Pudong skyline by day
One of the placed I’ve lived in and grown to hate (but later appreciated) was Shanghai. It’s hard to imagine that the place 6-year-old me lived in was so different when I visited at 17 and 19 years old. Back then, the Shanghai metro consisted of just two short lines and the Pudong skyline was nothing more than the lonely Pearl TV Tower and the Jinmao Tower. But now the city has grown to over a dozen metro lines, hundreds of skyscrapers, and what used to be a hole in the ground is now one of the world’s tallest towers. Shanghai is truly a testament to the will of the Chinese people and its ability to grow strong. So why did I used to hate it?
We’ll have to go way back in history to when I was 6 years old. My father was assigned to work in Shanghai so our whole family had to move there. The taxis started at just ¥10 (about US$2 at the time) for the first 2km, and we lived just one metro stop away from the financial district so we took a cab everywhere. Things were cheap so a little money went a very long way.
Noodle shop near our old neighborhood
But so what if you could buy all the things you wanted? I had no friends, no sense of belonging, and no sense of place. I remember a tear rolling out of my eye as the Dragonair flight to Pudong Airport lifted off the tarmac in Hong Kong. I pressed my face against the cold window for my last glimpse of Hong Kong thinking:
“Am I ever going to come back?”
The faithful bund never changes
And at that moment, that’s the first time I felt I belonged anywhere, the first time where I felt like I had something to lose – I was 6. My two years in Shanghai were miserable: my parents would bring me to boring dinners with their friends, I had nothing in common with the people there, and I grew more inward-looking. My only solace was found in the TV and Lego bricks. It felt like a whole two years of my left were unaccounted for – a gap that I’m not willing to look back on.
Three tallest buildings in Shanghai
When I did return to Hong Kong just before my eighth birthday, I found that because of my absence nobody remembered me anymore. As an 8-year-old kid, 2 years is a quarter of your life so all my friends had already forgotten about me.
At that age, I was trying to prove myself but due to the lack of social interaction, found myself inferior. It is for that reason I began reading and learning about different subjects of studies to “prove” that I was not inferior, even if nobody actually thought I was inferior. My sense of self-inferiority came only from myself.
After I had exposed myself to so many new things and learned a variety of skills with debatable levels of practical use in life, I became increasingly interested in discovering my own sense of self as a teenager. This is why I write. Do I blame my father?
