My childhood memories of Shanghai are of the 1940s and 1950s. The current location of Xintiandi used to be my childhood home. The road where my home was located was called Xing’an Road, but now this road is no longer there, and it has become a prosperous Xintiandi Xinli. I still remember when I was in junior high school, my family moved here, a family of ten, including my parents, my grandmother and six siblings, lived in a very small house.

Summer in Shanghai is very hot and humid. At that time, there was no air conditioner, and there was no condition to use electric fans at home. When it was the hottest, me and my brothers and sisters would do homework, read books, play chess with just a fan. Sometimes when it was too hot, in the middle of the night, I would even lay the mat with my eldest brother directly on the side of the road to sleep, and go back to the house when the night was a little cooler. I still remember that Nanjing Road was the most prosperous road at that time.

There were various shopping malls, and there were trams in the middle of the road. However, taking trams and shopping malls were very luxurious at that time. I left Shanghai in 1959 to go to university in Beijing, and then I was assigned to work. I didn’t return to Shanghai until 2002. I can’t help feeling that Shanghai has undergone great changes and its economy has developed rapidly. Shanghai now has many skyscrapers and it has become a financial center. The address of my childhood home is no longer there, and many streets are no longer what they used to be. I still remember when I was a child, I would often go to Fuxing Park which was not far from my home. However, when I returned to Shanghai in 2002, I went back to the park, although the park was still there, I felt it was much smaller than I remembered. When I was small, I thought the park was huge, but goodbye to Fuxing Park, I have grown up, even grown old.