In many ways, this place reflects a version of Chinese culture that is disappearing, but I didn’t notice that until I left.

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The cicadas rasp “zhi, zhi, zhi”, a constant music of the summer heat, thick enough to press against the humid air. Sunlight slips through layers of leaves, washing the ground in moving shadows. In childhood, I stand because my body was taught to. The sidewalk warms unevenly beneath my feet, patch by patch. The world appears overexposed, cast bright under filtered sunlight.

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The edges blur. The air smells faintly of chalk, whiteboard marker, disinfectant – air worn thin by use. Sunlight enters reluctantly, sliced into rectangles by metal window frames. The teacher’s voice is flattened into rhythm. Pages turn in unison. And my body knows to sit straight before my mind decides to. Nothing here needed to be explained.

 

A bright, oversized world once lived in my imagination. I pulled out food from the refrigerator, rearranged chairs, and turned my pink bed into a stage. With my grandparents, I built plays without script. At the time, I didn’t question it.

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I flip through pages of childhood – friends long forgotten, notebooks now gone. We compared ice cream flavors we got after fire drills, laughing as we shared a single melting cone. Peers called me “1+1” because my name sounded like one-one in Chinese. Only later did I understand why this felt natural. That classroom taught me how to stand still. The dialect spoken there – once instinctive – was my first native language.

 

The cicadas’ calls still echo. Time skips. Cars rush past, then stop, stacking into rigid rows. As if everything is designed to move past something else. In city traffic, I stand because there is nowhere to settle to. I am there without arriving. Noise spills everywhere – engines burning, wind snapping against vehicles, voices overlapping. Laughter dissolves into glass buildings and the steady pulse of malls. Everything moves, but nothing waits. I recognize the rhythm. My life followed it for fourteen years without pause.

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At night, lights illuminate a sky that never fully darkens. I don’t know how long I have been standing, letting people flow past me. I am held here, unnoticed. Anonymity roots itself into the structure of this rapidly growing city, where each life continues as it is supposed to. Yet unseen does not equal freedom; it is simply the default status. I remain half suspended, in a space both familiar and unfinished. The LED screens glow brighter than faces. I still belong here, but the city would never stop for me. As I stand, I am wrapped in its rhythm, engulfed by its system.

 

The crowd muffles. The scene tilts. Wind cuts sharply across the wide river, a dark, moving line. The first time I return, I mistake movement for belonging. Stepping closer, the ripples shrink; darkness seems to pull me down. Lights blur like a rainy car window. Skyscrapers rise with confidence, their reflections trembling in the water. Across the river, buildings glow, but the light never reaches my hands. I stand at the Bund, the city’s center, yet nowhere inside it.

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Behind me, history waits gently, unlit. Ahead, the futuristic Pudong skyline with its neon skyscrapers. The old and the new press against each other here – colonial stone at my back, glass and steel before me. I am small, but not insignificant. I am unfinished. I belong fully to neither.

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I drift again, suspended, not because of being lost, but because standing with awareness in a place that once held me unconsciously. And then I am here again.

 

Sunlight filters through layers of laundry and wires, warming my shoulders. The alley narrows, cluttered and familiar, a path my body remembers before my mind does. I look down and see taller legs, larger shoes. I walk by muscle memory. This time, I noticed what has not changed – and what has quietly slipped away.

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The air smells of soy sauce, damp concrete, and someone else’s lunch – ordinary food –everyday food – the kind I grew up breathing in. The smell moves through me sharply, the way oxygen hits blood. Laundry hangs overhead, swaying in the summer breeze like quiet flags of survival. Paint peels from uneven stone walls that lean inward as if listening – to cicadas, to footsteps, to passing voices. I slow down, not because I have to, but because the space asks me to.

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In my head, sounds overlap: mahjong tiles clashing, radios running all day in my grandparents’ home, neighbors calling out in the dialect that once lived naturally on my tongue. The language returns without effort. I could be anywhere in the world and still be here.

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The alley stays. I do not.

 

The city never pauses long enough for certainty, and neither do I. Light, sound, crowds — everything moves with purpose, with efficiency, with urgency. Being here feels like motion without arrival. For a moment, I felt held rather than observed. Something is missing, though I cannot name it yet. Time folds inward, tightening. The scene tilts again.

 

A low hum rises, constant and insistent. Pressure builds against my ears, dulling sound, pressing my body into a narrow seat. There is a brief weightlessness, then a jolt- a soft collision of metal and air. My hand grips the armrest before I realize why.

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I sway slightly. Then I understand where I am.

 

I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting on the airplane from Shanghai to New York. This place has no clear sense of time. Every surface reflects me - the dark screen, the window, the dim cabin - but none of them recognize me. I am visible and anonymous at once. For the first time, I stand, realizing I am allowed to be between.

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These places I passed through were not separate scenes. They were fragments of the same question, orbiting one place all along. Shanghai was not only where I grew up; it was the system that taught me how to move before I learned how to question. It gave me familiarity, protection, and a kind of privilege so complete that I mistook it for the natural order of the world. I learned to stand straight, to wait, to follow rhythms already in place – long before I understood why those rhythms existed.

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Leaving did not erase that shaping. It revealed it. What I carry with me is not just memory, but an internalized way of reading space, authority, and belonging. Growth, I realize, is not a clean shift from belonging to distance, but a transition from unconscious presence to quiet awareness - learning how a place shaped me, and how to carry that shaping forward.

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When I wake fully, the dream does not disappear—it rearranges. Each time I look back, I see Shanghai differently: not as an answer, but as a structure that taught me how to hold contradictions. Cicadas spend years underground for a season of sound. I once thought Shanghai was the sound. Now I know it was the waiting.

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Belonging is no longer choosing one place over another. It is learning how to stand between them.

 

The city keeps changing. And so do I.