Word: shanghaiing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...last week in Shanghai in May of 1949 was spent watching the city go through its final agonies before Mao's forces swept in. A public execution of six black-marketeers, scapegoats of the collapsing economy, was held at the railroad station. To cover it, I had to accompany the victims in the police paddy wagon as it careened through the tangle of traffic on Nanking Road, the siren wailing and the doomed men screaming for mercy. At the station the victims were dumped into the street and then shot through the head, one by one, pointblank...
While the center of Shanghai has added not one new building to its skyline, the outskirts have been made over completely. Row upon row of two-and three-story gray cement apartment buildings link the city with the outlying farm land. The apartments built during the past 15 years replace the vast tracts of squatters' huts of the old days...
Built right into each apartment complex are clinics, schools, grocery shops and usually some light industry. Like most people in Shanghai, the Chengs enjoy telephone service of a sort. On incoming calls a messenger from the telephone service center appears at the Chengs' door. The messenger fee is 1½?. Then, by paying another 2? at the service center a couple of blocks away, Cheng can connect with the calling party, provided the caller has stayed put at his own telephone center...
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...
...Toll Bridge. One day I decided to repeat my old walk to work from the Broadway Mansions, renamed Shanghai Mansions, to my former office on the Bund. An unsmiling crowd of 200 or 300 fell in behind. We trekked over the Garden Bridge, now the "No-Toll Bridge." The Soochow Creek below smelled as bad as ever and was jammed with the same sampans that have been used to unload freighters ever since Shanghai was opened to foreign shipping in 1842 after the Opium...