Remember in Lost in Translation, the lovely film about two Americans adrift in Tokyo, how disoriented Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson looked? There they were in their rooms at the soaring Park Hyatt, their elevation only accentuating the disconnect between them and the city's inhabitants, far below. Well, I've stayed at the Park Hyatt Tokyo and felt some of the same disconnect. But when I recently checked into Shanghai's much newer Grand Hyatt, I felt all of it. No, double or triple that. It's not merely that Shanghai's Hyatt is the tallest hotel in the world, occupying the fifty-third to the eighty-seventh floor of the futuristic Jin Mao Tower (its Tokyo counterpart commands the top fourteen floors of a fifty-two-story building). It's also that the Shanghai I viewed from the windows of my room or from the Cloud 9 bar, on the eighty-seventh floor, was completely different from the city I first visited a quarter of a century ago. I felt like an astronaut peering down at a strange planet.
Everybody had warned me to expect huge changes in Shanghai, and I had read enough about this economic showcase of the new China to believe that I was prepared for what I'd see. But I was wrong. To begin with, there's the sheer volume of recently erected skyscrapers stretching for miles in every direction in this city of 17 million people. Then there are the new highways, bridges, museums, designer stores and top-flight restaurants and hotels. The architecture ranges from the high-end to the tacky, with an overdose of gaudy neon lights, but the overall impression is simply breathtaking. "It just knocks your socks off, what they've done: it's so big, so marvelous," says James R. Lilley, a former U.S. ambassador to China.
It's also a city that is changing every moment. That is why the moment to see it is now, while its rich history is still evident in the older buildings and traditional neighborhoods. These have so far eluded the relentless drive to modernize, but who knows how much longer they'll survive?
In 1979, when China was just opening up to Americans, my wife, Christina, and I visited Shanghai for the first time. Coming from bustling, supermodern Hong Kong, where I was based as a Newsweek correspondent, we felt as if we had taken a step backward in time. Although the Bund, the swath of colonial-era buildings along the embankment of the Huangpu River, gave the city a touch of faded elegance, there was no trace of economic development and no sense that this once great port city was still connected to the outside world. We could roam the streets for hours and never see another foreigner. Friendly crowds, everyone dressed in the same dark blue Mao suits, accompanied us, curious about us, the odd interlopers. In our hotel, a low, stately building in the district still known as the French Concession, everything from the stained walls to the tin cutlery reflected decades of neglect. In the dining room, an elderly waiter leaned over and whispered in proper French, "You know, we used to have real silverware here." It was his way of telling us that the hotel — and the city — had seen better days.
