6 Luxuries You'll Miss After You Leave Shanghai

As much as we expats bellyache about certain aspects of Shanghai life -- syrupy internet, gastronomic gentrification -- there are quite a few luxuries we take for granted until we return home and don't have them any more. And obviously these are gross generalizations from the viewpoint of one overprivileged, ignorant American. We realize many expats hail from places that either share these luxuries with Shanghai, or are impoverished to the point that their citizens would never take these for granted.  But hopefully at least some of these will resonate. Here are six. 

Safety

We're double-dipping a bit as we included safety in our countdown of the 6 Best And Worst Things About Living in Shanghai. But what other city of 25 million can you stand naked on any street corner at 3am, and the worst that's going to happen is a weird look -- or a video on our site. Try that in the Chicago equivalent of Shanghai's Baoshan neighborhood. Yep, Shanghai boasts one of the lowest violent crime rates per capita. Obviously if you're from Davos, Switzerland, this isn't a huge change. But if you're from NY, where it's starting to look like it did in Death Wish again with rampant subway slashings and that crazy who went on a hammering spree like a meth-addled Super Mario, you're going to miss it. 

Lack Of Rules And Regulations

It's not so much a lack of rules and regulations as it is different rules and regulations, which afford you different luxuries than back home. Yes, there are steep penalties for drugs, but you can also stagger down the street at 9am in a bathrobe with an open fifth of baijiu in hand and no one's going to stop you. In fact, being a degenerate alcoholic apparently gets you promoted here faster than a Harvard degree. The Great Firewall's a buzzkill, but lax copyright laws make it easy to rip and repurpose stuff from the Chinese web without ramifications (not that you should). You can also listen to free music using QQ, and download a host of movies. Not to mention that requirements to teach English or do certain other professions aren't exactly Navy Seal-esque (but more on that later).

Efficiency

For a city of 25 million, they sure do run a tight ship. The metro is fast, clean, has barriers to prevent crazies from shoving you on the tracks, and has been updated this century unlike it's NY counterpart. Okay, it's not as diverse as New York's...and would it kill them to stay open past 11pm (at least on weekends)? But we digress. Stores don't close down arbitrarily on Wednesday, and a lunch break doesn't mean downing cabernet and pasta from 1-6pm. Buildings shoot up like bamboo and get torn down just as fast -- just compare photos of Pudong now and 30 years ago. Need a new highway or shopping mall? No problem. City officials will clear cut an entire neighborhood without resistance from residents, who simply get "harmonized" to another part of town. Historic preservation societies don't have a say either as urban renewal here basicallyentails auctioning off land to the highest bidder. Hence why your favorite food streets are getting excised like carbuncles by a teenager before prom. Buy hey, we're rating it on efficiency, not morality. 

Cheap eats

We have our problems with Shanghai's food scene -- the epidemic of kitschy mall restaurants, New York prices for inedible foreign fare (even Vietnamese and Thai) etc. -- but cheap eats was never one of them. 20RMB in New York might get you something off the dollar menu at McDonald's; in Shanghai it will land you dunes of fried rice, a fried porkchop and xiaolongbao made by a granny that's been hand-rolling them since the rickshaw days. This applies to the wet market, where you can get fresh produce, and live poultry and fish for dirt cheap. Back in the States, they'd wait until it's half as fresh, slap an organic label on it, and sell it at an egregious markup at Whole Foods.

Bargains

In that vein, there are few better places where you can get a better deal. Need a dress shirt? Get it hand-tailored at the South Bund Fabric Market for little more than 120RMB. Cheap handbag? Fake market. Need a key duplicated? No need to go to Lowe's Hardware; just have your neighborhood key cutter do it for 10RMB (yes, a hundred guys now have keys to your apartment; but that's beside the point). Everything else? Taobao. 

Foreigner Status

We never liked the term "foreigner status." It might've been applicable in the early 1900s, where you could murder someone in the Chinese part of town and get away with it because your Concession was under a different jurisdiction. But thankfully, things have evened out a bit. There are plenty of things that suck about being a foreigner here; making international headlines for infractions that wouldn't make the local rag had they been committed by a Chinese person, the Al Norte-esque saga to land a work permit here, the fact that you can get middled out of a businessyou dreamt up. Not to mention that "foreigner status" is a pretty heinous generalization as there are so many types of foreigners. An African American with fluent English has less of a chance at landing an English teaching job than a white Eastern European who speaks two words of it. 

So to grossly generalize, there is more upward mobility than back home. The English-speaking talent pool is a bit shallower, so you'll have people without degrees making 15-20k RMB per month teaching English, and 20-30-year-old editors of major city publications who were interns just a couple months ago. Had I applied for a Wall Street Journal gig back home, I'd probably be pushing coffee for the 50+-year-old senior editor for months before landing a junior position -- in the unlikely event that they accepted me in the first place.

And guys, why do you think you're having success with quantities/calibers of women you'd never dream of scoring back home. It's not because of your 100-watt personality. It's because an American Walmartian is considered exotic here. It's the same reason McDonald's (at least when they started) is considered a haute item here. But once locals go to the US and have a bonafide Black Angus, grass-fed burger, they probably won't look at the quarter pounder the same way again.

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