Day 6,
September 23
Hongqiao Road and Yanan Elevated Road run parallel to each other, but like parallel lines embedded in projective space, they eventually intersect at infinity — and when they do meet, it’s a massive world consuming intersection.
I’ve run Yanan Road before both ways, deep into the core of the city, and to the airport at what feels like The Edge of Civilization. All of the elevated highways in Shanghai have a non-highway road running beneath them, which makes them nice to run on, especially once you leave the confines of the Inner Ring Road and intersections grow less common. Today was my first time running Hongqiao Road (though I'd walked and biked to the subway station there before). I found it much nicer. I got on it at the intersection with Huaihai Road, which I know primarily as the main road cutting through the French Concession, though it continues into Changning district. Trees line the streets, dropping leaves over crumbling sidewalks beneath halfway constructed highrises. Once you turn onto Hongqiao road, there are parks on your right for much of the stretch to the intersection with Yanan Elevated Road. Whenever I got stuck at a red light I’d turn right and run towards Yanan Road, crossing the street when there’s a chance, then turning back. I passed shopping centers that looked like flying saucers, filled with restaurants that I’m sure have nothing vegetarian except for rice. If I want to see what they look on the inside, I’ll have to get one of my meat loving companions to go with me, then make them uncomfortable by eating almost nothing while they have a massive feast.
Shanghai always feels most lovely to me a few hours after it’s rained, before the sun emerges from the clouds. Clear days here feel so unnatural. Maybe this is just me. I’ve always hated the sun, no matter where I lived. But the fact that the sun is much rarer here makes me hate it all the more when it occasionally shows its face. The best days are the inhumanely humid and hot cloudy days. That’s when running actually feels like something.
At the big intersection, I neither turned on to Yanan Road nor stayed on Hongqiao. Instead I got on Gubei road. I’d been here before, late at night, looking for a hamburger place with a veggie burger on the menu. I couldn’t find it. The bike I got on to go back had some problem where you couldn’t stop pedaling: the pedals would push your feet forward. I found this completely unbearable. I switched bikes as soon as I could. The journey there and back passed many woody hills. I wanted to see it during the daytime. I of course should have learned by now that all the parks here are mere simulations of wilderness, and that whenever I actually run by them or enter them, I’m just overcome by how small they are. Still, it’s a nicer place than many to run.
Today on Gubei Road, running back to Hongqiao, I encountered that sudden sensation of simulation I’ve encountered intermittently, here in Shanghai. This is new to me. I never felt this feeling of unreality in Beijing. In fact, Beijing felt punishingly real — realer than anything I’d encountered up to then. Maybe it’s simply because Beijing was my first taste of a truly big city, and I’d been under the impression for most of my life that only cities are big real — a certain kind of aspirational elitism one absorbs from the right sorts of media.
Maybe the early months of the pandemic did something to my brain. I remember having a dream where, in order to alleviate diplomatic tensions between the two countries, China and America agreed to trade cities: China would get New York and America would get Shanghai. The brightest minds of both America and China spent worked at a plan to uproot these two cities from the earth and transported them across two oceans to their new locations. A side effect of this massive engineering project was that the two cities acquired giant domes around them. Everyone in the outer suburbs of either of the cities was granted an apartment in the wall making up the dome.
I took the bus to Shanghai as soon as I could. For some reason Kyoko Koizumi went with me. We took an elevator up one of the domes, looking for a convenience store. I was so excited. It’d been so long since I’d been in an elevator, and now I was standing in a whole world of elevators. I was never going to leave those dome, even though I had no where to stay. It didn’t matter. I’d find a way. I’m sure Kyoko Koizumi would have no problem getting herself an apartment here. Even trapped indoors, in a dome, I had a sense of freedom I hadn’t felt in years. I woke up, hugging onto that feeling of elation, slowly coming to the realization I was still on the floor, covered in sweat, in my mom’s air-conditioner-less house in Baltimore.