I met him over the school holiday. It was just after Chinese New Year so my students had all been dismissed and I could finally see Shanghai. I stayed in the old Jacob Astor House. That decaying hotel was a measure of how much the International Settlement described in my guidebook had declined since the Chinese Revolution.
        Yet the crumbling elegance of a century past held certain charms for me. The warped, wooden flooring that squeaked underfoot, the cavernous dark corridors, and the dusty chandeliers that hung from the vaulted ceilings above me all contributed to my sense of wonder. What history breathed from these walls or lay beyond locked doors -- The foreign devils had been driven out, and the Astor degenerated into a cheap riverside hostel on the north bank of the Huang Pu, or Yellow River.
        The steel-grey skies above Shanghai that day were wreathed in tattered white clouds and the twisted ribbons of smoke from a thousand tenement chimney pots. The sound of the morning traffic came to me from all directions: trucks honking, bicycles clattering, and battered city buses rattling over the Wu Baidu Bridge over the murky Wu Song Canal. Meanwhile men and women in drab, padded winter clothes streamed past me. That much hadn't changed.
        Shanghai! I closed my guidebook, and repeated the name like a mantra. Shanghai, here at last!
        Someone noticed me and stopped to introduce himself.
        "Are you American?" Liu asked.
        I smiled and shook my head.
        He made an effort to return the smile. Liu was older than I first had thought and far more serious. The broad forehead was creased. There were lines by his mouth. I took him for about 30 years old.
        "Welcome you to Shanghai," he said. "Please let me be your guide."
        I tucked the guidebook under my arm and we crossed the bridge together. A handful of workers scrambled up the enormous concrete harbour beacon they were erecting in Huang Pu Park. A construction gang had cut down all the trees and they were paving the lawn in the park, formerly the pre-war British Public Gardens where Chinese and dogs had been prohibited.
        "Where did you learn your English?" I asked him. "It's very good."
        "I am middle school English teacher," he said.
        "Me, too," I chuckled, "I'm an English teacher."
        With difficulty, Liu managed another wan smile and then he looked away.

        We were walking down the Waitan -- the Bund -- that grand riverfront boulevard of the International Settlement, China's Wall Street in the pre-war era. Anybody who had been anyone had lived, worked, or played there among the banks, export houses, apartments, and exclusive clubs where fortunes rose and fell with one political crisis after another.

        First we saw the twelve-storey Cathay Hotel. Chaplin had slept there. Noel Coward had written "Private Lives" in the penthouse. That same hotel had been the corporate headquarters of the Sassoon family who had made their fortune in opium and sunk it into real estate, becoming the biggest landlords in the city with nearly 2,000 buildings between them.
        Under its new management, this hotel was the Heping or Peace Hotel and really the only building on the strip to retain trappings of its former glory. We wandered into the lobby with its art deco lamps, brass doorplates, magnificent wrought iron work and cathedral ceilings. Liu knew nothing about the building and showed hardly any interest in it. Instead, he kept looking anxiously at the liveried doormen and clenching and unclenching his fist.
        Nothing would have prepared me for the decrepit Dong Feng Hotel once the exclusive Shanghai Club. I turned to Liu and laughed in surprise. It housed a complete Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet that even sported a plastic effigy of Colonel Saunders. The legs of the billiard tables by the Reading Room had been sawn off to fit shorter enthusiasts. Teenaged Chinese majorettes performed in flesh-coloured leotards at the International Seamen's Club.
        My one disappointment was the massive Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank which had been long since stripped of its trademarked bronze rampant lions to serve the people as the Shanghai Municipal Government. The armed guards there blocked our approach.
        "I want to get out," Liu said to me finally. "You have to help me leave China."
        I knew it was coming. How many times had I been asked that question in China, or even Asia, for that matter.
        "What can I do?" I replied.
        "You're an American. You can do anything you want."
        "I told you, I'm not an American. And I'm an English teacher just like you, and I don't have any money. I'm travelling through China on a shoestring budget. Get it?"
        "I can pay!" he said, "I can pay much money."
        "It's not money, Liu," I said.
        "I'm not a middle school teacher anymore, I quit. I teach English to private students for money. And I have a lot of money now."
        I shrugged. "Tell me, Liu, how do you quit a job as a middle school teacher in China, anyway?"
        "You just stop showing up."
        We passed the next few hours tramping all the way to the old Chinese city and down its meandering cobbled streets. A truck had backed into a market and a few men were throwing halved pig carcasses onto the pavement. Mounds of baozhi or winter cabbage lay covered in canvas sacking nearby. Hawkers were selling hot chestnuts, and sweet potatoes they had been baking in rusted oil drums. I snapped a few pictures of the market and of the sagging red brick buildings in the quarter. Some were plastered with mud and straw. Sheets and trousers flapped on clotheslines strung in every direction. An old woman carrying tin pails of water on a yoke across her back reminded me how few homes in the quarter had running water.
        "Why do you want to leave?" I asked. Maybe it was a stupid question.
        "China!" He turned on me, "China, it's too poor, you can't imagine it."
        Liu was about my height and build. His hair was light brown and he had a broad, square-jawed face. He looked like schoolyard bully I had once known. It was surprising how Western he looked. I thought he could pass almost anywhere so I asked him if he had thought of going underground.
        We discussed countries right around the world: Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Libya, Morocco, and Egypt, Iraq, and Iran. I had seen most of them so I showcased all the capitals; had he considered Cairo, for instance? Been thinking of Bangkok? Some idea of Seoul? They were crowded, too, but you still could buy your way in. What about it? What about going to a Third World country? I suggested Africa and the Middle East. Or he could go illegal. He could land in my own country, Canada, or in the U.S.A. and go underground. I warned him that it would mean washing dishes and cleaning johns and waiting tables for years. There would be another amnesty for illegal immigrants. There had to be because there were so many.
        We were both exhausted and drained from walking so long. We were tired of each other. I asked him, "Where do you want to eat?" as we turned past a shop selling steamed pork dumplings, jiaozhe, and noodles, lamien. We ended up at a Chinese fast food chain called 'Uncle Sam's.'
        He watched me pulling out my wallet after we'd eaten.
        "I can buy my own lunch," he snapped. "Who do you think you are?"
        "Look," I said, "I didn't ask for your company. Maybe we should split up here. I'm sure you have better things to do than hang around with me."

        But he followed me to the French Concession anyway. That cantonment had the bizarre appearance of a Hollywood soundstage into which hundreds of thousands of Chinese had been dropped.
There were Tudor style villas and Bavarian gingerbread cottages. European family names were emblazoned in Italianate script on apartment buildings. Pillared, neo-classical department store building were crowned with outrageous Gothic turrets. Even the site of the First National Congress of the Communist Party had been affected. All the street signs had been replaced and every brick in the building painted red. The Concession had an unreal quality like a bad movie.
        At Nanjing Road, perhaps the longest and most famous road in Shanghai today, we climbed the pedestrian overpass and looked down the busy street.
        I had never seen anything like it. There were more people on it than I had ever seen anywhere in my life. The view took in thousands of people walking east and west on the road.
        "You can see all Shanghai from here!"
        Liu looked up wearily when I took my camera out of my bag.
        "Do you want me to take your picture?"
        "No, I never appear in my pictures," I replied.
        Hundred of pedestrians shoved by us on the crowded bridge. I turned and focused my camera on the thousands more below us. People were walking ten or twelve abreast and spilling onto the sidewalks. I guessed there were at least four or five hundred every block. And how many blocks were there? The sidewalks swelled with men in suits and young women in bobbed hair and short leather skirts walking to the shops.
        "What do you see there?" Liu said in disgust.
        "I've never seen anything like it," I answered, snapping off a few more shots. "You don't know what you've got, this is better than Hong Kong, or New York. All that vitality! All those people! I've never seen anything like Nanjing Lu anywhere else in the world."
        Liu looked sick. I waited on the bridge hoping he would leave.
        "Look, Liu, if you can't leave China," I said, "Can't you make the best of it? Why do you have to go to America?"
        "I had a girlfriend. I failed to get a passport for Singapore and she left me. She went to the hospital for abortion. She is trying to marry a foreigner. She won't speak to me any more."
        "Never?"
        "If I go to a West country and make much money, I can send for her. She will come back to me if I have a foreign passport."
        "I don't want to hurt your feelings, saying this, but did she want you or the passport." I gestured to the thousands walking below us. "And as they say, 'there are other fish in the sea.' Why don't you find someone else?"
        "Yes, yes," he muttered. "More rice in the bowl. Someone new."
        He had been very busy, very busy. He was working, always working. He never went out anymore. He just gave English lessons.
        He followed me down Nanjing Lu.
        "What do you want from me?" I shouted in exasperation. "Go to Hell!"
        He tailed me all the way back to the Pu Jiang Hotel. To my relief, the doorman blocked his approach.
        He spat at me. "I'm just as good as you are, and this is my country. Why can't I live like you!"
        "Good bye, and good luck," I said, squeezing by the doorman. "I really must go."
        With relief, I dropped into a big armchair in the lobby. Two young Chinese women sat near me on the couch. Someone must have signed them in at the desk. They chatted there, painting their fingernails, one of them adjusting her stockings. The elevator door opened and a girl left on a foreigner's arm.
        I trudged to my room. I got my towel and soap and tramped down the fusty hall to the communal shower on the third floor. The light in the shower room was broken so I left the door to my stall open and stripped from my clothes by the light from the hall.
        For a while I thought I was alone. The steaming jet of hot water cleaning the dirt from me. Then I noticed another man staring at me from the shadows. He sounded as if he were from Pakistan when he spoke.
        "Are you a Christian, or a Jew?" he asked.
        "Does it matter," I answered from the clouds of steam.

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