The narrow alleys of my glorious childhood universe

Xixi's shikumen community.

I grew up in a shikumen lane house. 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, and yet it seemed to me that the street was wide, always bright and well-to-do.

It was my grandparents' home behind the 24-story Park Hotel, the tallest building in East Asia in the 1930s. Most shikumen houses were built in that era as well. There were more than 9,000 shikumen complexes in Shanghai, accounting for about two-thirds of local residences when the construction of such houses ended in 1949, according to municipal records.

However, a drawback of such residences built abutting one another in the style of British terrace houses was that the three or four households living in each house had to share a bathroom or use spittoons.

So a typical morning in the alley started with residents in slippers and pajamas emptying the spittoons containing the family's overnight bodily waste.

I was lucky though, because my grandparents and two uncles lived on the second and third floors of the house, so I did not need to share a washroom with other families or use a spittoon.

They lived there from the 1980s to the mid-1990s. There were three bedrooms and a bathroom on the second floor and a balcony on the third. As there was only one kitchen on the first floor, my uncle renovated the third floor and added a kitchen.