nineteenth-century wet version of O’Hare Airport. Shanghai is still the largest and richest city on the mainland—even though it isn’t really Chinese and dates back only 156 years in a country that eats eggs that old. Shanghai has grown from a piffling village to a metropolis with a population of 13.4 million. Or so says my 1996 guidebook—outdated while still on the press. The 1996 official estimate was 16 million. Wrong, too. The city government has since decided that 17 million people is closer to the mark. But no one keeps pace with Shanghai. I had a tourist map so current that the copyright was for the next year. I went to the spot marked Shanghai Art Museum, and the museum was gone. They’d sold the museum. A department store was going up in its place. It took me two days to find the new art museum, though it’s a whopping-big round thing with loops on the top like a granite wok—perfect for stir-frys on Jupiter. I was usually lost in Shanghai, despite the fact that the main part of the city is no larger than midtown Manhattan and is laid out more or less on a grid. Getting lost in right-angled intersections with street signs in English produces a chill of embarrassment and a hint of Alzheimer’s-to-be, like getting lost in a Kmart. And, indeed, familiar brand names were everywhere. The very words for foreign goods are enough to conjure with. The most common form of advertising is just a product’s moniker in large roman letters, as if Toyota had a billboard in Times Square reading “ .” Shanghai buses carry so many logos, they look like NASCAR Chevys. Every lamppost seems to be named after a soft drink. The new buildings in Shanghai are like giant pages in an Ugly Man-made Materials catalog. They are sheathed in kitchen-sink stainless steel, storm-door aluminum, translucent-plastic disco flooring, and vast expanses of chrome and smoked glass—vertical ’70s coffee tables crying out for a Mount Rushmore noseful of cocaine and a razor blade the size of an airplane wing. Many structures are covered in ceramic tiles like giant inside-out shower stalls. Some have random chunks of classical decoration—pediments, friezes, Doric columns—pasted to minimalist boxes, as if the Parthenon had been converted to ministorage units. Others aspire to be Legoland built from Legos as big as 7-Elevens. And one spherical corporate HQ on a cubic plinth buttressed by hulking triangles managed to be grim, silly, monumental, and cute all at once —the Tomb of Hello Kitty.
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