A Totally Impractical Guide to Living in Shanghai

On the other side stands a shouting woman

In Istanbul, at the last flat I lived in before we left Turkey in 2008, my upstairs neighbour- a middle-aged woman in a house dress and slippers- used to ring my doorbell repeatedly at all hours. If I was in the shower, she’d keep ringing it until I was out and dried and dressed. Sometimes she was content to keep her finger on the doorbell for a good ten minutes before I answered the door.

Whenever I opened the door to her, she’d launch into a very fast, very loud tirade about…something. But I was never sure what because, well, I couldn’t understand her. My Turkish abilities were good enough to understand her had she bothered to slow down and stop shouting, but my scrunched up mystified face only made her shift into even more clipped, shouty tones. I’d stand in my doorway, in my PJs or sopping wet or with dinner rapidly cooling in the kitchen and she’d shout at me, a wall of sound that seemed to go on for ever, increasing in density and impenetrability.

What was she shouting about?

According to my landlord, whom I’d then call for clarification (the woman was a distant relative, it seemed),  my doormat was too dusty or I’d placed my garbage out on the curb at the wrong time or…something. My deer-in-headlights facial expressions and pleas for her to slow down and repeat what she’d said more clearly fell on deaf ears. Shouting was the way to go.

She wasn’t the only neighbour who barraged me with finger-to-the-doorbell mystifying shoutathons over the years. I actually thought it was a Turkish thing for neighbours to find something to yell at each other about across the threshold. I came to dread the sound of the ever-present bird-call doorbells in my various flats. If it rang, especially if it kept ringing after the first push, I knew I was in for a long, complicated, shouty lecture.

But it isn’t just a Turkish thing to ring doorbells and shout at your foreign neighbours who stare wide eyed and incomprehending at the barrage of barely understood verbiage.

Oh, Shanghai, Shanghai.

As you may know from previous posts, my Mandarin abilities are pretty basic. They are a lot less basic now that I’ve completed my 80 hours of intensive study over the past month but really, they are still pretty basic.  I’ve demonstrated this lack of ability in the lifts going down to the lobby when neighbours have tried to engage in small talk and I just stood there smiling like an imbecile, repeating the few phrases I could remember, nodding politely.  Most of our neighbours have given up on the elevator pleasantries- I get a brief nihao then silence.

Here, it isn’t the immediate neighbours who shout at me across the threshold. No, the woman across the hall with the appalling snarling beady-eyed mutant mini-dog has ceased trying to talk to me when her dog runs out to the hall every morning to bite my ankles. She knows I’m far too stupid to talk to.

Others haven’t realized the extent of my stupidity and keep trying to shout.

A few weeks ago, our doorbell rang at around midnight. I was asleep. The doorbell kept ringing. And ringing. I woke, thinking perhaps the building was on fire or a neighbour needed help or we were being evacuated or something similar, and so I got up and padded out into the darkened living room, peered through the spy-hole and saw a woman. I opened the door to a barrage of shouting. Apparently I’d ordered food. She thrust bags full of styrofoam food containers at me and berated me for…something. I had no idea what was going on. She waved a piece of paper in my face, as if the blur of densely written Chinese script would clarify anything. I kept repeating my stock phrases of I don’t understand and This isn’t my food at her but she was fairly adamant that increasing the speed and volume of her argument would help me to realize that I had indeed ordered food and would now kindly pay her for her services. If only I would just stop being so difficult.

Last night, our doorbell rang and an older woman in a cotton nightie and fuzzy slippers stood there with a clipboard and stern arrangement of facial features. She shouted at us for a few minutes while we explained repeatedly that we had no idea what she wanted. The more confusion we displayed, the louder and faster she spoke. I caught a few things- something about 150 and television. The rest was just an elided blur of tones. My brain ached. We finally speed dialed our landlord and shoved the phone at her and she stood in the middle of our living room in the thin cotton nightie and anklet socks (slippers left politely at the doorstep), barking out her frustrated needs to him. Ah, we had to pay for our cable TV. Ah. Right then. We paid, thanked her, and she left.

I’ve reached a point where I don’t want to open our door to anyone unless I’m actually expecting someone (hello New York Pizza!) or answer my phone unless the caller display shows someone I actually know. I’ve had too many years of being shouted at, as if the increasing volume and speed of the conversation will help to overcome my fundamental lack of comprehension and crucial gaps in vocabulary knowledge. It makes me feel tired and stupid.

In my Mandarin course last month, I learned about likes and dislikes, shopping, fruits and clothing, numbers, furniture and rooms, measure words, family members, and jobs. I would have appreciated a unit on possible doorbell dialogues.