Dubai is on everyone’s lips. One side of social media salivates over its curated opulence. The other sneers at a city that has become a byword for excess. Barely a week goes by without the British press telling the story of somebody moving to Dubai for lower taxes or, conversely, that the “Dubai dream is dead”.

The city-state benefits from this discourse-fuelled soft power. It strikes both the haves and have-notes. Dubai fever is democratic. The city is an El Dorado of the east for remittance-sending strivers, sun-seeking expats and scammers. For many, it represents an unsettling post-western horizon. A version of the future that is already here. Rows of supercars overlooking glittering marinas. Toothy-grinned influencers, crypto bros and aspiring entrepreneurs crowding the same clubs. Labubus dangling from designer handbags. We’re enamoured of this cliche of Dubai, a historyless slab of a place, where the right price can buy you anything and anyone. But behind this binary view is another way of looking at Dubai – a place that is much more interesting and unusual than is often understood.

The city’s past and present is often reduced to the 2 sq km of downtown Dubai, where visitors congregate. This is the centre of luxury, where records are made to be broken. It is a panorama of lavish hotels and flashy restaurants, with the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, providing an apt backdrop. This image may be a defining one, but it says very little about the mundane joys and pains of life in Dubai.

I remember visiting an industrial district to attend a poetry reading organised by a collective of young Dubai-based Filipinos. Their work grappled with the oddities of second-generation life. What does belonging mean when it isn’t enshrined by citizenship? How do you build a foundation on shifting sands? These locals spoke from within an intensely stratified society in which identities are both fixed and surprisingly porous. Dubai is the natural habitat of the “third culture kid”. Everywhere, you overhear the chameleonic lilt of international school accents. As a Londoner, I speak to Dubai-raised Somalis and recognise the bruised tenderness with which they describe their city. You don’t get to choose your home town. The heart is ungovernable.

Today expats make up 85% of Dubai’s population. Through their businesses, schools, cultural centres and social clubs, various diasporas assert their presence. The city hosts the largest Malayali community outside India. Iranian art dealers rub shoulders with Afghan handymen. A Lebanese property developer shares little more than a language with the underpaid north African waiter taking their order. A decade-deep, Sudanese middle class thrives in the very country that is inflaming Sudan’s continuing civil war. Dubai is home to generations of immigrants who have sought shelter and opportunity. Their children face the challenge of reclamation.

It has also long been a transit hub, connecting travellers to motherlands that weren’t properly served by European or North American airlines. (Emirates, the flag-carrier airline, savvily capitalised on this, furiously expanding throughout the 1990s and 2000s.) For many, Dubai came to represent hazy layovers and family reunions. Sheer necessity introduced outsiders to the city. Others, including me, visited extended family members who resided in the emirate. The Dubai we encountered was one of polyglot haggling, stuffed suitcases and relentless change. Each layover, each summer, revealed a dramatically transformed city, with towering additions to its skyline. This was the city as pure id, a glittering “urban spectacle” as the scholar Yasser Elsheshtawy put it. Coining the term “Dubaization”, Elsheshtawy named the hyperreal extravagance of the city’s urban landscape, an aggressive, cash-flush development model that has become a global blueprint. Dubai leads, often to where we would rather not follow.

Later, as an adult, my trips to the city were defined by work. For a brief spell I lived in Al Raffa, a bustling old neighbourhood. The Dubai I found this time embraced its jostling contradictions. In the Deira district, I shared a platter of Tamil food with a Nigerian film-maker, who recommended a local Ethiopian hairdresser. At a rooftop bar crammed with rowdy South Africans, I met a Somali-American flight attendant recovering from a nervous breakdown. We laughed at the absurdity of seeking stability in a place as transient as Dubai. On another trip, an Ethiopian millennial detailed the humiliations she endured when renewing her residency visa. She had lived in Dubai for most of her life, and had no intention of leaving. I had been aware of the other Dubai, the metropolis behind the myth, but these conversations still disarmed me. The city is attracting a different class of newcomers, those who had never expected to settle there.

Dubai has always been a cosmopolitan place – Baloch traders have settled there for centuries, seafaring Emiratis spoke Hindi and the Indian rupee was a local currency well into the 1960s. And there’s nothing new about Britons flocking to a part of the world, the Persian Gulf, that was shaped by British imperialism. As a sheikhdom, Dubai was one of the Trucial States, part of Britain’s informal empire in the Persian Gulf from the early 19th century to 1971. No amount of historical amnesia will change that. The British expat is a stock character of the 20th-century oil boom, with British people working as engineers, administrators, technicians and educators. The “Jumeirah Jane” stereotype was born in that era, a term referring to the leisurely wives of expats who spent their afternoons by the pool. Repelled by Britain’s broken social contract, many of today’s young professionals idealise the tax-free plushness of Dubai life. (It’s worth noting that the confectionery craze Dubai chocolate was invented by a British-Egyptian woman based in the city.) In my own circles, Dubai became a refuge for working-class graduates who felt disproportionately victimised by years of austerity. Their careers flourished in the Gulf, and their passports guarded them against the worst forms of exploitation. For once, they had the upper hand.

But the west has a habit of hoarding complexity for itself. The rest of the world is rendered one-dimensional, a vulgar composite of tropes. This lack of curiosity extends even to the migrant labourer, the quintessential symbol of abjection in the Gulf. We live in a time where domestic workers in the United Arab Emirates chronicle their daily lives on TikTok, responding to the comments of interested viewers. For those who are looking, there has never been greater access to the hopes and struggles of low-wage migrants.

Contemporary Gulf literature breathes life into stories often reduced to statistics. The children of the city’s labourers are now writing about their parents’ struggles. Dubai Puzha by Krishnadas, Tania Malik’s Hope You Are Satisfied and Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People depict the modern Gulf metropolis with humanity and humour. Dubai-set Malayalam dramas and films portray migrants scrimping and saving, finding camaraderie along the way. Cinema continues to take a sweeping view of the migrant experience, with films such as Deira Diaries (2021) tracing four decades in the life of a Keralan expat. Such narratives peel away the person from the occupation. Migrant workers become more than objects of pity. Prickly, lovelorn, shrewd, pragmatic; we are increasingly exposed to their inner lives.

When it comes to the Singapores, Dubais and Shenzhens of the world, a certain kind of inattentiveness plagues those opining from the west. It’s easier to tell half the story, to bat away complexity. Peer into the crush of glass and sweat, dreams and desperation. Dubai is a funhouse mirror. You’ll see what you want to see.