Drafty Draft of the Place Essay

THE City of China
I was born in a city that is not representative of the average standard of modernization of China. It was originally a fish and textiles town that I can never know of. 2220 years ago, Shanghai was merely a tiny piece of land where people usually trade on water; about 1265 years ago, a city began to form on the land; around 880 years ago, it became one of the most popular cities of the ancient China; during the century from 1843 to 1953, it was colonized by several “empires” including Britain, America, France, Japan, and so forth; it is now the “business-card-city” of China with 20 million permanent population and another 18 million floating population in 6,218 square kilometers area. Once every year, the city will be emptied by the outflow of immigrant workers and businessmen—as a tradition, they go back home for the Chinese new year festival. It will be re-pumped in a week when the break ends. To me, it has always been a city where, for these seven days, the boom and cracks of firework reverberate through; and for the rest 358 days, it is restless with incessant noises burst out from everything— the vehicles, the machines, the citizens.

Sound of any kind is captured between walls and magnified.Twenty years ago, I hear whistle from the ships at the harbors while sleeping at my old home at the other side of the city; these years, I can hear the chatting of some bus driver down the street while trying to sleep in my current apartment which is thirty stories above the ground.The city-organizers are optimistic and ambitious about utilizing its capacity. With the emerging problem of light and sound pollution, skyscrapers still keep rising from this small land since six decades ago. Every inch of it is either occupied by buildings and roads or to be occupied.Only by standing at the top of some skyscraper can I see a whole piece of sky—it is always fragmented if I just watch it from the ground as most human beings do. Looking down from the above, there was no open space in the city. Beneath the skyline there are millions of square boxes filled with either glass or black hollows in buildings and cracks among various constructions.

Decorating Lights began to proliferate about a decade ago. The city in daytime is sparkled with reflection from glass that spread all over, and is brightened with luminous public ornaments at night, which illustrates to the citizens the definition of redundancy twenty-four-seven. Colors of all kinds grew on trees alongside the main roads, in the bushes under the overpasses, on the roofs of buildings. I remembered that, in a short period of time, the window glass of my apartment in Shanghai was dyed with two layers of lights: a foggy gold faded from the upper edge of my window frame because of the yellow lights on the top of the building, and a creepy green beamed from the street lights . It has been literally an urban jungle for a while until the municipal government compromised to the pressing supply of electric power; it will only be a shining jungle during the national festivals. Public electronic facilities are maintained well in order to make sure that every light bulb in the city gives consistent performance in those days of celebration.
All of the urban “glamour,” the blinding lights and colors, the deafening huzzle and buzzle, the suffocating crowdedness were just as common as the dusty air that people breathe. The residents enjoy the luxury and privilege that the city brings to them while condemning the lack of autonomy and democracy regarding their living space. However, being precise, it is simply complaining, but nothing more. Being one of the people, I didn’t hear the roar of this city, nor did I see the pale reflection of sunshine that pierce through the entire place—not until my first trip outside the city around my eighteen’s.



The Mountain and The People
What the mountain taught me was that I was born a yellow child of the brown soil, but I grew up on grey concrete and steel. Natural area and wilderness are merely mysterious two-dimensional pictures to urban kids.

The yellow mountain is the first and the most magnificent mountain I’ve been to. It links together 72 peaks, and the highest peak reaches 1864.7 meter above sea level. The area is famous for its scenery with peculiarly shaped mountain tops, pine trees, cloud-sea, and so on. Being a popular natural preservation zone, the several peaks where tourists frequent have rather became transfer stations of travelers in tourists' seasons that span through most time of a year. Tourists don’t need to worry about haunted beasts or jumping monkeys in those spots as the chance of seeing them are tiny.

I didn’t get to see the essence of its landscape since I visited on a cloudy day with continuous drizzle. However, the weather on that day created flickering scenery of the peaks under the cover of fog and cloud, driving visitors to celebrate this crafted, persistent, and aged being that indicates a connection to the past and to the legend of reclusive ancient sages that almost every Chinese read about in classical literature. The eighteen-year-old me started planning seriously on reclusion in mountains like this for my distant retirement.


What fascinated me was not only the landscape, but also the people in those regions, those worlds that I only heard of. They live, grow, and die on the terraced fields, accompanied by green plants, colored rocks, cows, birds, and bugs. Simple lives. They looked content although their clothes are ragged and dusty; they sponsor themselves with organic food and natural underground water although they looked skinny and tanned (tan is not popular among Chinese); they inhale fresh air instead of smoke and ash; they own a whole piece of sky and land.A famous Chinese essayist calls them, those who came out from the land, the real Chinese people who have roots. It is his critique towards the Shanghainess—the arrogant, biased, anti-foreign citizens who were probably the only population that are completely urbanized in China last century, and who made his childhood bitter and himself into a Shanghainess in his memory.

He found that everything about the soil were absent in the city. People know dust but not earth, “green urban facilities” but not healthy trees, self-protection and assimilation but not open view and communication—the disconnection from the brown land is the crux of their snobbish value. Therefore, they, the Shanghainess, don’t share the idea of earth and hometown as most other Chinese do. Land to them is a misty concept, so is home. Citizens are given subtle privilege in working for a better life compared with most Chinese in other provinces. And so they are facilitated with the agent of “walking out”, but are lost and unsure in returning--the lack of emotional bond with their terrace endows them nothing but a vague cultural identity. Shanghainess are a bunch of children internalized with indirect and unconscious contempt for their own hometown.

The Old Lanes
With the national policy and attitude towards the city as the major direct-controlled municipality of the four by the central government, Shanghai has been stuffed to develop. Driven by the need of expanding domestic demand, everything keeps changing. Within the twenty years that I have been in the city, traditional constructions continue to disappear. The lanes that I used to live in were one of the places where a few old buildings remained.
The lane that my family used to live are constituted of three-storey-Japanese style houses which were built for Japanese generals and commanders in Shanghai during the second World War, but opened to citizens after the liberation of China. In the lane next to ours are houses of traditional Shanghai style, which are called Shi Ku Men.
In order to preserve those old architecture, the municipal government usually make them into governmental offices or accommodation. As long as something is recruited for governmental use, they face the destiny of being redecorated. However, most of them were given a new look, but not inner improvement. From appearance, no trace of the old times can be found unless in photos.


The Most Beautiful Campus in Forest's Eyes
When I first came to Miami University in Ohio, I was trying to find out why it was named as the most beautiful campus of the United States by Robert Forest. I think it’s the unity, or the harmonious combination of the architectural style and the landscape. I was surprised to find out that the buildings are repainted at least once per semester, and some inner facilities, such as window frames or handrails are repainted once every two months. However, the color remains the same. From inside out, the originality of the constructions are being maintained with the best effort of the school. The huge trees on campus are eye-catching as well. Almost all of them are in sizes that only hundred-year-old trees possess. I thought their scales were just results of the genes at first. While walking around them for the first time, I uttered “ Wow, they look like they are at least a hundred years old.”
“They are.” My American friend who accompanied me replied with confusion.
I felt ashamed immediately, and I was annoyed that I should swallow this feeling.

Re-viewing My Lane
The first time I go back to Shanghai from America, I decided to visit my old house again, and take as much photos as I could since the city was going to have a new look for the coming EXPO event. The city-runners always want every foreigner who comes to the city to see a “fresh” look of Shanghai; I usually don’t have faith in such effort. Unfortunately, the lane had already been repainted when I got there: the bricks that constructed every wall and every inch of the ground of the lane lost its loyal red. Instead, they are covered with some shade of grey, making the lane look dustier.

As I stood there being lost of thoughts, some resident of the lane passed me by. All of a sudden, he bowed to me several times. I thought he might have mistakened me as some foreign tourist since I have a professional camera in my hand. But the repeated action soon became shameful to me—the bows indicated that he thought of me as one of those offspring of the Japanese commanders. After the end of the Sino-Japanese war, the governments of the two countries joint effort in organizing descents of the Japanese army men to revisit the places where their ancestors had lived in Shanghai. My lane was one of them. And on his face, I saw vulnerability and pandering to the invader that shouldn't have existed in this age--it was insulting. He knew the history of the lane, and I suddenly became the only connection to the past in his eyes by appearance. Everything else was different aside from the false identity I represented.

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Some words in an essay I read haunted me. It is written by one of the American teachers working in the English department of the university I attended in Shanghai. He irritated lots of my classmates with his journal about HongKong: he criticizes the crowdedness of the area, and how air and sound pollution has made an irreversible damage of the environment. He also emphasizes in the essay that Shanghai will be the next soon. The essay was included in our textbook for an English writing class. My peers were strongly offended when reading it in the class, confronting with him about how it was all negativity that Western writers can report about China. However, I was silenced by being wordless for a refutation. The environmental crisis had no place in face of racial emotions.

Wendell Berry said in “Preserving Wilderness” that “the ability to do something is not reason enough to do it” (517). What is pity to me is that the ability to maintain the environment seldom shares priority on the list of national or international agendas. In case of my city, the continuous renewal of its appearance brushes away most local relics and the fragile connections that some of its citizens seize on as definitions of their belonging.