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The Shanghai high life of quality lady
Lily Wang is looking at pigs' brains. She wears high heels and a coat with a fur-lined collar, and she clutches a pink handbag in one hand and a champagne glass in the other.
They stand in small groups chatting, westerners and Chinese together. The sound of Mandarin and Shanghainese is peppered with English and Taiwanese slang. Wang is a typical Shanghai yuppie. She's browsing a gallery in a newly renovated building project called Three on the Bund, which also houses an Armani store, the first Evian spa in China, and a restaurant opened by world-renowned chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten. The restaurant is filled with well-heeled diners feasting on fancy fusion cuisine against the backdrop of the city's sparkling skyline. Not long ago, the only Chinese who could afford this kind of restaurant would be government officials getting drunk on state money, or perhaps a celebrity. But now over half the clientele is local. "What's evolving here is the concept of spending for lifestyle," says Handel Lee, cofounder of Three on the Bund. "We're coming out of a nation of want, where the mentality was to save, because you don't know if you will lose everything tomorrow." On the main thoroughfare of Nanjing Road, Maserati and Ferrari showrooms alternate with sprawling Hugo Boss and Louis Vuitton stores. Neon signs blare advertisements for everything from Haagen-Dazs ice cream to the newest golf resort. Worldly friends. Wang spent her afternoon shopping. She has round eyes, long black hair, and friends from all over the world. Though she's from a small city in neighboring Zhejiang province, Wang went to college in Beijing, then got a master's degree in management in France. "In the past, a lot of people would go and not come back. But now, there are more opportunities here than overseas," she says in fluent English. Her Shanghai friends are also well traveled. And independent. While a few years ago, a young woman shopping for Prada handbags was inevitably on the arm of a tycoon from Hong Kong or Taiwan, today's yuppies earn their own keep. Wang works for a real-estate company called Inexco and opened the company's office in Shanghai last year to look for investment opportunities. In a city where skyscrapers multiply as if they were created by a computer game, the company is looking into residential and warehouse space. It pays her an annual salary of about $35,000 and puts her up in a serviced apartment downtown. This leaves her with cash to spend. It also leaves her with the freedom to choose her own lifestyle. Like many of her friends, Wang is in no hurry to get married. Her most recent boyfriend was American, but he is no longer in Shanghai. "You lose your freedom when you get married, so I'm taking it slow," she
says. "And in the meantime, I'm really enjoying myself!" -Bay Fang
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