Outside the walls of Chinatown, past the protective greenbelt of Ping Tom Park, is the Great Swamp sopping up crumbling buildings, feral dogs and lost travelers.
Inside the walls, in the once sprawling city reduced, Rome-style, to a tiny enclave, are cybercafes where the mafia farm for World of Warcraft gold, McDonald's with hot pot dining tables, ping pong halls, mobile repair shops selling jailbreak iPhones, e-waste recycling sweatshops, four-star capsule hotels, brothels inside Youth Hostels, pieds-à-terre, dormitories where college students cram into multi-level bunk beds, apothecaries, antique shops filled with Ming ceramics of questionable provenance, IMAX 3D movie palaces built in the Art Deco Chinoiserie style, chapels for Western-style white weddings, acupuncture centers, discothèques and Dance Dance Revolution arcades, coin-operated pissoirs, shadow puppet theaters, landscape architecture offices, mausoleums with the embalmed bodies of Richard M. Daley and other former mayors, topiary gardens, haberdasheries where tourists get outfitted with a Mao suit in just a couple of hours, Grant Achatz's take-away, droning server farms, car dealerships, exoplanet radio observatories, Freemason lodges, aviaries and apiaries, abattoirs, salt mines holding the collections of the Field Museum of Natural History and the Art Institute of Chicago, cave pharms, slave labor camps, POW camps, the Obama Presidential Libraries, Apple Stores selling iPad knockoffs, bootleg DVDs and dumplings at the Genius Bar, sentient golf courses, baseball batting cages, foreign news bureaus of CCTV, favelas, Buddhist temples on the grounds of Protestant cemeteries on the grounds of the Holy Name Cathedral, which rents out one of its towers as a Falun Gong meditation center, the other as a synagogue, fog water catching stations, zeppelin loading docks, Boeing manufacturing plants, Starbucks, emergency AC cooling centers, bôiteries, karaoke bars, oxygen bars that always fill up whether or not there's a methane alert, the venues for Postopolis! Chicago, AM radio stations, fabulous fabulous ballrooms for drag shows, hot-body contests, mock same-sex weddings, Chinese opera performances and the Miss Transgender USA beauty pageant, fishmongers, cordwainers, cobblers, tea houses, calligraphy schools, English language schools, elite boarding schools, charm schools and gao kao preparation night schools where students hook up to oxygen tanks in the hopes of increasing their concentration, National Ethnic Minority Theme Houses, outdoor escalators, sky elevators, wetland safari travel agencies, hutongs, fully immersive Cave Automatic Virtual Environments (or CAVEs), H&Ms, Zen-inspired spas, hipster boutiques, white guy rental agencies, watering holes for foreign consular workers, consulates, organ harvesting clinics, sanitariums, orphanages and missionaries, branches of the Louvre, the Guggenheim and the Tate, helipads, satellite campuses of the world's leading universities, studio spaces in which guests for A Date with Luyu are interviewed via satellite, crematoriums, windmills, grottos, giochi d'acqua, betting shops, bakeries, abortion clinics and cinemas that play all the films of Jia Zhanke all the time.