alice entering Wonderland, completely isolated from the real world. This radical transformation gave rise to overwhelming bewilderment and endless uncertainty.
Upon reflection, I realized that this was the symptom of a kind of “identity crisis.”
Psychology educator Kendra Cherry defines developmental psychologist Erik Erikson’s concept of “identity crisis” as “a developmental event that involves a person questioning their sense of self or place in the world.” Any global citizen facing dramatic changes in modern society could fall victim to it. The old residential areas, old telephone booths, and even me in “Bamboo Garden New Village,” are all troubled by the same question: How to find our own place in the ever-changing metropolis?
I continued my urban journey and accidentally walked to Century Avenue, which presented me with a typical image of Lujiazui: several wild lanes stretched across the avenue, with fancy cars running on them; many luxuriant trees guarded the avenue and the transparent glass walls of the fancy high-rises reflected the sunlight.
It was at that moment that I recalled a sentence that the NYU Shanghai philosophy assistant professor Brad Westlake said in his “Global Perspectives on Society” lecture, that “cities are the most complex things in the world.” Cities are tolerant enough to let different identities coexist. It’s unwise to interpret a city from a single perspective and to generalize a city by a single image like I used to do. Just like the world has a time difference, every city has its own time difference. We can’t assure that every part of the city develops at the same rate. Because some areas keep evolving while others remain traditional.
I, born and raised in Suzhou, a city just a couple of hours west of Shanghai, came to this megacity more than twice a year since my childhood for various reasons. In my mind, Shanghai, the city I know the best besides my hometown, has always been a place where everything looks good and new. However, starting from 2021 (the year when I began living in Shanghai not as a tourist but as a student), the more I have integrated into the city, the more I become skeptical of my childhood illusion. Today, it dawns on me that below the appealing surface of Shanghai, things aren’t too luxurious to reach. The bricks, the telephone booths, the Bamboo Garden New Village…… all the things I saw on the road, no matter how old and normal they seemed, constituted the most realistic Shanghai.
Assume that we erase Shanghai’s history and demolish all the old areas, making Shanghai the “utopian” city with only newly-built skyscrapers. At that time, the name “Pudong New District” will make no sense, because when there’s no “old”, how do we define “new”? When there’s no depth of time, how does the city maintain its cultural treasure? When there’s no distinction, how do we compare to discover beauty?
The famous architectural historian Colin Rowe put forward the concept of “collage city”, which is not to completely remove the history, but based on history, collages the new elements to make the old ones and new ones coexist. Shanghai is a hybrid collage city where the “old” and “new” coexist. The magic of the collage city lies in that the deeper you dive into the city, the more you’ll feel ignorant of it. By walking on the Shanghai streets and paying close attention, you can get to take a glimpse of the reality of Shanghai. After that, you’ll be amazed by the beauty of urban diversity that time has created.