#167. Home Sweet Home (Saturday, August 24, 2002)

What was your best day…of experiencing true urban chaos?

This is probably common knowledge, but it’s worth emphasizing: Shanghai is a big city. Not just by population, but by how it feels like a dozen separate cities—each with its own dense, highly urbanized downtown, yet close enough to blend into one enormous municipal organism.

I’d spent essentially all my conscious life in Ottawa, a city about five percent the size,¹ so this month-long trip before seventh grade was a shock. The strangest part wasn’t seeing skyscrapers or packed streets once; it was doing it over and over in completely different parts of the city, each dense enough to feel like its own downtown.

I didn’t keep count, but this outing with my parents and brother might have been the fourth or fifth such excursion. I never figured out exactly which part of Shanghai we were in. I only remember a huge mall, several surrounding buildings or outdoor areas, and repeatedly having to dodge traffic between them. Drivers in Shanghai did not give a damn (#41); traffic lights and seatbelts (#67) often felt optional, and crossing the street repeatedly felt genuinely dangerous if I mistimed anything.

The only non-traumatic part I remember clearly was shopping. At one store I picked five cheap Chinese-dubbed National Geographic DVDs: avalanches, volcanoes, quicksand, the Titanic, and “cameramen who dared.” At a game store, my dad asked whether they sold Chinese Yu-Gi-Oh! cards (they didn’t),² and I spent the rest of the day annoyed because I didn’t want random strangers in Shanghai knowing I liked Yu-Gi-Oh!. Eventually we headed into the Metro carrying several shopping bags, though I no longer remember what most of them contained.

But this was not today’s Shanghai Metro. In 2026 it has nineteen lines; back then it had three. Naturally, the cars were impossibly crowded—more packed than any form of transportation I had ever seen. Luckily we boarded at the first stop, so we got seats and then watched everyone else fight for the remaining seats, elbow room, and five inches of railing. We got off at the Cao Bao Road station, where I see the tallest person I had ever seen in my life³—the guy must have been seven-and-a-half feet tall or something—just casually walking the platform.

Our grandparents’ condo was on Cao Bao Road but still a long way from the station, so we headed for the bus. Instead, we found a woman in a full-on screaming fight with the driver—angry enough to look almost violent, and going on for several minutes while everyone else simply watched. We decided to walk.

When we finally reached my grandparents’ high-rise unit, I dumped the shopping bags on the table, collapsed onto the couch, looked around at my parents and grandparents, who didn’t know English, and said, with complete relieved sincerity:

“Home! Sweet! Home!”

I hadn’t been to New York yet, and our recent Toronto trips (#103, #69) had mostly been spent in the outskirts or Mississauga.
I had been super-into the show when it came out months earlier, and the card game had been recently released.
I can’t confidently say “ever since”; my height reference points have obviously changed.