It’s earlier this year that I came to this place. This is one of the most prosperous districts in Shanghai. High-rise buildings are here and there. The roads around the area are made broader and broader by time. My friend told me that I would surely love this place.
So I came in time. I seek for what he told me on the phone in this thriving city
. When I go downstairs to the nearby supermarket on foot, I pass by the shabby houses on the way, from which I see struggle, poverty. There are people in them.
But I don’t see them. When they look at me, their eyes appear hollow, with indifferent look on their face.
I feel tight inside me when I walk by them. What do they live on? Struggle day in day out. Old woes don’t fade away, when new ones come along. In spite of it,
they still live on. This makes Ernest Hemingway come into my mind and one of his
works: The Sun Also Rises.
In his another work he said man can be destroyed, but not defeated. So that these people live on, no matter how hard their condition is, is because in their plain heart, they have known it? When I googled The Sun Still Rises, I saw these two lines: I know the sun is coming in, even on gray days…The sun is creating power, and it makes me happy.
We were made to be the way we are, someone said. So that means some of us are destined to be poor, others rich? Some are meant to have a showy life, whereas others miserable? Then the problem is who made all this? And what’s the principle?
Years ago, when I myself was in misery, I didn’t think of as much as I do now.
I struggled to make a living too busily to have time to think all this was fair
or unfair. Then when I lifted up from the dim condition, when I had chance to read and experience, I found out that there were actually far more miserable people in this world then I had used to be.
Then I found I was lucky. A balance came into my life. I became satisfied, not content though. So if my case is also fitted in here? For those people living hard and poorly, for one reason, they live on because they have no other choice; But for another, is it possible that they are learned to be satisfactory for the
sake of not losing hope.
This also reminds me one of the most famous female writers in China: Aileen Zhang. In her novels Shanghai was always the background. She once said that she loved
the lives of ordinary people in Shanghai. So she wrote them, wrote about stories happened in the alleys and laneways, big and small.
But here I don’t write like she did, and I am not about to do so, for I know
so little. I will just walk and see. Luckily, Shanghai,with courtesy, has never
disappointed me,there is always much to wonder.
Caroline
