半个上海人: Understanding What It Means To Be Half Shanghainese

It’s 9 ‘o clock and the Shanghai sky is aglow with a purplish red hue, poison ivy concentrate watered down enough for glittering mall lights to pierce through. Across from us on the other side of the Huangpu River sits gold pools of international wealth: former European banks wrapped in warm lights. The air is cold, but it’s sweetened by the aftertaste of 松鼠桂鱼 (squirrel fried fish), fried and bathed in a sugary red sauce. This mixes with a faint floral smell. The tiny yellow petals smushed into the lines of my sneaker soles signal the beginning of autumn. 

I’m walking with an unlikely party down the Pudong pier. My thirty year old colleague tilts her head towards the skyline and asks a Korean classmate of mine from East China Normal University (where we take supplemental HSK 6 level Chinese classes) how Shanghai compares to Seoul. My adorable fellow intern instead turns to me, insisting for a third time that my mandarin doesn’t sound “western foreign.”  Rather, it has a dialectal echoes of Hong Kong or Taiwan. 

It’s always been hard to explain my mandarin accent, but I’ve become so much more comfortable attempting it here than I ever did in the states. My accent is certainly not as standard as that of my Shanghainese American mother, despite attending eight years of a dual language elementary and middle school (though through formal education, my Chinese reading and writing has always been stronger than hers). 

It has the sweet upward lilts of my Taiwanese teachers, especially evident when I say family names like “mother” or “brother,” but also a mildly overdone emphasis on tones – perhaps from young Grace carelessly repeating overzealous Chinese recordings of phrases to “get ‘er done” (pass the oral exams) or else, from my American tendency to overcompensate with confident inflection (fake it till you make it)! 

When people ask me about my accent here, it’s not from a place of judgment like I anticipated, even feared before making my first solo voyage to Shanghai. I mimic their curiosity. I cherish each journey-to-Shanghai story swap. 

So I’ll swap mine for yours. The last time I visited Shanghai was when I was four. I have absolutely no memory of it (mom likes to joke that this is why you never take young children on trips abroad). I always meant to come live here for a chunk of time, in part to prove to myself that I can settle into a rhythm and belongingness in “the motherland,” no matter how uncomfy it might be, or else to understand the grooves of Chinese school and working life that I could only trace from Chinese dramas. Ultimately though, I hoped to uncover what it means to be half shanghainese and take it back home with me. 

  1. Being half Shanghainese means certain things coming much easier to me than I expected/ navigating a new, complicated sense of belongingness

    Making friends was easier than I expected, in part because enrolling in a university meant that I made friends in classes, but also because my Chinese was adequate enough for me to drink in the “Friends of friends are my friends” collectivist culture here. On Fridays, perched on the green seat cushions of a Haidilao hot pot joint, I often found myself in groups of eight or nine, half surrounded by people I knew and half whose Wechats I had added by the end of the night (which to be fair, I have learned does not mean that either of us will follow up beyond the automated greeting message). I appreciated how often social butterfly friends would organize gatherings like this and slowly got better at tailoring the “so what was Harvard really like” answer to this new audience.

    They were under the impression that discrimination against Asians at these largely white institutions is rampant and while I don’t deny that being East Asian shaped my experience at Harvard (guiding me towards friend groups and creative communities that elevate the Asian voice like The Wave), I can’t pinpoint an instance in which I was actively discounted because of my race. I did find the scarcity of female economics faculty of color to be more acutely alarming, especially when I wanted to get involved in econ research. Last year, I finally got a chance to confront the department about this and advocated for a women in econ department mentorship program. Okay, side tangent over. Back to Shanghai.

Ingesting views and spicy food from 江西 (JiangXi)

One even generously arranged a trip to his hometown in  江西 (JiangXi) where his family took us hiking up 三清山 (Sanqing Mountain). Hiking in China is more of a cardio game. Mountains here are completely paved, so it feels like walking up an endless spire of stairs, except surrounded by tall rock quarries and Chinese trees. He even let me fly his drone. I reveled in the excitement of meeting each new roulette of people and even brought foreign classmates into the fold.

While I found meeting new friends to be easy, deepening relationships was more formidable, especially because of the language ceiling. In time, I eventually met two patient Chinese friends who indulged me on numerous Chinglish cafe and bookstore trips. Both of them I met through my internship.

Blending into the seams of the city was similarly frictionless, because I look as Chinese as can be. Truly a blessing in disguise. It was easy to feel a sense of initial belonging by looking into a crowd and seeing faces that looked like mine. Jacket cuts and mascaras were meant to flatter my features. I knew if I got lost or couldn’t find something, I could ask for help. Furthermore, people didn’t stop to record me without permission like they sometimes did with my white friends, nor did they stop me to ask for pictures. They did, however, often ask me to translate messages or instructions for my Italian friends, which I was happy to do.

Funnily enough when in China, I felt an inclination to watch American stand-up, despite feeling an inclination to binge Chinese dramas when I'm in the States. It made me wonder if tv show escapism is easier when they’re produced abroad, the same way some people find music sounds better in a foreign languages.

2. It means having an itch for all the quintessential Chinese experiences, including but not limited to:

Various friend get togethers ~ mostly karaoke and dinners

  1. Celebrating Chinese New Year: My sweet coworker took pity on me during the holidays and invited me into her home for Chinese New Year. My heart stirred after seeing the effort her family took in preparing so many Shanghainese New Year classics like egg dumplings, 八宝饭 (eight treasures sticky rice), stir fried river shrimp, as well as shanghainese classics like 红烧肉 (red braised pork cubes), whole steamed fish, and 烤麸 (sweet and savory steamed rice gluten and wood ear mushrooms). 

  2. KTV and learning Chinese drinking games: a popular way to celebrate birthdays. Controversial opinion: 小姐牌 is a superior form of King’s cup.

  3. Clubbing in Shanghai, followed by Haidilao: Haidilao is the only restaurant still open at 4 am, a shock to me as a born and bred New Yorker.

  4. Ordering takeout: 美团外卖 became my best friend. Delivery food is so cheap here, around $5-7 USD! As is bubble tea, which is around $2 USD! I subsequently gave in to all of my food cravings.

  5. Celebrating Christmas as a Young People’s Holiday: Friends gather and do wintery activities. We chose to go skating by the Shanghai tower, had 烧烤, went to a christmas party, and I hosted a sleepover (which in retrospect is crazy to pack into one weekend). 

  6. School things: Eating at the Canteen (My university’s canteen food selection was so good ~ bibimbap, noodle soups, dumplings, 铁板餐 Sizzling Iron Plate dishes, Shanghainese dishes, omurice ~ just stay away from the cafeteria burgers…), Studying for Finals, Biking around campus, Playing Badminton

  7. Learning how to play Avalon in Chinese and struggling to convince people of my stream of logic with my limited vocabulary

Left: swiping a fellow intern into our school cafeteria; middle: a coworker and I at Junior Achievement China’s 30 Year Anniversary Gala; right: discovering the wonders of China’s gorgeous public libraries with 3D models on display

3. It means taking opportunities to sing in both Chinese and English, because if I can speak fluent Chinglish, why not sing in Chinglish too?

Singing for ECNU’s 17th Mini Expo International Cultural Festival

4. Learning to defend your beliefs in Chinese

Perhaps the most useful thing I learned in class was how to organize an argument in Chinese when you might not have all the right words you need. The “首先,其次,再次, 最后,总的来说” (first, second, then, finally, in summary) structure is basic, yes, but a good basic for keeping your argument structured. “比如” aka giving plenty of examples became my go to when a Chinese friends’ face began to contort in confusion. Don’t give up on expressing complex ideas. Eventually, eventually, they will come across. 

There were so many immediate use cases for this, from discussing differences in education systems with my boss to opportunities restricted by registered residence (户口) with Chinese friends. It deeply enriched the types of conversations I was able to have with people, because I should be able to be stubborn and opinionated in both English and Chinese!

Serene shots of campus and graduation photos

5. It means taking screenshots to upload into google translate 

Simple things such as making a Taobao purchase or figuring out what type of washing machine detergent to use always took impossibly long. I needed to be scrupulous with reading all the comments and all the product details. My camera roll is still full of screenshots to decipher the hyper specific product vocab used. Sometimes I still bought the wrong thing, like the time I bought hand wash detergent for fabric instead of washing machine detergent, which reddit later told me I could not use interchangeably… 

5. It means craving western friends who you don’t have to think around (and cooking with them)

Sometimes I needed to turn my brain off. Using Chinese all the time meant my mind was working overtime, translating and scrambling for the right words to say. The week after telling a friend that I needed to make more English speaking friends, I asked a random Italian grad student at a cafe about her interesting looking architecture syllabus. Then, I bonded with her friend about nearly dying while biking through a specific intersection (this is why we need protected bike lanes, people!) and had the balls to invite myself over to theirs for dinner.

These Italian girls became like sisters to me, because we grocery shopped and cooked together. We learned to cook rice on the stove for the first time (still inferior to rice cooker rice but grew progressively better each time) and I taught them how to make the perfect saucy tomatoes and eggs. They did the dishes. A match made in paradiso. 

Two weeks later, they invited me to their Beijing and Xi’an trip. I still can’t believe I said yes. Now, I can’t imagine not having gone. This side quest allowed me to compare city planning strategies!

For example, I learned how much better transit management is in Shanghai compared to Beijing, despite it having a larger population, and how much better Beijing is at handling tourists than Xi’an. I swear if I couldn’t read Chinese, we would have never been able to find our way to and around the Emperor Qinshihuang's Mausoleum Site Museum site. Those shuttle system’s entrances were not intuitive at all!

Taking a very loud 16 hour overnight train with Italian friends to Beijing and other side quests including clambering up the uneven Great Wall steps (protect your knees please, jeez louise)!

It also helped me understand how truly international Shanghai is relative to other big Chinese metropolitans and HOW MANY FRICKING PEOPLE THERE ARE IN CHINA OVERALL. All of these tourist destinations were saturated to the brim. I couldn’t see my feet while in the tidal wave of people moving through the terracotta army pits. Luckily, one of my Italian friends was tall enough to forge a path for me.

Now, I am supplementing my Italian friend withdrawal with youtube shorts of Jessi and Alessio (because Arthur Avenue is so far).

6. It means making a list of things that surprise you (part of list below)

Notice that my battery is 1% in this screenshot, which should convey my absolute dedication to this reflection post; I’m sacrificing my battery capacity to write another line

7. It means realizing Shanghai is a city that’s hard to leave

What an understatement of the century.

There’s a certain bitter twinge about leaving something brought you so much joy even when you know it’s time to go. There’s a Chinese term, 舍不得, that encapsulates all the inner turmoil of having to part with something you treasure so much. I’m not sure it’s just Shanghai that I’ll miss parting with, although I know I’ll pine for the tranquility (sheer safety) I felt taking city walks or bike rides at night here, the grandeur of the malls, the serene, traditional Chinese beauty of East China Normal University (weeping willows, small bridges, pavilions), and all the cheap, good food.

It’s much more about the courage to experiment and about letting go of a period in my life where my sole responsibility was to get to know Shanghai on my own terms. I dyed my hair here. I tried contacts. I got a degree that I didn’t know I wanted but am glad I have. I made friends that no one else from my life in Cambridge and New York know. I got a job where a nonprofit trusted me enough to translate their annual report. 总的来说 (In sum), to me, being half - Shanghainese, half American can be distilled down to not being afraid to stand out in a crowd where people do sort of look like you. It’s about practicing your Chinese so you can lean into your American views. It’s about drinking in the electric current of the city and feeling the challenge in your bones to attract as many questions as you learn to answer.

I recently watched an Ali Abdul interview about public speaking and one of his comments resonated with me: that being confident is an instantaneous choice, made over and over again, like a switch being turned on when the default mode is to not engage. I want to extend this idea to the art of making friends, because I’ve found that it too is a decision to strike up that unnecessary conversation, made over and over again. This makes adjusting to any new place feel more approachable to me somehow. Because in a world of diminishing third places, all I have to do is ask myself to strike up one conversation before I leave that new cafe. It works in Shanghai, at least.

farewell dinner where Italian friends, Asia & Romina, bring homemade chocolate cake

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