“Socialist China gone to capitalist dogs.” The refrain from recent doggerel came back to his mind, as if in a counter rhythm to his steps. Everything was changing fast, beyond comprehension.

His jogging was changing too. In the past, running in the starlit solitude, few vehicles visible, he had enjoyed the feeling of the city pulsing along with him. Now at this early hour, he was aware of cars driving around, occasionally honking too, and of a crane cranking in a new construction site one block ahead. It was said to be an upper-class apartment complex for the newly rich.

Not too far away, his old shikumen-style house, where he had been living along with a dozen working-class families, was about to be pulled down for a commercial high-rise. Soon the residents were going to be relocated to Pudong, an area that was once farmland east of the Huangpu River. After that there would be no possibility of a morning jog along this familiar street, in the center of the city. Nor could he enjoy a bowl of soy soup served by the Worker and Farmer Eatery around the corner. The steaming hot soup flavored with chopped green onion, dried shrimp, minced fried dough, and purple seaweed-so delicious, yet only five cents. The cheap eatery, once advocated “for its dedication to the working-class people,” had disappeared, and now in its place stood a Starbucks coffee shop.

Perhaps he was too old to understand the change. Huang sighed, his steps growing heavy, his eyelids twitching ominously. Near the intersection of Huaihai and Donghu Roads, the sight of the safety island further slowed him down. It had looked like a flower bed in the spring, but now so barren, brown with bare twigs trembling in the wind-bleak, like his mind.

There he glimpsed an alien object, red and white, in the pale ring of the island lamplight-possibly something dropped from a farm truck on its way to the nearby food market.