New 'hood

So I moved a little while ago--from a dorm room in the fishbowl foreign students' residence of a way-off-in-the-boonies campus to a shared apartment in a neighbourhood of Pudong.

Pudong's a weird place. It's the home of Shanghai's signature skyline--think towering phallic skyscrapers and that ugly, bulbous space station, the Dongfang Mingzhu--on the eastern banks of the Huangpu River. It's also home to the Special Economic Zones the city began in the early '90s to launch Shanghai into the market-driven (but still centrally orchestrated) global economy. On its eastern outskirts are communities of migrant workers and other groups relocated when their old downtown houses were bulldozed and modernized.

Like I said--weird.

The neighbourhood I've landed in offers a fascinating glimpse of the bridge between traditional Shanghairen and their emerging upper-middle class.

My apartment complex is home to a mix of young families and old people, with the odd thrifty businessman thrown in. Like traditional Danwei-style "model communities" it's fenced off, has blase security guards at the entrance and--as I learned to my chagrin early one Sunday morning--the main gate locks up between midnight and 6 a.m.

Across the street from my apartment is a big indoor market boasting a cornucopia of fruits, vegetables, hunks of tofu, still-flopping fish and enormous slabs of raw meat. The street outside is dominated by tiny stores selling household goods and steamed rolls; a woman sits on the sidewalk every day at her portable sewing machine and seems to be making a killing.

A block in the other direction is a strip of bars, beauty salons and the first veterinary hospital I've seen in this country. The latter, especially, is a sure sign of a population bourgeois and wealthy enough to worry as much about their animal companions' health as they do about their own.

So there's now demand for a snazzy-looking place where the children of the Cultural Revolution can take Fluffy in for her shots.

Mao Zedong would not approve.

A few blocks north, there's a ramshackle grouping of houses under a bridge, with outdoor water taps and low-hanging laundry lines reminiscent of Puxi's shikumen. Except, of course, these dwellings (and in all likelihood their inhabitants, as well) are a little more illegal.

Over that same bridge is the enormous--and, quite frankly, not a little frightening--Lotus department store. It's your typical disorienting, overly huge Wal-Mart type store, designed to house everything you could possibly want arranged in such a way that you won't find it without plowing through several kilometres of shit you'll never need but will likely end up buying anyway just because it's there.

My housemate loves it.