china, foreigners in china, shanghai in the 1980s, the shanghai friendship store

The Snake Pit: No Escape (‘The Shanghai Friendship Store’ — Chapter 3)

The following excerpt from The Snake Pit (Chapter 3), from the novel The Shanghai Friendship Store by Susan Ruel. It is the continuation of the previous articles, A Floating Life (Chapter 2) and A Chinese Eleanor Rigby (Chapter 1).  It chronicles the experiences of a small foreign community living in Shanghai in the 1980s (the heyday of Friendship Stores). These state-owned stores ...