Xujiahui is my playground, my prison, my secret garden.

I have lived in Shanghai for just over ten years.  Ten years and four months to be exact and of those ten years and four months I have lived in Xujiahui for just short of ten of those years.  That's a mighty long time to be stuck in one city let alone one neighbourhood.

Before living in Shanghai, I lived in Hong Kong and moved more often than an illegal immigrant with visa issues.  Partly because I was an illegal immigrant with visa issues.  Haha...  (Only kidding, I'm British, we own Hong Kong).  And in other places I have lived I have moved with alarming frequency. Six months in one place felt like a long time, I felt like I was growing roots at five.

Then I came to the Xu and life stood still.

Literally.

I like Xujiahui.  I have everything I need here – a place to live, streets to wander around at night on, Grand Gateway – and hardly ever venture out of the area.  Sometimes I get on the subway to Bandit Country.  Starsky & Hutch both live down there and sometimes Hutch will ask me if I am planning making a southbound trip on Line One ('Heading South tonight?' he says) and sometimes I reluctantly agree and get on the train, feeling nervous at the site of wide open spaces and too many trees.

Space is over-rated.  Fuck space.

I like buildings, ugly ones like Mei Luo Cheng, and streets packed full of impatient girls who need to 'buy something' in one of the thousands of unnecessary shops littered around Xujiahui.  I like cars honking at me to get out of the way as I walk on the sidewalk and people handing me little name cards with pictures of airplanes on them.

Xujiahui is an enigma.  It's a bit like the Twilight Zone on a low budget and directed by a twelve year old.  Look to your right and it's all Gucci bags, Jimmy Choo heels and Shanghai girls that will regard you as nothing but trash; look to your left and it's dark-skinned vagrants selling dodgy watermelons and screaming 'laowai' in your face.  It's all things to all people at all times.  China loves to make comparisons between itself and other countries – Hainan is Hawaii, Suzhou is Venice, etc – so Xujiahui is a Legoland version of Manhattan.  But with more crack heads.

So I very love it.

Where I live is groovy.  All my neighbours are hardcore original Shanghai gangstas.  I get in the lift and I go 'Ni Hao' and they go 'Nong hao' and light up a Double Happiness, even the kids.  They have lived in Xujiahui forever.  They literally can point out the window and say 'I can remember when all of this was just fields'.  I tell them that I'm off to Wagas to drink iced latte and loiter around and they laugh and go 'Wagas??  That place used to be a pig farm ten years ago'.  And they're probably right.

I walk through the six-storey building complex next to my house and none of the people there look pissed off that there houses haven't been marked 'Chai'.  Why should they be?  They don't want to be shoved out to Farmer Giles country out in Songjiang.  They like living in Xujiahui.  Despite the fact that they don't really enjoy all the delights of it, the fact that they could if they wanted to, that's what really matters.  For them, swanning about it in their jim-jams and yelling at each other is high-living, Xujiahui-stylee.
I had to go to Hong Kong the other week.  If that wasn't alarming enough in and of itself, the fact that I had to get to Pudong Airport set my pulses racing.  What a pain in the arse.  Line this, line that, then the MagLev...  Christ, I felt like an extra in Jason and the Argonauts.

I was going from the subway to the MagLev and had to go into a Family Mart store to stock up on provisions and it felt weird.  Sure, I recognised the tune as I walked in (come on, we all know it – do do do do do dooooo, do do do do doooo) but apart from that it was alien central.  The staff didn't speak Xujiahuihua for a start, but some reptilean language only known on other sides of rivers.  And they looked at me funny as if to say 'ye don come from round 'ere, do ye?'.

I was pretty glad to get back to Xujiahui.  I'm a Xu-lifer.  What's the point in going anywhere else in Shanghai?  Everywhere else looks weird or under-developed or full of bumpkins.  I like the sophistication of the people in Xujiahui, I like the post-postmodern architecture.  I like the dozens of fast food outlets where Xujiahui-ren enjoy fine American dining and discuss the merits of living in Xujiahui.

I can't see Xujiahui being anything more or less than what it is.  It's the kind of place where people who haven't quite made it live.  It's Nouveau Riche sucking the fake gold off a Rolex bought in Walmart.  It's a wannabe, another contender.  If it was London it would be Dick Van Dyke singing about 'Apples and Pears'.  But I also can't see me leaving anytime soon.  Right now I'm typing this in a tea house on Nandan Lu.  There's a bunch of Shanghai geezers chain-smoking and playing cards on the next table and the waitress looks bored and stares out the window.  That to me sums Xujiahui up – a Chinese version of Nighthawks made out of felt and framed in thick fake gold.