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How I left the crowd for the suburbs
By Wang Yong |
July 7, 2012, Saturday
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SINCE I moved to my own apartment in a western suburb last week - ending my eight years of life in rented homes - I've acquired a new habit of getting up at 5am, turning the car's ignition at 5:30am and arriving at the office at around 6am. Even with a 30-minute delay, I arrive before 7am after driving 30 kilometers from Qingpu District to downtown.
I don't consider myself a workaholic, starting work so early, but I must avoid those jams that often paralyze the traffic between 7am and 9am in spring and summer.
In the first two days of my new biological clock, I felt dizzy getting to work so early, but by the third day I had adapted and found it more efficient to begin work before 8am than after 9am.
Getting to work early has other benefits: I see sun rise as I never did before; I drive fast enough to save fuel; I enjoy our newspaper's canteen's rich breakfast as I seldom did; and I turn off office lights when no one else is working (some early-bird janitors often turn on the lights and then leave them on forever) to save power for two to three hours.
While I struggle, often happily, to retool my biological clock, I cannot retool my car to reduce emissions. How I wish I could get up at 5am and walk to work in less than an hour. In my previous life as a renter of simple rooms downtown, I usually walked to work in 25 to 50 minutes.
Like many other new Shanghainese - those who were not born in Shanghai but have settled here in the last decade - I moved to the less expensive suburbs at a time when downtown housing prices remain sky high. The average price in Qingpu of an apartment like ours was half or two-thirds of the cost of a comparable downtown apartment in 2010.
When I bought my apartment, which was under construction at the end of 2010, the real estate developer advertised in newspapers and other public venues that there would be a subway line passing our neighborhood in 2013. That was too optimistic, so many buyers have rushed to learn how to drive and buy new cars, though we're already deeply in debt with home mortgages.
I choose to live in the suburbs not only for the lower housing prices, but also for the fresher air. But am I not a trespasser upon rural or quasi-rural serenity? And what about all my neighbors who drive day in and day out, polluting the nearby pristine paddy fields?
Amateur driver
I hate to drive around, but I have had to become a driver myself, a cautious amateur. My life close to nature is limited. I leave the countryside at dawn and return at dusk. For about eight to 10 hours a day, I'm part of the roar of central Shanghai. It's only at night that I find a pleasant chorus of frogs and crickets, but if we urbanites hadn't moved to the countryside and claimed land, wouldn't there be more frogs and crickets singing to themselves in more paddy fields?
Says professor of geography Laurence C. Smith: "Cities will trump agriculture. Farmers will either lose or sell their historic water rights. Croplands will return to desert." In his 2011 book, "The New North: The World in 2050," he also says: "For the last two decades, cities in the developing world have been growing by about three million people per week. That is equivalent to adding one more Seattle to the planet every day."
One of the best observations in his book is that urbanization aims to enable people to live better - it certainly does in many aspects such as healthcare and education - but in urban areas, most of the human race cannot feed itself or get its own water.
Take his observation a bit further and one could reasonably infer that the more space is urbanized, the less men are to feed themselves or get their own water. Indeed, much of my new neighborhood is built on riverbeds that have been filled in and covered with steel and concrete. Whereas we urbanites advance, farmers retreat.
Some of my colleagues joke with me: "You're now like a farmer, living in the city fringe and getting up at wee hours."
Yes, I live far from the city crowd and I get up early, but do I look like a farmer?
I don't consider myself a workaholic, starting work so early, but I must avoid those jams that often paralyze the traffic between 7am and 9am in spring and summer.
In the first two days of my new biological clock, I felt dizzy getting to work so early, but by the third day I had adapted and found it more efficient to begin work before 8am than after 9am.
Getting to work early has other benefits: I see sun rise as I never did before; I drive fast enough to save fuel; I enjoy our newspaper's canteen's rich breakfast as I seldom did; and I turn off office lights when no one else is working (some early-bird janitors often turn on the lights and then leave them on forever) to save power for two to three hours.
While I struggle, often happily, to retool my biological clock, I cannot retool my car to reduce emissions. How I wish I could get up at 5am and walk to work in less than an hour. In my previous life as a renter of simple rooms downtown, I usually walked to work in 25 to 50 minutes.
Like many other new Shanghainese - those who were not born in Shanghai but have settled here in the last decade - I moved to the less expensive suburbs at a time when downtown housing prices remain sky high. The average price in Qingpu of an apartment like ours was half or two-thirds of the cost of a comparable downtown apartment in 2010.
When I bought my apartment, which was under construction at the end of 2010, the real estate developer advertised in newspapers and other public venues that there would be a subway line passing our neighborhood in 2013. That was too optimistic, so many buyers have rushed to learn how to drive and buy new cars, though we're already deeply in debt with home mortgages.
I choose to live in the suburbs not only for the lower housing prices, but also for the fresher air. But am I not a trespasser upon rural or quasi-rural serenity? And what about all my neighbors who drive day in and day out, polluting the nearby pristine paddy fields?
Amateur driver
I hate to drive around, but I have had to become a driver myself, a cautious amateur. My life close to nature is limited. I leave the countryside at dawn and return at dusk. For about eight to 10 hours a day, I'm part of the roar of central Shanghai. It's only at night that I find a pleasant chorus of frogs and crickets, but if we urbanites hadn't moved to the countryside and claimed land, wouldn't there be more frogs and crickets singing to themselves in more paddy fields?
Says professor of geography Laurence C. Smith: "Cities will trump agriculture. Farmers will either lose or sell their historic water rights. Croplands will return to desert." In his 2011 book, "The New North: The World in 2050," he also says: "For the last two decades, cities in the developing world have been growing by about three million people per week. That is equivalent to adding one more Seattle to the planet every day."
One of the best observations in his book is that urbanization aims to enable people to live better - it certainly does in many aspects such as healthcare and education - but in urban areas, most of the human race cannot feed itself or get its own water.
Take his observation a bit further and one could reasonably infer that the more space is urbanized, the less men are to feed themselves or get their own water. Indeed, much of my new neighborhood is built on riverbeds that have been filled in and covered with steel and concrete. Whereas we urbanites advance, farmers retreat.
Some of my colleagues joke with me: "You're now like a farmer, living in the city fringe and getting up at wee hours."
Yes, I live far from the city crowd and I get up early, but do I look like a farmer?
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