In the middle 1800s, all along America’s Pacific coast, hundreds if not thousands of men got Shanghaied.

Crimped.

Here they were, these gentlemen, ambling along the various waterfronts of San Fransisco, Seattle, and Portland and finding themselves a wee bit parched decided to step inside to one of the local establishments for a drink. And what with the first and second drink going down so smoothly and all, maybe one or two or all of these gentlemen found themselves with a third. Harmless really, unless of course it was laced with Opium, wherein they found themselves going under, so to speak, and upon waking realized —well golly—they were on the high seas, with land long gone behind them.

They were heading for Shanghai.

I arrived in not so much this way. I went slightly more willingly and without significant opiates.

Slightly.

To be honest, Beijing had left me a little shaken. That place was for real. A sweaty, smog burp of Chinese culture swathed in a blanket of swirling micro-particles. How small? I’m glad you asked. Small enough that I researched it: small enough to perforate your lungs like a million little ninja stars. And we were still shrouded in smog for 4.9 out of the 5 hours on the bullet train south, so I didn’t expect much from Shanghai. Maybe just brown lung, not black.

But no.

Shanghai was a breathe of fresh air. Or at least fresher air. It just felt…better. It took only an instant for me to feel this, but significantly longer to puzzle it out. Yes, the air was slightly cleaner, that metallic tang was gone, but that wasn’t it. It was the city. This towering, shiny, luminous city. It reminded me of other enormous cities. The main walking street (Nanjing) was big and broad, edged on both sides by enormous flagship stores. I know this store ZARA, or UNIQLO or PULL&BEAR, or even next level stores, HERMES, PRADA, et cetera et cetera.

Ahhhhhh. I understand flagship stores. I could have been in Paris or Milan or New York or my hometown favorite, the Windy City. Places where you could get a piece of bread that wasn’t sickly sweet.

Not just the stores either, but the buildings that house them. The architecture in this area, it’s western. It’s Chicago-style. It’s former British Concession. It’s many, many things, most not Chinese. The Bund is still full of repute, a strip of architecture wonder with each successive building representative of a different western style, all familiar. Walking that lane, with the Huangpu River on one side, stately buildings on the other, I could have just as easily been on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. Shanghai’s French Concession? Lincoln Park. The observation deck on top of the Shanghai World Trade Center (oddly paired with a Disney promotion, Mickey and Goofy and Donald plastered everywhere, Sears Tower, or whatever they call it now). Ah…this feels right.

So the most populous city in the world…comfortable? Yes. It could have been Chicago. Bright, shiny, new penny Chicago. No tarnish.

Wait.

There may have been a little tarnish. This above stuff, that was all first instinct. First day stuff. First night, though? Wander out at night and it’s a different story.

Prostitutes, first. Always prostitutes first. Nanjing Road, that fabulous shopping Mecca? Turn out the lights on those bright displays and the streetwalkers immediately descend.

“Hello. Massaggi? Sex?”

I noticed other things too, not present in the afternoon sun. For instance, all that garbage that piles up as high as the second floor on every corner? There are scrubby little low-caste types, barefoot and dressed in torn shirts and clam-diggers piling rickshaws with the stuff by night. Once the rickshaw resembles the profile of an elephant, off they peddle into the night.

“Massaggi? Boom, boom?”

Another strange sight, two boys, no more than 12 or 14 out in the middle of the sidestreets. One carries a long metal rod about as tall as he is, four, five feet. The other a similar rod and a flashlight. They move from manhole cover to manhole cover to god-knows-what cover and the one shines his flashlight into the small keyhole where the real utility people pry open the cover. No idea what they are looking for, but they open three or four manholes in the short time I watch them.

“Pssst. Marijuana? Sex?”

Food carts. Ragtag affairs composed of a couple of planks of wood lashed to an axle with baling wire, precariously balanced over a propane tank or a rusting metal box full of smoldering charcoal. The old entrepreneur grilling or woking all sorts of meats on a stick or vegetables or chestnuts or countless other unidentifiables. To be bought en masse and consumed over low slung tables with lower slung stools. The smells emanating from these spits were equal parts intoxicating and revolting.

“I have the sex. You want?”

Last, the destitute. Here then is when the luster wears off of the shiny penny. One street away from Nanjing, running parallel, homeless crowd the dark shadows, sleeping literally in the gutters. Children, soot faced and grimy, begging, mother nearby nursing another child and a large beer.  A 2015 Range Rover Sport is parked not 10 feet away. The juxtaposition is notable.

After one night of restless wandering, of turning away countless offers of sex and massage and drugs, I am left awake to re-examine my earlier feeling of comfort. After midnight, Nanjing is no Michigan Avenue.

Will I feel better about Shanghai come again in the morning?

Will I forget the overlapping rich and destitute?

Will I remember that Prada store’s display, all gold and silver and polished metals? Or will it be those huddled forms in the gutter, those boys searching for…for…something in the dark?

In the end it seems Shanghai is a coin, one of those ones with two sides. One side is the new, the ultra-modern, the sleek, the wannabe west. The other, tails side, is the old, the withered, the seedy. In Shanghai, no one has officially notified the huddled masses of this next leap forward towards modernity. It is growing so fast it doesn’t know where one thing starts and the other ends. Shanghai is where the observation decks are so tall you can no longer see the cardboard lean-tos, where the phenomenally wealthy live ten paces from phenomenally poor, and where the mag-lev trains hurtle past rickshaw garbage collectors.

Processing all these has been difficult. It feels like I’ve been Shanghaied.