Death in the Lane

Yes, this sounds like it's going to be an Agatha Christie novel but there is no mystery here. A few days ago, we were informed by Mr Guo, our driver, that an elderly gentleman who lived two doors down from us, had died in the night.

Relatives and neighbours wearing black armbands started appearing in the lane. The dead man's clothes were burned out in the lane in an oddly unceremonial ceremony and without much reverence.

We asked what it would be appropriate for us to do and it was suggested that we buy some flowers. This did not mean buying a bouquet but rather a huge wreath on a stand with a commerative plaque in the middle. One was duly presented and joined the others which lined as far as the eye could see into the house and snaking out into the Lane.

The previous occupants of our house were a French guy who worked for L'Oreal, his Chinese wife, their two children and their three ayis (one for each child and one for the house). Apparently, they behaved like lords of the manor and distributed largesse to the occupants of the lane for completing small tasks like collecting their mail when they were away. We were not really keen to get into a financial relationship with our neighbours but wanted them to know that they had our sympathies. It seems that the gesture of buying the flowers was appreciated and the widow and her son came over to thank us and told Mr Guo what a nice family those foreigners are.

Somewhat alarmingly given the high temperatures, we had been told that the body would remain in the house for three days and I took to rushing past the house in question with my nose held. As the days progressed, fortunately, the only smell which reached us was a pervasive one of incense.

On returning from a trip to the cash and carry which was located, unsurprisingly, in a far flung part of town which looked nothing like the parts of Shanghai I've become familar with but very similar to the other Chinese cities I've been to, Mr Guo attempted to get the loaded car as close to our gate as possible and ended up stopping outside the dead man's house. Unfortunately, this co-incided with the assembly of large amounts of mourners wearing the black patches and white sashes of the bereaved. Fearing that the body was about to be carried out, I glanced at the red eyed widow and hurried by. To my alarm, Mr Guo opened the boot to unload the car. No, I gesticulated, later. He looked surprised. I couldn't communicate that I didn't think my shopping was very important under the circumstances and wanted him to vacate the area to make way for whatever ceremony was about to happen but when I hot footed it into the house and closed the gate after one more gesture, he got the message.

When I re-emerged into the lane half an hour later, the only trace of what had happened was a chalk ring inside which had been another bonfire of clothes.

Ayi

Our ayi (maid/helper/other politically correct term) 'Sally' speaks a tiny bit of English which is just enough to enable us to communicate the essentials.

Unsurprisingly (or surprisingly depending on your point of view), she is very enthusiastic about looking after Toby and is slightly disappointed that I seem to spend so much time with him, leaving her to clean the floors, do the ironing etc.

While I had no qualms whatsoever about leaving Eliot at nursery in order to go to work, I do feel irrationally guilty about leaving Toby with Sally while I indulge myself by going swimming or meeting someone for lunch although less guilty if I am taking Eliot to school or food shopping. This is doubly pointless as for much of the time when I am out, Toby is asleep. Nonetheless, I am not selfless enough to pass up the opportunity of some 'quiet time' so most days, Sally does a stint with Toby.

Yesterday, my landlady came round to pay some workmen. As soon as she arrived, Sally proudly scooped Toby off the floor and proceeded to extol his virtues. While I don't understand exactly what she was saying, there can be no doubt that she was explaining how far he had crawled, how he had pulled himself up to standing and his other many achievements. Well, she may have been saying 'look, isn't this child outrageously fat? And he's so backward, he can't even crawl properly' but I prefer to believe the former. Somehow, the fact that Mandarin (or Shanghainese) was the language of the moment, gave Sally what she felt was the right to appropriate Toby. For half an hour, she continued to hold him and elicit admiring coos from our landlady, leaving me to hover aimlessly in the background.

One of the main reasons to have an ayi is not one that I would have predicted. It is because the counters in the kitchen are about a foot lower than they would be in Europe and we are actually endangering our health and our backs if we try to cook or clean up in it. I consistently bang my head on the extractor hood which is at eye level and Jamie can barely see the counters they are so far away from him.

We assume that Sally is happy in her job. She spends a lot of time singing to herself as she works. Her favourites are 'Old MacDonald' and 'Jingle Bells'. Needless to say, this drives me insane but it would hardly be reasonable to ask her to stop and as Jamie says, if the biggest complaint you have about your ayi is that she walks around singing, you aren't doing too badly. My response is to crank up the music and sing more loudly than she does.

Summer in the city

Some time after summer was officially declared to have begun, it has arrived with a vengenance. Last weekend when it was hot but pleasantly breezy, Jamie scoffed at those who warned of unpleasant times ahead. "It doesn't get that hot here - it's nowhere near as hot as Bangkok". It's 37 degrees today and incredibly humid. Even taking Eliot to school at 8.30am was an ordeal. This was as much due to the energy required to push Eliot as to the now overpowering smells which accompany any walk.

Given the Chinese propensity to dump all rubbish on the streets, Shanghai is surprisingly litter free. This is not because people put their litter in the waste bins which do actually line the streets, but because there is an army of street sweepers patrolling the pavements. Each lane has its own litter bins at the street end of it and these are kept remarkably tidy and are emptied regularly. With temperatures in the high 30s though, even regular emptying is not enough to keep the odours at bay and the street sweeper bins can now be nosed out at some distance.

The colourful open food stores which I walk past on the school run have turned into a gauntlet of overpowering smells which I dodge as quickly as possible. The fresh fish store is no longer so fresh and the entrails which sit in the buckets by the shop are stomach turning. The meat store which had no smell a few weeks ago can now be detected all too easily and I avert my gaze from the man stirring the chickens' feet with his hands. Even the fruit and flower stores are no longer so pleasing. If you add to this the pervasive, acrid cement dust, it is a heady mixture which leaves you feeling as though there is not quite enough oxygen in the air.

I collapse into my cafe with more relief than usual and bask in the air conditioning and the ever delicious aroma of cappucino.

Sporting prowess

It was a weekend of sports tournaments. Yesterday, Jamie's office had organised a badminton tournament. Strangely, the address of the courts was a lane off Shanghai's premier shopping street. We headed, somewhat sceptically, towards it doubting very much that we would find a badminton court amidst the Vivienne Westwood and Chanel shops lining the street but, as is often the way in Shanghai, you turn the corner and suddenly the glitz disappears and you are back in China.

We headed down the lane encouraged by the people wandering past with rackets and then, sure enough, there was an aircraft hanger of a building with a dozen badminton courts inside. The paint was peeling off the walls and there was no airconditioning in the 30 degree heat but there were some pretty keen badminton players there. Jamie joined the somewhat out of condition office colleagues and tried hard to adapt his squash game to badminton - not entirely successfully. Some of the players on the neighbouring courts were, so I was told, professional players who, in true communist style, were playing side by side with the likes of Eliot who was determinedly hitting the shuttlecock over the net next to theirs.

Today, Jamie was playing in a charity tennis tournament. Not knowing what to expect, he headed off alone to find out whether or not it was worth the rest of the family turning up. Half an hour later, I got an excited call from Jamie. "Come down, there's a 250 seat stadium and a half hour opening ceremony. So we came. Centre court was almost the size of the one at Queen's. On it were 50 or so people waiting to hear the opening speeches and a very large sound system playing "The Ride of the Valkyrie".

After interminable speeches, the former mayor Shanghai (65+) tottered onto the court in his tennis togs and declared the tournament open by serving to the strains of the theme to the Magnificent Seven.

Jamie's partner was an elderly Japanese who, it became apparent within seconds of the warm up starting, was incapable of hitting a shot in court. Jamie's opponents were a senior party cardre and a young, rather sharp looking player. Jamie and partner were wiped off the court. It was then that it became apparent that the supposedly random pairings were not quite so random after all. The former deputy mayor was playing on the next door court with an extremely good partner who essentially won his match single handedly. I found out later that he was the club pro.

Photographers swarmed around making much of the tall foreigner and his two childre. "You are like an angel" said a Chinese lady to Eliot as he shouted "good shot Daddy". When I pointed to Toby in his pushchair, she said "Two children. Happiness". Happiness indeed.

Learning Chinese

Eliot is learning Chinese or at least so he thinks. While the things he can actually say don't amount to much more than 'hello', 'goodbye', 'excuse me', 'thank you' and 'see you tomorrow', he believes that he can communicate and that people understand him perfectly. He realises that the sounds of Mandarin are different to those in English but he doesn't seem to understand that if you don't make the right sequence of sounds, the sounds don't mean anything.

This morning, Eliot opened the gate to our house on his way to school. "Ni hao" ('hello') he said in a very passable accent raising his arm in salute to the noodle maker, the bookseller, our driver and Master Worker Shen who were out in the lane preparing their wares for the day. Shema jzhe shema he added conversationally and completely nonsensically while maintaining passable accent. "Mummy, do you know how to say 'Mummy' in Chinese?" he asked a few seconds later. "No" I said, hoping I'd learn somthing "Mummy-ah" he said (incorrectly). I think he got this from our helper Sally (as she insists we call her). The sounds are coming but the words are not.

At the receiving end of Eliot's 'faux chinois' is Xiao Jun, Master Worker Shen's eight year old son. Eliot has a strange relationship with Xiao Jun. When they scooter in the lane, Xiao Jun is the leader and Eliot follows him enthusiastically. When, however, Xiao Jun comes into our front garden to play with Eliot, Eliot bosses him around endlessly. This doesn't help Eliot as Xiao Jun doesn't understand but he knows when he is being bossed around and the desire to play with Eliot's toys is usually outweighed by the irritation of Eliot's constant chatter in about ten minutes. "Eliot, you have to speak Chinese to Xiao Jun, he doesn't understand English" I say. "Xe Xema Xedze" says Eliot in reply to Xiao Jun, nodding encouragingly. Alas, Xiao Jun is still at a loss.

On saying goodnight to Sally today, Sally answered in Mandarin and Eliot tried and failed to repeat what she said. "I don't think that was right Eliot, try again". He repeated his made up words. Sally smiled. "You see" he said, "she understands me" and she did.

The Sound of Silence

I woke up this morning with the feeling that something was wrong. A sense of unease permeated my sleep fogged mind. What was different? Something was definitely amiss. As I struggeld to full consciousness, I realised what it was. Outside, I could hear birds singing. Birds singing in Shanghai? I'd seen birds in the garden. I'd seen them in cages but I'd never heard them before. Apart from the birds, silence. Absolute silence. Of course - the construction ban was in place. Student exams had started and building had stopped. I took out my earplugs and stretched out. I could almost be in the countryide. Two minutes later, the banging of metal on metal. A stubborn builder was defying the ban. Then the noise of police sirens as government forces rushed to the scene of the crime.

OK, I made that bit up but I was impressed by the effectiveness of the ban. We hadn't been expecting that much from it given that the night it was supposed to come into force was the night that our neighbour Master Worker Shen decided to rebuild the interior of his house. Drilling started at 10.30pm. The next morning, we emerged from our house to find the lane strewn with the entire (albeit meagre) contents of the house which added to the outside fridge units, four chairs, 7UP umbrella, bird in cage, four kittens and their mother and druken friend who emerges from the house in his pyjamas no earlier than midday, all of whom habitually lurk outside Master Worker Shen's house.

Urban planning

You may have noticed that construction is a recurring theme of these blogs. It is all pervasive in Shanghai. Building is going on everywhere from soaring tower blocks to small hole in the wall dumpling stalls. The noise created by these works (let's not even think about the pollution) creates a constant background orchestral accompaniement to the city right around the clock. The government, taking pity on its beleagured residents, has decreed that all construction other than on the most important of municipal projects, must cease between the hours of 10pm and 6am in the run up to the public university entrance exams in order to give the candidates a good night's sleep. During the days of the exams themselves, no construction whatsoever is allowed.

The city will also grind to a halt from 14-16 June. A big-wig conference is being held in town and various roads will be closed to allow the cavalcades through. Everyone is 'encouraged' to take a holiday but the pay-off is that they are supposed to work the weekend before. In order to help ensure co-operation, air conditioning is being turned off in the offices.

Working hours here are very flexible. On returning home from a Saturday night out at midnight, we came across a slightly sinister, lone figure in our lane wearing large earphones, a luminous striped jacket and a battery pack and swinging what looked like an oversized iron sink plug which was periodically rested on the ground, along the pavement . "What in the world are you doing?" we asked the man. With a remarkably cheerful smile (he was probably glad to catch a glimpse of a fellow human being), the man told us he was checking the underground water pipes for leaks. Quite why this activity had to take place at midnight on a Saturday was something we didn't have the energy to get to the bottom of.

Celebrity Baby

In Shanghai, Toby has achieved the kind of celebrity status he could only dream of when competing with the glitterati of Primrose Hill. Cries of "bebby, bebby" follow him wherever he goes. As the imperial chariot makes its way through the streets, the crowds part to let him through (sometimes) and the indignation at having to move gives way to wonder when the realisation that a foreign baby is among them dawns.

Toby smiles graciously at the adoring public (fortunately, he is a very smiley baby) and I maintain a frozen grin on my face as people lean forwards to prod him. 'Can these thighs be so large? Can his face really be so white? Are his eyes really so blue' and no doubt 'is his nose really that big?'. Toby is poked and stroked on all available bits of flesh, but I have to face tirades from old ladies who are appalled that he is not wearing socks. "But it's 30 degrees and he's hot", I attempt to communicate as Toby sits in the pushchair with sweat pouring down his face.

When I take the boys out in the double buggy, people only realise that it contains two children as I go past them. "Wah, lianger" ("wow, two of them") say the amazed public pointing as if to let me know. I am tempted to stop and feign amazement - "really, two of them? Oh my God, how did that happen?".