I live on the 7th floor of a very old building in Shanghai. I love it. But when you live in apartment blocks in China, the only place your clothing can dry is over the top of the bedroom door, or outside. I am in charge of angling myself out of a window, clothespins in one hand, clean shirts in the other, and a flimsy metal frame between me and a 20 metre drop. About a week ago, the inevitable happened.

My girlfriend’s pants fell down.

They did not fall to the ground because Chinese apartment blocks look like this.

They settled, instead, about two floors down. My first reaction was to panic because my conscience was battering me in the frontal lobe and going “you had one job to do.” My second reaction was to steel myself. I would need to finally confront my neighbours. To avoid impacting your health through unnecessary narrative tension, I’m obligated to tell you the article of clothing was safely recovered, no one was harmed, merely severely flustered, and everyone was okay. But I did learn to make a few new friends in a Chinese metropolis and I thought I should share my insights.

It’s okay to knock on doors.

I think we fear knocking on doors in metropolises. We’ve seen enough movies that we’re secretly convinced every one of our neighbours has a crossbow rigged to the handle and they’re probably pickling their murdered lovers in there or something.

But it’s okay. Much like snakes, your neighbours are as afraid of you as you are of them, unless you’re not. In my case, I went downstairs, braced myself, and knocked. A very friendly young Shanghainese lady opened the door, looked at me (I was taller than the doorframe), overcame her initial confusion and brightly said “Hi!”

Despite this promising opening, she didn’t speak English and I speak Chinese in the way a toddler does long division, but after cleverly choosing my introductory sentence (I chose “some clothes have fallen” rather than “my trousers are down” because I thought it might be less threatening), she and her lovely mother agreed to lean precariously out of the window and inform me that in the time it took me to explain my trouser problem, the offending article had fallen onto the fourth floor.

Realise everyone knows the building about as well as you do

My first problem was the non-existence of the fourth floor. Some people like to talk about how in China there is no 4th or 14th or 44th floor because it sounds like the word for “death,” but much like the missing 13th floor in Europe and America, that is a phenomenon mostly reserved for people who have the luxury of being silly.

The real reason was that the building I live in has been built and rebuilt since about the 1920s. Somewhere along the line, it was decided that while the main stairwell and elevators should reach to the fifth, sixth, and seventh floor, leading into long corridors conveniently accessing all flats, floors one through four were populated entirely by lepers and/or dangerous radicals and must therefore be sectioned off under quarantine.

I discovered all of this by myself, after torturous conversations with seven neighbours. Preliminary surveys showed three believed the elevators go to floors two through four (they don’t), four thought the stairwells would (they don’t) and all seven thought I was hilarious/deranged (jury’s out). In the end, after a particularly unhelpful run-in with the building superintendent, it was discovered that in the alley at the back of the building, there are a series of doors that access four apartments each, one on the ground floor, the second floor, third and fourth. Each of these stairs are the only way in and out of those apartments.

We all had a good laugh about the confusion. By the time my quest had reached the gates of Mordor (staircase 28), I had attracted a small gang of stalwart observers.

We all laughed again when we found out the doorbells didn’t work.

Realise everyone knows the neighbours as well as you do

Nobody knew anyone who lived on that staircase. I asked probably half a dozen people but got mostly blank looks or hurried shakes of the head because they’d just been accosted in the back-alley of their home by a six foot foreigner with a crazed look in his eyes yammering something about getting through this locked and barred door because his trousers were down, and they weren’t feeling particularly helpful.

I think the stereotypical chatty neighbours that are always talking about you behind your back are never as pervasive as your paranoid mind thinks they might be. They probably barely know each other’s names, let alone gossip. Granted, I was in the leper colony so everyone probably suspected each other more than the hippie-drippy free-love commune on floors five through seven—

—but you’d still expect they’d know at least something about the person living on the other side of their wall, right? But do you? Probably not, so why should they be any different?

Unless, of course, you’re forced to interact with them. Like when you take the time to talk to them, ask about the history of the building, how they came to live here, how they’re doing, what their favourite H.C. Andersen story is (perils of being Danish in China is that everyone’s read Andersen), all while you wait for someone to open the door so you can get your girlfriend’s bloody trousers back.

Or they might notice you properly for the first time when they lean out the window, take a good hard look at you, and file you away in their mind forever under “possible danger.” Which leads me to my next point…

If you must make a scene, make it entertaining

Terry Pratchett said that city people love nothing more than a bit of street theatre. I think that if you unpack that sentence, you’ll find the most concise summary of metropolitan life in human history. Definitions may vary from city to city as to what constitutes “street theatre.” In Nottingham, for example, it was usually a vagrant/university student in a state of intoxication that would floor an elephant yelling obscenities at police officers/a wall. In Prague, it’s a four-man band playing New Orleans jazz. In Shanghai, it’s a Muslim street vendor getting into a fight with the chengguan.

Or a foreigner standing in the back alley of the apartment block and yelling at anyone who might live on the fourth floor. Windows obviously opened and the scowls came out but I was saved from serious ire by two factors; a) I still had my stalwart observers watching me carefully and with smiles on, and who’s going to be the one to stop their midday entertainment by snivelling about the noise in Shanghai and b) hahaha is he speaking Chinese?

One of my loyal, newfound companions joined me half-heartedly for a few bellows, for which I am eternally grateful because he (let’s call him Sam) subtly corrected my pronunciation and I continued honking like I’d been saying it right all along. Finally, a wizened face with a shock of white hair poked itself over the fourth-floor windowsill and a squinted at me. Sam and I jumped up and down and hollered to get my saviour’s attention.

The old lady only spoke Shanghainese, so Sam would translate to Mandarin and I would do my best to explain that the damn jeans were hanging right over her head, no, right there, yes, no, to the ri— yes!

She took out what I can only describes as a halberd and casually flicked the jeans out into the air, where they sailed down, got caught on the electrical wires for the most harrowing four seconds of my life, and then dropped unceremoniously to the ground. I think Sam actually cheered, but I was too busy nodding and thanking the lady profusely. She smiled and waved back. Sam and I shook hands, I said thanks to the others, apologised to the people still at the windowsills, and everyone returned to their day.

So that’s that. The most important thing to take away from this is that at every turn, I was met with friendliness and humour, something I think we forget can exist in such dense metropolitan apartment blocks. I am a better person now because of the lessons I learned from that experience. I’ve made some new acquaintances whom I share a smile with in the corridors even today (hoho, remember that one time?), and I got the trousers back. I’m glad my first reaction was to step out into the fascinating ecosystem that is my apartment block.

That’s total bollocks, I lied. My first reflex actually involved a coathanger, some rope and a large bamboo pole, and gave a whole new meaning to the term “trying to get in someone’s pants.” I’m not proud of it, but I did what I thought I had to do in a way that meant I didn’t have to face my neighbours, and admitted it to my girlfriend who then took this picture.

And my hair looks terrible on top of it all.

Oh, God, the neighbourhood got their first proper glimpse of me looking like this. Blow this for a lark, I’m moving.