1: Outside the window

The house where I grew up has long been dismantled. Removed to make way for a new generation of shining towers in Shanghai, an ancient fishing village born again as a gleaming metropolis, all brittle glass and metal. Nothing could have stopped the city’s inexorable march towards modernity, even if that meant selective amnesia. This included the rickety concrete buildings in Teacher’s Village No. 2, Putuo district, which once housed me and my family in my most wide-eyed and vulnerable years. On the scrap heap, it was, like the other remnants of Communist era housing.

Since then, my path has been long and winding. Not as confident, nor as strident, as the journey my native city had taken - to become the new financial heart of a new superpower in the East. But I had done some selective amnesia of my own. I had forgotten everything about that rickety concrete building, set in a small communal village where everyone knew each other; where women called down to their neighbours as they hung their clothes out to dry on bamboo poles; where children played together and parents took turns to babysit; and my mother put bags of rice out in the sun to chase out the bugs. I had forgotten those things, until they were gone.

But these are not the memories I want to tell you about. No, because their disappearance is not a surprise to anyone anymore. Yet some acts of forgetting catch you out and stop you in your tracks, even after they have disappeared for years.

What I want to tell you about is simply one scene I saw year after year, season after season, from the study at the back of that rickety concrete building. That’s it, nothing complicated. The study was badly built with the same thin and flaking walls as the rest of the house. It had a corrugated iron roof and unreliable electric wiring. The neon light, the only ones my parents could afford, flickered and sometimes went out and it was not soundproof at all. But what it did have - to make up for all these injustices - was a large window along the full length of the back wall, and, outside it, a small garden filled with tall swaying bamboo, leafy pomegranate plants and our share of the mature beech trees that lined the whole compound.

I could sit there for hours, watching and listening to the mysterious way nature worked outside. Most of the year there were birds to keep me company. They flew high above us and visited us simply because they could, or sang only when they were happy. Then there was the gentle rain in spring and autumn, that made a pitter patter sound on the iron roof and drenched the bamboo, which would bow and weep in gratitude. Afterwards, the world always seemed cleaner, clearer. And finally, in the monsoon season, the rain would shower down in great torrents that pounded the iron roof and deluged the world outside, fraying and flustering the normally strong, proud beech trees. I thought then that the heavens were saying something important, that I could not, nor put my finger on what it was.

Many years later, I can see that, in other places, and very different situations, I always found a way to keep an eye outside the window. Like from a silent and well-insulated bedroom, many floors up from the earth and its inhabitants, on a narrow bed facing away from the window – a small slit in the wall. I watch its reflection in a mirror on the opposite wall, 12 inches square. Still, I think I hear the birds sing and see the trees sway with the burden and the gift of rain. Even in that narrow aperture, they seemed to tell me, not all those who wander are lost.