A Taipei Designer's First Shanghai Trip, and a Crab Misunderstanding
Chen Bozhou landed in Shanghai on an October afternoon, his first time on the mainland after years of only reaching as far as Hong Kong. A 34-year-old design manager in Taipei, he had saved up vacation days and picked Shanghai, partly because his father had once sailed there as a young sailor and never stopped talking about it. The Bund’s towers were taller than Taipei’s, his father used to say, and Nanjing Road’s shops were bigger. Chen wanted to see it with his own eyes. He booked a hotel in Huangpu district, not far from the Bund, dropped his bags, and went out to walk. Nanjing Road Pedestrian Street was packed shoulder to shoulder, neon flashing until his eyes swam.
That evening he found a modest restaurant and ordered hairy crabs, a Shanghai autumn specialty. The menu listed them at 236 yuan each, which he quietly converted and decided was acceptable for a treat. He ordered two, one for now and one to take back, imagining a neat pair on a plate. What arrived was two large boxes, each holding several crabs, side dishes and tools. The 236 yuan was not per crab at all but the price of a set. He sat there for a moment, laughing at himself, then ate as much as he could and asked the staff to pack the rest.
It is a small story, but it captures something many first-time visitors from Taiwan notice: the scale. Portions, buildings, crowds, distances. Chen had grown up hearing about the mainland secondhand, through a sailor’s memories and news clips, and the reality kept overshooting the mental picture. A crab dinner for one turned into a feast for four. A walk down one street took an hour because the street simply would not end.
He spent the next days doing the usual circuit. He rode the metro, which he found cleaner and cheaper than expected, and used his phone for almost everything, from paying for breakfast to renting a shared bike along the Huangpu. He crossed to Pudong and looked back at the colonial-era waterfront his father had described, now lit up and crowded with tourists taking the same photo from the same angle. He sent his father a picture. His father replied with a voice message, unusually long, mostly reminding him to eat properly.
What struck Chen most was not the skyline but the small rhythms. Older men fishing off the embankment at dawn. A woman selling roasted sweet potatoes from a cart near his hotel, who remembered his order by the third morning. Shop assistants who switched to Taiwanese-accented Mandarin the moment they heard his voice and asked, kindly, where he was from. He had expected awkwardness and found curiosity instead.
He kept a note on his phone of things he wanted to tell his father: the crab boxes, the metro map, the sweet potato cart. Travel between Taipei and Shanghai has become routine for many people on both sides, but for Chen it was still a first, and the gap between the stories he inherited and the city he walked through turned out to be the most interesting part of the trip. He booked a return visit for spring, this time with his father’s old shipping route in mind, and a firm rule about ordering crabs: ask first, then point.