Fifteen years ago, I saw Haibao everywhere, but never gave it any attention.

Haibao was the mascot for the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. Back then, the cheerful blue, sea-inspired creature was ubiquitous. No opportunity to promote the event was wasted, and Haibao was always there — so omnipresent you stopped noticing it.

I’ve since come to appreciate Haibao. They’ve become an object of unrequited love. In my novel “Prima Donna,” I describe how they quickly faded into oblivion after the Expo ended. All that was left of the iconic symbol was its pale shadow. In the end, only my laid-off, wandering protagonist, Xiao Huadan, was still looking for it.

After finishing my book, I started a hashtag on social media site Douban called “Global Haibao Search Contest.” The rules were simple. One: only chance encounters; two: share a photo. Over the past eight years, digital strangers have “caught” 999 Haibao (the number is a coincidence) in countless settings all over the world — posters, passport pages, parking lot welcome statues, arcade tickets. I like to open the page whenever I have nothing to do, check out the newly found Haibao, and like them one by one. This is always a happy moment.

Haibao appeared “between two magnificent firework shows” — a phrase I saw two years ago at a photography exhibition in Shanghai. If I’m not mistaken, it refers to the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2010 Shanghai Expo, two major events that aren’t ancient history, yet already feel distant. Once radical announcements of the future, they are now haunting memories full of nostalgia. At the time, people moved as the land changed below their feet, constantly losing yet constantly accelerating, fervently believing that the world would continue to change in the same direction. In the blink of an eye, the next decade arrived. The pace slowed, and many people started involuntarily to reflect on the memories scattered among those two displays of fireworks. A concrete sign of this was Haibao’s resurgence.

Almost overnight, Haibao ceased to be a dispensable mascot, a dilapidated souvenir gathering mold, forgotten somewhere in a parking garage. They had transformed into a Shanghai OG, a confident and proud figure who had seen the times change, smiling through it all. Few now mock Haibao’s appearance. Fifteen years later, the charmingly devilish glint in their eyes and the provocative curl of their lips exude the demeanor of an effortless admiral. Its emojis have gone viral, and secondhand merchandise has become bestsellers. The Shanghai Metro even relaunched Haibao-themed transit cards. In its wake, other mascots from the same era — the 2008 Beijing Olympics’ Fuwa and the 2014 Nanjing Youth Olympics’ Lele — were also admired anew. The fates of faded internet icons were rewritten.

In this collective “dreamcore” era, I took my Haibao transit card — I’d found one before prices skyrocketed — and a set of homemade stickers of Haibao in various poses with me to Osaka in Japan, which was hosting the 2025 Expo. Upon landing, I quickly gave up on the idea of visiting the Expo, for reasons that were nearly identical to the ones adults gave me in 2010 for not accompanying me to the Shanghai Expo: the weather was too hot, the venue too remote, the lines too long, the tickets too expensive. Reaching this level of conservatism and laziness, I’d finally become an adult too.

When it comes to travel, there’s a Chinese saying, lai dou lai le — “might as well, having come all this way.” This is crucial, as it determined the further course of events. I chose to visit another “World Expo” in an Osaka suburb: the relatively uncrowded Expo ’70 Commemorative Park. Fifty-five years ago, following Tokyo’s successful 1964 Olympics, Osaka hosted the Expo for the first time, receiving more than 60 million visitors within half a year. Today, it’s a rather unremarkable attraction, used mostly by nearby residents for weekend strolls, dog walks, shopping, or the children’s playground. But, following the wave of interest sparked by the current Expo, the museum about the 1970 Expo has seen visitor figures tick up.

I was struck by the park’s landmark, the Tower of the Sun. The massive white structure has outstretched arms and three separate faces of the sun: one scowling (the present), one golden (the future), and one black (the past). Half a century ago it was a controversial symbol. Now it looks majestic and moving. On the lawn that surrounds it, people watch acrobatics, visit night markets, set off fireworks, or hold relaxed summer festivals. In the distance, elderly people in wheelchairs were taking a group photo with the statue in the background. Did their younger selves visit this place 55 years ago with their families, taking only passing glances as they rushed through, remembering nothing but the heat and the lines? Perhaps, deep in their drawers, they still have souvenirs they bought back then and promptly forgot about. As an event’s meaning fades with time, something unexpected always remains, quietly gleaming through everyday emotions — just like the Haibao people have discovered hiding in plain sight.

I remember how Shanghai’s Huangpu River cut the 2010 Expo in half. Today, both sites are home to shopping malls, parks, and a museum. Stepping inside the museum’s China exhibition hall, I can still clearly sense the heartbeat and sounds of another decade as if they are well-preserved pieces of amber. Back outside, I come across a few faded Haibao figurines hanging off of lampposts, surrounded by a new era, new people, and new stories.

I remember how the western, Puxi side of the Expo was called the “Urban Best Practices Zone.” Fifteen years ago, I had no idea what it meant. All I knew was that, compared to the country pavilions across the river and their hourslong lines, these urban planning exhibition halls were easier to get into. After the Expo, most national pavilions were torn down, but the buildings of the “Urban Best Practices Zone” were repurposed as an art and design hub. The legacy that has been preserved best of all is the “Better City, Better Life” slogan — even today it is still emblazoned on the streetsweeping cars that ply Shanghai’s streets.

For more than a century, World Expos have been celebrations of the futures that humankind cannot stop imagining. In the Osaka of the ’70s, industrialization was advancing at a breakneck pace, making their imagination of what 21st-century life in megacities would look like more radical than today’s reality. I stood before a replica of a work called “Swirling City” for a long time, marveling at its detail and daring, but unsure how many of its predictions had been proven correct. Looking back, cities are just as likely to leave us lonely, marginalized, and dispensable.

In this sense, “future” is a concept more concerned with the social atmosphere in which a plan is designed than with the time when it should be realized. I’ve seen the future as it was imagined in 2010, and the future as it was imagined in 1970. Perhaps I’ll have a chance to look back at the future as it was imagined in 2025. At least in this moment, as I pose for a photo in front of the Tower of the Sun while holding my Haibao transit card, what I see is two golden eras — or rather, a meeting of two golden eras as filtered through nostalgia, each bearing a similar sense of turmoil and aspiration.

The 2025 Expo also has a mascot: Myaku-Myaku. Before my trip, friends told me I didn’t need to get them any Expo souvenirs — especially not Myaku-Myaku, whose design has been compared to large intestines on the Chinese internet. Only after I asked did the clerk at an airport store slowly pull a box of stainless steel Myaku-Myaku keychains out of a drawer. I almost couldn’t get myself to buy one, but I did. Maybe after 15 or 50 years, there will be people thinking back fondly to this odd, once-mistreated mascot and the decadent era from which it came.

Which fantasy, past or future, is more comforting? At least for now, the former seems more popular. Young people reminisce about their childhoods, the elderly yearn for their youth. Everyone catches their breath inside illusions of wishful thinking. I sometimes wonder, given there is a financial product called “futures,” whether there shouldn’t also be something called “pasts.” I could imagine hearing someone say, “Hi, I’d like to put in a large order for pasts, thanks.” As a contrarian investor, I’d buy futures nobody wants to visit for a bargain, then hoard them and never sell. I imagine a future autumn where I’m taking a rusty Haibao and Myaku-Myaku to Osaka to see the Expo I never visited all those years ago, trying hard to recall what happened in that unremarkable year, 2025, and whether the wishes humanity had at the time were ever fulfilled.

(Header image: Haibao statues on display in Shanghai, Dec. 28, 2024. 500px/VCG)