Currently reading: The Great Chinese Revolution, 1800-1985 by John King Fairbank; Oracle Bones, by Peter Hessler; Cries in the Drizzle, by Yu Hua. Plus articles by Mark Selden, Elizabeth Perry.

This morning I visited Jing’an Temple. Lining the longest side of the temple were a series of shops devoted to everything from mobile phones to what looked and smelled like very expensive gelato. Next door to Jing’an is a massive high-scale shopping complex which, despite its obvious seniority to most buildings in the area, seems to have maintained its cache. It smacks of older money than the newest complexes, perhaps part of the first generation of international indoor malls. Once inside, I tried several times and from several spots to take a picture. Each time a guard appeared and simply said “No. No pictures.” I wondered if Jing’an were just a decoy and I had found the real temple.

I spent the afternoon in Zhongshan park, reading. It was as lovely a day as I’ve seen in Shanghai, with a relaxing breeze and light skies. I haven’t yet witnessed a blue sky, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed. At Zhongshan park I struck up a halting conversation in Chinese with a young man from Sichuan province. Mostly we talked about how good Sichuanese food is, but then he started asking me about America. After a few minutes we parted ways, but before leaving he told me (from what I understood) that he thought China and America were the same (“yiyang”). The comment was a little out of the blue, and I didn’t get a chance to follow up. He said he loved Shanghai; he thought it was a very beautiful city. I agreed.

Several comments made to me on this blog (or in private about this blog) have meant a lot to me and been very helpful for thinking about my time here in Shanghai. I’m now two weeks into my stay, and it feels like it’s gone by in a heartbeat. I’ve learned a lot about the city, but I’m constantly reminded of a comment Professor Sherman Cochran made once in class, that after 50-odd years of studying China he still felt he hadn’t quite grasped it, that something eluded him. At two weeks, something would be seriously wrong if this comment didn’t resonate with me, but even after so short a time here I think I’m beginning to get an idea of what exactly he meant. China and Shanghai may forever be just beyond my understanding; I may always lack the kind of immanent, visceral understanding of this place that, to a limited extent, I can claim with America. There are whole worlds of American experience that I couldn’t possibly understand, but I did grow up and come into consciousness as my own person ensconced in American literature, history, politics and myth. That’s what it takes to get under the skin of a place, and the consequences of that frighten and excite me. Do I think professor Cochran feels any less fulfilled because he devoted his life to the study of a place he will die not understanding? No, probably just the opposite. But I wonder if when he set out he fully believed he would one day arrive. I wonder if anyone has the luxury of that illusion today.

I will hazard one comment: one thing that young people in Shanghai seem to have in common with many young people in America is a sense of being released from History’s demands. For the generation of Americans born on the eve of the “end of history” (a claim whose absurdity doesn’t change the fact that it has exerted massive ideological force on many of our understanding of the last 20 years), History is something we imbibe intellectually but have little tangible contact with. The closest I have come to History in America is my parent’s stories about the late 1960’s, through which I once vicariously lived the excitement of that time. For the most part, we experience the great events of the recent past through books and television programs; they remain neatly contained in the past, safely prevented by time from spilling over into the present. Sadly, I don’t experience September 11th or the War in Iraq as History, but as an image repeated so many times as to have no meaning. No doubt this is due to the peculiarities of my own situation and these sentiments won’t be shared by others, but I know from countless conversations that at least a few other young Americans feel similarly.

In Shanghai I am confronted with History all over, and in many different forms. But I’m most interested in disavowed history, which there’s a lot of. Most young people I’ve talked to in Shanghai don’t seem to care at all about China’s revolutionary legacy. They say they basically respect Mao, but beyond that they don’t seem to have put a whole lot of thought into it. Two people, when I asked about the Tienanmen Protests, simply shrugged. I asked if the topic was taboo, and they said: Sort of, yeah, but it’s just not something we think about. When I asked one girl what she thought about Shanghai’s revolutionary history and its various powerful labor movements, she chuckled, told me I ask silly questions and changed the subject. I pose these anecdotes not to criticize young people in Shanghai for being so depoliticized, but to ask: what does it mean for a city (or country) to change so much and so many times that such seemingly powerful legacies and narratives can be met with such passing indifference? After all, China’s revolutionary legacy seems to me not just one narrative among others in China’s recent history, but *the* narrative. As Wang Hui says, the very idea of modernity in China is so intimately linked with political revolution that the process of severing that tie will take a tremendous amount of intellectual/ideological work.

I want to understand how people in general relate to China’s 20th century, but I’m most interested in learning from and about young people. So far, this has proved very difficult: the clearest and most thoughtful voices either come from beyond China or beyond the youth.