江南的雨 Jiāngnán de yǔ — Rain in Jiangnan

The plum rains, and heating that does not exist

梅雨 — the plum rains, named for the season when plums ripen — is a real meteorological feature, not a figure of speech. A quasi-stationary front sets up across the Yangtze valley in mid-June and stays for three to six weeks, bringing continuous light-to-moderate rain, humidity in the nineties, and temperatures in the high twenties. It affects central and eastern China, southern Japan, where it is called tsuyu, and Korea, where it is jangma. Then it lifts, and July and August are hot, bright and violent, with typhoon season arriving from the southeast. What the plum rains do to daily life is the part a visitor is unprepared for, and it is not about getting wet. Nothing dries. Washing hung indoors stays damp for days, leather goes mouldy, books cockle, walls bloom, and clothes in a wardrobe acquire a smell. A dehumidifier is standard equipment in a Shanghai flat, not a luxury; so is a dryer setting on the air conditioner, and so is putting everything out in the sun the first clear day afterwards — a collective event you can see from any window, with quilts over every balcony rail. The thing that compounds it is the heating line. China divides at the Qinling mountains and the Huai river: cities north of it were built with municipal central heating, supplied on fixed dates from roughly mid-November to mid-March, and cities south of it were not — on the reasoning, made in the 1950s when resources were scarce, that southern winters were mild enough to do without. Shanghai is a few hundred kilometres south of the line. So in January a Shanghai flat is around ten degrees inside unless the air conditioning is running, and in June the same unmodernised concrete holds damp. Northerners who move south are consistently astonished by how cold it feels, and there is a long-running public argument about extending the heating network, which is expensive and, so far, unresolved. A practical list, then, since it is short and it works: a dehumidifier, and run it; silica gel or camphor in the wardrobe; leather and cameras in a dry box; the air conditioner on dry mode rather than cold; shoes rotated so nothing is worn two days running; and the acceptance, which is what 苏小雨 is recommending with 忍一忍, that this is six weeks a year and it ends. The tell that you have acclimatised is the one Alex reaches in the last line: complaining about the weather fluently, in Chinese, is a genuine milestone.