Model behaviour

Best foot forward: street style in Shanghai

October saw the zenith of stylish happenings in Shanghai: the biannual Fashion Week. Sadly, Shanghai’s offering isn’t really up there with the likes of Milan, Paris or London – despite an opening show by designer heavyweight/crackpot Dame Viv  (and no, I didn’t attend. My invitation must’ve got lost in the post). This is largely due to the fact that it’s government-organised, so unlike the willing parade of celebrities, fashion editors and cashed-up buyers who’d normally make up the audience, you get a load of provincial suits forced into attendance. While a typical front row at New York Fashion Week, for example, might feature an established A-lister (Kate Moss, Anna Wintour, Gwyneth Paltrow), a bright young hipster actress thing (Emma Watson, Dakota Fanning) and someone with money and skinny thighs but zero taste (Paris Hilton, Nicky Hilton), its Shanghai counterpart would consist of a handful of surly officials sweating in shiny, ill-fitting suits and trying to work out what to do with their complimentary graphic-print scarf – plus someone who looks like your ayi. In fact, she probably is your ayi. Guanxi goes a long way in Shanghai, and in addition to washing your socks, she also scrubs the gold-plated toilet bowl of some local authority bigwig – who on that particular night decided sinking a bottle of bai jiu in his local KTV was preferable to getting a first peek at the new collection by Decoster Concept. Meanwhile, the people who actually care about this stuff and can provide new designers with the oxygen of publicity they’re so desperately seeking have to beg, plead, bribe or stalk the PR team for a press pass.

There is one nice thing about Fashion Week, though: the fact it’s held in Fuxing Park, a charming little enclave filled with little old people doing quintessentially Chinese things, like tai chi, walking backwards, clapping, getting into blistering arguments over mah johng and taking their fat, pop-eyed Pekes for a waddle and a wee. The arrival of several huge white tents, an army of photographers and a thumping bass soundtrack has little impact on the habits of a lifetime, hence you get bemused locals wandering into the VIP areas, popping up in the background of fashion bloggers’ ‘street style’ photos and standing round nodding solemnly to a bass-heavy remix of Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This). Thinking about it, they’re probably the ones who wind up on the front row, too….

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As a matter of fact, I recently have the chance to do a little modelling of my own. When an email from Shanghai’s foremost fashion blogger, a kooky Korean, pops into my inbox, asking me to appear in a street-style shoot (featuring ‘Shanghai’s most stylish people’), I get all excited – surely only a short step to The Sartorialist! Then I find out it’s a footwear shoot. Hmph. Presumably featuring Shanghai’s most stylish toes, ankles and knees. Mind you, it’s still one in the eye for the friend of M-O’s who once told me I shouldn’t wear shoes with ankle-ties, as they ‘don’t do athletic calves like yours any favours.’

The other ‘hipsters’ are a couple of leggy ex-models (which I thought was not at all in the democratic spirit of ‘street style’), Kooky Korean’s handsome Swedish lover, and the Carey Mulligan-esque web editor at a rival magazine, who’s all elfishly cool with a tousled blonde crop and dinky little limbs. I feel like Ugly Betty in my outsize specs, and am left wondering if I’ve been chosen for the jolie laide role. Luckily, Web Pixie is a friendly sort and we’re soon having a grand old time laughing at the mood boards and proposed outfit sketches. ‘What the hell is that?’ screams Web Pixie, pointing at an outlandish, pink feathered creation. ‘It looks like Big Bird having a hot flush!’

Gawking over, we’re driven down to the Bund and in no time at all being shoehorned into our outfits in the back of a van with blacked-out windows, while the surly driver sat in the front having a fag and pretending to read the paper, all the while slyly checking out Web Pixie’s gamine charms in the rear-view mirror. To my smug delight, my own threads are judged sufficiently hip for the first few shots, although they do rather spoil things by cramming a strange peaked policewoman’s cap (apparently very this-season Louis Vuitton) on my head.

Taking the first shots in my stride

The second round runs rather less smoothly. Web Pixie looks on with trepidation as Kooky Korean rummages around in the back of the van to produce none other than the Big Bird-esque creation. ‘This will look rrrreally great on you!’ she pronounces with a beam. I try to hide a smirk as Web Pixie gloweringly shrugs it on, but my triumph is short-lived when I’m suddenly handed a huge, heavy black cloak ‘which will make a great, flowing silhouette.’ Together with my high leather boots, heavy-framed specs and envelope clutch ensemble, the effect is distinctly – nay, unmistakeably – reminiscent of Harry Potter on his way to Potions post-Quidditch match. ’Late again, Potter! That’s 50 points from Gryffindor!’ barks Web Pixie, sniggering.

The odd couple: Big Bird and Harry Potter

Suffice it to say that I doubt Scott Schuman will come knocking any day soon….

We don’t need no education

It seems like an age since I’ve put fingers to keyboard in the name of this blog – I can only crave pardon and blame it on a string of events beyond my control. Or general Shanghai malaise, which reportedly sets in after six months. Here’s a short recap of what’s come to pass:

1. October sees the Mid-Autumn festival, noteworthy for its ubiquitous and delicious-sounding mooncakes,  which are in fact just another – obscenely expensive – addition to Shanghai’s endlessly disappointing dessert lexicon.  From the outside, they look promisingly like pork pies, but the first bite clogs your mouth with a sweetly glutinous, wallpaper-paste-like filling of lotus and red bean – followed, horribly, by an encounter with a whole hard-boiled egg. Every one of my Chinese friends purports to hate them, yet the night before the festival, queues outside the traditional mooncake stalls stretch down the street, people wearing the harried looks of husbands doing a Valentine’s Day dash to the petrol station for the last box of Milk Tray. I suppose mooncakes at Mid-Autumn must be the Chinese equivalent to Christmas pudding – no-one likes it, but a Yuletide without the stodgy horror, simultaneously cremated and sodden with booze, is unimaginable.

2. M-O decides to finally make an honest woman of me (toasting the moment with a plate of calamari and a bottle of Thailand’s finest sparkling white). Having rather rashly assured M-O that I’m not into bling -’something small, contemporary and unusual is much more my style’ – I’m now spending hour upon guilty hour online, clicking between Cartier’s, Boucheron’s and Van Cleef & Arpels’ websites, ogling lumps of ice so huge they could have scuppered the Titanic.

3. Finally, I’m forced into supplementing my meagre Time Out salary with a teaching job. Having sworn I’d never set foot in a classroom of teenagers again, I’m swayed by the promise of normal, nine-to-five working hours, and a host of obedient students, drilled with military precision and hungry to learn. As Frank (who wears the slightly harried, pop-eyed look of every Director of Studies) points out, this is the best state school in Shanghai. Its name, unbelievably, is BILE.

Alarm bells should really have started ringing on first glance at the contract. Being the good little ex-lawyer that I am, I go through the thing with a fine-tooth comb, marking up dodgy clauses about fines for tardiness in red, but blithely passing over ‘Teachers must not beat or touch students in any way’ with a chuckle at the very notion of being driven to such measures. The dress code raises another grin: ‘Any teacher who arrives at class wearing slipper, knicker or vest will be summarily fined 100RMB.’  Presumably, the previous staff comprised a parade of Rab C Nesbitts.

I set off on my first day in positive mood, in my best school-marm outfit of chinos, blouse and brogues. I fondly imagine the ‘getting to know you’, crowd-pleasing icebreakers I’m going to run as part of each inaugural lesson. As soon as I set foot in the ’50s style classroom, however, I can see how grossly I’ve underestimated the situation.

For a start, the classes are absolutely huge: forty to fifty kids, sprawling out of those miniature metal desks-cum-chairs. I crumple up my roughly-sketched seating plan: no way am I going to learn all those names. I resort to calling on them with reference to their accoutrements: ‘Mr funky lime-green glasses’; ‘Lady with the pink hair bow’. The remaining students quickly rid themselves of any identifying features and assume that mask of impassivity that the Chinese have down to perfection.

My second mistake: assuming that because they’re Chinese they might be more tractable than the average teenager. Not so. The ‘tude coming off the back row is pure, undistilled Grange Hill. There are oily T-zones, bum-fluff moustaches, gangly limbs and gelled hair in abundance. Even the simple exercise of getting them to introduce themselves in English ends in farce: an ‘X’ ; a ‘Chocolate’; and a ‘Xujiahui’ (the district in which the school is located; a bit like calling yourself ‘Notting Hill’ or ‘Clapham’) later, I realise they’re making up their English names as they go along, to mass hilarity.

Thirdly, my equipment is old skool in the strictest sense. In my last teaching job, I’d smugly tapped the teen zeitgeist with YouTube clips, interactive whiteboards and fifteen minutes of Twilight for good behaviour: here, I have a blackboard and five different colours of chalk. I end each lesson covered in a fine layer of white powder, like an over-zealous baker’s assistant. The only nods to technology are the snazzy headset microphones the other teachers are sporting, and when I wind up hoarse with shouting, I regret rejecting one for fear of looking like a low-rent Britney Spears – or a dodgy telemarketer.

Lunchtime rolls round and I’m broken. I skulk to the canteen with my free coupon to collect my tin tray of rice, unidentifiable vegetable mulch and bits of chicken bone in broth and contemplate skeddadling before the day is out. I’m saved by the arrival of Amy,  a perennially cheery, cuddly teddy bear of a bloke (I later discover he’s actually called Amine, but it’s too late, the name has stuck). He’s an old-timer and listens patiently to my tale of woe. ‘I mean, there’s literally nothing I can do to discipline them!’ I moan. ‘Now I know why there’s that clause in the contract – I came this close to manhandling one little sod out of class.’ Amy nods sympathetically and imparts a few pearls of wisdom. ‘Now, the thing these kids fear worst is losing face in front of the others. So what I do is, I send ‘em to stand on one leg in the corner. If they wobble, well, they get the trash can treatment.’ ‘The trash can treatment?’ I look askance at him. ‘Sure. I give ‘em the trash can to hold. That baby really makes your arms burn after a minute! And sometimes, I lean over as I go past and, y’know, spit in it.’ He smiles beatifically.

Armed with this knowledge, I steel myself to re-enter the fray. Just as I’m poised to enter the classroom, nursery music trickles out over the tannoy and a voice intones: ‘Yi. Er. San. Si. Wu. Liu…’ I peep through the window. To a student, they’ve closed their eyes and are massaging their faces in a series of complex routines: clockwise, anti-clockwise, up, down. Those with glasses have taken them off, giving them that vulnerable, naked mole-rat look. ‘Eye exercise time,’ Amy grins, looking over my shoulder. ‘Twice a day. It’s supposed to ease the strain on their peepers.’ I feel an unexpected tenderness wash over me at the sight of this unified effort. Then the bell goes and I head into class, where every now and then I glance over at the bin standing quietly in the corner – a deeply reassuring presence; a shield; a little grey friend.

China, a land flowing with colostrum and honey

I’ve been reading the reports of rioting back in Blighty with increasing horror and disbelief. When I click on the Telegraph’s nifty little map plotting the looting hotspots and see that even bloody ‘gentrified’ Balham (or ‘The Balhamas’, as a resident friend fondly refers to it) is skewered by a red pin – people running around waving machetes and setting piles of rubbish ablaze, apparently – I start to count the blessings of living in China.

Yes, there might be a Great Fire Wall preventing me from keeping up to the nano-second with Stephen Fry’s tweets, and slowing my Gmail to an agonizing, keyboard-pounding crawl. And yes, I might have to hop-scotch my way down the street to avoid dog turds and snot rockets, on the rare occasion I brave a pair of flip flops. But if I see a machete on the street corner, I know it’s about to be wielded at the neck of an unfortunate duck or chicken, rather than stoving in an innocent shopkeeper’s front window (or a policeman’s head).

Disaffected youth? I’ve barely seen a teenager on the street since setting foot in Shanghai – they’re all locked away in their rooms, doing ten hours’ violin practice on top of homework, under the fierce supervision of a legion of Tiger Mothers. And yes, there’s an increasingly materialistic culture, and the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is definitely widening, but people here don’t think you’re entitled to the latest electronic gewgaw just by virtue of existing. No, you work for it; you save long and hard for that iPad 2. And if all else fails, you sell a kidney. You don’t get something for nothing, see?

Actually, the purpose of this post wasn’t to draw comparisons at all: it was simply to provide a little light relief, courtesy of an idle rummage in my local supermarket freezer this afternoon. Eyeing the limited selection of icy treats on offer, I decide to branch out from my normal mini-Viennetta-on-a-stick and plump for a Mingzhiniu Creamy Oats Delight, which I vaguely remember a colleague from Time Out lauding to the skies in a taste test (it’s a hard life being a food editor…)

Sure enough, it’s deliciously creamy, with a nutty, oaty aftertaste. A bit like sweet, milky porridge in ice-cream form. I idly turn over the wrapper to lick the last dribble and the product description catches my eye.

Not being a new or expectant mother, I probably wouldn’t have known what the hell ‘colostrum’ was if it hadn’t been for the furore surrounding the sale of ‘Baby Gaga’ breast-milk ice cream. As it is, after an initial dry-heave, I make a mental note never to check a list of ingredients again (ignorance is most definitely bliss as far as most Chinese processed food goes). What’s funny is that apparently Creamy Oats Delight has been on sale for years, making it yet another example – like fireworks and the compass – of the Chinese getting there long before the West. Bon appetit!

You say tomato, I say fan qie

The difference between your mother and one of these? Merely a tone...

M-O and I are now two months into our Mandarin lessons. After ploughing through a series of woeful demo classes at various schools – which chiefly consist of practising the word ‘ma’ in the four different tones and a solemn warning that by getting it wrong you might risk calling someone’s mother a horse – we finally strike gold with Benny, the enterprising founder of Ask Benny! Language Academy. Benny is rather sweet: fine-boned, quick to laugh and a wearer of those rimless specs that always remind me of dentists.

He also has the slightly camp manner I’ve noticed in a lot of (unquestionably) straight Asian men. It was a great surprise to us when he announced his engagement to the formidable Jenny, who apparently coerced him into a proposal with the words ‘Wo kui gei ni hen dao mafan, Benny. Huo yu wo kui gei ni hen dao qiao yi‘ (‘I can give you lots of trouble, Benny. Or I can give you lots of joy.’) And he even has to pay her parents for the dubious privilege of marrying their daughter: 100,000RMB, about ten thousand quid – a sort of ‘reverse dowry’ as compensation for taking her away from them. Personally, I think he’s been had.

The lessons are not a success. Rather disappointingly, Benny casts us according to Shanghainese gender stereotypes: hence, all my newly acquired phrases relate to designer labels and shopping (‘I love LV’; ‘Today I went shopping and I bought an LV bag’; ‘I want James to buy me an LV bag’ etc) while judging from M-O’s vocabulary list, he spends his time working, drinking pijiu and whoring in M1NT, Shanghai’s answer to Boujis.

Worse, M-O and I – while cut from very different academic cloths – share an insanely competitive streak. I was the kid whose hand was constantly in the air (a la Hermione Granger), who cried at a French test score of 90%, and who sent her Latin teacher a postcard from Rome ten years after GCSEs (‘and Mrs Smith, I finally made it to the Via Sacra! Per aspera ad astra!’)

M-O, by comparison, was the kind of weasel who sat at the back of the classroom, sneering with his mates, literally too-cool-for-school, yet somehow still absorbing the lesson through osmosis and natural brilliance. It infuriates me how he manages to recall words he’s heard only once, while I go cross-eyed over my notebook of scribbles, trying to decipher my specially invented ‘phonetic’ code.

I spend hours thinking of word associations in my quest to master the language: kao jing (close or near, pronounced ‘cow jean’) becomes a heifer squeezed into a pair of tight, close-fitting denims; wu liao (bored, pronounced ‘woolly ow’), the opposite to the emotion you’d experience if a sheep stepped on your toe. For pei gen (bacon, pronounced ‘pagan’), I imagine a bunch of lardons streaked with woad dancing at a Stonehenge solstice. It’s all in vain: the words just don’t stick. They keep slipping from my grasp, like oily dumplings from a pair of chopsticks.

‘You just need to practice,’ M-O smiles condescendingly after another arduous lesson. ‘Talk to Ayi.’ ‘Ayi despises me ever since she’s had to wash my underwear!’ I burst out. ‘I’m sure she thinks only a horrible Western slapper would wear thongs.’ ‘The doormen, then. Or the cabbies,’ he suggests, fully aware that my meagre journo’s salary doesn’t extend to taxis.

I sulk, but console myself with my painstakingly accurate pronunciation. He might remember the words, but in a tonal language like Chinese, that only gets you so far. To Benny’s mirth, M-O describes me as his ‘niu pang you.’ ’It’s nu pang you!’ Benny giggles. ‘Girl friend. Niu pang you is like calling her your ‘beef friend’! No sense!’ ‘Well, she can be a bit of a cow,’ says M-O, glaring at me. ‘Bi zui,’ I retort without thinking. Benny’s delighted. ‘You remember how to say ‘”shut up”!’ he beams.

The next evening, a rude old sod tries to barge in front of me at the fruit-and-veg stall. ‘Pai dui (Get in line)!’ I bark, the words out of my mouth before I even engage my brain. He stares at me venomously for a minute, before stepping aside. I’m trembling slightly as I fumble in my purse for yuan. Have I cracked this strange tongue? Or am I destined only to speak in insults and imperatives?

Suddenly a fight erupts across the street, where the taxi-drivers are lining up for their evening noodles. I try to identify the original combatants, but there’s such a hullabaloo I can’t.  Everyone is shaking fists and yelling at each other at a decibel level that makes it reckless to get any closer. From the relative safety of the fruit stall, the malevolent would-be queue jumper suddenly starts bellowing as well, though he clearly has absolutely nothing to do with the fracas.

It’s then I realise that in China, insults and imperatives might be a pretty good place to start. Gun kai!

Forget breakfast like a king – it’s brunch like an expat

Do you like see food?

I’ve lost count of the number of local dining reviews which start: ‘Brunch in Shanghai is an institution.’ The sad truth is that for most of us here it’s the main event; the zenith; the raison d’etre of the weekend.

The routine typically goes like this: after a booze-sodden Friday night, you roll out of bed hungover to the teeth, squint at a sky ponderous with clouds, and immediately shelve your plans for the day, rejecting even the option of a foot massage as overly effortful. The one thing that remotely appeals is a free-flow champagne brunch at a five star hotel.

People talk about having ‘done’ the Westin or the Shangri-La, as though it’s some formative experience like climbing Everest or visiting a Patpong ping-pong bar. The relative merits of each are loudly debated: the Shangri-La has a ‘candy factory’ that would put Willy Wonka’s emporium to shame; le Meridien’s ‘La Vie en Rose’ features rose Moet and pink-rubber-clad nurses dispensing restorative syringes of Bloody Mary. But the daddy of them all is the venerable Westin – a hymn to excess and a paen to the worst possible taste.

I’m taken there by M-O as a birthday treat, several weeks after arriving in Shanghai. Having stoically subsisted thus far on xiaolongbao, shengjianbao, noodles and danbing, the selection of Western fare is an embarrassment of riches. There are two floors of food stations groaning with everything from mini doner kebabs to California rolls, charcuterie, pizza and ice-cream sundaes. There are baskets overflowing with myriad variations on the humble loaf (we haven’t seen bread in a fortnight); lobsters reclining on beds of ice; Mr Whippy machines churning out ice-cream. And then there’s the unlimited effervescent golden nectar. An imperceptible nod brings a qipao-clad waitress scurrying over with a magnum of Veuve.

We’re fascinated by the neighbouring table, three starkly beautiful Swedish teenagers who have the palely elegant, slightly vulpine look of people who spend their time lolling on velvet chaise longues in darkened rooms eating chocolate-dipped cherries and plotting nefarious acts. Clearly here on an absent daddy’s dollar, the two Valmonts and de Metreuil disdainfully sip champagne and pick croissants apart, stopping occasionally to fiddle with iPhones and plan, with sidelong glances, the desecration of their sweet virginal waitress.

As a veteran of college balls which cost a hundred quid a ticket, I know where my strengths lie. I might not be able to drink my money’s worth, but I can certainly eat it. I make three, four, five trips to the buffet. The chef at the Turkish station wordlessly hands me my sixth mini-kebab, and there’s something in his eyes which makes me feel a bit ashamed. Returning to the table, my appetite suffers a further blow as I get an eyeful of Chinese dining etiquette, courtesy of a slim, elegant matriarch dressed head to toe in Armani.

From a plate piled high with crustacea, she delicately selects a spider crab leg, crams the entire limb in her mouth and masticates vigorously, before leaning to her left and spitting the resulting debris onto a side plate, like a gull regurgitating a meal for its chick. It’s hands-down the most stomach-churning thing I witness in Shanghai – and that includes the unfortunate later experience of being spat upon (inadvertently, I might add – I was cycling in the offender’s slipstream, and the wind-drag factor just did its thing).

I look down at my plate, and see that now it holds a mini berry pannacotta, a chocolate truffle, some green tea cheesecake (I loathe green tea), baklava and two pieces of pizza. M-O swiftly confiscates the booty, branding my gluttony ‘disgraceful’. It is all rather grotesque and reminiscent of a earlier age of excess – the colonial heyday, perhaps, or a Roman banquet. I’m feeling the need to retire to a vomitarium.

Fan-tastic entertainment

When the ‘entertainment’ starts up – some pre-pubescent-looking Chinese girls doing the can-can to the strains of ‘Let’s Get Loud’, their tiny bird-ribcages and narrow hips lost in the voluptuous Latino ruffles of their dresses, the full horror of our situation dawns on us. Valmont doesn’t know where to look, his smooth inscrutable mask falling away in aghast incredulity. ‘I think it’s time to go,’ I announce to M-O. ‘I’ll just grab an ice-cream for the road.’

Best in the West(in), but some of us are not amused

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For all the well-wishers out there, I’m delighted to report that I’ve passed my company medical with flying colours. Incredibly, my liver is fat-free. What I do have, however, is a ‘deviated septum’. ‘Got a nose-bag problem?’ asks my editor, flinging the certificate of results on my desk. As someone so impossibly square as to have worked in the Square Mile for four years and never seen so much as a speck of coke, I think it’s unlikely. It’s left to good old Wikipedia to set my mind at rest, although I’m now suffering from an interesting variation on the notion of ‘navel-gazing’: that of ‘nostril-gazing’.

A 50:50 chance of 20:20 vision

The Chinese medical exam: not one for needle-phobes

Now that I’m gainfully employed in Shanghai, my tourist visa needs to be converted into a work permit, which involves all sorts of bureaucratic hoops, red tape and strange alchemy. The first hurdle is the medical examination. Our diminutive, ferocious office manager Suzie hands me a printed confirmation of appointment at the Foreigners’ Clinic, and sternly reminds me not to forget the fapiao, the official stamped receipt, after paying upfront. ‘Or you cannot claim money back!’

Ah, the fapiao. So much more than a bit of paper, it’s the difference between getting your (often substantial) expenses reimbursed or footing them yourself. Taxi drivers and restaurants are supposed to dispense these official stamped invoices as a matter of course, as are landlords. Inevitably there’s a lot of huffing and puffing, and sometimes a flat refusal when the person in question is on the fiddle and wants to avoid paying state taxes. In the Time Out office, however, the fapiao is king.

I trot off to my appointment, quaking inside. I’ve resigned myself to the official diagnosis of ‘fatty liver’ – every expat I know has tested positive for it –  but the exam often reveals other medical anomalies. M-O, for example, was diagnosed with the terrifying-sounding ‘sinus bradycardia’, though a frantic trawl of the internet revealed this to be nothing more sinister than a slow heartbeat. Which, as he smugly points out, actually puts him in the same bracket as most world-class athletes.

Mixed up with this fear is a competitive streak of gargantuan proportions. I’ve never failed an exam in my life: in fact, my biggest triumph (bar a distinction in Grade Two tap dancing) was passing one of those hearing tests where they give you a pair of headphones and you have to say ‘yes’ every time you hear a beep. With congenital deafness in the family and permanently waxy ears, the odds were stacked against me, and the spectre of a vile, flesh-coloured, intermittently screeching hearing aid loomed large. I consequently answered ‘yes’ every five seconds, irrespective of beeps, which led the doctor to conclude that I had the hearing of a dog – or a bat.

Once at the clinic, having paid my 700RMB and obtained the precious fapiao, I’m handed a skimpy white gown and some fetching blue shoe-covers, and asked to disrobe. I join a shuffling line of bemused-looking laowai who are slowly being siphoned off into different rooms. It’s all a bit 1984-esque. One poor chap has a hacking smoker’s cough and is struggling to make his robe meet across his huge beer belly. I look at him sympathetically, thinking that he doesn’t stand a chance. The Belly is ushered into a room marked ‘ECG’, where in all likelihood he’s pitched straight down a chute to the Dumpster.

After a brutal blood sample – which feels like the nurse filed the needlepoint flat in preparation – I’m sent to another room, where I’m weighed, poked and prodded, before being summoned for an X-ray, followed by a generous slathering of cold jelly across my stomach and an ultrasound. Judging by the frenzied way the doctor keeps digging the scanner further and further into my ribs and frowning at the screen, one of my vital organs is clearly missing. Perhaps the fat around my liver is such that it’s actually serving as camouflage.

Eventually, she gives up with an exasperated sigh, and I’m into the home straight: the eye testing suite. An irritable-looking old medic points his pen at four Magic Eye-type pictures on the desk and asks me to read out the numbers I see. I wonder if this is a joke and then panic, as I was always crap at Magic Eye and was generally left feeling like the class dum-dum while the other kids rhapsodised about the unicorns, sailing boats and mystical scenes suddenly erupting from the page.

He then hands me a soup spoon, and gestures that I should cover one eye with it before reading off the letter he points to on the wall chart. It takes me a minute to realise that the only letters on the chart are M and W, so I have a fifty percent chance of getting it right. Yessss! If only Specsavers had employed a similarly lax method, I might not have been diagnosed with myopia aged 12, and thus had to suffer the twin indignities of train-tracks and specs (and might actually have got my first kiss before the age of fifteen).

It’s only as I leave the room that I realise I’m still wearing my glasses. If I don’t get full marks now, it’s a rig of Eurovision Song Contest proportions. I trundle back to get dressed. At this point I realise I have lost the precious fapiao. Cue frenzied running through the corridors and bursting through doors, robe flapping open, like Randle McMurphy‘s crazier sister. Eventually, the receptionist offers me a replacement, but I know that’ll cut no ice with Suzie, and burst into tears. She stares at me impassively in a way that only a Chinese person can.

Just then, the Belly waddles up clutching a familiar-looking bit of paper. ‘Is this yours?’ he rasps. I snatch it gratefully and somewhat over-effusively wish him the best of luck with his test results. As for mine, you can watch this space…

Of nosegays and noxious vapours…

My biggest fan...

It’s hot in the city. We’re talking a sweltering, Turkish bath-type heat, the kind that drenches you in a cloudburst of sweat from the minute you step outside; in the inspired words of a rival hack: ‘a sort of supernatural humidity that leaves your brain boiling in its skull juices.’ The washing machine is going 24/7 in our ayi‘s ceaseless bid to clear the perspiration-soaked mountain in the laundry basket. We’re edging into three showers a day territory.

The welcome flipside to our suffering, of course, is the enormous range of seasonal fashion paraphernalia that this foul climate has engendered. Fittingly for the style capital of the Orient, everything is either outsized, cloyingly cutesy, or wonderfully bonkers. I see huge sun visors – the sort that could take a passer-by out at a hundred paces –  in a nod by the Shanghainese matrons to this season’s ‘luxe sportswear’ trend; charmingly bucolic straw sun hats trimmed with satin ribbons, like something Marie Antoinette might have donned at Versailles; ubiquitous lace-trimmed parasols, which do double duty as umbrellas when the poetically named ‘plum rains‘ arrive. Fans of all shapes and sizes abound, from bright, cheap paper offerings to enormous, printed canvas numbers which unfurl like the wings of an albatross. I’m enchanted by the theatrical new world of summer accessories – hitherto confined to a pair of shades and a straw beach bag – opening up to me.

I even abandon my Western quest for bronzed skin. A tan in China is deeply undesirable, as it marks you out as one who toils outside and thus a member of the peasant class. I’ve seen women emerge from the metro holding bags, scarves and even open magazines over their heads to protect them from the dreaded rays. One weekend, M-O and I meet our friend Iris for lunch on the sunny terrace of a popular restaurant. She’s sitting in the only available patch of shade, fashionably pale, as cool and elegant as her botanical namesake amongst the sweating expats whose faces are the same colour as their Bloody Marys. ‘These marks, how you say, spots?’ she says, pointing at M-O’s liberally befreckled arms. ‘Freckles,’ I correct her. She shudders, drawing further back into the shadows. ‘Very bad in China. Like defect. No one want, so we cover ourselves always. And use skin-whitening treatment in every cosmetic.’ ‘Poor you,’ I say sympathetically to M-O, who is rolling down the sleeves of his shirt, scowling.

As the mercury rises, so does the olfactory assault on the nostrils. I’m not talking about the decrepit drains, or the stink rising from the sluggish waters of the Huangpu. No, apparently we Westerners reek to high heaven: our meat-and-dairy heavy diets producing a distinctive tang known as shan – a rank odour of sheep or goats, the historical scent of the mutton-eating people of Mongolia. In ancient times, the honk which accompanied the border raiders was such that they could be smelled on the breeze before they were actually sighted. ‘So do we really smell bad?’ I ask Iris, conscious of the two lattes and grilled cheese sandwich I’ve just polished off. She shrugs delicately. ‘Maybe just a little…stronger.’

The next day, I sit next to a old man on the metro who’s sporting another fashion first, the ‘Shanghai bikini’, which comprises a ‘wife-beater’ in an off-white hue (anything from buttermilk to ivory goes) rolled up to display copious amounts of belly while still keeping the nipples decorously covered. Like most Chinese, he’s also clearly no believer in deodorant. Which isn’t something I’ve ever had an issue with – hey, I’m the one who smells of mutton – until now. It’s 37 degrees outside, and even someone impossibly fragrant, like Betty Draper or Kate Middleton, would be breaking a terrific sweat.

I try breathing through my mouth while simultaneously flapping my fan, but nothing works. It reminds me of an overnight bus trip I once took in Mexico, where the passengers’ staple diet of frijoles had resulted in a near-stupefying miasma of botty fumes. Salvation came in the form of that travellers’ staple, tiger balm, which I smeared liberally inside my nostrils. A measure which almost burned my septum away and left me unable to taste anything but camphor and eucalyptus for several days, but was worth it for the resulting olfactory shield. Unfortunately I have none to hand this afternoon. And then it hits me: the final, romantic accoutrement needed for summer in Shanghai.

Bring back the nosegay.