Alexandra stood at the entrance to an anonymous brown skyscraper in Hongkou, looking at about an acre of immaculate white tiles lining the floor to the lifts on the other side of the foyer. It was such a bland space it could be the entrance to a hospital. As ten lanes of traffic continued to snake past them in the street, she raised an eyebrow at Zhang. It wasn’t what she’d expected of the best hotpot place in town.

As if reading her disappointment, Zhang grinned at her and gently touched her elbow to steer her towards the lift. A couple of teenagers, one with a shaved head, the other with a purple mohawk and multiple nose rings, followed. Earbuds in, the teenagers’ eyes were glued to their oversized phones. Perhaps they were texting each other? From what she’d seen so far on the subway, in the streets and the park, no-one went anywhere in Shanghai without earphones.

She looked up at Zhang. He gave her an easy smile and she felt pleased she’d decided to come.

‘How was your first couple of weeks? Make any new friends?’ Zhang asked.

‘Some,’ Alexandra replied. ‘About fifty! My team’s pretty big in this office, so it’ll take me a while to get to know them. But they’re all super sharp, and they know what they’re doing. Although—’ she hesitated, not sure how to put it ‘—I mean, they’re all so young. With degrees from everywhere: Beijing, Singapore, London, Amsterdam, Boston, Munich, Sydney. It’s an office full of smart pups—the most diverse desk I’ve come across.’

‘What were you expecting?’ he asked, looking a little bemused.

Alexandra flushed. ‘Well, I knew they’d be good. I just wasn’t expecting my team would be equally comfortable running a NASA program!’ She smiled. ‘Maybe I’ll do that next.’

‘Next? Would you change careers?’ Zhang raised his eyebrows. She’d sensed that he was curious about her choice of work when they’d talked on the way home from the park the previous Sunday. ‘What exactly did a commodities trader do?’ he’d asked.

Make money seemed too glib, so instead she told him about risk analysis, flexible mathematical formulas and derivatives.

‘Hmm, good question,’ she said now in answer to his query. ‘I’ve been doing this for a decade so I don’t really know what else I’d do.’ She didn’t quite like to say that she wasn’t sure what other job could give her such a rush. Though, lately, the adrenaline highs had not come so easily.

The elevator doors opened to deafening Chinese pop music and an explosion of colour. A girl with a lime green earpiece and a clipboard and dressed in an incredible silver-sequinned miniskirt strode over to them in three-inch wedges. Beside her, Alexandra felt like a dowdy spinster aunt in her tailored pale blue Armani jacket and navy pencil skirt. Clearly this was no ordinary bar.

The hostess waved them to a waiting area with a huge smile.

To one side of the waiting area was a nail bar, where they found two girls barely out of their teens laughing and chatting as they each had a manicure and a complicated set of fruit-salad stickers embossed onto their fluorescent nails. They looked over at Zhang and waved as he walked towards them. ‘My cousins, Peta and Petra,’ he said, pointing to a pair of cheeky round faces.

‘Hi, Zhang!’ they chorused, waggling their fingers at him for approval. They obviously adored their older cousin.

‘Very nice, ladies. A step up from—what was it last week? Star Wars?’

The girls giggled.

‘This is my new neighbour, Alexandra.’

‘Hi,’ Alexandra said. ‘I love your nails.’

They beamed at her.

‘Right, well, let’s get a drink.’ Zhang ushered her across to the general seating area. ‘When I’m in Shanghai, I try to bring the girls here every few weeks; they love it.’ They perched on crimson velvet cubes at a white table, and seconds later a woman appeared carrying a small wooden box filled with squares of watermelon and pawpaw and spicy rice snacks. Alexandra and Zhang sipped on watermelon juice, and Zhang handed his phone and sunglasses to the waitress to be cleaned at the special station.

Alexandra had the feeling she was Alice entering a twenty-first-century Wonderland.

A group of young men in matching college t-shirts sipped Tsingtao beer as they played chequers, while the group at the table beside them played cards.

‘What is this place?’ Alexandra asked. She looked over at a buffet with bowls of every type of condiment. Six different chillies, shallots, shredded greens, lotus root and tofu. ‘Is this where all the cool kids hang out?’ she teased.

Zhang grinned. ‘Pretty much. It’s cheap, so you get lots of students.’

‘And families,’ she said, eyeing a row of kids playing games at a station of iPads.

Two tables away, people were fashioning bright squares of paper into origami cranes.

Alexandra must have looked confused about what they were doing, because Zhang explained, ‘You get a discount for every crane you make.’ He nodded towards his cousins. ‘They loved it for years—until they grew old enough for the nail bar.’

Alexandra laughed. ‘Naturally.’

With the loud music, fluorescent lights and raucous laughter, this was about as far from first-date territory as you could get—not that this was a date, she reminded herself; she was merely having dinner with her friendly new neighbour.

Hugo would hate it here, Alexandra thought as she sipped her watermelon juice from a yellow plastic cup. Their first date in London had been at the Ivy: crisp white tablecloths, waiters so pompous they winced at her accent and hundred-pound bottles of wine that Hugo had ordered like soda water. Alexandra hated to admit it, but she’d been impressed.

As the music changed and a waiter did a twirl on the way to get some menus, Alexandra found herself smiling. And she considered something else…did she want this to be a date?

‘Your table’s ready,’ said the cute girl in the sequinned skirt, smiling and batting her eyelash extensions at Zhang. Clearly Alexandra wasn’t the only one who found him charming.

They followed the waitress to a table with a giant stainless-steel plate with a hole cut in the middle.

‘It’s for the hotpots. You can choose from four different types of base broth.’

The cousins wandered over and, after confirming Alexandra had no food allergies, started ordering from a menu delivered on the iPad.

‘We’ll get our favourites, and you can tell us what you think,’ said Petra.

Minutes later two men rushed over carrying square silver tureens filled with broth. Petra pointed at one: ‘Sichuan—very hot.’ She giggled.

‘That’s okay,’ Alexandra assured her. ‘I’m used to chilli. My grandmother uses it a lot. Good for a fever, keeps the blood flowing, right?’

‘Is your grandmother Asian?’ Petra glanced at Peta. ‘We were trying to work out your background. You look a bit Chinese.’ She frowned. ‘Sorry, is that a rude thing to ask? I didn’t mean to be…’ She looked from Alexandra to Zhang.

Alexandra paused before answering. Oma was her true grandmother; to say otherwise felt like a betrayal.

‘My grandmother’s Austrian; she moved to Australia as a refugee. From China, actually.’ She hesitated. ‘So did my grandfather. But he died recently.’ Her voice cracked as grief flooded her body.

The girls murmured their apologies and Zhang nodded slowly as he looked into her eyes, as if it explained something deeper about Alexandra.

‘But to answer your question. I’m not really sure whether my—’ she didn’t want to use the word real ‘—who my blood grandmother is. My mother was adopted from China.’

‘Have you met her?’ asked Petra innocently before Peta whacked her on the thigh and shushed her.

‘I don’t know who they are. I was hoping while I was working here I could find out.’ She ran her hand up through her hair at the back of the scalp and traced the line of her scar.

Zhang nodded, as if that explained why someone would be a commodities trader in China.

‘I went to a government department today but it was a dead end. They had no record of my mother. The officer didn’t seem to think that was unusual.’ She was blushing now; she didn’t want to make out her grandparents had done something illegal.

Zhang gave her a reassuring smile.

Petra said, ‘It’s common for people to come to China searching for their birth families. Our baba is a journalist at the Shanghai Daily and he worked on a story once where an anonymous policeman told him that so many “lost children” turned up at his station that staff didn’t record all the cases.’

Alexandra flinched and took a sip of her beer.

‘The government is working hard to reconcile families, but—’

Zhang softly but firmly interrupted his cousin. ‘Did they give you any tips on where to try next?’

Alexandra gave him a grateful smile. ‘The Jewish Refugees Museum.’

‘I’ve heard that place is amazing,’ said Peta.

‘I’ll go on Friday afternoon. I won’t have any time before then.’

‘I’m sure the staff at the museum will be able to help. You’ll find something,’ said Petra.

Waiters in white smocks bustled over with two more steaming hotpots.

‘Mushroom and chicken.’ Zhang pointed from the dark to the lighter broth, but Alexandra could have told them apart from the pungent smells wafting up from the centre of the table. Plates of raw squid, sliced beef and clams arrived alongside blocks of silky tofu, circles of white lotus root, and a slimy salty green that must be seaweed. There were five different types of mushrooms she didn’t recognise, from gold fans to tiny brown buttons and delicate silver threads. There were plates piled with leafy vegetables and a bowl of tiny pale blue eggs. Petra went off to grab a bamboo box full of toppings like chilli, nuts, sliced shallots and dried tofu skins as piles of meat Alexandra couldn’t identify piled up around her.

Zhang lifted his chopsticks and started plucking some meat, mushrooms, leafy greens and tofu, dropping a little of each in the broths and giving them a stir.

A waiter put a plate of sliced watermelon beside Alexandra. She thought it was an unusual choice, more a dessert really, so why would they be serving it now?

The broths boiled and bubbled, making Alexandra hungry. Another waiter appeared—they were everywhere—with a ball of white dough and started tossing it with flicks of his arm; it was far more dramatic than spinning pizza dough. He kept pulling and throwing the white dough, making it longer and longer and folding it over and over on itself.

Alexandra laughed, mesmerised, when she realised what he was making. The dough had become narrows strings of rice noodles. The waiter stopped, pulled some scissors from his apron pocket, held his creation over the broths and chopped the ends off, dropping equal amounts of long noodles into each of the broths. Zhang gave them a poke so they were submerged for a second.

‘You want the noodles to absorb the flavours,’ he explained. ‘Can you pass me your bowl please, Alexandra? You’re the guest of honour so you get served first.’ He held a giant spoon over the broths. ‘Which one would you like to try first?’

Alexandra didn’t hesitate. ‘The Sichuan, please.’

Peta and Petra looked at each other with raised eyebrows and tried to suppress their giggles behind their hands.

Zhang didn’t miss a beat. ‘Okay.’ He ladled the clear pink-hued broth and some of each of the ingredients into her bowl and Alexandra topped it with the crunchy dried tofu, shallots and crushed peanuts. She was about to sprinkle some chilli on top when Zhang warned, ‘Careful. It’s very hot. You might want to try it before you add more chilli.’

‘Okay,’ replied Alexandra. ‘But I love a spicy soup.’ She took a sip of the broth, and felt the fluid warm her lips and throat, then quickly used her chopsticks to fish out a noodle. She sucked down the noodle, soft and salty, before the roof of her mouth started to burn.

Her lips were stinging. Her tongue was tingling, her throat contracted and beads of sweat appeared on her forehead. Everything felt like it was on fire. Gasping, she reached for her Tsingtao but Zhang pointed to the triangles of watermelon. Alexandra shoved one into her mouth, with only the green skin sticking out between her lips. She didn’t care what it looked like.

The relief!

She wiggled her tongue against the watermelon, then pulled it in and out of her mouth until the burning, tingling sensation subsided a little. She picked up a white paper serviette to wipe the droplets of sweat running from her temples.

‘Like it?’ Zhang asked.

‘S’great.’ Alexandra said, her mouth still stuffed with the watermelon. She gave him the thumbs-up sign, even though she had started to wheeze.

‘It’s super-hot, even for me,’ said Petra kindly.

Zhang ladled out a bowl of the mushroom broth with meat, noodles and pickled vegetables and placed it in front of Alexandra. ‘Maybe mix up the two until you get used to it,’ he suggested.

Alexandra nodded gratefully as she put the green rind on the plate before her, took a swig of her beer, and then shoved another triangle of watermelon in her mouth.

Zhang held his beer up and winked at her. ‘Ganbei.’

‘Cheers,’ toasted Alexandra as she whipped the watermelon rind from her mouth again.

She inhaled the scented broths deep into her lungs and looked around the restaurant, seeing people get their shoes shined or have shoulder massages as they waited, rap music blaring and the noodle thrower doing his magic tricks and twirls at the next table. Then she turned and watched Zhang serving broth and making jokes with his cousins, admiring the gentle way he had with them, and she felt something shift. Alexandra was surrounded by irreverence and joy. Hundreds of people were having a great time here. Not just existing, but living.

And here she was, with a burning mouth, sitting on a fluffy purple stool in a hotpot chain having a ball with new friends in a strange city that shimmered and sprawled as far as the eye could see. Alexandra had loved being home and sharing meals with Romy and Nina, and making fresh salads for Kate, Brad and their tribe of young children, who nonchalantly tossed the corn and carrots around the room instead of eating them. Food was best shared with family and friends. Not for show, as it had become with Hugo, juggling caterers and high-end restaurants.

Romy was right, as usual. It was time for Alexandra to let a little joy in.