Greetings from Shanghai

Exploring Shanghai is like what I imagine going into the Grand Canyon or Olduvai Gorge would be like. Not because of the great towering mass of buildings rising up everywhere around me, but because Shanghai reveals its history in layers. At the top are the futuristic superskyscrapers of Pudong, which recently completed construction of its World Financial Center, the planet's tallest building (for this week, at least; the city is at work on another building which will block the center from view when completed). At the bottom are the thousand-year-old stones and sculptures decorating the Yuyuan Gardens in Shanghai's Old Town, which were complimenting the gardens of high officials and wealthy merchants long before they became photo opportunities for an endless stream of tourists.

But it's the stuff in the middle that really interests me: all of the places in Shanghai that began as one thing and have been recycled and repurposed since then. There are the European-looking bank buildings of the Bund, built on opium money when the area was still part of the British Concession, seized and used as offices by the Communist government and later re-transformed into businesses run either by foreigners or by joint Chinese-foreign ventures. There are the old mansions and apartment buildings, seized and defaced by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, occupied by two or three generations of families and then either returned to the original landowners or turned into a museum in the late 1980s (apparently, there are disadvantages to owning a home that the government considers historically significant).

The "museumification" of places is a strange thing to see. This morning, I visited the "water village" of Zhujiajiao, a Ming-era town of stone buildings and red tile roofs astride a series of canals that's been almost entirely transformed into a tourist attraction (if you run past all of the shops fast enough, you can almost imagine that all the shop keepers are shouting "Hello! You want to buy something? Hello!" in one voice). It's hard to say if it's an historic site, and yet if Zhujiajiao hadn't been turned into a tourist trap there's a good chance nothing of the original buildings would have survived at all.

Shanghai's layers are horizontal as well as vertical. The center of the city is gleaming and modern and perpetually under construction. But just a couple of blocks from my 52-story hotel is a farmer's market, complete with cages of anxious chickens, a kiddie pool choked with tiny, squirming crabs and old men in sleeveless white T-shirts shouting at each other over games of mah-jongg. I like seeing that side of the city, and I wish I had the chance to see more of it: sometimes, like Las Vegas, it seems Shanghai is trying so hard to be everything to everyone that its own identity seems amorphous.

There's an emphasis on making money here that can be disconcerting. Last night I was walking on the Bund with the other journalists on our press tour and doing my best to avoid the hawkers selling roller skates, postcards and kites. One of the other journalists stopped to talk with a kite-seller, and suddenly five or six of them converged upon her, each shouting over the other with promises of better deals. The group was so concerned with making a sale that none of them noticed the strings of their kites converging with each other, until the whole thing tumbled to the ground in a tangled mess.

But it's important to keep things in perspective, I guess. I'm sure there are super-rich people here -- someone has to be able to afford to live in those giant skyscrapers they keep building, one after the other -- but most of the people I've talked with want money so they can have... a car. Or an extra room to their apartment. Or to be able to send their parents on a trip overseas. More than anything, people seem to want to be able to take care of the people who have taken care of them. There's nothing particularly mysterious or layered about that approach, but I'm still finding it fascinating.