Time to Pretend

Now my life is out of the safety of American education system, off the Fudan campus and away from my friends—most of whom have now left to go be back home. Yuri left two Thursdays and now I am alone in a new apartment building. Actually, I’m not alone, I live in a penthouse apartment at the top of an ordinary complex with seven other roommates from various different countries and cultures.
I moved to a new place where I will stay for the next two months as I do an internship downtown at a consulting company named Emerging Asia Group.
The neighborhood that I am living in is a big change from the college atmosphere that I was previously in. Yanchang and Pingxingguang road is a far more useful place, full of life, a step back into the life of traditional Shanghaiese. When I walk the streets to the metro stop, to the watch repairman, to the grocery store I cannot understand a word spoken. Everyone speaks Shanghaiese which sounds like the humming and grinding of a band saw with the cozy complexion of Japanese; a steady humzzzshshsh.
Being one of few foreigners in the neighborhood I get the usual stairs walking down the street. As usual, when I order in a restaurant or get my dry-cleaning done it is expected that I can’t speak Chinese or understand anything. Usually, I can’t understand the Shanghai dialect they speak but when I reply in Mandarine I am received with reactions of excitement and surprise. It turns out that before the communists took over it was more common for people to speak English than Mandarin.
My daily routine starts in the morning after I leave my apartment for the day. I step outside on the city streets and almost immediately I am greeted with the most intense breakfast action one can imagine. Right outside the vegetable market stands selling buns, fried dough, Chinese sandwiches and—what I always order—cracker sandwiches made like a wrapped up egg crape. I wished it smelled like breakfast but instead it’s a combination of slaughtered chickens, liquid garbage and the sweet foreign smell of roasting ducks. I push through the clogged sidewalk traffic of early morning grocery shoppers until I get to the metro line 1, ten minutes outside my apartment. I push bodies to cram on the train and it remains clogged for a few stops until the Shanghai Railway station. Listening to my iPod somehow relieves the personal space problem.
I get off at Huang Pi South Station. When I emerge to the surface I arrive in a different world from the one that I live in. I take a shortcut through a Hong Konger built skyscraper that is always immaculately clean. Street side Starbucks and Coffee Bean compete for their corner posts; there is a Mac store and a Zara. I cross the street kitty-corner in the four way cross walk and head for the Tiffany’s, at the corner of that building is the skyscraper where I shoot up to the seventh floor.
At work I spend my day researching companies that no one has ever heard of, mid-size pharmaceuticals, branches of major conglomerates, HR, financial M&A etc. I search very oblique information and try to understand how these companies could fit into China. Then I write reports about it. At about 12:30pm, the whole office leaves for lunch and we enjoy a one hour break together. The afternoon goes by with more Google searches and corporate research.
At six o’clock I get off work and head downstairs to head home. When Yuri was still here she met me a couple of times at my office and then we headed out for dinner or just an evening walk. It was fun to walk past to Porsche and Cartier shops pretending I had a real job that could afford this stuff. Because my stipend is so modest and my time at my internship is so short, it is like everything is a game of pretend, just to see if I like this lifestyle. All evening long Shanghai unnaturally puts on a light show with its florescent signs and designer neon lights.
When I don’t eat downtown near my office I head up to where my apartment where I can either have a meal for a little over a dollar or I can head to the nearest shopping mall and get a burger or some Japanese food. The neighborhood gets quite once the market closes around 6:30 or 7pm. Heading home, the interestingness of the day is over when I get to the top of my apartment to my cozy little room and the 14th and a half floor.