The Search for a Vanishing Beijing

"This is a quirky book that I don’t think many people have heard of. It’s actually been quite useful to me in terms of decoding the area where I live. I’ve never met the author – he’s a lawyer who lives in Beijing, and has evidently dedicated himself to understanding the folk history of the city. There are some really interesting odd facts in there. For example, he’s describing the part of town where I live, and he says if you look off to your left, you see an undistinguished guesthouse. But that guesthouse was, in fact, the former home of the founder of China’s secret police, who is one of the legendarily cruel figures in Chinese history. He was also quite an educated connoisseur of antiques and he filled his house with all sorts of elegantly chosen furniture. There’s something fascinating and horrifying about these two facts side by side. It’s not the kind of thing you get from your average tour guide, and certainly not what you get from your average guidebook. For someone who is going to linger here for a few days, and really wants to walk around the hutongs – which really is the most interesting thing to do in Beijing these days – it is a fairly indispensable companion. Yes, it’s organised as a series of walks. So you’ll start at the Drum Tower, for instance, and walk south from there, and you’ll pass by the old homes of China’s greatest writers and you’ll pass by the little one-storey house in which Mao Zedong lived when he was a young library assistant in Beijing, etc, etc. I’ve lived in four houses in five years. It’s not actually that houses keep getting knocked down, it’s more the radical fluctuations in life which make you move. For instance, one place I lived, I was there a year and I liked it a lot. But I also happened to be living, it turned out, next to the centre of the window-making community in Beijing. It was a very earthy neighbourhood of migrant workers who built windows for contractors. I don’t know about you, but I had never spent much time around the making of windows. It involves cutting glass and steel with handsaws, and they do it more or less 24 hours a day. I felt very close to the artisanal economy of Beijing but I decided to leave after a year. But I love living in these places, so I tolerate the moves. They haven’t been knocked down, though the place I’m living in now, my neighbours all say that we’ve been identified for demolition. They just don’t know when, probably not this year, but maybe next year. They have very complicated feelings about it: it’s never quite as simple as the feeling we have as outsiders, which is, ‘Oh how could you give up this lovely old house you’ve been living in at the centre of the city?’ In some cases people do feel very attached to the place, but in other cases they say, ‘Look my house doesn’t have a toilet; it doesn’t have reliable heating. I want to live in a modern apartment and I’m going to get a lot of money for this place.’ That’s not to minimise the emotional impact, and often these people don’t get compensated adequately. But Chinese people have more complicated feelings about it than a visitor can gather from only a few days of wandering though these terrific parts of town."