Rain

I woke up this afternoon to a different world outside. Apparently it rained this morning. You can tell, everything's changed. Shanghai has taken on a crisp, fresh color. Everything's clean. The tiles on the roof of the old-style houses are red, no longer brown. You can even see the subtle colors on the skyscrapers. I didn't realize before how gray this city is, constantly covered in a thick layer of smog and car horns. But gray would imply that it's slow. It's just the opposite. I guess it's a lot like New York, a giant city that's constantly moving, expanding, building higher and higher up. Kinda like the tower of Babel, too. It's hard to fathom 9 million people here. I don't wanna imply that China is completely environmentally unfriendly, though. Sure, there's plenty of pollution, but at the same time, there're unexpected ways of conservation everywhere too. All except the oldest toilets have 2 flush settings: less or more water. There're these cute little electric motorcycles running around that doesn't use gasoline. And all the people from my mother's and grandparents' generation would never allow the water to be left on and wasted. This mentality doesn't come from the most "forward", "progressive" liberal thinking. Instead, it's rooted back in the old world when things were scarce.
I ate lunch at a little restaurant downstairs opened by a family from XinJiang province (Uyghurs). I never knew the English word Uyghur was for XinJiang people until I looked it up just now. When I was little, my conception of the XinJiang ethnic group was this exotic, beautiful people who would sing their distinctive songs while picking grapes. The girls all had long, thin braids. My sister had this really cute baby cap lined with purples beads that was in the XinJiang style. The family who ran the restaurant wore Muslim head scarves and caps. I know so little about what their lives might be like, as a plain Han person, part of the dominant ethnic group here. But at the same time, I wonder, do they feel the same living in Shanghai as I do in the U.S? In this city, they're also a minority, far away from their homeland, obviously stands out from everyone else, looking Chinese, and yet different somehow