paddy. The operator looked like a man mowing his kid’s wading pool. Back in the city, I was walking along the Nanjing Donglu, with its store windows full of Lee jeans and Adidas shoes and Revlon eye shadow, when I peeked into an alley, and there, six feet from the makeup counter, was a man in his underwear giving himself a bath at a sink. Because that’s where his sink was. If you live in the one-room warrens of Shanghai, the lavatory is in the street, shared with a half dozen other families. And a sink is luxury. Sometimes it’s just a water tap, padlocked so that the folks from the next warren over don’t poach. The toilet is down the block, if there is one. Wagons come through the alleys in the mornings, collecting wooden chamber pots. The houses built when Shanghai was a treaty port were huddled into narrow streets and squeezed around dainty courtyards. They are pastiches of French style, English fenestration, German brickwork, and Chinese smiley-lip tile roofs, as odd in a small way as modern Shanghai’s skyscrapers, and typically Asian in crowding. In the 1950s the little houses were divided into tiny apartments. In the 1960s the Communists inserted concrete prefab housing into every remaining open space. Hundreds of rows of two-story tin-roofed cubicles were built from tar-jointed slabs of concrete in people’s areaways, in front of their doors, and along their sidewalks between the housefronts and the curb. Now the old neighborhoods of Shanghai are as intricate as Parcheesi boards and practically on the same scale. Ground-floor rooms open directly onto the street. People live in the middle of the road, wander the snack stalls in their pajamas, tip back their kitchen chairs amid bike and motorcycle traffic, and sell cigarettes and newspapers to the passing throngs without needing to get out of bed. And this is not poverty. Not by Chinese standards. By Chinese standards this kind of material deprivation isn’t even worth noticing. It’s negligible, one might say. And that’s what the World Bank does say. The World Bank publication China 2020 Series: Sharing Rising Incomes asserts that there are “70 million absolute poor in China,” and that “about 100 million additional people survive on less than $1 of income a day,” and then, in the same paragraph, the World Bank states, “urban poverty is negligible.” Conditions in Shanghai are an improvement for the Chinese. This urban squalor is sought after. You need a government permit to move to Shanghai. People travel thousands of miles and sneak into town to live like this.
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