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able to receive partial compensation, which she used for college tuition for
her daughter. Another of my mother's oldest friends complains bitterly about
the cost of the metro system, preferring the bus instead. Of course, as a U.S.-
based visitor to Shanghai, I love the trains, with the mobility they aff ord me,
and the clear maps that make the city accessible to me as a tourist. In theory,
I love the bus too, because bus systems are aimed at locals, particularly old
people and people with kids, but the reality is that I only ever was on the bus
with my mom and her friends. Once, on a bus ride with my mom and her
friend, a rural migrant to the city was transporting extremely large packages
and taking up several seats. One cranky Shanghainese lady complained
loudly about the rural migrants who didn't know how to behave (“low-
quality”) and was shouted down by other locals who pointed out that the
city relied on the labor of the migrants. h at was a moment that could have
happened only on a bus, as the migrant wouldn't have been allowed on the
metro (the packages were too large to fi t through the security screening
machine), a moment where public space and political discourse about
migrants in the city exploded into cacophonous view.
h e rather obvious point I'm trying to make here, is that “better” means
diff erent things to diff erent people, and people's ideas of whether something
was indeed an improvement may change over time. h e notion of “better-
ment” is not complete but contingent and highly contested. h e variability
of “better” is also quite literal in the expo case. Despite the prominence of
“betterment” in the o' cial expo slogan, the o' cial meaning changes based
on whether it is aimed at English- or Chinese-speaking audiences. h ere are
often multiple layers of meaning at the expo, evident in the actual transla-
tion of o' cial materials. In Chinese, the slogan is literally ৄؑ , 儻س੒ޓભړ !
Chengshi, rang shenghuo geng meihao! (roughly, “h
e city makes life better
or more beautiful”).
As one China scholar notes, the expo slogan and advertising simultane-
ously enact a discourse on modernity and “proper behavior,” and a notion of
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