From sunlight streaming through drooping, wind-blown branches of the hundred-year-old willow in our neighborhood park to neon lettering gleaming in the night amongst sleek, window reflections of its sky-reaching edifices in our “backyard,” Shanghai manifests a personification of the complex amalgamation of the East and West, the noise and serenity, and the tradition and industrialization. Influenced by cultures across the world, the city remains not only a dense cluster of rigid buildings, but a being of its own, bursting with life past its “edges,” and after my dad started working there last year, I felt this vitality and intricacy in each moment of my weeks in this urban hub as my visits to Shanghai filled with experiences defined not only by the complexities of the city’s culture, but also the complexities of my dad’s character and story.
My first stay back was full of festivities. As red lanterns and paper dragons fluttered in the February winds, families all over the city gathered to spend Chinese New Year together in celebration of cultural pride imbued by Chinese values of benevolence, loyalty, and tradition. Our own family reunited in my dad’s apartment with all our relatives traveling from across the country. Our days filled with family card games and elaborate feasts, bantering in playful competition and chatting over aromatic Chinese dishes that swirled before us in blends of red, oranges, and greens. Whether it was listening to his mom lecture him about taking his medicine or watching his older sister make sure we all had our favorite dishes on the dinner table, seeing my dad and his family together showed me hints of the people that had influenced and cared for him most in youth. Growing up in two countries vastly different in culture on two sides of the world, I also saw echoes of my own upbringing as an Asian-American in my dad’s upbringing as a Chinese native, as well as the Eastern emphasis on family and respect contrasting the Western emphasis on the individual and independence. This blend of Chinese and American values not only reflects my family’s journey, but also mirrors a fusion of tradition and modernity that defines Shanghai, where the old and new coexist in constant cultural evolution.
My second time back was full of history. During our strolls down Shanghai’s historical streets on shopping sprees and sightseeing adventures, my dad showed me at greater depth this intersection of Eastern and Western ideology and technology. He shared stories of how Shanghai, originally open as an international settlement after the First Opium War, grew to be the most westernized Chinese city, incorporating the most advanced Western technology and pushing back against traditional Chinese cultural discouragement of trade and monetary discussions, and how it also experienced the greatest self-industrialization and endogenous growth. Evident in an e-commerce so expansive we found it difficult to get around without a phone and in the innovative, avant-garde stores we visited on Wukang Road, the city’s rapid urbanization and modernization shapes every aspect of life in Shanghai. Walking past the old residence of a high-ranking Qing Dynasty viceroy, peering up the apartment of the US-educated prime minister of the Republic of China during the Japanese occupation in the 1930s who was assasinated by the KMT, and dining in the old mansion of a 1900’s mafia kingpin, I witnessed how this dynamic evolution of Shanghai’s layered social, cultural, and political history propelled the city towards its modern urbanization today while growing closer with my dad as I saw his love of learning and research in his free time.
During my third and longest visit just this January, I finally gained glances of my dad’s daily life in a city without the noise of his family. At his office, I watched him in his role as a leader, getting glimpses of the ways his work stress affected him, and simultaneously gained a more nuanced understanding of the city’s work culture, witnessing the high pressures of young adults in their demanding, unstable work-lives. Mirroring the ambition and uncertainty of other global megacities, these career tensions further echoed in my conversations with taxi drivers who shared their harsh schedules and holidays away from home. At company pickleball games, I watched my dad still search for that noise of family as he rallied his teams together, while noticing the way younger employees tiptoed around their bosses. As I visited his world outside of parenthood, these intricate interactions of work and personal relationships grew apparent not only in my dad’s life, but also in Shanghai’s culture and society that was shaped by these individuals of diverse stories.
Whether it was lighting fireworks on the city’s outskirts, shuffling through crowded, ten-story malls, or strolling past aged architecture, Shanghai revealed its embodiment of a coexistence of traditional and modern ideologies rooted in deep entanglements of the East and the West. And though the distance between us was farther than ever, in this city, I felt closer to my dad than ever as I understood him more deeply as not only a parent but a man deserving of empathy and compassion for his imperfections.
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