This book began as a doctoral dissertation, and was finished a decade later than I had intended. Its path between defence and publication owes much to people who, at various points across that decade, trusted that the work would be finished when there was little evidence to suggest it would.
My deepest debt is to the late Theodore C. Bestor, to whom the book is dedicated. Ted's writing on Tokyo neighbourhoods was, more than any other single influence, the model. His patience – year after year, while I let the project take a long detour through architecture, applied design, and Thai government policy work before returning to the page – is the gift I have spent ten years trying to honour. He died in May 2024, before this book was finished. I am sorry he did not see it.[1]
Funding for the fieldwork on which this book rests was provided by the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the Fairbank Centre for Chinese Studies, the Harvard Asia Centre, and the Graduate Society Fellowship of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. Earlier research was supported by the Fulbright Program, the Asian Cultural Council, and a travel grant from MIT.
The architect Jan Wampler, who first sent me to China through the Tsinghua-MIT Beijing Studio in 2006, taught me to treat buildings as practices rather than as objects. My MIT master's thesis was supervised by the late Stanford Anderson, who insisted, against my early instincts, that architectural form is always also political form. His insistence is one of the things this book is finally an attempt to honour. The historian John Dower introduced me to a Japan whose texture shaped everything I have since written about cities. The three of them, together, taught me to read across disciplines without anxiety. I have tried.
Jeffrey Lehman, the founding Vice Chancellor of NYU Shanghai, gave me a postdoctoral home from 2014 to 2016 and a teaching role on his Global Perspective on Society course that, more than I knew at the time, shaped the kind of anthropologist I was becoming. Without that postdoctoral year I would have left Shanghai a year before the fieldwork was ready to be left. I am grateful for the support and for the example.
It was Magnus Fiskesjö at Cornell, then teaching alongside me at NYU Shanghai, who introduced me to John Crespi at Colgate University in the spring of 2016. John had arrived in Shanghai with a class of Colgate students for a semester at Fudan, and a decade of friendship has followed – drinking sessions in three countries, cooking sessions in at least four, the introduction of a great many of his Colgate students to Tranquil Light, and the steady example of a Chinese-studies scholar who reads the language better than most of his Chinese friends do and wears the achievement lightly. John read drafts of this manuscript at several stages over the past two years; the single most consequential piece of editorial advice the book received – to stop reciting years and start telling the story – was his. The Prologue in its current form is shorter by his hand than by mine.
Matthew C. Gutmann at Brown University came back to Shanghai several times between 2014 and 2017 during research trips for his own work on marriage and gender in contemporary China. We sat in many of the same fields together. He cited me generously in the resulting book; he taught me, by example, what it looked like to do anthropological fieldwork in middle age with the energy and humility one is supposed to have at the start. Over many slow beers in Shanghai courtyards and Bangkok bars, he showed me what kind of scholar I wanted, eventually, to become.
Sue Anne Tay's photographs accompany this book; her generosity in sharing her archive has been one of the project's quiet pleasures. Matthew Williams collaborated with me on two earlier articles whose arguments inform several chapters here. Lu Hanchao's scholarship on the lilong is the foundation of most of the historical material this book cites.
Apiwat Ratanawaraha, a fellow Harvard-Yenching scholar and longtime friend, and his partner Ray, hosted me for a week at their lake house in Monson, Massachusetts, in 2015, at the precise moment I had stopped believing the dissertation would be finished. Three-quarters of the original document was written in their kitchen, on a deal table by a window facing the lake, in conditions of quiet I have never been able to reproduce in any subsequent year of trying. The dissertation that emerged from that week is not the book you are reading; this book is much better than that one. But the week in Monson is the small miracle in the middle of it, and I am grateful to Apiwat and to Ray for the rooms, the lake, and the year of further patient encouragement that followed.
I owe a particular and quiet debt to the woman who, in 2011, made the original introduction to the neighbourhood I have called Tranquil Light, and to the residents who let me sit at their gates for sixteen months and counting. The book is for them as much as it is for any of the named individuals on this page.
For the long second half of the project I thank my colleagues at the Digital Economy Promotion Agency in Bangkok, and especially the citizens and municipal staff of Nakhon Si Thammarat, whose work on the @NakhonCity platform has been the most useful empirical confirmation of this book's central argument that I could have hoped for.
Chollawan ‘Plub' Wanichpan came back to Shanghai with me in 2023 and again in 2025 to walk the lanes of Tranquil Light, sit at the kiosk, and patiently help me see the compound with the eyes I have developed in the years since 2016 rather than the eyes I had then. The book's title is, between us, also a small private project; we have been locating Shanghai together for several years. The version of the city this book describes is one of several we have walked through. I am grateful, beyond what an Acknowledgments page can hold, for the company and the eye.
And finally my family. My mother and my brother, who waited longer than they should have had to. My father, who taught me to ask the questions and who, by the time I had developed the vocabulary to ask him properly, was no longer there to answer. Some of the book's hardest paragraphs are, however indirectly, addressed to him.
Errors of fact, judgement, and interpretation are mine. The book is much better than it would have been without the people listed above, and somewhat worse than they had reason to hope.
– N. A.