I arrived in Shanghai on a foggy, grey November day in the year 2000. The city felt like a scene from Blade Runner — veiled in mist, restless, and electric with transformation. Everywhere I looked, something was shifting: skyscrapers rising from the dust, entire districts wrapped in scaffolding, the noise of construction echoing like a new rhythm for the century.
There was a sense of awakening in the air. Young people were beginning to look outward, curious about the life that was emerging beyond the familiar. The old neighborhoods, once alive with the hum of daily life, grew silent at night, waiting for the bulldozers that would soon erase them.
Shanghai was becoming something else — a city caught between memory and ambition, past and projection. Its pulse was that of perpetual renovation, a place where change itself had become the only constant.
