Old Beijing, Meet New Beijing
Reviewed by Alex Pasternack
Posted July 30, 2008
For two dollars, the curious can clamber up the Tiananmen rostrum and stand where Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. From this vantage, one gets the same view the Great Helmsman had of the legendary square, and some of the hulking buildings that would come to symbolize the People's Republic: the Great Hall, the National Museum, and the Monument to the People's Heroes, a towering monument to class struggle that faces north, piercing the feng shui of the city's ancient central axis. Like a museum itself, none of this imposing arrangement has changed since -- save for the addition of Mao's mausoleum in 1977, and a phalanx of video cameras -- making the square feel like what it was meant to be: a physical manifestation of state power determined to maintain an old vision of the future.
But just south of here, past the city's old front gate, the past is under siege. The buildings and lives that crammed together for centuries here, in the legendary, lively neighborhood of Dazhalan, have all but lost out to the old imperative to be modern. A drive that began with Mao, arose again in the 1990s under more capitalist pressures, and accelerated with the Olympics has demolished thousands of traditional courtyard homes and uprooted their residents. Taking their place will be upscale apartments and a pedestrian shopping mall where international brands will be fronted by ersatz Qing dynasty facades. The story of urban redevelopment may not be new, but in Mike Meyer's The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed (Walker & Co. 368 pages) it gains a valuable sheen that comes with intimacy and worldly perspective. His book isn't just an excellent, loving paean to a neighborhood imperiled by Beijing's Olympic-era makeover, but one of the best portraits of any city in the throes of modernization.
Defending the ramshackle existence of Beijing's hutong has long been a pastime of those who do not live there. Since at least the 1920s, when the Nationalists began a countrywide "reconstruction" campaign, foreigners lamented the loss of Beijing's urban lifeblood. While some Chinese longed for the modern grandeur of a Paris, Berlin or London, Meyer writes, expatriates lavished praise on Beijing's ancient, warren-like layout, which, one foreign memoirist wrote in the 1930s, "has none of the dreadful impersonal quality of the more recently designed quarter of a European capital." In The Years That Were Fat, George Kates described a life in a "gently decaying" courtyard home with "charming possibilities for rearrangement," where manners are "sensitive and refined." It's an account that might sound familiar to the expats who today inhabit plush renovated courtyard homes, complete with their own toilets and dishwashers.
To most hutong residents, however, life is much different. The very word hutong is said to come from the Mongolian word for communal neighborhood water wells. Today, plumbing is largely restricted to shared bathrooms, where stall-less squat toilets epitomize the very public-ness of hutong life. Meyer's book takes a cue from an unlikely figure: Le Corbusier, the French architect who, like New York's Robert Moses, may have approved of Beijing's sprawling, car-compatible makeover. Corbusier complained of the preservationists who, after "a little 'slumming,'" rally to preserve the iron-work of "rotten old houses full of tuberculosis and demoralizing." Just as the demolition crews were beginning their campaigns in 2005, Meyer, a former Peace Corps volunteer, moved into a room in a Dazhalan courtyard. "Were they worth preserving?" he asks. "There wasn't much time to find out."
At home in the hutong, Meyer is able to chronicle its extinction like a preservational linguist might do with a dying tongue. His subject is not just the grammar of its architecture but the intonations of the personalities that live in it. The effortlessness of Meyer's snapshot belies his exhaustive collection of contemporary ephemera ("make a tremendous contribution to the 2008 Olympic Games" urges a relocation notice) and excavation of arcane historical details. In one of a smattering of history sections, we learn of the short-lived American occupation of the neighborhood after the Boxer rebellion, one defined, refreshingly, by such goodwill that locals begged the troops to stay. Another poignant chapter brings to life the architect Liang Sicheng, whose Cassandra-like visions of Beijing's transformation in the '50s and '60s haunt city planners today, and inspire writers like Meyer.
But it is the people, not the architecture, that is his account's greatest strength, and the hutong's most convincing argument for survival. In his unsentimental account, neighbors like The Widow, Soldier Liu and Recycler Wang come alive with a familiarity that doesn't sink into stereotype. At the local school where Meyer takes a volunteer teaching job, and as Olympic clocks count the seconds until the city's coming out party, small talk about weather or food gives way to the hutong's concerned refrain: "Do you know when our school will be demolished?"
Nobody knows the answer, at least no one in the neighborhood. The faceless perpetrator of the city's most feared graffiti C the character chai , which appears scrawled on condemned buildings C is the Hand. "Neighborhoods that had survived the fall of imperial rule, the republican era's modernizations, Japanese occupation, and Mao's industrialization fell to a faceless foe. The Hand moved through the hutong after dark, surreptitiously marking courtyard homes..."
The symbol of the Hand helps to underscore the mysterious and sinister closed-door process by which district governments, in spite of any protections mandated by higher officials, sell off land to the city's real estate developers. It's the system that has reshaped Beijing since the formation of a property market began to chip away at the social housing system three decades ago. Though he speaks to a number of luminaries on the sidelines of Beijing's development and pours over other examples from Connecticut to Seoul, Meyer does not gain access to Beijing's dealmakers and planners themselves. Just as well: if this mysterious invisible Hand is a convenient device for Meyer, it's absolutely necessary for the officials who want simply to pay residents to move out so they can build malls, skyscrapers, and spectacular, irrelevant, monuments.
Typically, the Hand's gestures are swift and sweeping, but there are exceptions. Meyer highlights the Chongqing "nail house," a home that drew widespread attention in 2006 for its owners' unwillingness to pack up (eventually they did, for a very tidy sum). In Beijing, just south of Meyer's neighborhood, a restaurant still sticks out like a sore thumb in the middle of a newly constructed green strip, its decaying brick walls scrawled with messages of protest by the owner.
Still, as Meyer is not afraid to point out, few residents are willing to defend their living conditions, which have grown decrepit thanks to decades of government and residents' negligence and a convoluted ownership system. The hutong crumbles in a vicious cycle of collapse, in which neglect by residents only further encourages government condemnation. In some other old cities, like Hanoi and Luang Prabang, turning endangered homes into models for renovation has helped activate pride and awareness. In parts of Beijing, the hutong has been converted into souvenir-laden pedestrian streets with rebuilt courtyards. Hanging over any solution however is the possibility that the Hand could come in any moment and sweep it all away. "Once the Hand paints chai on a home's wall, the only thing open to debate is compensation."
But no compensation could make up for the hutong's sense of community. Even as she contemplates trading in her courtyard for a high-rise apartment, the Widow longs for a tight-knit, well-located community, with a supermarket and hospital nearby. Without those, she asks her neighbor, "who wants to leave the hutong?" In one sense, the question is a moot one. But even after the last hutong has disappeared, and as the long global march of urban renovation continues, the characters, stories and urban idylls that populate Mike Meyer's captivating book will prompt us to keep asking it.
Alex Pasternack is a free-lance writer based in Beijing.
