上海的月亮: EN — LARRY ROMANOFF: Whither Goest Thou?

4, 2022

By Larry Romanoff

In our busy lives we seldom take the time to think deeply about who or what we are, about where our present trajectory will take us, and about how things will be in the end. We don’t often think about what is important, about what really matters, about what are our most important values. And we almost never consider the example we set for other people or the effect our words and actions might have on them. In a sense, being busy “living our daily lives”, we remain oblivious to the purpose of living that daily life.

East Nanjing Road, Shanghai

In Shanghai, there is an area on the East part of Nanjing Road, from the People’s Square Metro station to the Bund on the Huangpu River, that is a large and wide pedestrian mall. No cars, no scooters or bicycles, just people. Thousands of people, both locals and foreigners who are partly residents and partly tourists.

And on this blocks-long mall, there used to be a few people whose purpose was to prey on the foreigners, particularly the tourists, always ready with some scam to grab a few dollars from an unsuspecting visitor.

One day some years ago I was sitting on a bench on this mall, enjoying the sunshine and watching all the activity, when a young man and woman came and sat beside me. Their English was perfect, and they began to chat with me. They told me they were university students from Beijing, enrolled in a College of Art, and were in Shanghai for an exhibition of their works. And they invited me to come to the small warehouse nearby where all their collective works of art were displayed, and to see if maybe there was something I liked.

It was necessary to listen to them for only a few minutes to realise they were not students but were little pawns in someone’s game of printing pirated paintings on cheap paper for maybe $1 each, and selling them to innocent trusting tourists at highly inflated prices. I informed them of my conclusions and expressed my lack of interest. The young man didn’t care to hear any more, and he immediately got up and walked away. But the girl stayed.

I asked her why she was doing what she did, and how she felt about knowing that she was cheating innocent people, tourists who trusted her, stealing their money by lying to them. I asked her if that was what her mother had taught her about how to live her life, and I asked what her mother would think and how her mother would feel, if she knew what her daughter was doing. The girl began to cry, and she sobbed continuously as I persisted with my questions.

Our conversation ended, and the girl asked for my contact information, my mobile phone number and my WeChat account. I gave them to her, and we parted company. A week or two later, I received a message from her, telling me that she had quit that “job” selling fake paintings and had gone back to her home town to reconsider her life and think about what she should do.

A week or two later, I received another message telling me she was returning to Shanghai and wanted to meet me, and that she had a small gift for me, of some snacks particular to her home town. When we met, she told me about her trip home. She said she had told her mother about me, and that she cried when she told the story to her mother. And she said her mother also cried.

Then, she told me she had found another, real job, with a large company that valued her excellent English, and that she was now on a much better course for her life. And she thanked me for caring enough and for taking the time to say the things to her that I said. I never heard from her again, but I assumed she was okay.

Now, I know that with billions of people on earth and with many billions of encounters and transactions between all those people every day, that one little event was so trivial as to disappear into nothingness. But still … for one young girl, it mattered that I lived. And perhaps that is the highest achievement to which we can aspire – to have it matter that we lived.

Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 34 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chap. 2 — Dealing with Demons).

His full archive can be seen at

https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ + https://www.moonofshanghai.com/

He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com

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