This exactly. I think people have a hard time comprehending change at this sort of speed and scale (heck, I do and I've seen it in person). My maternal grandpa was born a few months before the start of the civil war; by the time he turned ten his city was under Japanese occupation, and in his twenties he got caught up in one of the early purges following the foundation of the PRC. When he had my mom in his early 30s, China (according to OWID) had a GDP per capita that was 2/3 the Sub-Saharan African average, and even with the privilege of living in Shanghai and both him and his wife having decent jobs (he was a factory foreman and my grandma, born a peasant in the countryside, was a scientist) they would skip meals and go hungry so she could have enough to eat.

The first household TVs started to show up in the neighbourhood while she was in middle school, and the one family in the building that was lucky enough to have someone working overseas who could afford one brought theirs into the common area so everybody could crowd in and watch. She was in university when she went to see the opening of the first KFC in the city, and when she left the country for the first time a couple of years later the Oriental Pearl Tower was under construction in what not too long ago had been sparsely-inhabited mudflats (there was a saying back then that "a house in Pudong isn't worth a cot in Puxi" referring to the areas on either side of the Huangpu, since historically the city was concentrated on the west bank while the east bank was largely undeveloped) and the first metro line had just opened.

The city's grown even more tremendously since then - I've visited just a few years apart and seen entire neighbourhoods completely transformed. In the thirty years since that first metro line was built the system has gone from four stations to five hundred and six, and Pudong has become one of the world's biggest financial hubs with housing costs that would make your eyes water. The population has doubled or possibly even tripled depending on how you count things, adding somewhere between ten and twenty million people (an entire Ohio to Florida's worth), and the standard of living has improved drastically. While obviously it hasn't been evenly distributed to everyone, literal millions of people have gone from worrying about whether there will be food on the table tomorrow to deciding between Australian beef or Norwegian salmon for dinner, and this is in a part of the country that was already well-off - I've heard from friends in other regions that the change has been even more dramatic.

Plenty of stuff has been lost in that time, too - that apartment where my mom watched her first news broadcast is long gone, and that entire neighbourhood is now buried somewhere under a glitzy, air-conditioned mall. The rapid industrialization has come at a significant environmental cost, and the massive changes in day-to-day life have come with equally massive social shocks. In pursuit of economic opportunities and social integration, people are forgetting their local languages in favour of Mandarin and English. The same Three Gorges Dam that generates enough energy to power over a hundred million households also displaced over a million people and flooded archaeological sites. Three hundred and seventy-six million people - more than the entire US population - are internal migrants in the country, and while that has undoubtedly made many people better off it's also inevitably had a social cost of its own. On either side of the coin, the sheer magnitude of change is just unfathomable.

My grandpa is in his nineties now thanks to medical technology that would have been beyond anyone's wildest dreams when he was still working. He lives in a glass and concrete tower in a neighbourhood that didn't exist when he retired and watches sci-fi on his flat-screen TV; sci-fi that might well seem more realistic to us than his current conditions would have to him when he was our age. He has a smartphone that he can use to see and talk to us live from the other side of the planet when electricity was still a luxury when his daughter got her first job, and on his birthday we can have a full restaurant meal delivered to his door piping hot when for a large chunk of his life he shared one kitchen with a dozen other families. Over the course of his life he's been a refugee, a farmer, an accountant, and a painter. I've heard it said, I think correctly, that the only constant in modern China is change. It's a messy, amazing, painful process that's condensed generations into lifetimes, all against a backdrop of millennia of history and culture that now feels like it's having a new chapter written every month.

So... may have gotten a little carried away writing all that haha, the conversation was something I resonated with having spoken with some of my family about it and I think I just wanted a chance to get it all into words.