FB friends can breath a sigh of relief. With this post I will have exhausted every comment and picture I have wanted to post with reference to the trip to East and South Asia. I had intended this last comment, about Shanghai, to accompany a picture of the Shanghai skyline, and we took many pictures of it. But it is impossible to find one that does any kind of justice to that project. Not even the professional ones one might find through Google Images. Certainly not the ones we took. There is the traditional skyline of the old Bund area of central Shanghai, behind which skycrapers have gone up in recent years. But the really high skyline is not there. Rather, it is across the Huang Pu River, in the Pudong district. That is where the 102 story building stands (now the worlds second tallest). And the building that everyone calls the bottle opener because the top of it is shaped like the instrument for popping beer caps. And extending for many miles out into the suburbs there are skycraper apartments for many of the 23 million who call Shanghai home. The Shanghai skyline is beautiful by day, but more so at night. We were impressed on this trip by several of the cities we saw. Notably, Hong Kong, Ho Chi Minh, and Bangkok, though also (in their own way) Seoul and Beijing and Taipei. But none of them match Shanghai IMHO. In fact, I think todays Shanghai, the commercial Big Apple of China (Chinas NYC just as Beijing is Chinas DC) ranks now as the worlds most splendid city (of course I havent come close to seeing them all). Shanghai certainly has its problems, pollution being among the foremost; though even in that, it seems to do much better than cities to its north, and especially better than Beijing. Shanghai is a city with many public parks, flower boxes, and green spaces. And, even though I didnt necessarily feel it so while there, Shanghai is in some sense a hometown of mine (as for my family). Funded by a Fulbright-Hayes grant, a group of South Carolina academics led by Melford Wilson Jr spent the major portion of the summer of 1988 in China, half of our time there spent in residence at Shanghai International Studies University. More to the point, as some of you know, I am the last-born member of a missionary family. I was 2 years old the last time my family went to China for that purpose and 4 when we left as the Communist victory was being completed in the post-WW 2 Chinese Civil War (or, as that is covered in contemporary China, the liberation neared). The familys previous mission assignments had been in Kaifeng, far to the north and west of Shanghai and west of Beijing. But because of the Civil War, Shanghai was where we lived and my parents worked this last time. Shanghai has a special place in my heart for that reason. And for another reason as well. Because he was an American, my father was arrested after Pearl Harbor by the Japanese occupiers of China and he spent a year imprisoned in a Japanese concentration camp. He and many other Americans and other westerners were released in 1943 in a prisoner exchange with the Japanese (one of only two such exchanges that took place during the war). He rejoined his wife (my Mom) and my older brothers in the U.S. Born in 1944, I am gratified and grateful for the timing of that prisoner exchange! My fathers concentration camp was in the Pudong district. Walking around that region of Shanghai, now gleaming and filled with the citys highest buildings, my brother Paul Gillespie and I marveled as we wondered what our father would think about what the place has become!
Posted on: Sat, 05 Apr 2014 11:33:41 +0000
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