Chapter 33: Good night
Beneath a deep blue parasol at a glass-walled café supported by a steel frame, Su Can, Qiao Shuxin, Lin Guangdong, and Zhao Hao, who was currently in Shanghai, gathered in the bustling commercial heart of Xuhui Center. Where the arrangements of roadside trees could not reach, commercial towers rose from the ground and stabbed into the sky, seemingly proclaiming the speed and vitality of the city's growth.
Yet this surging urban construction, while raising one high-rise after another, also made it harder for people to enjoy that freest of things: the sunlight that migrated from west to east each day.
These landmarks, racing one another into the sky, cut the curtain of light rising from the horizon into pieces, scattering its fragments across the city's magnificent landscape. Antlike crowds flowed among them, hurrying back and forth.
People were always drawn to beautiful views. The middle-aged men who bought fast food at eateries and sat in corners, the women who watched their uniformed children squeeze onto buses with schoolbags on their backs each day, the office workers pedaling toward their next appointment with a client-even those enjoying comfortable lives in their cars would occasionally look toward the high-rises in each neighborhood.
How many people hoped to enter the upper floors of those commercial towers, to have spacious offices, tidy desks, comfortable chairs, and the wealth, prestige, fine clothes, and fine food that came with them? How many felt that their current floor was not high enough and wanted to climb higher? And how many felt that their position was not good enough and hoped to edge a little closer to the best spot?
Besides accommodating a human society increasingly pressed for space, high-rise, high-density buildings also carried a certain human dream: the dream of freely enjoying each