Home » Feature » Art and Culture
Living like an American teen (sort of)
Print Edition
The fire station at the corner of Yuyuan and Wulumuqi roads is a landmark of my childhood. Besides it are two large buildings which, in the 1930s and 1940s, were the Public School for Boys and the Public School for Girls, built by the Shanghai Municipal Council for the children of foreigners.
In those days they were not, as now, called international schools. It is interesting to note that those two schools were built outside the International Settlement.
From 1938 to 1941 our family lived in a ground-floor flat in Lane 749, Yuyuan Road. My brother and I took the public bus to our respective schools. One day I missed my bus stop and was taken on to the next stop at St George’s, a terminus for buses and trams.
To me, it was a large, bustling place with crowds swarming around. Now, the only original building in that area is the Paramount Ballroom which, to this day, holds tea dances.
Lost, I stood there crying. In the end a tall British policeman took me all the way back to my classroom teacher.
In those days there were a number of schools for foreigners, the cream of the crop being the Cathedral School for Boys (on current Hankou Road) and the Cathedral School for Girls (on current Huashan Road). These had been founded by the Anglican Church and were private schools where the fees were very high. Our schools, by comparison, were for the ordinary folk.
Another prestigious school was the Shanghai American School, then on Avenue Petain (today’s Hengshan Road). It had been founded in 1912 by American missionaries mainly for their children.
After World War II, my mother having taken me to her home in Dallas, Texas, for a year, I attended SAS from 1946 to 1949. As much as possible, I lived the life of an American teenager.
There were, of course, schools for the children of other nationalities such as a French school, a German school and a Jewish School on Seymour Road (now Shaanxi Road N.).
As far as I remember, the only interaction between any of these schools for foreign children was on the sports fields.
(Betty Barr Wang, a Scottish who’s married to a Shanghai man, has been living in the city for 46 years and used to teach at the Shanghai International Studies University.)
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
