During a recent visit to Shanghai I found myself strolling in Xujiahui park, a few blocks from one of the city's busiest shopping districts. It was a cold, clear day, and school had just let out.
I watched as children flooded the park. One of them, a little boy probably no more than eight years old, wearing a blue school uniform with a red neckerchief, approached me. His grandmother walked a few paces behind him. As they passed, the little boy squared himself, craned his neck so he could address me directly, and said, as though he were an ambassador in a diplomatic exchange, "Good afternoon!" in perfect English.
"Good afternoon," I replied.
The proud little boy, who seemed as if he had been waiting forever to speak English to a Westerner, smiled widely. His grandmother laughed. And we all went on our way.
I recalled that moment the other day, when I read another story on Americans' growing pessimism about the future. Just as large majorities of Americans say their country is headed in the wrong direction, much of the world is moving in the direction of America.
I read in my guidebook that close to a quarter of the world's construction cranes operate inside Shanghai city limits. You can walk along the Bund, the old imperial cantonment on the banks of the Huangpu River, and stare across the water at the crystalline towers of Pudong, a neighborhood that less than 20 years ago was farmland. Soon Pudong will be home to two of the ten tallest buildings in the world. The Shanghainese are building a thoroughly postmodern megalopolis that doesn't look or feel anything like the Forbidden City. It doesn't look or feel like a Soviet industrial center either. It looks and feels like New York.
American kitsch culture is there, too. One night we had dinner with Chinese friends who were about to get married. As the conversation turned to the upcoming festivities the bridegroom produced a laptop from his backpack and placed it on the table. He wanted to show us a slideshow they had made for the wedding. The slickly produced display featured the happy couple in Western wedding costume, frolicking against computer-generated backgrounds to the tune of the California R&B group All-4-One's "I Swear." The bride-to-be bobbed her head to the music. "I like this song," she said in Mandarin.
You go shopping and feel like you never left home. At a DVD kiosk in the former French Concession I bought the first season of Lost for-between you and me-$20. When I handed the DVD to the clerk he nodded in approval and said, in English, "Good show."
"That's what I hear," I said.
He paused and said, "You watch Prison Break?"
A friend recommended I visit Plaza 66, a gleaming new mall in the heart of the city. Its several floors are filled with luxury goods from across the globe, though most of the brands are Western: Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Zegna, Hugo Boss, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Celine, and Prada, to name a few. For Shanghai's wealthy, Western goods mean status.
But it's not just the super-rich who like Western things. On the outskirts of People's Park is a franchise of Häagen-Dazs ice cream (founded in the Bronx) that had a line out the door on a bone-chilling New Year's Eve. Nearby is a Starbucks, one of half a dozen I saw in Shanghai. Across the way from Starbucks is a McDonald's. Not far from that is a Pizza Hut. Why anyone would eat at Pizza Hut when you can get fresh xiaolongbao (dumplings) and baotze (steamed buns with vegetable or pork filling) for next to nothing is a mystery to me. Yet each of the U.S. franchises was packed with young Shanghainese.
Not everything is Western and brand new, of course. Turn off a busy street into a seemingly empty alleyway, and you soon find yourself in the middle of a community of Chinese, some of whom are reading the paper, or doing the wash, or plucking the feathers from ducks. Old men gather in circles around tables watching their friends play checkers. The alleys are gray and dirtier than the boulevards. The old apartment buildings there will likely be demolished.
A lot of history will vanish with them. One day after lunch, walking down an alley, we came upon a section of concrete wall on which many years ago someone had scrawled in red, "Long Live Chairman Mao!" The flaky graffito summoned up China's tumultuous past. But at that moment the only people in the alley who betrayed the slightest interest in this political relic were two Americans bundled up in winter coats and gloves.
MATTHEW CONTINETTI