This is the Shanghai I remember.
Fifteen years and hundreds of glassy skyscrapers later, the city on this postcard exists no more.
Notice the streets: few cars, some buses, and dozens of bicycles.
As rustic as Shanghai was back then, it was still the most cosmopolitan city in China. Every time we stopped in Shanghai that summer, I felt like I was returning to a familiar friend.
I sent this postcard to my dad’s mother in August of 1995. Since I wrote mostly about the weather, I didn’t bother to include the back of the postcard here. (I wrote about the weather because I didn’t want to alarm her by telling the truth–I was having a rough summer and couldn’t wait to return to Hong Kong–but that’ll have to wait for my memoir.)
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