The streets of Shanghai.

Last June, in a faraway province of rural China, an eighteen-year-old high-school student, denied the opportunity to take the college entrance exam because he could not pay his eighty-dollar high-school fees, killed himself by stepping in front of a train (New York Times, August 1, 2004). At the end of July, in a little village in central China, hundreds of police fired rubber bullets into large crowds protesting high taxes, corruption, and a booming economy that makes the big cities rich and leaves the farmers behind (Washington Post, August 7, 2004).

I had not read these stories as my train rumbled across the countryside from Beijing toward Shanghai last summer. I had read the New York Times Magazine article, "The Chinese Century" (July 4, 2004) predicting that China's virtually unlimited labor market of young men would both wipe out American jobs and provide American and Chinese consumers with "tons of stuff"--T-shirts, DVD players, cell phones, and toys--at lower prices.

And how the young men work! Crammed into sweltering buses and sleek subway cars, pedaling their rusty bikes, they swarm to work. Throughout Shanghai they are knocking down walls, digging up streets. Below my midtown hotel window, on a border between a poor neighborhood and the Nanking Street shopping mecca, a new, block-sized building is going up as cranes and steam shovels toil even through the night. A few blocks away the prosperous young swarm through the glittering malls buying watches, camcorders, jewelry, and Haagen-Dazs at three dollars a small scoop.

One day I saw at the bottom of a subway stairs a skinny, young boy, wearing only shorts, kneeling on a mat with a little open bag between his knees. His arms were cut off at the shoulders. I resisted the impulse the say something, to bless him; but I wished there was a journalist in Shanghai to tell his story. What happened to his arms?

One night when I returned to my hotel from the Shanghai Symphony, I paused at a tiny neighborhood plaza, the tip of a minimall where locals stand, squat, or stretch out on the ground to listen to live entertainment, a man strumming "Blowing in the Wind," a flutist, or on this night, a street singer who pours out his ballad directly to a tiny baby in a stroller who gapes back in awe, as if this show, this opera, is for him alone.

Then a procession of trucks heaped high with black earth and rocks gouged out of the construction site beneath my window come roaring out of the workplace and into the concert. The street singer, his eyes and smile fixed on the child, sings as if the trucks were silent and as if the garbage doesn't reek.

For my last two days, I move to a better hotel, the old Cathay, now called the Peace Hotel, built on the Bund, the riverfront financial district with its beautiful promenade along the water.

"Where are you from?" asks the swarthy little man in a blue shirt and four-day beard beside me in the elevator, as we exit the elevator and walk toward my room. Something's wrong here, I think.

"I have no work," he says. He had targeted me on the street and followed me into the hotel and is now almost in my room.

"You must leave now," I say. And he vanishes down the stairs.

The next morning I take the subway far across town to St. Ignatius Cathedral, once the nineteenth-century headquarters of the Shanghai Jesuits, partly destroyed in the cultural revolution, but restored and reopened under the current regime. After Mass I linger on the church steps to take in the scene.

A few feet from the church steps a dozen ragged children rush me at once, pushing me, crying out, and shaking their plastic cups. Apart from the group, a slim, slightly older boy stands, an open bag dangling from his neck. He has no arms.

"It is getting worse," a German tells me. "They come from the rural areas, and there is no way for them to live. I have been here five years, and this is worse than ever."

"The arms?" I ask. The horrible suggestion had come to me that maybe parents mutilate their children to make them more pathetic beggars. "Accidents at work," he replies. "The construction companies hire anyone and then when they are injured, lose their arms, they throw them away."

And it is only now, later, that I allow myself to think that the armless boy may have been the same boy I saw two days before.

Raymond A. Schroth, SJ, is the Jesuit Community Professor of the Humanities at St. Peter's College, Jersey City, New Jersey.