At least according to an article from netease, which shows that the average Shanghai citizen’s disposable income level has reached 20257 RMB, placing atop the list for Chinese cities, and displacing Shenzhen for the first time.
I spent a few hours in the afternoon at Plaza 66 and Citic and all those places on Nanjing Lu，window shopping at all these places that i could never afford to buy stuff in. These strange citadels of capitalism always seem eerily empty, or at least in terms of people that are really buying things. I look at the coiffed women that walk around and work there, and it reminds me of Hong Kong, and everytime I see people who work there I wonder how they feel about the gap between them and the people they serve. I have no doubt they cannot afford the things that they are selling to others.
It reminds me too much of Hong Kong and too much of Southern California. There is a certain comforting familiarity to these places, for me, but at the same time everytime I walk through a mall of this sort, I understand “where the money is”, and wonder why I bother being so interested in things that don’t really make much or involve much money. There are too many European brands and designers to keep up with. I think that I must be an awfully simple person at heart. I have always known that I was not part of that world and never really would be. Sometimes I wonder how my life would have turned out if that realization, which existed as something inchoate and intuited as early as the age of 15, had, well, been a realization–that is, I had realized something about myself. What a gift that would be: the gift of disabusing oneself of illusions, instantaneously. That would save so much suffering. And then what of life?
