I was a shikumen girl

Photo provided to Shanghai Star

I grew up in a shikumen lane house downtown. The alley was so narrow that if I stood on my toes in the bathtub I could watch the couple living across from us quarrel, but in my childhood memory, the street is always bright, wide, and well-to-do.

It was my grandparents' home on Huanghe Road behind the 24-story Park Hotel, the tallest building in East Asia in the 1930s and it remained the tallest in Shanghai for half a century.

My grandparents lived on the second and third floors of the house from the 1980s to the mid-1990s. There were three bedrooms and a bathroom on the second floor and a dining room, a kitchen and a balcony on the third.

My two uncles lived in two bedrooms after they got married and my grandparents lived in the other. When my twin brother and I stayed overnight, we had to make a bed on the floor in our grandparents' room. It was so much fun to sleep on the floor. We jumped up and down and played handstands until we fell asleep.

In the morning, vendors would call out, selling hand wrapped wonton in the alley. Sometimes our grandfather would take us to the eatery at the door of the alley for nice hand-pulled noodles for breakfast. The noodle master made balls of dough on an aluminum table, and stretched his arms repeatedly until the balls became countless thin noodles.

The stairs in the house were curved and the old wood creaked as you trod on them. I carried my small bicycle up and down the stairs and the elderly man living on the first floor always gave me a hand. His granddaughter was an airhostess, which was rare and a source of pride back then.