by Karoline Kan
* * *
In the summer of 2015, I moved from the room I’d been renting for two years to the top floor in a hutong located in an older, characterful part of the city, closer to my office. My British friend, Oscar, was also looking for a new place, and asked me if I wanted to share a hutong house together. My salary had doubled, so I could finally move into a neighborhood that, in my mind, represented the spirit of Beijing.
Our house was complete with a yard and a rooftop terrace, and from my window I could watch the trees change with the seasons. On summer evenings, I liked to sit on the terrace, taking in the clouds transforming from red to purple as the sun set and flocks of pigeons flew through the sky. During the night, rain often dropped from leaves into a jar my neighbors kept under their window. Plunk, plop. In winter, I could reach out and feel the snowflakes. At my front door, I was greeted by the neighborhood ginger cat who would run toward me on top of the garden wall separating our house from the abandoned one next door. My “new” house was old, and full of stories. Though I had little money to spare and was unmarried, there wasn’t anything nicer than sitting with a cup of hot tea and a book in the home I had created for myself. There, I began to love my life.
Baba said I was ridiculous: He didn’t understand why in the world I wanted to live this way.
I had not told my parents that I was living with a guy—even though Oscar and I were just friends—and when Mom saw his clothes on the sofa while she video-chatted with me, she jumped to conclusions.
“No,” I said. “It’s not what you think. He has a girlfriend—and it’s not me!”
“You’re getting too wild. What are you doing? An unmarried woman living with a man? A laowai?” Mom’s voice was shaking with anger, but, secretly, I had known they wouldn’t be happy, and had done it to prove they should not care, or that I shouldn’t. It was a small act of rebellion.
Our house in the hutong had clay-tiled floors, two good-size bedrooms, a small study, a spacious living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom, plus, of course, the roof terrace, where we sometimes held parties. We put up old film posters, threw down rugs over the cold tiles, and decorated the rooms with plants and a variety of lamps for atmosphere. The first floor had space enough to accommodate two couples and a divorcee. I didn’t see her that often since she was dating someone, but I could hear one of the couples, who was always fighting.
The other couple, the Fengs, lived in the remaining two rooms. They were from Henan, and I liked them a lot. I would see them every day at around seven o’clock when I had finished work, and when they were usually cooking in their open-air kitchen.
They sold savory crepes filled with things like fried eggs, or chicken or vegetables, near the National Stadium or the “Bird’s Nest,” which had been one of the showcase venues of the 2008 Olympics and was now visited by many tourists. Located in the midst of a busy commercial center, the area teemed with white-collar workers.
Like most other breakfast vendors, they had converted their tricycle into a mobile, cooking-gas-fueled kitchen, small but perfectly formed and topped by a glass case to display the food. It was a humble job, but, one pancake after another, they had been able to send their two children to college. Their twenty-six-year-old daughter had graduated from one of the top universities in Beijing and now worked at a logistics company. Their son was studying at another university in Beijing and sometimes visited on the weekends.
Mr. Feng was friendly. Every day I saw him washing lettuce, chopping up chicken, or frying eggs to prepare for work the next morning. He always greeted me with: “You’ve come back?”
Mr. Feng’s relatives lived next door and liked to grow pumpkins and cucumbers in small pots on their roof. As the vines grew, they trailed all the way to my door. The only way to get to their roof was by using the stairs in my yard, so I often met the woman holding a bucket of water at my door. Then we’d smile at each other and chat.
I liked the diversity of the people in the lively, mazelike hutongs, as well as the sense of community created there and which I hadn’t felt since leaving Lutai. Young people would play music in a small guitar shop; a stray dog we called “Little Yellow” would wait for his friend Old Li, the dumpling-restaurant owner, to feed him; foreigners liked to sit around drinking Tsingtao beer, chatting, eating, at an outdoor barbecue place. At the fruit stand, the owner’s daughter would sit outside doing her homework at a makeshift plywood desk. The recycling man, who used his electric tricycle to collect bags bursting full of crushed plastic bottles and collapsed, tightly tied cardboard boxes, would weave his way down the alleys and wave with a smile as he passed. We were all from different backgrounds, rich and poor, old and young, local and migrant, but we lived together harmoniously.
On weekends, if I stayed home, I would chat for hours with my neighbors. Many complained about the high cost of rent, and we’d laugh about the willy-nilly sense of the city we received in return. Urban planning had meant that so many beautiful ancient wooden structures like the hutong houses had been torn down, replaced by matchbox-like offices and glass-fronted hotels and apartment blocks.
The Fengs were considering moving back to Henan, their hometown. In the fifteen years they had lived in Beijing, they had saved enough money not only for their children’s education but also for an apartment near their families. They joked that it was their dream to “dress in fine silk and return home like royalty.” But their daughter did not want that. She had grown up in Beijing and knew nothing about Henan. She would not go with her parents if they chose to leave, nor would her brother.
The one thing that had encouraged the Fengs and other migrant workers to persevere was the belief that they would eventually “go home,” and they were thrifty as possible in order to save. When they talked about Beijing, they spoke as if they were visiting. New things that happened in the city seemed to have nothing to do with them. But after ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, many of them remained.
What they didn’t realize—or want to believe—was that their hometowns were also changing, the way people talked and dressed, and their habits. We had all become people without roots.
* * *
I was happy not only because of my new home but also because I had a new relationship. Two of my author friends and I had been speaking on a panel about Chinese youth, and Christian was in the audience. I had noticed him sitting in the second row, nodding when he agreed with what I said, which I appreciated since the panel was in English. When I got stuck on certain words and stammered, he would smile at me with encouragement.
He had a handsome face, reddish-blond hair, and deep, melancholic eyes that seemed to belie a boyish curiosity. He looked thoughtful as he sat there and listened to us.
After the panel, Christian and I spent the evening talking only to each other, as if no one else existed. He was two years younger than I was, and had recently gotten a job at the Financial Times’s Beijing bureau as a junior reporter. We left the event together and bicycled in the same direction. It turned out we lived close by each other, and so it was even easier for us to start dating.
When my parents heard about my new relationship, the first thing my mom said was: “Bring him home.”
Chapter Eighteen
Coming Home
My neighbors Mr. and Mrs. Feng ignored their daughter’s opposition and bought an apartment in Henan. If everything went well, they would leave Beijing within a year. Their son would graduate soon and they believed their city sojourn was reaching its end. One thing that pushed them to make the decision was the increasingly unfriendly attitude toward migrant workers.
Beijing had launched a “city beautification campaign,” aiming to clear away tens of millions of illegal structures in the alleys, many of which were accommodations for nongminggong, “farmers-turned-workers” or low-income migrant workers, as well as the shops and restaurants where they worked and which catered to them.
The campaign was marketed as a way to improve the city aesthetically, as some renov
ations would also need to be done; however, it was no secret that the campaign was also an effort to “tackle urban diseases,” as the media had dubbed them: overpopulation, increased traffic congestion, limited water resources, and pollution. The solution was simple and crude: push people out to the suburbs and other nearby regions. As the project quickly got under way, the sound of drills and jackhammers and revving dump trucks became almost constant. Without jobs or affordable housing, many low-income migrant workers found they had nowhere to work and could no longer afford to live in Beijing. They had to leave.
One day a demolition crew arrived in our hutong with forklifts and power saws, ready to take down a row of shops and houses. The owner of the beauty salon, who had replaced a brick-and-cement wall facing the street with a window to attract customers, was told the window ruined the look of the building. It had to be taken out, the wall restored, and the front door painted red. In fact, almost all doors in the hutong had to be repainted, as the government wanted to mimic and re-create an idealized version of Old Beijing.
The crew also removed red lanterns hanging in front of a Sichuan noodle restaurant, claiming these added too much personal design and were in danger of causing fires. They sealed the doors of many other shops and restaurants operating without a license, and demolished all the lean-tos and second floors that had been expanding for years haphazardly, house-of-cards-like.
They walked from alley to alley, sometimes themselves filling in unapproved windows and doors with cement blocks and bricks. My street looked as if it had been hit by an earthquake.
I was sad and angry to see people like the Fengs being pushed out. I wasn’t a target, but what about next time?
What disappointed me most was that many local residents supported the campaign. They believed nongminggong made their city dirtier and noisier. Their reactions reminded me of how we had been treated when we first moved to Lutai. In reality, migrants didn’t take anything from the locals. They had no health insurance, enjoyed no government aid, and did the jobs others turned their noses up at. They weren’t parasites; quite the contrary, they contributed to our way of life in Beijing.
One day, when I returned from work, I saw Mr. Feng repairing his tricycle, both of his hands covered with so much black machine oil it looked as if he were wearing gloves.
“Finished with work?” he greeted me.
“Yes.” I smiled. “Are you done early today? How’s business?”
“Let’s not talk about it. We’re barely getting by,” Feng said as he picked up a screwdriver to use on a handlebar. “Beijing isn’t working for us anymore,” Feng said, putting the screwdriver aside to sit on the steps and light a cigarette.
Street selling was, technically, illegal. But Beijing had tens of thousands of food peddlers skilled at dodging the authorities, who often just turned a blind eye. Now and then, Chengguan, the City Urban Administrative and Law Enforcement Bureau, would launch a raid. If they caught peddlers, they would take away their tricycles, which could be returned for a fine.
But Mr. Feng and his friends had made private “arrangements” with some of those working for the Chengguan so that they would be informed in advance of any raid. This arrangement cost the peddlers a few yuan a day—far less than any fine—and had worked for years. But recently, with Beijing’s determination to push migrants out, the Chengguan had ceased their protection racket. And the inspections increased. Two-thirds of the food peddlers who worked near the Bird’s Nest stadium had already left.
That morning, the Chengguan almost caught Mr. Feng. They arrived just as one of his customers was handing over money for a crepe. When somebody shouted, “Run!” Feng threw a handful of coins back to the customer, jumped on his tricycle, and pedaled away fast as he could. When he was making a turn, the tricycle toppled over, breaking the handlebar and chain and the glass display case. By the time I saw him, Feng had spent more than an hour trying to fix it. The tricycle was all Feng had to make a living. I was worried about him, but didn’t know how I could help.
Feng stood up, washed his hands in a bucket filled with soapy water, and gestured toward the garage at the end of the road. “I’ll go to the mechanic,” he said, and then it dawned on us.
“Damn it, they even shut down the repair shop. Shit.”
While I worried about Feng, I discovered that I might also be affected. By the end of July, most second-floor apartments near the main streets had been demolished. If they kept going, ours would also be knocked down, and I might return one day, as one of my friends had, to find my landlord waiting to tell me I must move within three days because my apartment was being demolished.
Beijing was like a spoiled child. The whole country fed her its best resources. When she asked for something, she got it. She could call people to her, work them to her benefit, and when she didn’t need them anymore, she would kick them out anytime, without remorse.
* * *
Sure enough, I was affected but not yet in Beijing. Our hutong in Lutai was going to be demolished. My neighbor Wang Jianli’s dream was finally coming true twenty years after he had first talked about it.
Because some people were still dependent on dangerous and polluting coal-fueled stoves to keep warm, the government planned to move them into apartments with centralized heating. Tianjin’s newly appointed mayor, Xia Xin, declared that there shouldn’t be a “slum” in the center of town, and that it would be removed. Tianjin was supposed to be one of the most developed cities in the country, and Lutai was its suburb. It was not a slum, at least not to me. Every family had their own yard and single-story home. “Well, the mayor said it’s a slum, so it’s a slum,” said my mom.
All residential buildings were destroyed if they were not contemporary or high-rises. An announcement was posted at the street-committee building:
Great news! Dongdaying community will be demolished under the policy of the People-Benefiting Project. The plan is for each home to become an apartment, and the government will compensate your loss on indoor renovation and decoration. From now on, no family is allowed to make new construction or renovations to their houses and should wait for the demolition team to do the evaluation for compensation.
The offer was this: The government would take away all the houses, replace them with new twenty-floor apartment buildings on the site, and give the homeowners a modern home the same size as their old one. If anyone wanted something bigger, they could purchase the extra space at half the market price. Some found it reasonable, yet others found it unacceptable. My parents were not happy with the situation, but didn’t want to fight with the government. So they signed the agreement.
Suddenly the town was divided into two tribes. The pro-leave people stopped talking to the pro-stay people. In an odd juxtaposition, the former called the latter greedy, thinking they were staying just to negotiate for more government benefits. Siblings fought with each other, and children stopped talking to parents over inheritance issues. A woman showed up at my mom’s school with a bandage on her arm. Her brother had stabbed her with a knife when she was negotiating with their parents for her share of the compensation money.
And then there was Ms. Sun, a childless old woman who would be particularly out of luck if she were rehoused. Ms. Sun was nicknamed “Black Widow” because of her dark skin and the fact that her husband had died twenty years earlier. Nobody knew her first name. She ran a little farm shop that she didn’t have a permit for, and she never paid taxes. In the late 1990s, after her husband died, she sold their one-room house for 17,000 yuan and used some of the money to build the little shop where she then worked and lived. Without planning permission for its construction, she wouldn’t get anything from the government if it were demolished.
One day in September, another poster on the wall of the street-committee building announced: “Don’t let the dingzihu get one penny more than the rest who sign the agreement earlier.”
Dingzihu, or “nail households,” meant families who disagreed with the demolition policy
and compensation and refused to leave their house without a better offer. In recent years, the local government had started to care more about public opinion, thanks partly to the internet. Sometimes the dingzihu “won” and could remain living in their homes, though sometimes the government would then permanently cut off their access to power and water.
Many young people had moved away from Dongdaying when they married, so the hutongs were now filled mainly with older residents, who had lots of questions.
“I checked, and our apartment is only five hundred square feet. When you measured the house, you didn’t count the kitchen and bathroom we built?” asked a neighbor, Zhao, during a community meeting with officials.
“No” was all one official said. His hair was unnaturally black against his very fair skin, and he sat with five other officials answering questions. Two young men sat at a desk and helped the homeowners sign their names on the agreement letter and information registration.
“But this is such a small apartment.”
“You can buy extra space.”
The neighborhood was forty years old. Nowhere in Lutai was older. Living in an old neighborhood was a sign of being poor and backward, especially in small towns and cities, unlike in Beijing, where it had become fashionable. Chinese people usually despised old things, which they felt easier (and better) to replace than to repair.
* * *
Partly to appease my mom, I invited Christian to spend the Spring Festival with my family. I had never taken any guy back to Lutai, but I thought it would be polite to ask him, and that he might enjoy it. However, before he accepted, I had to warn him—to take a boyfriend home for this particular festival was as close as you could come to announcing your engagement. Weeks before our visit, I started to give “training” lessons to both Christian and my parents, who had never met a foreigner.