Strange Juxapositions
Three Memos to Shanghai Deborah Hunn
A woman exits a bookshop. I breathe the darkly filtered air with caution, steady as a hand practised on a pulse. Adjust my white beak. Side-eye the body count of 2022. Shuffle to the sharpest corner of the bench. Six years ago, sardined in a Shanghai metro I watch anxious mask-smothered girls blink across my shoulder, as if second guessing a tidal wave set to fling them over the flat-edged world. I of course know better. Let those poor souls fear the rocks; floundering is not in our lexicon. A woman exits a bookshop, boards a backlot B movie tram to a rendezvous with grief in an IM Pei future I once viewed across a Bund packed with smiling families, with bridal lace, with ice creams, with tootyfruity streamers, with tourists trailing eager red flags, with shiny Nike tops and backwards caps and fresh white trainers and silver sticks launching wave upon wave of selfies over the glittering harbour. I breathe the darkly filtered air with caution as steady as a hand practised on a pulse. Adjust my white beak. Side-eye the body count of 2022. Shuffle to the sharpest corner of the bench. Four years later CNN footage unfurls that present as a photocopy purged of its past; an unrelenting negative spool of grey concrete desert. Nothing. No one. A static whip of waves in the harbour. A strand of ghost ships. A sudden straggler breaking cover, scurrying crablike across the screen. Goodnight Shanghai. Goodnight. I’ll see you in my dreams. And yet I still know better. Let the poor souls scurry for the rocks; sinking is not in our lexicon. 37
