Present Every Time

Plodding along southward along the Huang Pu.  Now we’re crossing under a tunnel, I should be able to look up which one it is (The Dapu Road Tunnel), that will take me to the conference center.  My driver keeps running up on people’s immediate backside and flashing his lights.  I’m sure it’s annoying to look back and see but it’s less troubling here in the car without the horn sound blaring. 

Now we’re over on the Pudong side near the Shi Bo Huai.  It looks like an inverted red pyramid.  Huawei has its big Connect event here once again today there will be plenty of people to meet and chat with.  I just can’t kick this damn sinus infection in the left of my face.  I feel like I’ve had a swollen upper cheek for a month now and look like I got socked in the face.  It comes and then it goes.  At present, it’s flaring.   Annoyance, I suppose I need some antibiotics before long, to kill it dead. 

Roof top garden later, looking down on Dong Hu Lu and the intersection of Huai Hai Road.  Never knew what those two characters meant, when I first lived here.  The Huai Hai Campaign in northern Jiangsu in end of 1948, the final decisive battle before all was lost for the Guomindang and the Communist victory was sealed.  A fitting redux for French Avenue Joffre or indeed the Guomindang’s nomenclature that only lasted two years:  Taishan Road.   The battle of Huai Hai ran right past Taishan on the road to victory.  Did it factor into the renaming?

Now I’m up the familiar road out to the airport.  Left my departure from good friends till the last minute, of course.  Shanghai tends to do a better job of managing traffic on these roads, even in rush hour than Beijing ever does.  The simple reason, beyond the thinner density of political VIPs is that the roads are elevated and there are fewer chances to get on and off. We were talking books.  Good friends who enjoy good books.  Friends who are also entrepreneurs trying to make it all work with these numbing winds of change.  Yes, one more cup of tea.  Now I’m practicing my lines in case I arrive after the forty-minute before departure cut off time.  We’ll be alright.

Never done with this city, am I?  Did I know that the dialogue would extend this long when I first came here in 1993?  Think back.  I believe I was up in a hotel looking down on the city thinking this is cool, and remarkable, and very different, but not necessarily enduring.  Impossible to properly recall.  But I did fall in love with it then  And all that I thought I saw and tried to see and longed to see when I’d left were impermanent.  The echoes though are present every time I stop during my progression through the place, and think, even on a familiar ride like this.

We’ve arrived at 1789 in Chateaubriand’s memoires.  I won’t soon forget the scene with the peasants rampaging through the streets with the heads of two nobles on pikes, eyes, dangling out one head, teeth clamped down upon the spike of another.  His sister’s fainted.  I assume I might have as well.  He bolts the door and berates them and they leave before they can add his head to their collection, because they are now being chased.  Chilling.  I must revisit the chronology of the French Revolution.

Friday, 10/12/18