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Shanghai as hub of the universe
ByToday, a Thursday, my wife and I had lunch with some good friends from Boston, passing through Shanghai after a few days in Beijing. Another set of American friends this coming Saturday, and different ones on Sunday. A friend from Europe passing through next Monday night.
Five times in six days is unusual:
on average, about twice a week we meet friends from previous lives who are visiting Shanghai. This is always great on our end. We're glad to see familiar faces; the "so what's it like?" conversations are useful occasions for thinking about what it actually is like here; plus visitors can often mule in requested supplies (eg: coffee) and take out envelopes to be mailed outside China, increasing the chances they'll ever reach destinations in the United States. Never having been that gregarious a guy, I feel newly sociable. I can only wonder how many visitors a person who actually has a lot of friends might receive.
But what does it say about connections between the U.S. and China that Americans keep streaming through, as if this were just another routine stop on the work-and-leisure circuit? I think it says something positive. As I hope future Atlantic articles will demonstrate, and as I have said directly to the person who came up with this phrase, I am no fan of the cliche/half-truth assertion that the world is flat. But certain parts of it are connected in ways they never were before; these (welcome) visits have been a surprising data-point about one aspect of the connectedness.
