I

The city rises from floors of asphalt to ceilings of steel and glass in moments. Horizons which glowed for generations on the outskirts of Shanghai become shadows more quickly than a new generation can bloom. The city is now in the grips of a cultural evolution. This is not the growth of a new appendage, or the widening of the eyes, or even the elimination of the colon; this is a cataclysmic shift in such a short period of time that lifestyle is struggling to keep up with the environment around it.

It is as if the world has quickened its rotation ever so slightly that the population has to brace itself like a commuter grabbing a subway handrail as the train takes a turn. Life adapts, as it always does to survive, but the pace has accelerated to such a degree that questions of what has come before and what is being surrendered no longer manage to form on the lips between gasps.

Between every skyscraper, high rise apartment complex, and imitation Wal-Mart there is a valley of rubble. There is a courtyard of broken bricks scattered by wrecking balls and bulldozers, punctuated by rivers of garbage and broken glass. It is not a construction site, but it is the purgatory of progress, the spotted apocalypse between the third world and the first. It is a playground of the left behind, where street urchins rummage for knickknacks that weren't towed from the blockhouses and bungalows of yesterday's equality.

Sometimes for whatever reason a few buildings remain, they pump thick smoke from their chimneys and serve lunch to the construction workers waiting for the order to tear them down. It is the proudest and most debased of capitalist ventures, like Bertolt Brecht's war profiteers. At the place where the destroyed meet the still standing, the recently created wind brings more than a chill to the next row of Shanghai antiquated inhabitants. Just as one row disappears the next is marked for demolition, not in any crude spray painted "X" like the trunk of Amazonian trees, but a sigh from the mortar, from the foundation, and from the eyes between the window blinds with the realization that a way of life is ending, that the existence of the past is a barrier to the future.

Shanghai has become the Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail. It is breaking itself down and recycling itself into something new. Though no one has thought to ask the question of what happens when the snake sheds its skin.