The thought afterwards comes in a few week after I started the list. The thought is as follows: why do I have to love every city I live? Why is that every city I decided to live in has to conform to my dream? Maybe I can just enjoy Shanghai, enjoy it as a stop in my life, as how I enjoy the unfamiliarity I love in the towns I have wondered in my travel, as how I enjoy the difference in a new dish, cooked with a different philosophy, a taste I may not like but nevertheless an experience I delight? Maybe I can enjoy the city for all its ridiculousness - the pajamas on the streets, the serious faces the citizens took on the tinies affairs, even the construction that changes the city’s face everyday - laugh at it, understand it, sympathize it, maybe one day love it for who she is, maybe not, and why do I have to love it anyway? Enjoy it. Enjoy this city that is one of the fastest growing city in the world, and see how it grow, for better for worse, and recall this experience with fun, if not fondness, ten, twenty or forty years from now,  in my living room whichever city I live then, and say” When I lived in Shanghai 2008…”

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When I got off the plane in Shanghai, back from an otherwise unfortunate Christmas vacation, I was met by the grey sky and the noticeable dusty building, dusty cars, dusty people, and I was reminded of the dusty neighbors and dusty events unresolved from the renovation. I was surprised to see how clearly unhappy I was to come back. So I ask the question why I live in a city I am so unhappy with. Then in an effort to be positive, I ask the question in a different way, what are the reasons I live in Shanghai? Actually my heart cried,” Give me reasons, give me one reason, to justify moving to this city, to continue living in this city, and to persuade myself not moving away from it. ”

So I am starting a list of things I like about Shanghai. Maybe I can find my reasons.

1. In Shanghai people are conservative in promising others in term of time. People I’ve worked with very often deliver before the time they’ve promised. For example, they’d say” Oh, it is busy season, the fastest I can give you is next Wednesday.” But mostly likely the things get delivered or tasks get done by Monday. I have never had this happen to me anywhere else. So, cheers to Shanghai on this one.

2. Views of gingko trees from the bedroom window and the living room window. There aren’t any leaves on the branches now, but there are buds bursting with lives. At the first of the spring, they will turn to sprouts of green. Tender, fresh, lovely.

3. The French balony and the French window, with shutters outside and dark pink curtains inside, on the third floor of an old house on Ruijin Rd. between Yongjia Rd. and Fuxing Rd. , and the person who closed the curtain - seeing from the No. 145 bus going North, at six o’clock in a early spring evening getting dark.