The (Bitter)Sweet Stuff

The last time I went to Xi’an, I stood on the south side of the city walls, forty feet above street level. I looked north, into the old city center, and saw a sea of gray rooftops, barely changed from the architecture of my youth. Then I turned around, outward, toward the rest of the world, and was confronted with a wall of skyscrapers just across the moat, the glass windows reflecting the setting sun back at me.