At the park's back gate, we looked inside ShanghART, one of the growing number of galleries in the city that offers provocative images of China in transition. The use of color was refreshing because so much modern Chinese art is bleak. That was more money than we had. It is also more than most of China's 900 million peasants earn in a year. Amid the sound of slurping noodles and clouds of cigarette smoke, vendors sell their wares from hundreds of tabletops.
Buyers begin by offering half or a third of the asking price.
They include clocks, eyeglasses, typewriters and photographs. Some of my favorite finds, though, are old pictures and artifacts from the Communist Party's propaganda machine. Unusually candid, it shows Mao, Deng and others looking tired and wearing grave expressions. At this time, the country was still suffering from a massive famine, which Mao helped create with the disastrous Great Leap Forward. Like most of its mistakes, the party has never really owned up to this one, which led to the deaths of perhaps 30 million people.