Since I moved to Shanghai in September last year, I’ve lived in three different places. This wasn’t the original plan. My primary idea was to live in a hostel for a few weeks while I looked for an apartment of my own. However, things didn’t exactly go to plan, and it was early January before I found myself fully settled, at last. My experiences may not be typical of a newly arrived expat, but they are worth telling, by way of warning as well as entertainment.

Coming to Shanghai in September was my second time in the city. I had spent a week here in springtime last year, visiting my best friend Edward. This trip was the catalyst for my eventual move here, and the youth hostel I stayed at (which will remain nameless, for the sake of anonymity) was to become my first abode when I moved here. My aforementioned friend Edward had also stayed at the hostel when he originally moved to Shanghai four years ago, so he knew the manager quite well. In an enormous stroke of luck, it turned out that the hostel needed a marketing assistant. Given my background as a PR copywriter, Edward suggested me for the job. Instead of paying me a salary for the first two months, I would get a free room at the hostel. This all sounded grand to me in London, so it was with a light heart that I set off to Heathrow with my one-way ticket to China.

Photo: katsniffen

After a couple of days settling in and getting to know Shanghai, I had my first meeting with the manager, Lao Wei, who split his time between Beijing and Shanghai. A problem soon became apparent. His English was as limited as my Chinese, so we had to enlist the help of another staff member to help us understand each other. This was a problem, along with the fact that he was hardly ever in Shanghai. My ‘marketing’ work, by end of month one, had consisted only of creating a rather lame Facebook group for the hostel. A wall of uneasy tension built up between Lao Wei and I, as the hostel staff reported to him that I was spending less time on my marketing duties than on frivolous pursuits like bar-hopping and job-hunting. Soon I was downgraded from my luxury double room on the quiet top floor of the hostel to a grimy single room beside reception, where every sound from the lobby found its way to me through card-thin walls. Worse still, after another few weeks of attempting and failing to communicate with Lao Wei, I was told that my marketing skills would no longer be needed, and that I would have to start paying for my room.

Despite this minor issue, I loved hostel life. I had a ready-made social life, as the bar and entertainment room was always full of people drinking beer and playing pool. It was like being at boarding school. I met a few other long-termers including a middle-aged writer called Peter from Kentucky. Exiled from the States after his parents threatened to institutionalise him, Peter moved to Tokyo where he spent 12 years as a lawyer. He then moved to China to write his memoirs, and he is here to this day, still working on them. Fonder of alcohol than anything else, he was (and still is) a fixture of the hostel bar, where he regales fellow guests with his conspiracy theories.

Photo: Marc van der Chijs

However, life isn’t boarding school, and sooner or later the fun had to end. Around early November time, I decided to look for an apartment of my own. Trawling a property website one afternoon, I came upon the perfect place. A 27-year-old Chinese guy was looking for a tenant to live in the spare room of his French Concession apartment. His place was in a lane off historic Xinhua Lu, and could be mine for just ¥1700 including expenses. This sounded like a real bargain. I got in touch with the guy, whose name was Lin, and arranged to see the apartment. First impressions were positive; he seemed friendly (promised to show me his favourite historical spots around the city, and take me for meals at his favourite haunts) and the apartment was lovely. There was no communal area, but I figured that the sofa in my room could be used for convivial flat-mate chats and language exchanges. I agreed to move in the following week.

Things were not what they seemed. From amicable guy I’d met, Lin morphed into an antisocial recluse somewhere within that week. He refused to open his door when I knocked on it, and insisted that all communication that passed between us ought to be via MSN messenger or text message. If I happened to be in the kitchen when he got home from work, he would either loiter in the hallway until I’d gone back to my room, or run through to his room without saying as much as ‘hello’. Contrary to the happy, sociable room-mates I’d hoped we would be, we were no better than strangers. I’m not sure if it was shyness on Lin’s part, pushiness on mine, or a mixture of the two, but the way things were going made living there pretty dire. After the social buzz of two months at the hostel, shutting myself in my quiet room every night was threatening to send me into a depression.

Photo: Susie Gordon

So back to the drawing board; I decided it was time to move on. I broke the news to Lin (over MSN…) that I would only be staying for one month. He wasn’t impressed, but there wasn’t much he could do, except express his displeasure with a frowny emoticon. I felt bad for letting him down, after initially telling him I’d be there at least three months, but my mental health would have suffered if I hadn’t moved on. After viewing a few grim places, along with several that were way above my budget, I chanced upon the perfect apartment. It was on the 19th floor of an apartment complex just north of Jing’an. After the suburban calm of the Xinhua Lu lane house, I was desperate to be back in the thick of it, so this busy area was ideal. My room-mates were to be a laid-back American personal trainer (Paul) and a French computer technician (Thierry), along with Paul’s dog Leo. I moved in just after Christmas, and I’ve been there ever since. Some of my friends think I’m mad to have left the tranquil leafiness of the French Concession for the traffic and chaos of Wuning Lu, but I didn’t come to Shanghai for peace and quiet! It took me a while, but I finally found my perfect place to live in this crazy city.

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