See is believing....

When we first moved to China, Craig and I were driving to the kids’ school for a meeting.  We had done this drive from the apartment to the school probably a half a dozen times already.   About half way there, I turned to Craig and said “I’ve never driven down this street before.”  He reminded me we had driven this way “about a half a dozen times.”  “Yes,” I said “but each time this street is so completely different.”

Is it me?  Or does  it seems that the streets of Shanghai perform some soft of scarf dance – peeling off layers or hiding behind veils, so each time I walk a lane or drive down a street -- something is different?   Streets, lanes, alleys, storefronts never look the same from one day to another.

Chalkboard in our lane changes every few months

Early Sat morning is different from Sat night

Youtaio -- a Shanghai breakfast food is only available in the  AM

Sometimes I think I can’t possibly gather up all the visual information available when I walk or drive down a street in Shanghai, but at other times I realize the streets really are different, depending on the time of day or night …. or day of the week. Some stores only seem to be open in the morning for rush hour (like the place that makes youtiao, which is essentially a breakfast cruller). Other stores seem to only open at night.  

Like New York, restaurants open and close all the time in Shanghai – or they re-open with a new décor or a new chef.  And then there are the vendors that change and move constantly -- both legal and illegal vendors with carts and wagons. For example, on our end of Haui Hai Road the vendors tend to be the illegal ones selling DVDs of movies still in the theaters, CDs, sketch books, and fake Long Champ bags.  On the other end of Haui Hai Road – closer to Hongqiao,  there tends to be more fruit vendors, who sell from wagons and carts, which look like they jumped off the pages of a Charles Dickens novel. 

This view of Shanghai will not be here in 20 years. 

With all the constant changing in Shanghai, you can become sentimental.  You can mourn the loss of your favorite noodle shop or a deco movie theatre, which will be closing soon.    Craig has an expression “The Shanghai you see is the Shanghai you get.”  Meaning, what is in front of you is where this ever changing city is today – so enjoy it as she is --  not how she was or how she will be.  

Many things have changed Shanghai – wars, occupations, and even expos have changed the Shanghai you see.

Shanghai was founded in the 10^th Century as nothing more than a swampy area east of Suzhou.  The total population until 1127 was only 12,000 households.   But in 1127 something happened that changed the trajectory of Shanghai forever.  In 1127 Kaigeng fell.  So why does this matter?  Well (and I didn’t know this until I started reading the history of Shanghia) Kaifeng was probably the largest city in the world from 1013 to 1127.  Kaifeng was the center point of four major canals and was a commercial and industrial center and had a population of 600,000 and 700,000. 

So in 1127 Kaifeng fell to Jurchen invaders and about 250,000 of those residents became refugees in Shanghai.  Shanghai was forever changed by migration and immigration. 

Last night I watched the movie Shanghai Calling (which I highly recommend).  The heroine, an American, comments on how we may call ourselves ex-Pats but really we are immigrants.  We may, in general, come to Shanghai in a different way from those Kaifeng citizens.  Most are not fleeing invaders. but we come.  We come for opportunity.  We come for love.  We come to be reborn – whether we are American Born Chinese (ABC), or returning home natives or third culture families.  We are part of Shanghai and the veils she wears and sheds. 

The Tale of the Nine Sleeping Dragons

Every culture has a flat bread (falafel, lavash, paratha, injera, naan, nang, tortilla, matzah) and every culture has stories or legends.   Cities have stories too -- real and urban legends.  Once we know them, these stories make us feel like insiders.  Do you know how to use the ceiling in Grand Central Terminal, outside the Oyster Bar, to tell a secret across the room?  Do you know the best fragrant garden in London, which is accessible even without the resident key?  (Clue it is in an unlikely Hackney location.)  Or that in Rome, some of the best Caravaggio painting are actually in a church near the Pantheon, 5th chapel on the left?  With each of these secret places comes a tale.    

Craig and I once found an old tattered book called New York in Sunshine and in Shadow, about NYC at the turn of the century.  The “sunshine” part of the book was very “Ragged Dick” --- “immigrates make good” stories – pull yourself up by your boot straps and make something of yourself.  The second half was a police blotter of sorts.  Every kidney harvesting internet tale you have ever read doesn’t come close to the warning tales of life the 1900s in NYC, where a drink in a bar you didn’t know, could land you under the floor boards penniless, naked and freezing.

I’ve started to seek out Shanghai “tales of the city,” albeit, not as exciting at "New York in Shadow."   One of the first ones I heard was the tale of the sleeping dragons or the tale of the nine dragons.  (Now, those doing their middle school research projects on Shanghai – this is a tale told to me second hand, so I don’t want to find this in your footnotes!) 

Isabel, our real estate agent told us this story one day in a van to distract us while stuck in mid-day traffic on the loop road at the Chengdu Bei Lu and Yan’an Lu intersection.  This intersection is a point in the city where “all the roads converge.”

As Isabel told me the story, the new elevated roads were being built at great speed, getting ready for the Expo. The massive construction project called the  Yan’an elevated highway was started in 1995 and completed in 1999.  To build this web of loop roads around the city, entire historic buildings were literally moved out of the way (e.g. The Russian neo-classical building, which is now the Shanghai International Exhibition Center was picked up and moved back.)

 

Everything was going well until they hit this central crossing point at Chengdu Lu.  A pillar needed to be placed on this site, yet no amount of blasting could help the crews get through the rock.  Finally a monk was called to the site.  He was very very old and wise.   He prayed for days and told the engineers he could not tell them the problem because of his vows at a monk.  But he now knew what the problem was.  The engineers begged the monk to tell them what to do, as grand plan for the city of Shanghai could not move forward without this road. 


Although he knew it was bad luck, he acquiesced and told them that under this spot slept nine dragons.  All of the banging of the construction had woken up the dragons and they would not let the road continue, since they had not been paid the right respect.  (Basically no one asked their opinion.)  The monk told the engineers that if they paid tribute to the dragons they might settle down and allow the construction to continue. 

So the city commissioned a noble monument to the nine sleeping dragons on the pillar, which would hold up the roads.  The sculpture was designed by Zhao Zhirong, the now-retired deputy director of Shanghai’s Oil Painting & Sculpture Institute.  (Some say the tale has nine dragons because the number nine (jiu) is a pun on the word ‘long lasting,” which is good for a pillar that literally holds up the whole Shanghai highway system.  


The monk was not so lucky.  He had broken his vow to keep what he knew about the dragon world secret and he died shortly afterwards, but the city was better off because of what he did.  

Now that I live here I pass the flying dragons every morning and knowing how they got there (or at least one version of how they got there) makes me feel a little bit more like an insider – even if it is only one tale of the city.  It is now becoming my city. 

The Hunt --- Home is Where the Heart Is

I haven’t posted in over a month and that was never my plan.   But learning to let go of my plans has been part of what I’ve been learning on this assignment.   My plan was I would find an apartment or lane house, live in it for a month or two and get everything set before Craig and the girls arrived for New Year’s Eve.  We would celebrate New Year’s Eve in the new apartment / house and all would be great. 

Well, I let go of that plan.  I came to Shanghai on Oct. 23, and when I returned home to NY to pack on Dec 12 we still hadn’t finalized our lease.  You would think that having a healthy housing allowance and an agent would make the process easy.  But, as my new favorite acronym goes – ICS (It’s China Stupid).   Sometimes things just take a long time here.  They don’t use the word bureaucratic but they call it “government-like.” 

Most expats (including Americans like us) can’t bring any furniture into China so we are required to rent a furnished apartment.  (Any furniture we would have brought in is taxed as an import.)  So, mostly what we shipped was kitchen stuff and clothing.  (I will later write a lament that I didn’t send my kitchen stand mixer.)  We are each given a “D” air container, which is the size of a love seat.   Getting the container to Shanghai takes less time than clearing customers.  (See ICS above).  So while there are tons of apartments in Shanghai, the aperture closes if you need a furnished apartment or if you are looking for a landlord to furnish an apartment for you, which some will do and then get their money back in through the rent (a work around ICS). 

Street View in Former French Concession

We were also “difficult” expats in that we didn’t want to live in the expat compound --  as instructed by the real estate agent.  We wanted to live in the older part of the city.  Part of our reason for accepting this assignment was to give the kids an experience of Shanghai – the old city.  In all fairness, you can’t be here without experiencing China, even if you live in a compound in the suburbs – but that said you can have various levels of China-ness in your day.  Craig and I made this decision that we wanted to live in Puxi  – ideally in the Former French Concession, in a lane house.  We like the history, the trees and the scale.  There are two side of Shanghai -- Pudong (also called Pudong New Area) and Puxi – divided by the Huangpu River.  Pudong has cleaner air and is where I work.  Pudong was fairly rural / suburban up until the late 1980s – early 1990s, when a new planned financial and business center was designed.  It is really quite lovely to work there and it is challenging some of what I learned about Urban planning in college, reading Jane Jacobs and watching Holly Whyte films.  Puxi is more historic (although the city seems to have no historic preservation and they let developers tear down Lane communities left and right), and is more congested and concentrated.  Someone described to me that Pudong is New Jersey and Puxi is Manhattan.  

Pudong -- New Area

Our desire to be a “Puxi family” caused much consternation to our real estate agent.  My first conference call with the agent and her boss in Hong Kong was mostly focused on how I should live on a golf course in Pudong and that if I lived in a Lane house I would have vermin.  (I got a follow-up e-mail expressing the same and they did say “vermin.”) 

After three days of looking at every shiny badly built apartment in Puxi and a wide variety of lane houses (one of which we loved but we couldn’t afford), we made two decisions – a lane house with a nice landlord on a lovely middle class lane and the Gascogne Apartment building.  We made offers on both and started to negotiate.  The lane house seemingly evaporated once the landlord got the lease from the IBM lawyer.  I’m not really sure if the landlord went silent or if our agent just decided to focus on the Gascogne.   I will never know really.  (Again see ICS above.)  

The Lane House that was out of our price range :-(

Living in the lane house would have been more complicated. No on-site help, landlord with minimal English / tenant with even less Mandarin, and questionable internet access.  The apartment building has a doorman and a building agent.  It has wireless.

The Lane House that evaporated

After much back and forthing and air quality testing etc. we finally signed our final lease on Dec 31 – a day after we arrived in Shanghai.  The managing agent miraculously got the apartment painted and ready for our move in. 

So after all that drama, we love our apartment.  It is clean, renovated and simply decorated. It is also historic and architecturally significant in to the city of Shanghai.  And that my dear reader is priceless, when married to an adorable architect.

The Historically Significant Gascogne Apartments

 The Gascogne Apartments are in a 1930s compound in the former French Concession. The front building is all locals  and has shops on the lower level, the middle building is our apartment building and the back building is a boutique hotel with no sign.    

The Gascogne was designed by the French architecture firm Leonard, Veysseyre and Kruze and completed on what was called at the time Avenue Joffre in 1934.   Avenue Joffre --  now Central Huaihai Road -- is a boulevard stretching across the French Concession in an east-west direction and has always been quite the shopping street. 

The central building was completely  renovated and now services ex-pat.  The residents are American, French, Italian and Auzzies as far as I can tell.  It is not one of those buildings where there is a party every weekend in the common space.  People come and go, have drinks and dinner parties and spend time in Shanghai --- people are always on the go in this building.  

Renovated Lobby of The Gascogne

   During the Second World War the Gascogne was commandeered by a Japanese headquarters company.  They occupied the six lower floors and it is said the Japanese behaved correctly toward the remaining tenants, consisting primarily of “stateless persons or others nationals who were not interned.”

Later the building housed members of Shanghai's consular corps and underwent years and years of renovations.  The basement has been written about in some materials I’ve found.  Up until the last renovation, when individual furnaces were installed, there was a massive coal furnace - fed 24 hours a day by stokers – and it is said to have resembled the boiler room of an ocean liner.  

Some have criticized the latest and most comprehensive renovation for lowering the ceiling height in the apartments,  but I'll take lower ceilings if I get central AC during the Shanghai summer.  I think the renovation should be celebrated because they preserved the metal windows and made them all operable. The look and functionality of the windows is very important the basic design of the building.  Also, the way they handled the AC  ensured that there are no window units badly installed. 

Our Living Room on Move-In Day

So it was a journey getting here, but it feels like home now.  Tiny Bubbles arrived and yesterday our containers arrived. We have forks again and a salad spinner!  In the meantime, Chinese New Year week has begun.  The city twinkles outside our windows at night, while random BOOM sounds drive away bad luck and monsters.  We are figuring how how to communicate with merchants in the wet market and we are muddling through communicating with our driver.  The kids have gone to school for two weeks and survived -- uniforms and all. 

We haven’t followed the plan I had in my head .... but we have arrived and are home.