Day 2876 in Shanghai and I’m walking with Hasse on Dongdaming Road (东大名路) in the Hongkou district. In 2018, I lived next to this road; here I registered my first Chinese bank account, bought my first baozi in a FamilyMart, and it’s here that I photographed so many random things because Shanghai was all new to me.
Back then, this was already a decent area. Small family-owned shops and tiny bars alternated with the modern buildings, such as the — back then — recently renovated North Bund (北外滩) and the Music Gate (音乐之门). A lot of residential buildings where ready to be demolished or just looked abandoned, and some shops already had signs of a pending closure.
Today as I walk these streets again, I partly feel I own them. I see again the poor high-rise I used to live, and across the street I enter the now newly renovated old sailor’s hospital (上海海员医院) — now a fancy design center — and the receptionist tells me visitors aren’t allowed to enter, yet I think to myself: “I was here before you”, as I explored this building years ago, and was chased out by dogs.
We cross the road. The old shops along these roads have been closed and boarded up, but most of them still aren’t demolished. We enter the new shopping mall (SMP上海白玉兰广场), and at one of the new fancy coffee places I get a coffee. I’ve seen this building being constructed, and now it’s full of foreigners oblivious to that fact. In their faces I see a kind of innocence — freshness from their recent arrival in Shanghai, and lack of any homesickness. I don’t think I’m bitter, but it’s something else. A touring bus stops and a group of foreigners — one carrying a Mexican flag — step out.
We visit the North Bund, and what was already a beautiful park in 2018, is now fantastic. The flowers are all in bloom, there’s sculpted concrete everywhere, and beautiful art installations, supplemented by tiny stores of M Stand and Häagen-Dazs. These public space projects are popping up all over the city, such as Suzhou River (苏州河)’s renovation, or the West Bund (上海西岸), but also modern highrises such as Zhangjiang’s Gate of Science (张江科学之门). I feel this is the new generation of Shanghai; hyper-modern, clean, beautiful, rich — and yet public. It’s not connected visually with old Shanghai’s aesthetics from a century ago, or even anything that came a few decades ago.
A few days ago, I announced that we’re moving back to the Netherlands, which gave a sort of finality to the decision. This morning, I watched the crew’s pod from Artemis II split from the rest of the spacecraft to return to Earth, and walking these streets here, I can’t help but feel the same. I realize how much I’ve changed in these eight years, and realize that Shanghai will continue to evolve just fine without me — and that we will too, in the Netherlands. And that’s the type of fresh energy I carry with me.
2026
2018
