A Look at China: City of Shadows

As Beijing ushers in the Olympics, the courtyards and alleyways of old China cling to life. How much longer will they last?

The 46-foot clock high above Tiananmen Square counts down the seconds to the 2008 Summer Olympics, an event the government sees as China's coming-out party to the world. Billboards around the city promise "New Beijing, New Olympics." New Beijing is bigger, wider, flatter, more.

To my American eyes, it looks uncomfortably familiar. I first came to China in 1995 as a Peace Corps volunteer and decided to stay; I wanted to experience a different way of life from what I had known in Minnesota. Over the years, as China has developed, its cities have come to resemble the country I left behind: fewer bicycles, more golf courses and spas, conversations dominated by real estate.
But just south of Tiananmen Square, in the traditional courtyard home where I've lived since 2005, life moves at an age-old pace. The entrance to my building, a former mansion, is marked with a pair of carved pillow stones that hold a lacquered gate in place. A long, narrow passage leads to the courtyard, a quadrangle of one-story rooms. Multiple families live side by side.

Here the world drops away. The only sounds are the occasional meow of a cat and the wind rustling through cottonwood trees. Over the decades, our courtyard's central open space has been crowded by jerry-built kitchens and additional rooms. Visitors duck under drying laundry, washed by hand under the cold tap. If it weren't for my Internet connection, life here would be the same as it was centuries ago.

My neighbors don't wear watches, and I can hardly find a clock in the elementary school where I volunteer as an English teacher. Instead, each classroom has a flip chart marking the days until the start of the Games. The correct figure is displayed in only one room, and in another, the neglected countdown always shows there are 996 days before the Games.

As I watch my students, ages nine and ten, I wish that stopping time were that easy. This is the last year before exams will press down on their carefree spirits. The red-kerchiefed students tuck their yo-yos into their desks, then clamor to be called on, raising their hands in the air.

"What is the weather like today?" I ask a girl named Liu Yuezhang.

"Today is sunny," she replies, looking out a window framed by creeper vines. "My father is happy because today his pigeons are happy."

Outside, a flock of white birds dip over gray-tiled rooftops and persimmon trees. Bamboo whistles attached to the birds' feet emit a low hum. "Are those pigeons from your father's roof-top coop?" I ask her.

"I don't know," she answers, then switches to Mandarin. "From far away, pigeons all look the same to me."

Our hutong neighborhood is no different: It looks like thousands of other blocks in Beijing. Hutongs are to the Chinese capital as canals are to Venice. The densely packed lanes, many too narrow for cars, are lined with brick courtyard homes. Less than 1,500 of Beijing's 7,000 original hutongs remain; they continue to be razed.

The hutong where I live is part of the Dazhalan neighborhood, near the parliamentary Great Hall of the People. Its size and cultural importance are akin to that of New York City's Greenwich Village. The most famous old restaurants, like Chen's Stewed Intestine and Feng's Boiled Tripe, are here. Artists and antiques dealers fill the Liulichang market; the nearby lanes outside the destroyed city wall's front gate form the oldest and busiest pedestrian shopping corridor here.

It's packed with domestic tourists in search of old Beijing as well as foreign backpackers, including Germans, French, and British, who stay at courtyard inns that were once brothels and teahouses.

City officials describe the neighborhood as an urban corner (translation: slum); residents see it as a reliable, low-rent area. Its history stretches back 500 years, including an era when it served as Beijing's Chinatown; Han Chinese were not allowed to live within the walls of the Manchu-controlled city.

"They already tore down the Fresh Fish junction neighborhood," our recycler tells me when I see him. "Now they're tearing down Veranda Lane."

Following the Communist victory in 1949, Beijing's courtyard homes were appropriated and resettled by the government. The resulting legal limbo means that residents have little say over what happens to their own homes. Displaced residents are paid the equivalent of $1,000 per square foot for land worth three times as much. (The Geneva-based Center on Housing Rights and Evictions estimates that 1.25 million Beijing residents have been evicted due to urban development.) The resettlement fees aren't enough to buy a new courtyard home (which would cost about $1 million). Nor will the resettlement fees pay for a villa (which would sell for the equivalent of $800,000) in one of the American-style gated communities that sport names like Park Avenue, Upper East Side, and Napa Valley.

As a result, most former hutong owners move to the suburbs. "When the world comes here for the Olympics, people won't believe this is fabled Beijing," a man says in Chinese, through his tears, as a crew demolishes his home. "They'll think they're in some third-rate American city."

A woman known simply as the Widow, age 82, has lived in our courtyard for 40 years. Her husband left for Taiwan in 1949, at the end of the civil war, and never returned. She occupies a room of 90 square feet, furnished with a bed, chair, table, and television ever tuned to the Peking opera channel. The singers' plaintive squeals form the soundtrack of our lives.

The Widow walks into my bedroom; a chef's hat hides her wiry white hair. "You have to eat before class," she says, holding out a steaming yam. Then she steps over the threshold and out into the courtyard, adding, "That's the best thing about this neighborhood. Everything's close. You can put water on the stove, and when you get back from the market, it's boiling!"

Through the latticed windows of my living room, I see another neighbor, Mr. Han, who moved here from northern Manchuria. He spent his life savings to buy a local cell phone repair shop but was recently told the store stood in the way of a shopping mall. He shuttered the business and left.

As I entered our courtyard one night, I heard raucous laughter and singing. A dozen men had squeezed around a table in Mr. Han's room, which was lined with empty beer bottles. "I'm celebrating because today, at least, I can say I have a job," Mr. Han said.

"Tomorrow?" I asked him.

"For the poor," he replied, "there is no tomorrow."

That week, I stared out the classroom window at the modern office towers built atop razed lanes that rim our shrinking island. I pointed at a pair of golden arches shining in the distance. "McDonald's!" shouted the children. We saw a Wal-Mart too.

Every morning, I start my day by walking with the Widow through our neighborhood's market. Baby carriages outnumber vehicles; the air is filled with the sound of woks being scraped and the clack of majiang tiles. Shoppers bargain over cabbage and snack on oil cakes and hot soy milk.

Stand still and see: an antiques shop, a barber, a butcher, an acupuncturist, a museum, a police station, a masseuse. Then a group of officials go past, carrying the hutong's future in rolled-up plans and lists, gesturing upward at buildings only they can see.

 

From Reader's Digest

 

• • Sports

• A Look at China: City of Shadows Slideshow
• Images of the courtyards and alleyways of China show old merging with new.
• 
• Beijing Summer Olympics Slideshow
• See up-to-date photos of athletes in action at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.
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• The Official Website for the Beijing Summer Olympics
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