The Paris of the East

Shanghai, China and St. Louis, Missouri share very little in common. But one thing they do share is the dubious recognition of having once been a great city.

In 1903, St. Louis was the 3rd largest city in the quickly growing United States. Behind only New York City and Philadelphia, St. Louis was a powerhouse in the Midwest. Major businesses, important people and grand homes graced its streets. And then Chicago bought into trains, what the folks in St. Louis saw as a passing fad. And it was all downhill from there.

In the 1930s, Shanghai was known as the Paris of the East. Full of expatriates living unpoliced and decadent lives, and awash with opium, Shanghai was a center of all things desirable - legal and not.

The difference is that although St. Louis has modernized along with the United States, it has stayed in the early 1900s in attitude and progressive action. St. Louis is a city of beautiful mansions built over 100 years ago - mansions which are falling down, split into boarding houses, and often have the heat turned off. St. Louis is no longer a great city.

Shanghai, as a part of The People's Republic of China, seems to have stopped modernizing with all of the upheaval and turmoil of the 20th century. Business and news in China are much akin to the industrial age in America. But modernization is now happening at warp speed in Shanghai, and that's the key difference. The leadership of Shanghai is keen to regain their status as a city worth recognizing.

So I find myself frequently frustrated with people - not because of cultural differences, but because they are trying to provide services they are wholly unaccustomed to.

Stores, in an effort to look perfectly polished and well stocked, will have staff stocking shelves in the middle of the day. I have often had to gently push a staff person out of my way, because they found it more important to organize their shelves than to make their products available to me as a customer.

Restaurants, in an effort to sparkle, will clean up before you've finished. Eating dinner in a cafeteria this evening, S-- worked on a dish of rice. No surprise, much of the rice wound up on the floor. Before we were halfway through our meal, a staff person was on the floor at our table, pushing our stroller into the aisle and bumping our legs in an effort to clean the rice off of the floor.

Modernization is happening very quickly, and often service is sacrificed for surface presentation.

On another vein, we took a walk through the former French Concession this afternoon. My understanding of Shanghai history is that after China lost the Opium Wars around the turn of the century, England took a few chunks of land for their own. They invited all of their buddies to do the same. In the early 1900s, Shanghai had large swaths of land that were governed as embassies are - by foreign leaders tens of thousands of miles away. The French Concession lied in the heart of the city, and was the most beautiful. Mansions of French colonial architecture with lovely gardens surrounding them still lie at the heart of this city.

What saved some of these mansions was the people in power during Communism. Those calling for equality among the people also holed up in 4-story villas lavishly built by their former occupying powers. But, much like St. Louis, most of them became boarding houses and eventually fell into disrepair. A stroll through the former French Concession is a lovely walk down tree-lined streets and through large parks. On some stretches, the buildings are so far removed from their former splendor that you have to look for quite some time to realize what they once were. These former mansions look more like rambling tenements, with entire families living in each room and drying laundry flapping out most windows. In the same neighborhood, mansions are open as museums - Patriotic Sites - and rows of homes are being renovated, no doubt to be sold or rented in Shanghai's sky-rocketing real estate business.