Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Conventions
- Introduction: Shanghai Literary Imaginings: The City of Feeling Rising out of the City of Fact
- 1 Mappings: Drawing Mental Maps of Memories
- 2 Seduction: Reproducing the City as Femme Fatale
- 3 Nostalgia: Restoring Old Buildings to Rewrite the Past
- 4 Escape: Out of and into Various Places ‘Real’ and Imagined
- In Conclusion: The Shape of a City Changes Faster than the Human Heart Can Tell
- Glossary
- Works Cited
- Index
- Publications
1 - Mappings: Drawing Mental Maps of Memories
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Conventions
- Introduction: Shanghai Literary Imaginings: The City of Feeling Rising out of the City of Fact
- 1 Mappings: Drawing Mental Maps of Memories
- 2 Seduction: Reproducing the City as Femme Fatale
- 3 Nostalgia: Restoring Old Buildings to Rewrite the Past
- 4 Escape: Out of and into Various Places ‘Real’ and Imagined
- In Conclusion: The Shape of a City Changes Faster than the Human Heart Can Tell
- Glossary
- Works Cited
- Index
- Publications
Summary
For sure, I live in Shanghai, but Shanghai is just the land of my dreams. Ever since I began remembering things, she has been the land of my dreams. […] Perhaps Shanghai is big, sailing in the time and space of civilization like a giant ship. We are like passengers on this ship. Although we are familiar with the city and have been to many streets, roads and shops, we know only part of it. Or perhaps Shanghai is small, packed in our minds. Wang Xueying 王雪瑛 (2006: 125 and 133; translation by Sylvia Yu and Julian Chen)
The cliché is that there are eight million stories in the city. But really, it's more like there's eight million different cities, each created within each of our memories.
Jake Barton on the City of Memory project. (cited in Mooney 2008)‘Passing 97th Street in Far Rockaway still makes me hungry, and gives me vertigo.’ Thus starts one of the stories on the website www.cityofmemory.org, an online community map of New York citizens’ stories. The idea is simple: people can click on a particular point of the map and upload their memory of this place, including video, audio, and photos. When browsing the map with your mouse pointer, pop-ups appear containing the opening sentence and/or a picture of the stories attached to the places. Thus, New York's geographical map is gradually layered with a map of the ‘invisible landscape’, i.e. ‘a world of deep and subtle meaning for the people who live there, one that can be mapped only by words’, as Kent Ryden (1993: 52) puts it in Mapping the Invisible Landscape:
While the modern map is a marvel of efficient geographical communication […] in other important ways it does not tell us very much at all. The New Milford map provides an excellent example in this case, for I spent nine years of my childhood among those hills, houses, rivers, and names. The map tells me where certain hills are, but I retain in my legs the physical memory of what it feels like for a child to climb them.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Shanghai Literary ImaginingsA City in Transformation, pp. 51 - 100Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2015