A post-80s girl's tale of two cities

Lu Qianyu, born in 1980s, lives in Yushan town in Kunshan city, Jiangsu province and works in the Zhabei district of Shanghai. The two places are more than 50 miles apart. Every day in the morning, Lu takes a 15-minute bus ride to Kunshan to catch the high-speed train or the bucket train for Shanghai. Then after hurrying for nineteen minutes, Lu packs herself into the Shanghai metro. Another twenty minutes and she finally arrives at her office. This kind of one-hour commute to work is very common for office workers in Shanghai.

After she graduated in 2005, Lu moved to Kunshan with her sister from their home in Henan. However, in contrast to her sister, Lu decided not to take a job in Kunshan. Instead she chose to go job hunting in Shanghai, the magic city. That was the start of her life in two cities.

Having worked in Shanghai for several years now, Lu has had jobs in mail-order, phone sales, and cosmetics marketing. At the beginning of this year she launched a cosmetics company with two partners at the incubation base selling products through wechat and other mobile terminals.

"Shanghai is where I started my career and Kunshan is my family support base," says Lu. "The high-speed rail links them perfectly."

With the ongoing development of the Chinese railway system, and especially after the launch of the second phase of Shanghai's metro line 11 in 2013, which runs direct to Huaqiao in Kunshan, transport links between Kunshan and Shanghai are becoming ever more convenient. And people like Lu, dwelling in Kunshan and working in Shanghai, are ever more likely to opt for high-speed train as the preferred choice for their commute to work. They certainly live a life of two cities.