My Grandparents' Shanghai Home: A Guided Tour

摘要

In 2006, my grandmother took me to say goodbye to Alliance Lane, home to three generations of our family and a motley cast of neighbors, now a demolition site. A few "nail households"-holdout residents still negotiating their compensation-continued to empty portable wooden toilets, hang laundry, or cool themselves in the alleyway shadows. The roof and front half of our house were gone. Still standing in the rubble were the staircase, the kitchen, the pavilion room, and the terrace where my grandparents once washed and cooked, grew flowers and scallions, where my mother and I once played and daydreamed. Like a mirage under the sun, a migrant worker stood on the terrace and struck at our cement water basin with a sledgehammer.