Category Archives: Volume 8 | 2023-2024

Li Jiasheng’s critique of the rapid migration of services necessary for everyday life to smartphone apps and miniprograms is not only thoughtful and measured in its analysis, but also passionate and compassionate in its motivation. The essay begins with a moment of “fury” at an elderly woman who cuts in line, fury that immediately resolves into empathy as Jiasheng, reflecting on an experience that all city dwellers know well, recognizes not only his grandfather’s plight in the face of the digitization of everyday life but that of countless elderly citizens. The woman can’t pay by smartphone app and must instead disrupt the efficient flow of data by counting out hard cash. And what if it were an emergency? What if she couldn’t cut in line in front of a college student but had to use multiple apps to get food, water, medicine? Jiasheng’s framing of his rigorous investigation with personal experience arises from his experience of the Spring 2022 zero-Covid Shanghai emergency lockdown when many seniors struggled with health codes, group buy apps for food, and confusing, overflowing chats.

In our “Walking as Inquiry” version of WAI, students explored the work of urban geographers, ethnographers, urbanists, great essayists like Eileen Chang, and above all the “slow journalism” of visiting writer Paul Salopek and his Out of Eden Walk. They were challenged to use Shanghai as a site of inquiry, and in walking and sharpening their attention by slowing down, observing, describing and reflecting on specific moments, they developed final research projects that arose from their direct engagement with the city.

Jiasheng’s essay is exemplary. It begins with a specific everyday problem that matters to the writer then moves into strong analysis that draws on quality scholarly sources to make the reader both care and think hard about our overreliance on emerging digital technologies, especially during times of crisis and with regard to those most vulnerable among us.

—David Perry, Clinical Professor in the Writing Program

Letter from the Editors | Vol. 8

Volume 8 | 2023-2024

The 2023-2024 academic year during which this volume was compiled represents NYU Shanghai’s first full academic year without pandemic restrictions since 2018-2019. As our university turns towards the post-pandemic era, we are delighted to publish Hundred River Review Volume 8 as our first print edition since 2021. Our 8th edition truly showcases the diversity of outstanding work which students in NYU Shanghai’s core writing programs are able to produce. Essays which we have selected this year reflect on the recent past, take advantage of loosening restrictions to explore our wider home of Shanghai, and consider in detail the interaction between East and West which NYU Shanghai is proud to foster.

Volume 8 opens with Li Jiasheng’s piece on seniors and the Shanghai lockdown. Reflecting on lessons learned, Li challenges us to consider how the pandemic brought to light the “digital divide” between senior citizens and China’s ever more technology-oriented younger population and government apparatus. As China’s world of WeChat mini-apps and facial recognition purchasing is likely to continue expanding for the foreseeable future, Li offers a note of caution, reminding us that we “should learn from our elders” and avoid leaving anyone behind during digitalization. Taking the opportunity to explore the city of Shanghai beyond our new Qiantan campus, Volume 8’s second essay by Enkhijin Nerguibaatar scrutinizes the city’s linguistic landscape. Focusing upon signage in the Jingting Plaza and Tianle Place of Korean Street (hanguojie 韩国街), Enkhijin’s essay on Korean language use within this Korean cultural hotspot offers readers a window into one of the many diverse communities which call Shanghai home. Her work highlights how a diaspora makes ‘home’ in a new built environment, embedding a distinctive sense of place into the fabric of their everyday lives.

Moving beyond Shanghai’s recent events and lived landscape, the second half of Volume 8 addresses the fields of film, literature, poetry, and philosophy. Our third essay is Julie Wu’s “Weapons of the Weak.” Wu artfully analyzes how notional ‘submission’ to Confucian patriarchal norms displayed in Ban Zhao’s Eastern Han-era writings on etiquette and in the actions of the character Songlian in Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern can be represented as an attempt to seize female agency in a hostile world. While in Ban Zhao’s case this attempt proved highly successful, safeguarding her political position as a key adviser to empress Deng Sui, Songlian’s efforts resulted in tragedy. From subverting social norms within Chinese society, Volume 8 then moves to a comparative study of norms between China and the West. Carefully analyzing the intersection between the Socratic attack on poetry with the ancient Chinese poetic tradition, Lanyue (Alice) Zhang’s essay offers an in-depth analysis of how shi (詩) evolved a distinct educational and political purpose that deflects the attack on poetry leveled by Socrates. Zhang’s work is an example of the intellectual cross-pollination between China and the West which our core writing courses and NYU Shanghai more broadly are dedicated to fostering, and represents a worthy addition to our volume.

We are, as always, delighted to have received so many submissions to this volume, and are extremely proud of the masterful student work which we selected for our 2023-2024 edition. As we indicate in our journal’s mission statement, “above all, the Hundred River Review publishes works that can serve as pedagogical models and provides a space for students to share their writing, read their peers’ works, and engage in the exchange of ideas valued by NYU Shanghai.” We strongly believe that this year’s edition has fulfilled this promise.

Sincerely,

Peter Weise, Sarah Hakimzadeh, Jingsi Shen and Ben Hales

The Hundred River Review Editorial Board