Tag: Shanghai China

In China, I’ve heard people say you might have rats or cockroaches in your apartment, but never both.

If only they’d lived where I did. That creaky old wooden Shanghai townhouse — in the same 1920s style as the surrounding neighborhood — oozed a lot more than just character after we moved in.

John and I returned home one balmy evening and turned the lights on to find a black spot on the ceiling that moved. And just as I shrieked in disgust, it then began to fly, darting around the ceiling with a defiant buzz, as if to say “Go ahead, just try and kill me. I dare you.” Not even John’s whacks to the ceiling with a broom did any good, as the cockroach scrambled — and flew — away from our reach. We looked at each other with a tired grimace, and almost didn’t even need to say what was on our minds — yet another cockroach infestation. Continue reading “Chapter 79: Battling Roaches and Rats”

Friday, September 19, 2003 was just another overcast, dreary Friday in Shanghai — until John pounded up the stairs and asked about my bicycle. “Where did you park your bicycle last night?”

“Why outside, of course,” I responded. I pulled on my clothes and bounded down the stairs and outside, just to prove it.

But I was proven wrong. I stood before the doorway, only to find my bicycle gone. Continue reading “Chapter 77: The Stolen Bicycle in Shanghai”

Shanghai’s July heat has a way of testing you. Barely a month ago, you were still in that delightful Shanghai Spring — with its warm breezes perfumed in osmanthus and peach blossoms. But suddenly, the romance is over, and you discover you’re locked in a pressurized sauna. You almost have to part the humid-heavy air aside as you walk down the streets, now weighed down with moisture beading all over your face and body. It’s a public penance, where everyone must pay for those golden Springs and Autumns with molten, unbearable summers.

As July began to strangle Shanghai in searing heat and humidity, I felt strangled once again in my neighborhood as yet another source of noise and confusion marched through our lane. Continue reading “Chapter 70: Tested Under the Shanghai Heat”

“No soliciting.”

These words, written in black Chinese characters on a rusting white sign hung at each gate into my new community — a traditional Long Tang — read more like a dare than a warning. The one guard station, at the southern gate, stood empty more than half the time. The other two gates never locked, even though each one had a rusty red loop that could have easily held a lock of some kind — but it never did. Nothing about the setup suggested security, or even the attempt to stop solicitors. It might as well been a prison with all of its doors open, with a sign hanging at the door that said “no escaping.”

John and I escaped here, to Luwan District, after post-midnight garbage runs disturbed our sleep night after night. The nighttime here lay as dark and still as the streets, with their garage-door-like storefronts shuttered tight, the only sound a stray taxi here or a drunkard hobbling there. It was the night we hoped for, after a wrenching departure from our old apartment. “It’s very quiet here,” the real estate agent assured John with nodding confidence. For once, the agent was right.

But he forgot to tell John about one thing — the days and, especially, the daytime peddlers, crooning their wares as they bicycled in and out of the lanes of our community. Continue reading “Chapter 68: The Soliciting Shanghai Peddlers”