A distinct sound echoes through Shanghai. From the moment flight UA193 touched down, the pace of the city absorbed me. Genial yet short-fused taxi drivers barked in rapid-fire Shanghainese, creating a newfound sense of urgency, while cigarette smoke clung to the leather seats and the monotone hum of electric vehicles drifted into the night. Shanghai has a kind of “quiet chaos” to it. It offered a respite from Western living, yet the familiar comfort of the Bund’s Western vestiges and the uncertainty of China’s many wonders welcomed me with open arms. This push and pull kept returning throughout my first three weeks here. On the first day of orientation at NYU Shanghai, still badly jet-lagged, I heard something that has stayed with me: Take a moment to hear Shanghai, breathe it. Hug it. And once you’re done savoring it, tell me: what do you understand more about it now than you did before you took this leap of faith? It was Ted Magder’s, Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, call to action: to go beyond the Oriental Pearl Tower and the skyscrapers, and rather than just talk about Shanghai and China, to immerse myself in the once-in-a-lifetime experience of living here for a semester. This essay is one step in that direction.
Before Shanghai, my only glimpse of China came in May 2025, when 80 Duke students, including me, were flown out for just nine days to experience a civilization the West has long known mostly through fables and cautionary tales. We experienced China through distinct cultural elements: fine dining on a lazy Susan in Nanjing, reverence for prosperity beneath the crisp skin of Peking duck, and a strong sense of community in a dragon dance. We traced the annals of Chinese history through Suzhou, Nanjing, and Beijing, whose relics serve as cultural touchstones for more than a billion Chinese people and their diaspora. Frankly, I came out with more questions than answers. For the past year, I tried to quench my curiosity by reading US foreign policy wonks, teaching myself Chinese history, writing extensively about it, and quoting Henry Kissinger’s On China whenever someone mentioned China’s past. Safe to say, my hubris led me to expect Shanghai to confirm my preconceived, big-picture view of China: an old agrarian culture transformed by the arrival of the West and rebuilt under the guidance of the Communist Party of China and its local governments. It turns out Shanghai is more than a Chinese rendering of modernity. I have learned to think of it as one piece of a larger Chinese civilization, whose geography, culture, and history have challenged me to get off my pedestal and see the city with humility, attentive to the generations that shaped its language and food.
Up close, Shanghai is a mosaic of colonial influence and economic development that together made it a global metropolis. Reflecting on the city led me back to the Greeks. When Zeno of Citium asked the oracle how to live the best life, he was told to “take on the complexion of the dead,” which he understood as a call to study the ancients. Following the same advice, I started with Shanghai’s past: the l loose fishing communities along the muddy banks of the Yangzi River. After the British and French carved out concessions in the 1840s, their districts filled with Gothic and Art Deco edifices that welcomed Russian and Jewish émigrés and, in 1921, hosted the founding congress of the Chinese Communist Party, a reminder of Shanghai’s tenuous relationship with both the West and the rest of China. Walking into the House of Roosevelt on the Bund with our class professor, who preferred to go by Ray, and my classmates, I experienced this complex relationship in the stories Douglon, general manager of the House of Roosevelt, told about his father’s business ventures, where colonial influence stitched promise and peril into the city’s economic tapestry, and where all nationalities had a stake in Shanghai’s future. Shanghai’s status as the world’s busiest container port, along with a long history I have yet to fully uncover, is a source of pride for its people. The Chinese 成语 (idiom) 愚公移山, about a foolish old man who moves mountains through sheer persistence, suggests that the heart of Shanghai’s economic dynamism is a perseverance written into the heritage it shares with the rest of China.
History and economic development can explain a city, but a civilization spanning 4,000 years can’t be captured through one lens. Seeing cultures, dialects, and generations coexist pointed me toward something deeper: harmony. If Shanghai’s conflicted past has taught me anything, it is that the city holds together things that seem like they shouldn’t fit: grandiose architecture and the small, close-knit relationships; the noisy streets of Huangpu and the static hum of EVs; social elites gathering at rooftop bars while gig workers hustle through the streets on mopeds. Speaking with construction workers in whatever textbook Chinese I could muster, I found they were content with the daily rhythm of work: wake up, work, and provide for their families, while enjoying the simple pleasures of a bowl of noodles and good conversation. Because these conflicting realities were hard to wrap my head around, I decided to think about them in relation to the West. In America, a gap like this would generate three headlines a day, and legislation would become the cause célèbre. Americans tend to treat inequality as a byproduct of systems. Many of the people I met in Shanghai seemed to treat it as part of life, something to work alongside rather than confront or beat down. They didn’t seem to need ancient religious texts or TikTok influencers selling another self-improvement book to believe that society is most harmonious when everyone tends their own sphere of individual and family life. That struck me as a fundamental difference in how the two societies see themselves, though I’m wary of generalizing from three weeks.
In the crowds Shanghai regularly attracts, these rules of harmony are constantly tested through the language of everyday life. Foreigners like me wedge ourselves into the crowds bustling around the Bund. I was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a sea of people, all funneling onto 外马路 (Waima Road), from toddlers to seventy-year-olds. A strong sense of collective cohesion ran through the language. Elders guided the young, the buzzing cadence of Shanghainese handing down 成语 about unity and filial piety, delivered with a gruff kind of gentility; Mandarin (普通话) and Shanghainese commanded the crowd. I heard accents from all over China: Sichuan, Kunshan, Beijing, and many others I couldn’t place. In the crowd, I made friends with an 阿姨 (auntie), who taught me another 成语: 人山人海. I had assumed only native speakers could fully understand it, yet it captured something I hadn’t realized. It translates literally as “people mountain, people sea,” but I saw it in the way people took care of one another. Matriarchs helped aging men down the stairs; mothers and 姥姥 (grandmothers) softened their short-temperedness with the watchful care of a tigress over her cub. It did not matter whether sweat pooled on our foreheads or humidity made our clothes stick to us; we felt unity through the resonance of Chinese and its dialects.
I would be remiss not to mention the food. Shanghai’s food scene tells me something unwritten about the city and how deeply food is embedded in Chinese culture. Along Yangsi Road, right outside our dorms, the work ethic of Lanzhou migrants shows up in the 兰州面 (Lanzhou noodle) shops. Next to NYU Shanghai’s campus, a Xinjiang skewer spot proudly calls out to my friends and me in both Chinese and Uyghur, its halal menu overwhelming us with options. There is something intimate, too, about vendors from neighboring provinces introducing me to 生煎包 (pan-fried pork buns) and Russian dishes perfected two generations ago, sold from sidewalk stalls across the city center. The flavors from near and far, from provinces like Sichuan to the rest of Asia and the Middle East, open my eyes to the range of food Shanghai offers at absurdly low prices. Online food delivery apps like Meituan bring the same range to my doorstep: Sichuan food, Hong Kong savory delicacies, and northern Chinese sweets. My days usually end at Jerry’s BIRD HUT, a Cantonese restaurant by day and a bar by night. The place, about the size of a large walk-in closet, pulls me into the city’s social politics, one of its favorite pastimes: drinking. I’ve watched Jerry’s signature beer spark conversations, and fiery talks about Ukraine and Russia cool off over glasses of pineapple rum. The night usually ends with a few more beers and an earthy glass of the Bird Hut special. Shanghai’s food and social scene testifies to the many nationalities, regional affiliations, and culinary traditions that have made a home here, and it has become my favorite part of the city.
Three weeks in, Shanghai is no ordinary city to me. It is both a renewed, modern city and a deeply conflicted, historically tenuous one. This push and pull comes from the city itself: the uncertainty of living in China collides with a curiosity about its cultures, language, and generational dynamics, each drawing me closer to its beating heart. Somewhere between uncertainty and curiosity, I’ve realized that what I understand depends on where I choose to look. I’ve tried to see the city as candidly as I can, but this is still an incomplete rendering of a vast, bustling place. What does history further reveal about Shanghai? What other communities don’t I know about yet? What should I prioritize in the city to get an accurate portrait? I hope to answer them earnestly and honestly over the rest of the semester, with the humility to say “I do not know” and keep exploring.
by Alejandro Nina Duran
