Walking as Inquiry

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telephone booths

A Road to the Past: Tracing Shanghai’s History on Changshu Lu

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Low-rise lane houses and villas in a city of high rises

The local residents were walking along Changshu Lu, with fruit stores, diaries, and grocery stores. PHOTOGRAPH BY DONG ZHANG 

Walking out of the subway station, I was excited to go to Changshu Lu for the first time. We four students from NYU Shanghai’s writing class, went to Changshu Lu to conduct an algorithmic walk. We flipped a coin eight times to determine our “algorithms”: “head” stands for the left and “tail” stands for the right. And we walked on Changshu Lu accordingly.

Only low residential buildings stood alongside the road, without those kinds of skyscrapers in Lujiazui. Although Changshu Lu was old, you could still perceive the hustle and bustle of city life. Some people were selecting fruits carefully and bargaining with the shop owner. Some were queueing up for breakfast. And some were airing clothes and sheets on the balcony. These everyday scenes gave me a realistic impression of life, a feeling I did not have elsewhere in Shanghai.

Coffee and a telephone booth

 Manner Coffee, well decorated, stood out on the street and offered drinks to residents and travelers. PHOTOGRAPH BY DONG ZHANG

Moving forward, we were surprised to see some new trend stores. To take an example, Manner Coffee, a popular Shanghai coffee shop, was located on this old street. It was interesting to see old stores and new stores together. However, some newly opened stores did not match the ambiance of the street: a large proportion of customers are visitors, not local residents. We walked based on the algorithms, I found an abandoned telephone booth. It was rare to see one because nowadays almost everyone has their own phone. However, it was indeed the witness of an old era,  although now it’s abandoned and nobody knows how the government will deal with it.

Who needs a telephone booth when we all have phones (like the one that took this picture) with us everywhere we go? The sign inside says “Under Construction. Currently Unavailable.” PHOTOGRAPH BY DONG ZHANG.

The residence of a Chinese Christian doctor who helped create communist China

The former residence of Yan Fuqing, a pioneer in Chinese medicine education. PHOTOGRAPH BY DONG ZHANG

Moving forward, we found some historical sites, including the former residence of Yan Fuqing. He was a Chinese medical practitioner, public health pioneer, civil servant, and educator. Born in Shanghai in 1882, Yen came from a renowned family with a history of serving the Chinese government and society. After graduation from St. John’s College and Yale Medical School, Yen later returned to China and pioneered several public health initiatives, including the establishment of a local Red Cross, overseeing the Hunan-Yale Agreement, the foundation of the National Medical Association of China as well as the National Shanghai Medical College, now the Medical College at Fudan University. Yen actively treated patients during the Japanese occupation of China in World War II and saved lots of lives. His contributions to public health and medical education in China have left a lasting impact. 

The Shanghai Film Studio and the birth of the PRC

Shanghai Film Studio, one of the most famous Chinese movie companies, contributes greatly to the development of Chinese movie production. PHOTOGRAPH BY DONG ZHANG

Later on, we arrived at Shanghai Film Studio.  Established on November 16, 1949, it was one of the origins of Chinese film production. In the early years of New China, Shanghai Film Studio produced a number of excellent films with a wide range of subjects and rich content. Following the foundation, Shanghai Film Studio became the largest and most spectacular production base of Chinese films within a decade, and the development of Shanghai films entered its first golden period. The buildings in Shanghai Film Studio were generally low-key, like all the other buildings on Changshu Lu. It did not have as much space as other modern film studios. Nor did it have a billboard to attract people. It was likely for people to neglect without paying enough attention.

When I passed by the studio, I never expected to be able to come across such a famous film studio on this casual walk. I could still remember when I was a little child, my parents and I went to the cinema, watching a lot of classic movies produced by Shanghai Film Studio such as Railway Guerrilla. Many of them had a great influence on me. And I was glad to see that Shanghai Film Studio still thrived now. Although it has passed a long time and everything has changed greatly, those good old days in my mind will never fade away.

Renovation, preservation, “renewal,” and a changing Shanghai

Be aware! There is a construction site at the end of our journey. PHOTOGRAPH BY DONG ZHANG

By the end of the walk, we came across a construction site. Builders were tearing down old buildings and constructing new ones. This phenomenon is common in China today. With the rapid development of Shanghai and the increase of popularization, many old buildings have been replaced by new and tall buildings for more space, but still, local culture and history remain their features. 

It is always easy to focus on the most popular tourist attractions. But the real beauty of a city may lie in the unexpected places, waiting to be discovered by the curious souls who seek them out.

Walking Laoximen: A Call from Shanghai’s Past

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An obsolete IC card phone booth in Laoximen, where historic lane houses will give way to high rises, serves as a reminder of the city’s fast pace of change. Photograph: Jason Liu.

“Why do you think this is happening?” Asked by an old man with  undisguised hostility. Me and my members were standing on an empty street. All buildings’s doors were blocked with cement，cracks and detachment can be seen everywhere on the walls. 

Time goes back to two hours ago, three of my NYU Shanghai classmates and I exited Laoximen Metro Station and stepped out into a gray late-February Shanghai day. Sunlight barely shone through the thick clouds as we made our way toward a street lined by old longtang (Shanghai-style lane houses). All around us in the distance Shanghai’s modern high rises created a stark contrast with this older part of the city. We were on assignment for a university class, with a requirement to explore this city and wirte down what we saw.

We first planned to interview some residents or shop owners to know the story about this street, but to our surprise, the place where the doors are supposed to be is blocked by walls. Observing the upper floors, the windows are blocked with wooden boards and no clothes were being dried on the balcony, which is abnormal for traditional Shanghai residential buildings.

After a short discussion, we concluded that these abandoned buildings are the result of removal: Shanghai is getting more and more crowded, the old type of building can’t satisfy the demand of the population. The owners were asked to leave after reaching an agreement with the government on the compensation. (According to the local government, Laoximen residents can receive as much as 20,000 yuan per square metre, with bonus payments for moving out early.) Like the telephone booth, the old residential buildings don’t belong to this era, the only reason that they are still there is that they are forgotten by this busy, busy city.

 The temple standing among modern residential buildings, forming a strong sense of seperation.

Walking on, the first building available was a temple. Named Fazang Temple, this monastery serves Buddha and many other spirits. Though the street is quite deserted, there were still some people and monks doing Buddhism practice.

This temple survived because it is old, old enough to carry historical values. When I asked staff there about the history of this temple, he answered that this temple had stood here for over 100 years, with a proud smile. The other houses were abandoned also because they are old, but not old enough. However, the neighborhood of the temple had been adapted to modernized  buildings. The traditional Chinese style monastery combined with tall residential buildings, forming an illustration of visual impact.

 Modern buildings we saw from between the gap of old houses, showing a great contrast.

Leaving the temple, we continued our way on this desolate block, some old houses failed to hide the new ones. Seeing from the gap between old buildings, they looked like dwarfs compared with their successors, just like old men being overwhelmed by the young. The messy wires on the wall are just like the wrinkles climbing on their face. 

Though these old houses witnessed the history of Shanghai,  there are already no places for them in this city. Maybe after a few decades, people in Shanghai will forget the fact that these stunted and simple-structured buildings are the traditional residential houses and their upper generations used to call them home.

Continuing our way, we finally find another surviving house. It was a slippers store, hundreds of pairs of slippers were hung on the walls, piled on the table, filling all the space in this tiny room.

The owner was an old man, sitting by the door, washing his feets in a basin with hot water. Not surprisingly,  none of the passersby seemed to notice this store. I stepped forward, asked the owner why all the other houses got abandoned while he was still here.  He silenced for a moment and started repeating: Why do you think this is happening？

 A construction site where old houses were being demolished to save the land for modern ones.

I sensed his hostility and left. I did not take a photo of that store for the same reason.  Did the owner have a deep emotion for his old house so that he refused to leave? If so, why did he seem angry when I spoke of this topic? Or did he not feel the compensation from the government was worth his loss?  But in China, having the chance to remove is always seen as a golden chance to get rich as the compensation can be huge.

I turned to a relaticve who works in a construction company to solve my doubts. He replied: This is a quite common situation when our company tries to carry out project. Basically, this is the outcome that house owners want to make use of the chance to get rich thoroughly so that they demand high from the government and finally lose the chance to remove.  Such people are called hold-outs, causing great trouble for government. 

After hearing his opinion, I can’t help sighing that Shanghai is developing so fast that old houses are now burdens dragging down its pace. Will our home become demolished in 40 years? If it’s true, will I stick to my old house? I don’t think I know the answer.

 

Surreal Shanghai: Memory Booths

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During my Houtan Metro Station algorithmic walk, I came across an abandoned COVID test booth. The sudden appearance of testing centers in many cities around the world has been one of the most visible signs of how covid has changed our world. Walking through this abandoned COVID testing facility was thus surreal. The empty booth, once bustling with people, was now eerily silent. The signs that directed people when the center first opened were still there, but faded and weathered, and the testing equipment had been removed. 

There was something oddly satisfying about looking at the abandoned center – perhaps it was the affirmation that indicated that the worst of the pandemic was over, and that we are moving on to the next phase of our lives. That even in the darkest of times, there is hope. In the coming years, as we look back on the pandemic, these abandoned testing centers will serve as a powerful reminder of the toll it took on our world. Yet, they will be a symbol of the tenacity and resilience of the human spirit, and our ability to triumph over even the most difficult obstacles.

Shanghai’s streets may be rapidly modernizing, but remnants of the past can still be found scattered throughout the city. One such reminder is the abandoned telephone booths that can be found throughout the city. Despite their abandoned state, such phone booths act as an aide-memoire of Shanghai’s rich cultural heritage. They are a testament to the city’s past, and a symbol of its ongoing evolution. While it is uncertain what the future holds for these abandoned telephone booths or test centers, one thing is certain: they serve as a nostalgic relic of the past, and a poignant reminder the constant evolution of this lively metropolis. People used to queue up outside these booths. But now, with the end of the pandemic, and the advent of cellphones, the need for these booths has vanished almost entirely. (Nonetheless, I do think they are a peaceful retreat to escape the hustle and bustle of the city, and be by yourself.)

Red

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Last semester, I ended up buying a bunch of plastic roses — though I am a fan of real flowers, because they have soft, juicy petals and light fragrance. I need lively and photosynthetic plants to remind me of breathing in city life. When I came back to my dorm room weeks ago after winter break, I was not surprised at all that my plastic roses were still “thriving.” Since I pretentiously put them in the vase with rainwater and nutrients solution, there wasn’t even much dust on them. I used to buy real roses, a bunch per week. But my change to plastic roses was not a result of grief from their withering, but rather my roommate’s complaints about their rotting and stinking before I had time to buy a new bunch the next weekend! 

Nevertheless, roses are beautiful, especially the red ones. They remind me of life, turning from blush to crimson, and then from cherry to bricks, lastly to mahogany. Megacities like Shanghai, on the other hand, are usually made of grey and boredom, especially in late winter. The sky is a polluted grey. Buildings are constructed with grey reinforced concrete. Roads and bridges, cars and ships, blacks and white, shuttle into shades of grey. That is the city we live in. However, as the famous fashion designer Bill Glass once said, “red is the ultimate cure for sadness.” Red, I find, can treat your urban syndrome. It can pull you out of your regular day and pressure, and bring you surprise and energy — if only you walk in the city.

I walk in the afternoon of early spring in Shanghai. A web weaved by utility poles and wires envelops the city — a huge electric system. Every ten or twenty steps, a pole rises up from the ground and points towards the sky, accompanied by a fat metal utility box, cube-like in shape. These poles are painted with red and white stripes at eye level to warn people not to knock into them when gazing at their phones, while the upper reaches of the poles remain cement gray. There, because of the untouchable height, they have lost all color, free from the scar-like inky advertisement stamps that clutter their bases. One aged, leaning pole is tied to the tree beside it by wires, not very tightly, yet tight enough to pull it from falling. This camphor tree, a typical sight in Shanghai, became unusual somehow, its dark green leaves thriving through gaps among shadows of tall buildings and firmly rooted itself in the soil, a guardian of the city. A tiny patch of grass thrives next to its foot too, thanks to the sunbeams that just barely reach it. The long, thin, soft green leaves stretching all directions seem to be yawning this late afternoon. Life in the city is remarkable! You know that is true, if you have ever tried to squat down and observe the mosses and weeds squeezed between tiles and buried by cigarette butts–the greenest and lively things you can find in a city!

Aside from the electric system that threatens you from time to time and the color green that gives you hope and cheers you up always, something else catches your eye in city life. Lanterns with yellow ribbon spikes are hung from the eaves upon the grand mall entrance, one on the left and another on the right. Behind the windowsill, huge intricate and exquisite Chinese knot-like chuanghua patterns —a traditional Chinese art created by cutting delicate and symbolic patterns out of red paper for blessings. Though the Lunar New Year’s Day has passed, we still stay in the range of xiaonian—people celebrate the new year for the whole lunar first month “zhēng yue”!

Red appears everywhere. A few telephone booths on the streets contribute their part. Clearly, not one booth still functions—all out of electricity. But the chart nailed on it with handwritten ticks shows that specific staff clean and disinfect them every two days. It confuses me. I have no answer. I bet no one in Shanghai still holds anything called an IC card, whose full use is to be plugged into slots and make phone calls to another booth. Perhaps they just work as the “Queen’s Guard,” fully armed and dressed up, fervently defending the city from nobody at all. But I am still a fan of the telephone booth. Look at the red brackets and railings which firmly hold the clear glass, under an also red pointy roof — somehow a little faded, given to the traces of time. If it is raining, what a romantic scene it would be!

 I wandered into a community for the elderly, and I immediately immersed myself in it. Red flowers swim in the sea of bushes, some lift their heads for a breath or a leak of sunshine, some shyly bury their heads under twigs as if we cannot see them. I know nothing about gardening, but I guess that is at least some relatives of azalea — nine fuchsia petals and a plate of yellow stamen — exactly how a typical flower looks! They are dominant in numbers and color, spreading themselves all over the bushes — many are blooming generously, and many are dropping petals too. So the soil was covered by a thin quilt. I’m reminded of a couplet by the 19th-century poet Gong Zizhen: “The fallen red is not a heartless thing, it turns into spring mud to protect the flowers.” (落luò红hóng不bú是shì无wú情qíng物wù，化huà作zuò春chūn泥ní更gèng护hù花huā） Immediately, this poem came to me and encouraged me before I got upset about nature’s metabolism. My mind wandered around, imagining the poet Gong Zizhen reciting it next to me with hands behind his back. He looked aged and exhausted, almost at the end of his life. As a poet and an official of the late Qing Dynasty, he was well aware of the difficult situation he and the country were facing at the same time. As the First Opium War started in 1840, Gong wrote this set of poems just one year before, on his way back home after retiring from officialdom to reunite with his family. He was beset by many illnesses already and died in 1841—full of worries for the future of the country’s destiny. But what shows up among the three hundred poems is hope and indomitability, just as what he said about the “fallen red.” Even in the present day, in this COVID era, we may still be encouraged by this spirit of toughness and dedication from those sacrifices — the “fallen reds.” A flower falls and grows. Life comes and goes. Red circulates as petals, blood, sun, hope, and direction. 

In the city, sometimes there is not as much red as in the countryside and nature. Compared to the masses of grey, red prefers to exist as small dots or thin line-like, as a swaying flame lighting up your heart. On my way back home, I see a pair of red sports shoes, worn on the feet of a rickety old man mincing along with the help of his cane. The foamy soles of his shoes had been squeezed under his weight into many wrinkles and were severely out of shape. But that red seems to give him energy and strength to walk further and further. I lift my head up. Three rusty fire hydrants stand in a line at the corner of the street. A traffic sign with red trim and a red slash over the horn, warns people not to honk. On the road, the stream of brake lights flickering behind vehicles becomes a flowing river…

 Color plays a major role in our lives, as Amy Butler Greenfield states in her 2005 book A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage and the Quest for the Colour of Desire: “humans see the world in a cascade of color, with eyes that can distinguish any single shade from more than a million others. As a species, we prize color and attach great significance to it.” When we see an item or a scene, color always catches our attention first. Then we like to interpret colors into deep meanings — that seems like human nature. But, of all those colors, red has the strongest power, as Greenfield notes: “throughout much of the world, red represents events and emotions at the core of the human condition: danger and courage, revolution and war, violence and sin, desire and passion, even life itself.” Gong Zizhen is far from being the only poet to celebrate red, as famous verses from Robert Burns, Alfred Tennyson, and Emily Dickenson attest. We genuinely feel the vitality of red, and how red changes our life. Such great verses left us with deep impressions of the power of red in a literary form, for hundreds of years.

Recently, the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics just ended. And the mascot panda “Bing Dwen Dwen” was the most popular star last month. So people come up with a Brain Teaser: how can a black-and-white panda take a color photo? And the answer is to take pictures when they laugh as they stick out their tongue – then red added by smiles makes everything different. Red can symbolize passion, love, enthusiasm, hope, rebirth or rage, danger, shyness, etc. What if we make it simple: the roses, utility boxes, lanterns, chuanghuas, telephone booths, sports shoes, etc., are all just the smiles of the city!

Shanghai Collage

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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. 

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