Word: whangpoo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...usually starts with a leisurely coffee at the Dong Hai (Eastern Sea) restaurant close to the Bund, Shanghai's main waterfront road. Others start with exercises on parallel bars in the People's Park. By midday boredom sets in. The unemployed pace the banks of the Huangpu (Whangpoo) River or just wander about aimlessly. There is a lot of window-shopping: by men at the new Jinxing television store on Nanjing Avenue, by women at the First Department Store's display of pleated skirts. In neither location are the displayed goods in stock. Other young people simply...
...pulled up at the elegant Cathay Hotel, where the eighth-floor dining room overlooking the Whangpoo River used to be famous for its gin gimlets and beef Stroganoff-only now it was the Peace Hotel, and the ornate front entrance had been sealed off. A great tapestry of Yenan and a red and gold Mao-thought dominated the lobby. The dim lighting, bare walls and slipcovers on the old plush furniture gave the Cathay-Peace the half-open look of a lavish summer resort trying to squeak through the winter. The reception desk, once manned by British-accented Chinese concierges...
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...
...found my old office. The walls were filthy. Had they ever been repainted? To the bafflement of an old man poring over a thick ledger at a desk where mine once was, I vainly searched the walls for a familiar mark or crack. Outside, the lights along the Whangpoo River below were just coming on, but the neon glitter of old Shanghai is gone forever...