Mom & Daughter:
We used to live in Jiangxia Li, a lilong near the Suzhou Lake in Hongkou District. It was built in 1927, and I moved here in 1960 when I got married. I lived here until junior high school, when I was about 15 or 16 years old. Our old house has been demolished. I don’t know what exactly was planned for that place because we moved out before the demolition, when they allocated a new house. Because this place is too small.

Sister & Brother:
I moved out in 2018, and he moved out in 2019.
The Lane where we used to live is on Qiaojia Road, which is close to the Chenghuang Temple, the birthplace of Shanghai’s old city. I was born there. I went out to live in a public house for a year or two. Later I bought a house and returned to Shikumen house, but now the government has demolished the house again.

M:
The lilong house (I live in now) was allocated to me as the welfare of the unit around 20 years ago. I had no house or money at that time, so I lived here. In 2003, a house cost 500-600 thousand, but now it is not even possible to buy a house with 5-6 million. The house price is rising so fast, who can afford it? It's not that I want to live here, I don't want to live here. There is nothing good about Shikumen, they are all flaws. Only if you have money to buy a whole house, can you live comfortably.

F:
Our family moved here for quite a while, probably in 2013 or 2014. But I had been studying abroad until the epidemic last year, and I started living here from July 2020.
Buying and selling Shikumen houses is more like a matter of luck. Because it is quite difficult to buy a whole shikumen house with merged households. For example, there may be 3 or 4 households living together in one building, and you have to buy each separate one. The price will be raised high when you are trying to buy the last one. Moreover, residents generally only sell this ancestral house when the elderly in the family has passed away or when they want to buy another house. Someone happened to be selling his already merged shikumen house at that time, and my parents thought the price was acceptable, so they bought it.