Bridge

The word “Bridge” was stenciled in neat black letters at the entrance to a luxury residence community on the outskirts of Shanghai. The guard at the gate, who snapped his hand up smartly to his kepi when addressed, was hard pressed to say why it was called “Bridge”. It certainly didn’t connect anything to anything else and the newly tarred road that ran outside the entrance to the complex came to an abrupt end in at the edge of a dark and impenetrable thicket.

“Bridge” had been carved out of the wilderness only a few months before and then made habitable for wealthy foreigners. The residences were built in a faux-Moorish style with tiled roofs and turreted casements. By contrast, the doors - light oval shapes and disproportionately small - looked like something a hobbit architect had designed.

Life inside the complex followed a civilized rhythm of evening strolls with dogs well-heeled on leashes. It was an oasis of calm and tranquility interrupted only by the pulsing soubasse of bullfrogs that emerged at dusk from the rushes along the canals that traced the edges of the property

The frogs were all that remained of the wilderness that had been there before. It was possible that they were there because they had been overlooked but it was more likely that they had been carefully accounted for in the design and kept on as a momento mori of the countryside.

Every month the residents organized dinner parties that they took to calling “walking dinners”. They called them “walking dinners” because each family would volunteer to prepare a meal and then walk from one house to the next during the course of an evening tasting the food their neighbors had prepared. Through this pleasant diversion they got to know each other and came to appreciate each other’s cultures. A family of Danes who expected to find no more than salad when they entered the house of their neighbors, strict vegetarians from Bombay, were pleasantly surprised to find heaping trays of lightly browned Pakoras and Samosas.

This cross-cultural exchange was strictly confined to the complex though and did not extend to the world outside. Occasionally a small group of residents would take up wine glasses at the end of a “walking dinner” and make their way down to the entrance of the complex. With the gate just ajar they would watch as men in blue coveralls at the end of a shift made their way in twos and threes down the dusty road that led back to their dormitories.

They were workers coming from construction sites where they were putting up the walls and towers that would destroy their past while building a bridge to their future.