I have a domain name; therefore, I am. (Apologies, René.) I am Kathryn Pauli.
On June 18, 2008, exactly four years after our family landed in Shanghai for the first time, I have decided to do what a friend suggested when we made the move from Washington, DC. Write a blog. (What’s a blog? I asked her then.)
I spent my first months in China tramping the streets trying to locate remotely familiar foods to cook (envision a tall blonde woman eyeing the tubs of frogs and eels through tears). And discovering how very far away our son Christopher’s school was from our downtown apartment (45 minutes, assuming that there wasn’t traffic and in Shanghai there is always traffic –sometimes two hours by rickety taxi if he stayed after for extracurricular activities). That’s when I wasn’t at work alongside my husband, the new Chief Representative of the Shanghai office of his law firm, which he came here to open. (How to make a phone call to the US? How to find a lab to do studies in support in a client’s application to use a new chemical process? How to find a translator to help us talk to the lab? How to get the fax machine not to spew all 356 un-numbered pages of an incoming fax onto the floor?) It was all too much.
Especially on days when all I was certain I could accomplish was to buy stamps and, after 20 minutes in the post office, I emerged without stamps, unable to make myself understood although I had practiced the “at the post office” dialogue from my Chinese lesson before making the attempt. “Some days you just aren’t meant to buy stamps” became the family motto for my husband John and sons Alex and Christopher, at the time entering their respective sophomore years in college and high school. Back in 2004, I couldn’t have considered writing a blog, although I did sometimes take pen to paper.
Not that life in Shanghai was difficult.
But today it’s a lot better. I am writing from my tingzijian, a tiny room in a place I’d like to introduce. After our first year in Shanghai, we decided to move out of our furnished apartment and were lucky enough to get wind of a lane house for rent. The Shanghai lanes, or long tang, were mostly built back in the 1920s and ’30s, Shanghai’s first heyday. The main streets are lined with shops and commercial space and, every so often, gateways that lead down these narrow lanes to rows of townhouses.
entrance to our lane
All of life happened then, and still does, inside this quasi-public space; on any given day in our lane, children are out playing badminton after school, the fruit vendor has parked his cart next to the little house where the gatekeeper keeps watch, a game of mahjong is underway under a grape arbor, and busy residents are walking around. Right now, it has been raining for days, so there is not much laundry draped from the windows, but on the first dry day everything will hang out.
a good laundry day in our lane
Our house, in what used to be known as the French Concession back in colonial days, is on the best street in Shanghai. Go out one gate and in the morning it’s a marvelous cacophony of vendors – flowers, vegetables carried in on poles, the fish monger with turtles and or crabs trying to escape from confinement, a bicyclist with live chickens in cages and a vat of boiling water (the easier to pluck their feathers), a little shop selling flyswatters, combs, chamber pots, you name it.
morning shopping on our street
Go out our lane’s other gate and you are on Huaihai Road, one of modern Shanghai’s main thoroughfares, lined with shops selling elegant clothing.
Our house was built in 1928 and is narrow and tall – 4 floors reached by narrow steps. We share our walls with the neighbors. We are lucky enough to have a whole house, lovingly restored by our landlord, while most of our neighbors live in very crowded spaces in houses like ours that were broken up into small apartments after Liberation in 1949. All the houses in our lane were built according to the dictates of feng shui, with the important rooms facing south. If you were to visit me, you would enter a gate and walk through our small patio garden into a large south-facing room that is our living and dining room. The kitchen is on the back, facing north. Upstairs, on two levels, we have two large south-facing bedrooms with full bathrooms. But on the north-facing side are the tingzijian, tiny low-ceiling rooms that were used by servants or, in many cases in Shanghai, rented out to students. Shanghai’s tingzijian played an historic role in the twentieth century, as they were home to important writers and students who also formed the Communist Party. One of our tingzijian is now my study; from here I take in life here in Shanghai and, from here, I will send it back out.
If you are interested, please check back. I’ll post more in a few days. Next up: China’s Other Cranes, a report on our recent visit to a nature reserve in the far north.