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fi rst focal points of major urban redevelopment. My mother grew up a block
from the famed Bund, in what is now a fancy department store in the famous
Nanjing Lu shopping district, equivalent to New York City's Times Square.
My grandfather worked as a horse veterinarian at the Shanghai Race Club,
long a symbol of Western decadence, racial exclusion, and British imperial-
ism, symbolically “cleansed” after the Revolution as the “People's Square.”
Because of his association with the racetrack, my grandfather left for Hong
Kong, and his family soon followed. After three decades away from Shang-
hai, my mother tracked down her schoolmates, all of whom had grown up
within a block of her. None of them still lived in the area, the last among
them pushed out during the 1990s rehousing boom, and my mom's apart-
ment building is now the site of a fancy department store.
One exception is my mom's best friend's brother, who still lives in the
apartment they grew up in, in a building designed by a French architect.
Behind the façade and the bustle of tourists on their way to the Bund, he still
lives with his wife and teenage daughter in a single room about ten feet by
twenty feet, using one of about fi fteen cooking stoves out on the communal
hallway, and a single toilet and shower for the fi fty residents on that fl oor to
share. If Girard and Burtynsky revel in the large-scale sadness of old build-
ings tossed out, my mother's friend's experiences indicate perhaps why
some Shanghainese are a bit more unsentimental about relocation and
change, especially if it means more money, a little more privacy, and
cleanliness.
For the younger generation who lived their entire lives in the context of
such constant destruction and construction, the piles of rubble and migrant
workers living in the buildings they are paid to take apart are their norm and
their reality. One of the best documentations of this reality is called
Growing
Up with Shanghai,
a series of soundwalks with young Shanghainese who were
born and raised during the rapid modernization of their city in the 1980s and
1990s.
83
h
is series of sound recordings follows Shanghainese young people
