Word: emeralds
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Named after the verdant hills that slope down to the Atlantic Ocean, the Emerald Coast of southern Brazil has been luring visitors for the best part of five centuries. Half of Europe seems to have some historical foothold here, be it in language, architecture, customs or cuisine. The Portuguese were the first to arrive in the 16th century, settling among indigenous Indians as they established a local whaling industry. But by the mid-1800s they had been joined by whole communities of Germans, Italians and Austrians, who came to exploit the vast virgin forestland...
...catch a speedboat to the ancient fort on Anhatomirim Island, where the Portuguese fought both Spaniards and pirates. Nature lovers should visit Garopaba Bay, south of Florianópolis, to spot whales migrating to warmer waters between June and November. It seems even the ocean-going whale finds the Emerald Coast too alluring to ignore...
...lugging bricks 12 hours every day, in Shanghai's suffocating summer heat and stinging winter's chill, Qiu earned 1,500 renminbi (about $200) per month before she managed to get a job - and a raise - at a construction site not far from Emerald Riverside. Now she makes about $220 per month and, she says, the work is not as backbreaking. "We work about 12 hours a day," she told me one recent evening, sitting outside a big worker's camp, "and get one day off a week." I asked if she, like so many migrants, has family back home...
...There are 148 houses and townhouses as well as three 11-story apartment buildings in Emerald Riverside, and Fan Wei, the president of Forte and Guo Guangchang's deputy, says they are all sold. Slowly, as the day draws nearer that the town will be linked to Shanghai, people are beginning to move in. Until recently, one of our neighbors was Zhang Shuyi, 35, who owns his own small advertising agency. He lived just behind us with his girlfriend and a big mutt of a dog who occasionally scared the daylights out of our daughter, Abby. (Zhang, in typical Shanghainese...
...easy to forget where you are. But that's a mistake. There is genuine if sometimes subtle tension even in booming, middle-class China, and some of it is evident every time I go out for a bike ride, past the security guards at the entrance of Emerald Riverside. The developments here aren't exactly gated communities, but all of them are guarded, and for a legitimate reason: the fault lines between the migrants and the middle class are very real. Petty crime - theft, primarily - is common; and rarely do the two groups interact. Qiu, the young woman who loaded...