ShanghaiMamas

Shanghai surprise

Sunday, June 15th 2008

By Katrina Beikoff*

I discovered a new park the other day.  It’s less than a block from my home.

Birds chirping had been greeting us most mornings, yet the source of such trilling, utterly incongruous with the normal morning cacophony of horns blasting, engines revving, bellowing and barking, eluded me.

I’d failed to find anything other than the fearless sparrows that make the streets of Shanghai their home.  Yet here were birds, in this little patch of green.  In cages hanging from just about every second tree.  A park where people bring their prized pet birds to sing as they sit, and chat and listen among the greenery and the twitters of their surrounds.  And I didn’t know about it at all.  It was hidden, a mystery. Until now.

It’s been like that since our arrival in Shanghai.  We might take the same walk along a few blocks every day, yet occasionally, with a change of pace or a glance down a different alley, up pops an incredible surprise.

I’ve begun noticing, and for some reason counting, the number of times the flowers are changed in the gardens at the entrance to our residential complex. (9 times in five months - that I’ve counted.) The more-often-than-not mixture of colorful pansies is rarely watered, instead they are dug up and new flowers planted every few weeks — much to the delight of the kids.  It’s become an unofficial starting point for me on my daily walk to work: have the pansies been changed? Will the tulips that made an altogether-too-brief appearance make their return?  What will I see that’s different today?

I see that while the pansies might not be watered, the sidewalk is.  There must be an arbitrary groove in the sidewalk near one of the city’s upmarket plaza’s that defines the point at which cleaners are instructed by some authority to begin polishing each night with scrubbers and hoses that pump out great streams of water to add sparkle to the city street.

It’s not far from one of my favorite hole-in-the-wall eateries, ranked by name if not for its offerings.  “Delicious Gruel’’ never ceases to attract my attention.

The aroma of adjacent outlets a little further down the road, one that sells noodles and the other that makes on-the-spot pancake/roti concoctions with meat and vegetable fillings, always ensures a crowd. I keep stopping and watching and trying to identify the ingredients, which must be a tad annoying for the owner, but I will eat there one day.

I’ve decided to check out what niche services we have close by, and now acknowledge our three local key-cutters, two bag repairers, a shoe-repairer, a bicycle repairer, and someone who either wants to sell me a sewing machine or take up my trouser hems.

I know to dodge a particular corner and an overzealous shoe-shiner who even tries to polish sneakers.  One day he wasn’t in his usual spot — it appeared he was muscled out by a man with a pet monkey.

I have taken to my partner’s trick of moving from point A to B — he calls it ”following the green man”. Under the rules of this game, there’s to be no loitering at street corners waiting to cross.  Rather, whichever direction shows a green light for crossing the street, then that is the path that is taken.  We tend to end up in the vicinity of the office within around 30 minutes of our ETA. It takes us into alleys and nooks and its how I discovered possibly the only local stockist of cheap shoes that would fit my feet, a hidden market, an Avon store, and a bikini shop where I can make my summer selection.

Then, there’s the traffic.  In the town where I grew up, it was a 5pm ritual when the workday finished at the boilermaker/shipbuilding yards that provided the majority of local jobs, that hundreds of blue-overall clad men on bikes would cycle through the streets on their way home.  They rolled along, like a giant blue wave on wheels, and we would get a bit of a thrill hanging out on the town hall green  watching our dads or uncles, neighbors, boyfriends and friends pass us en masse (When I went to school we didn’t have a mall.  The town still doesn’t.)

But that was nothing to the morning and evening two-wheeler rush hour here. On every corner,  It’s perhaps bizarre that the sight of so many cyclists poised, foot on pedal, waiting for the jump on a green light in Shanghai, China should remind me so precisely of an element of my childhood in an Australian country town. I guess that’s part of the surprise.

* Katrina Beikoff is a Shanghai-based mum-of-two and award-winning journalist who writes fortnightly for shanghai mamas.  She also has a regular column in the Shanghai Daily English-language newspaper at www.shanghaidaily.com. Go to Opinion then foreign perspectives.  Her last column was titled ”Complainants themselves give cause for offense”.

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