Companion podcast
One episode per chapter, in a Microsoft neural voice — not a reading of the text, a conversation about it. Show notes and scripts in /podcast/episodes/.
Companion to Prologue
A dubbed Hong Kong gangster serial, a father secretly reading Chinese shopfront signs, and the neighbour with the thermos who was waiting twenty-five years later.
Companion to Introduction
A retired factory worker at a lilong gate asks where the author lives — and means far more than an address.
Companion to Chapter 1
Inside the gate of Tranquil Light — why a hundred and ninety-eight rowhouses on some of the most expensive land in Shanghai never got torn down.
Companion to Chapter 2
Teacher Hu, Rob, and Little Huang each invoke ‘tradition’ to mean something completely different.
Companion to Chapter 3
Inside the actual pavilion room the author rented for sixteen months — heat, water boilers, and the body as data.
Companion to Chapter 4
How a lottery stall became the compound's real seat of government, and the saying: better a bed in Puxi than a house in Pudong.
Companion to Chapter 5
The book's central concept — how ‘gentrification from within’ got its name, one Australian tenant and a thermos of tea at a time.
Companion to Chapter 6
The 2013 raid that shut down the compound's informal shop economy, and what it revealed about who gets to profit from heritage.
Companion to Chapter 7
The book's hardest chapter — Mr. Zhao, the marriage market, and a mezzanine that never got built.
Companion to Conclusion
What the compound taught the author, and how it became a citizen-reporting platform used by over 100,000 people in southern Thailand.
Companion to Coda
Where ‘gentrification from within’ travelled after publication, and three consolations the author refuses to let readers take from it.
The type size is in the top bar; this sheet is for the surface. Paper is the default; Dim drops the contrast for bright rooms; Night is for late reading.