The first week I lived in Shanghai, I was walking down Nanjing Street, in front of Cartier, and a man tried to sell me tiger paws. I was near one of the main high-end shopping plazas when the man — rustic looking, darkly tanned and wild-eyed — approached me. He peered at me expectantly and waited for his money. I looked down at the moth-eaten paws and up at the diamonds in Cartier’s window, and I felt as one often does here, like part of a Surrealist painting.
I left Manhattan a year ago, after a lifetime there. I was annoyed at spending $20 for a hamburger, depressed by designer boutiques on Bleecker Street, weary of the hovering spectre of al-Queda. I decided to move myself and my 12-year-old daughter, Lulu — whom I had adopted as a baby in China — from the old capital of the world to the new.
The first order of business (on arrival) was to find a place to live. I had researched brokers on the web and called one when we arrived. She came right over with a van and took us on a tour of the city. Rental brokers in Shanghai, it seems, are your hosts and hostesses. Not only do they find you lodging but they introduce you to the city, serve as advisers and translators, and continue to look after you for the duration of your lease.
When you rent a place in Shanghai, the landlord gives you presents. This is a terrific shock for a New Yorker. My agent told me I could ask for special furniture, TVs, gym memberships — the landlady would actually take me shopping.
I was uncertain what to ask for. Finally I requested a washing machine and window screens to keep out mosquitoes. My rental agent was so upset by my reticence that she insisted that the owner include a big TV and pay for the satellite service for a year.
There are two types of life coexisting in Shanghai: the Westernised life, which is becoming more or less like New York’s, and the old lane life still lived by a good many of the city’s inhabitants.
Each lane is a perfect little ecosystem. There is a lanekeeper who watches over the lane and a lane sweeper who comes morning and evening to clean it up, to whom I contribute about $5 a month. At the end of each lane is a little house with square windows, which covers garbage bins on one side of a wall and a communal sink on the other.
I learned more about my lane when I brought my dog over from New York. Once we had gotten a bit settled, I hired a pet relocator and my dog, Skippy, a miniature pinscher, was flown to Shanghai.
The first night I walked Skippy was the first time I went out the back door to the lane behind our house. I discovered that it was totally dark. My neighbours on either side were home but, it seemed, had no electricity. It was pitch black inside their houses. Only the sound of a transistor radio playing Chinese opera emanated from the buildings. It is a tribute to the safety of the lane and Shanghai in general that I walk the dog down that lane every night in total darkness without any fear. In the morning when I walked him, I learned that some of my neighbours also have no plumbing. I watched them bring their chamber pots out into the lane to a special truck.
Thirty years from now, Shanghai will probably be just like New York. But I don’t care about that now. When I finish writing this, I’m going down to Xiangyang Park, past the poor men from the north who are just arriving to sell animal skins, to find the group of my neighbours who set up a boom box at twilight for ballroom dancing. They don’t mind if I join in. The more the merrier.
NYT