In Shanghai, the past and present exist in this city not as historical phases but as simultaneous realities. In no other city on earth is the negotiation between memory and ambition conducted so openly, so dramatically, so daily. Walk from the gleaming towers of Pudong across the Huangpu River to the Bund, and you traverse a century in twenty minutes. Shanghai hedge funds operate in buildings so new the glass still has that particular brightness, while a few blocks away, longtang alleyways — the narrow residential lanes of old Shanghai — breathe with the accumulated life of generations.
Shanghai is fascinating because it has always been a city of reinvention. It was a fishing village that became a treaty port, a treaty port that became the 'Paris of the East,' a colonial cosmopolis that became a communist exemplar, and then, in the decades following reform and opening up, one of the most aggressive financial and cultural centers on the planet. Each reinvention left residue. Shanghai doesn't erase its past — it stratifies it.
This layering is what makes Shanghai irresistible to writers. The city contains multitudes not metaphorically but architecturally. Art deco apartment buildings stand next to Ming dynasty garden walls that stand next to glass curtain-walled towers. Every block is a compressed history lesson, and every history lesson contains the seeds of a story.
Shanghai's financial district in Pudong is among the most concentrated collections of private equity, hedge funds, and asset management firms outside of New York and London. The speed and scale of capital formation in Shanghai over the past three decades is itself a kind of magical realism — numbers that seem to belong to a different category of reality than ordinary human life.
For a writer, the world of hedge funds is fascinating not for its complexity but for its particular brand of superstition. Beneath the rational, algorithmic surface of modern finance, a rich layer of ritual persists. Auspicious dates for deals. Lucky office floors — never the fourth, always the eighth. Feng shui consultants hired before any significant office move. The formal apparatus of quantitative finance coexisting comfortably with practices that would not have seemed out of place in a dynasty-era merchant house.
The longtang — Shanghai's characteristic residential lanes — are among the most atmospheric urban spaces in the world. Narrow, shaded, lined with shikumen houses whose stone gate frames open onto small courtyards, the longtang were the social infrastructure of old Shanghai. They were the spaces where the city actually lived: where neighbors argued and gossiped and cooked and raised children and buried the dead.
Many longtang have been demolished to make way for development. The ones that remain feel like survivals — like pockets of an older city that managed to hold on through sheer density of memory. To walk through them is to experience the past not as something over but as something present, compressed into the spatial arrangement of doorways and drainage ditches and potted plants on windowsills.
In The Speculators & Other Short Stories, Shanghai is the first and most complex of the collection's twelve cities. The titular story draws the city's contradictions into focus: characters who traffic in financial instruments that bear no relationship to any physical reality, operating in a city whose physical reality is itself a kind of fiction — built at speed, on reclaimed land, reaching toward a skyline that seems to require a suspension of disbelief.
In our writings, Shanghai is one of the cities that most clearly demonstrates the idea that the magical and the mundane are not opposites but collaborators. In Shanghai, the city is a monument to human ambition, and human ambition has always been at least partly enchanted.