If it weren’t for chicken feet in the convenience store

A few days before I left Raleigh, a friend sent a message suggesting that we have a meal “before I head off for my diet of chicken feet.” When I went this evening to buy batteries at the convenience store down the street, there among the assortment of beverages and snacks, right next to the bags of peanuts and cashews were snack portions of chicken feet. I drew the culinary-adventure line there and opted for an evening fix of chocolate. I write this with all due respect to any fans of snacking on chicken feet who are reading this post . . . but aside from the novelty, it seems a fitting snapshot for the mix of old and new China, which meet in Shanghai. In this city, the new is winning. Shanghai: the most modern city in an every modernizing China.

Faces on the street include a high proportion of Europeans and Americans who have moved here to be part of the phenomenal economic growth, opportunity and excitement of this evolving place with 10 percent economic growth in the past year. It is a high-paced, skyscraper skylined, glitzy shopping centered, multicultural cuisined, artsy city. In numerous moments I have looked around thinking, “This could be New York.” As much as I love New York, this is still wonderfully and uniquely Shanghai. Along with chicken feet in the convenience store, countless turns also remind me that this is still China. The scaffolding we walk under for the every prevalent building improvements is made of bamboo. Parks are filled with early morning tai chi groups and older Chinese who waltz to classical music for their daily exercise. Street vendors sell grilled, skewered squid. Aside from the occasional (and often amusing English translations) signs with Chinese characters are everywhere, unintelligible to my alphabet oriented brain.

Our host, Jim Arnold ’74, says when he first came to Shanghai 20 years ago the only transportation was bicycles. The streets of Shanghai still feature many bicycles but now they are joined by motorcycles and cars, taxicabs, buses and trucks. For the life of me, I can’t figure how a culture so prideful of order and adherence to rules dismisses all rules when it comes to traffic. Maybe it is having surmounted the numerous obstacles necessary to drive (a lottery for license plates, the considerable testing to be a licensed driver along with the requisite bribe of the testing official, and the expense and availability of an automobile) that gives drivers an I’m Not To Be Stopped mentality, but pedestrian right of way is a nonexistent concept here. Stoplights are somewhat optional. Four- or-two wheeled, the same nonchalance of road rules applies. You are as likely to be taken out by a bicycle as a car. Street crossing is an exercise in nimbleness, faith, and adrenaline.

This need for nimbleness doesn’t daunt the high fashion of Shanghai’s hip twenty and thirty-somethings. High heels dominate the feet of the young women negotiating the crosswalks of Shanghai.