Away from them, men and women with crickets in jars sat together and haggled over and prodded the large insects; subsequently, I learned that the jars keep the crickets cool because only a cold cricket will fight. The prods are to get them going in the ring. The combat is not to the death. After three whacks with antennae, the match is won and the crickets are removed. A good fighter can cost up to ten thousand dollars, although at Xizang Road the highest price is about two thousand dollars.

When I cross the alleyways of the city, searching for a lane of men sitting outside with sewing machines so I can hem my jeans, it's the 1920s and '30s that come to me, the period during which the city was at its most prosperous and decadent, when many of the mansions and buildings were erected by the taipans (heads of foreign companies) and compradors (Chinese agents for them), who made their money in opium, and the mass of Shanghainese lived and died in the streets.

One day, as I was staring up at a streamlined Art Deco mansion, circa 1933, with a fantastic vertical line of porthole windows down the facade, it dawned on me that if the houses in my neighborhood—probably a thousand in all—were each once inhabited by only one family, that left close to a million of the city's inhabitants out on the sidewalk. The thought was sobering. It brought to life descriptions in J. G. Ballard's The Kindness of Women of the abject poverty on the streets of Shanghai in the 1930s. Ballard lived in Shanghai as a boy at that time, and the book is full of his memories. "Every morning on my way to school," he wrote, "I passed the trucks of the Shanghai Municipal Authority that toured the city, collecting the hundreds of bodies of Chinese who had died in the night. I liked to think that only the old people died, though I had seen a dead boy of my own age sitting against the steel entrance grille of my father's office block. He held an empty cigarette tin in his white hands, probably the last gift to him from his family before they abandoned him."

I am continually amazed at the number of beautiful houses in Shanghai, and the Mondrian-like '30s ironwork gates and fences that often surround them. Mansions come in '20s Spanish colonial, '30s Bauhaus, English Tudor, Tudorbethan, '90s Victorian, French Art Nouveau, Chinese Deco, and a mixture of all of those, and there are magnificent examples of Art Deco office buildings, apartment buildings, and smaller one-family dwellings. There are porthole windows, French doors, gables, balconies, pillars, courtyards, gazebos, walkways—because of the diversity of cultures here, every nationality's architecture of the early twentieth century is represented. My favorite of the Art Deco buildings are the two old theaters, the Cathay and the Paramount, with their Empire State Building roofs and pastel neon detailing.

The Paramount was the most famous dance hall in Asia in the 1930s, and a dance hall it still is. I wandered in on one of my walks and found it open and well attended. I went home, put on a '30s day dress and a hat and gloves, and went to the tea dance.