Shanghai Dusk
A city strains to wake from decades of unintended slumber, even as inevitable twilight draws near once more. Radiating from a roundabout diligently manicured without need for religion, streets gleam with the cool misty spray of a day’s resolute precipitation, with the collective sweat of a hundred thousand peddlers and twenty thousand accelerator-pumping, brake-jamming taxicab purveyors hurling themselves across the thoroughfares of hope and prosperity. Elderly traffic wardens, comfortably clad in luminous orange all-weather outfits, hurl indignant official insults at imperious violators of pedestrian decorum, whistling ear-piercing judgements upon those officially condemned.
On pret-a-porter no-cars-please thronging boulevards, the occasional begging mother with babe-in-arms and kowtowing amputee beseech society with their screamed silence, neighbours to pret-a-manger random meat-skewer booths. Uniformed security periodically spit below stern metal-pole signs forbidding the same; begloved concierges defend faux marble gates to lush Philippe Starck amenities and free hotel washrooms with L’Occitane en Provence handwash and moisturiser. A thousand construction sites consume a tenfold can-do cement-mixers, ambitious cranes and militant pile-drivers, each pounding a register of the waking dragon long forgotten by the world.
Further off the beaten core, perhaps a million lives thrive within discreet alleys off a thousand mysterious streets, pockmarked by nouvelle art-décor home-furnishing boutiques the embassies of European industry magnates, and by emerging local pretenders gleefully dethroning them of the British India/Crate & Barrel/Pottery Barn ilk (and at a fraction of the cost too!)
Within towering glass-cased monumental exhibitions of the finest architecture and interior design humanity has to offer, studious practitioners of ultra-current molecular cuisine and Iron Chefdom sculpt monumental feats of gourmetdom, gulped down by one-part appreciative globe-trotting connoisseurs, one-part keen wannabe Ferragamo-wearing applicants to international citizenry.
Life below teems and seethes; up here the wind howls its nocturnal anthem. A city waits another day, and dreams its next dawn.
- Shanghai, the late 2000s.
