Word: shan
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After 25 years there were striking changes in the people of Shanghai. In the old days, it was hard for a foreigner to walk along the Bund-the wide promenade along the Whangpoo, which has been renamed Chung Shan Road -without a procession of beggars, cripples and the just plain curious following behind. Walking to work in the old days, I had developed my own special clientele of beggars who got paid off each day, and who in return fended off the other beggars. Now the beggars and cripples were gone, but the ranks of the curious had grown...
...walked past Whangpoo Park, which until 1928 bore the sign, NO DOGS OR CHINESE ALLOWED. The main part of Chung Shan Road pulsates with exercisers: sword dancers, slow-motion shadowboxers practicing the ancient art of tai chi chuan, joggers, tumblers, wrestlers and a few elderly gentlemen who simply lean against a tree and let one leg swing free. The skilled performers draw a great collar of spectators around them. Study the faces. They are the young men and women of the new China, calm, well fed, drably dressed and always surprised at the sight of a foreigner. Only...
Finally, at No. 17 Chung Shan Road, there stood the gray stone building where TIME and LIFE had their offices on the sixth floor. I peered in through a grille and saw huge portraits of Lenin, Marx and Mao. The heavy bronze gates in the doorway of the building looked just the same. Even the faded gold mosaic of the lobby was just a shade grimier. Peering into the vestibule, I could see the rheumatic old elevators, still alive but having more difficulty than ever getting upstairs...
...scientific thoughts of the late Albeit Einstein, there were bits of less technical information to be gleaned: the author of E=m 2 ate eggs and drank tomato juice (he spilled some on his work) and bequeathed to history an unexplained (and here freely translated) bit of verse: I shan't be absent, little snookie, Though I am not a sugar cookie; What life has brought you up to now May sweeten the farewell somehow...
Premarital sex is taboo in China, and the expression of love and affection is extremely restrained. You rarely see boys and girls together, although there were a few couples strolling on Chung-shan Road along the Whangpoo River in Shanghai. Boy meets girl at school or on the job, or at a people's culture palace. All the Chinese men I met said that that was where they had met their wives. They laughed when I asked them if they ever said "I love you" to their wives. "That is not necessary," answered the editor of a Shanghai newspaper...