A month at the Shanghai Library, November 2004

Abstract

In November 2004, I spent a month working in China at the Shanghai Library, at the invitation of its director, Dr. Wu Jianzhong. This was a very interesting experience for me, and I am forever grateful to the University of Toronto for making the trip a reality. The Shanghai Library is the second largest library in China. It is a large public library that also functions as the leading resource library for the Shanghai university community, with exceptionally strong collections in the areas of science and technology. The city of Shanghai is a very westernized city in comparison with most of China, hence its nickname “China’s window on the West”. I left Toronto very early on 28 October 2004 and flew to China via Vancouver, arriving on the following day at 1600 hours. China is 13 h ahead of Toronto, so night turns into day, and I had terrible jet lag for almost the first 2 weeks of my stay. The flight from Vancouver was wonderful. We flew up the coast of British Columbia, along the mountains of Alaska, over the Aleutian Islands, past eastern Russia and Korea, over Japan, and finally over the China Sea and straight down into Shanghai. The first thing I noticed about Shanghai was the huge number of people. There are people everywhere. Shanghai is a city of 17 million, in an area roughly the size of Toronto. It is crowded everywhere, seemingly all the time — the airport, the streets, the intersections, the subway, and all the department stores and markets and shopping areas. There is severe gridlock, and there are literally millions of bicycles, large “cargo” tricycles, and motorcycles all over the sidewalks as well as the roads. The second thing was the poor air quality. This was hard to miss and is at least partly the result of the extensive construction taking place all over the city. Shanghai is changing at a very rapid rate. Old areas are being demolished, and huge high rises and skyscrapers are going up in their place. It’s very exciting to see, but it makes for a lot of dust! The first really exciting thing for me was seeing actual Chinese characters denoting Shanghai Airport. Then I began to realize that everything was written in Chinese characters (of course!), and it sounds silly, but that was a huge adjustment for me. I’d never been to a country where there was absolutely no chance of deciphering anything written. I was totally illiterate. Getting around the city was best done by taxi. A taxi anywhere seemed to cost only about CAN$4.00. (China is not expensive for Canadians.) This worked well for tourist sites, but there was a problem with lesser-known places. The taxi drivers could not read my Pinyin-transliterated map, and therefore it was necessary to have two — one in Pinyin, one in Chinese — so that we could put them together to figure out the location of my destination. One was then at the mercy of the taxi driver, and I never travelled anywhere without the hotel business card, so as to be sure of getting home.