S hanghai proper could be glimpsed only through vertical apertures between 
the high buildings of the Pudong Economic Zone as Nell skated westward. 
Downtown Pudong erupted from the flat paddy-land on the east bank of the Huang 
Pu. Almost all of the skyscrapers made use of mediatronic building materials. 
Some bore the streamlined characters of the Japanese writing system, rendered 
in sophisticated color schemes, but most of them were written in the denser 
high-resolution characters used by the Chinese, and these tended to be stroked 
out in fiery red, or in black on a background of that color.