It was over a year before our daughter Rosalind made it out to see us in Shanghai.  For the first half of our first year that we had been living as expats in China Rozy had been doing her final year of Chinese at SOAS, The School of Oriental and African Studies part of London University, described recently by an on-line magazine headline as home to “The biggest single bunch of eccentrics in Europe”. Celebrating a Century of SOAS’.  She was so at home in that academic environment that she decided to carry on her academic studies beyond her BA and try and get a Masters Degree in Chinese.

To earn money to do this she found work at a recently opened M&S Food Hall in Bedford, and through hard work, early morning rises, cycling several miles to and from work each day, she managed to save enough money by the end of March to pay for an  MLitt in Oriental Studies – Chinese at Hertford College, Oxford.  And not long afterwards found out that an awfully nice family from Hong Kong, who since 1911 has been financing scholars at Oxford engaged in furthering Anglo-Sino relations, were prepared to pay for a full scholarship for her.  So having spent six months getting down and personal with the Great British Public she was now able to leave all that behind her and come out to stay with us in Shanghai.  She was offered an internship at Richard’s company for 3 months as a technical interpreter and translator, working as a go-between between the British/Canadian engineers and their Chinese counterparts who are in the process of building a new factory.

Although she had spent 9 months in Beijing in 2012/2013 at Beijing Normal University as part of her SOAS course and 3 months in Taipei, Taiwan on a Scholarship over the summer of 2014, she had never been to Shanghai before.  So when she arrived I was interested to see what she wanted to see and do for the couple of days she had free before she started work.

I’d like a Korean meal please. So off we went to our local Korean BBQ restaurant for our first meal together in Shanghai.  Then what would she like to do?  I thought she might like to go and see the best that Shanghai had to offer  – The Bund, the Shanghai Museum, you know, the typical sort of things that new visitors and residents like to go and do.  I’d like to go and find a good book shop.  So off we went to the best bookstore I know in Shanghai the 8 storey book store on the Fuyou Road, and others along the same street.  And we amused ourselves for quite a while trying to find just the right sort of Chinese novel that she will be reading as part of her degree this year.  Most of the novels she found were more in the Mills and Book category I understand, but she did manage to come away with quite a handful in the end.  Books are much cheaper in China than they are in the UK, and books in Chinese doubly so.

It amused us to find copies of 1984 and Animal Farm in Chinese for sale and we wondered quite what the local population would make of it.  We did after that make our way over to The Bund, but I don’t think she was that impressed with Shanghai.  No real historical stuff here, as far as she is concerned.  Not like Beijing or Nanjing.

And for the three months that she was with us, she rarely had her nose out of a book when she wasn’t working or sleeping.  She would take one with her whenever she came out into the city with us, reading it on the metro or in a cafe for instance, making up for time lost whilst being a wage-slave for Marks and Spencer.

Watching her read on the metro provided some amusing moments.  The Chinese population are convinced that 老外 lǎowài (definition: 1. foreigner (esp. non Asian person) 2. layman 3. amateur) can’t speak Mandarin and even if they can speak it, it is far, far too difficult for them to read Chinese.  But they are also a nosey bunch of people, so it was amusing to watch a man who was sitting next to her on one trip start to read over her shoulder.  I think he was impressed that a Chinese girl would be reading such a classic novel.  From the side, if you don’t look at her very carefully and specifically if you don’t look at her eyes, her dark brown hair and dark skin tone mean that she could pass off as a young Chinese lady.  But eventually his eyes moved from the book to her face and much to our amusement he recoiled backwards a good foot or so as he realised that she was not Chinese. In Beijing she had a long argument with a man who kept telling her that she must be Russian and who wouldn’t be told otherwise.  In the end Rozy had to resort to asking him Do you know any Russians?  That shut him up.

Since leaving us in July, she went onto travel around East Asia calling in at Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan before returning for an overnight stopover in Shanghai on her way to Oxford University to begin her MLitt studies, where she seems to be settling in fairly well.