OLD SHANGHAI

Much of the old Shanghai has miraculously survived and in stunning variety. By the Garden Bridge the low white building in the British colonial style, formerly the British Consulate; the buildings of the Bund, and right off it a Tudor-beamed cottage (formerly Calbeck's wine store); across from it the former American club, in its columned southern colonial style, even its bricks imported from America; the sumptuous mansard-roofed villa in the French Concession where General Marshall once lived (and before him, a French nobleman); the Savoy Apartments with their stunning Art Deco detailing, right down the street from Post Pottier, the former French police station in Marseilles style; the Normandie, a wedge-shaped building which would be right at home in Paris, from whence the architect came.

These old buildings may be shabby and chockablock full, but they are still there, little islands of style in an ever-encroaching sea of faceless (and often tasteless) new high-rises. Looking in any direction from Avenue Joffre (now Huaihai Road, still a major boulevard), acres of shattered buildings and rubble resemble World War II bombing devastation. Unknowing visitors must wonder which war occurred here - and so recently?

Then there were the real finds, like elephant-ear cookies and White Rabbit rice paper condensed-milk candies - the recipe inherited. It was impossible for me, like most foreigners, not to walk past the dilapidated shops selling shoddy goods on the roads and fantasize about pre-Revolutionary Shanghai...Old Shanghai...the Paris of the East...the Whore of the Orient...the Queen of the Pacific. I closed my eyes and tried to picture the Shanghai it was before. I imagined gangsters, singsong girls, and socialites puffing away on flute-like opium pipes. I conjured up images of bespectacled intellectuals and disheveled artists. Images of the grinding poverty, misery endured by the vast majority of the Chinese residents. All I could think of was what a lively place Shanghai must have been compared with 1995, when getting a meal in a restaurant past 6:30 in the evening was impossible.

Shanghai's history as one the world's greatest cities cloaked it in a romantic aura, which made the reality of its decay in the 1980s all the more poignant. Despite the gray overlay of 35 years of communism, the exotic Chineseness of Shanghai still allured me. Occasionally, I often found myself needing a China fix and a shot of Shanghai in particular. The city's heartbeat seemed to grow a little stronger each time I visited, talked and heard about it - and with it, my desire to live there once again lingers.