Shanghai is a city in flux. In recent years, workers and machines have frantically destroyed large parts of the city to build a new one. But the mental maps and personal memories of its citizens are not as easily erased. Hence a skyscraper designed to meet the growing demand for office property may symbolize the city’s booming economy to some, while to others the sight of this very building may bring back childhood memories of the old neighborhood it replaced, becoming a symbol of lost youth and vanishing ways of life. It is precisely through literary imaginings that the citizens’ experience of Shanghai’s transformation is revealed: the city of feeling rising out of the city of fact.
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