The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed Book

Although I took forever to read "The Last Days of Old Beijing" I enjoyed the book (the lengthy read was entirely my fault, not the author's.) It gets three and ½ (3.5) stars. Or as Dan would have it, 3 stars and a smiley face: *** :-)

I've been to Beijing twice, but only flying in & out to get to Tianjin. I never got to see anything of the city (and in the mid 90's the airport was pretty dismal, although I was happily able to find some dolls requested by one of my Taiwanese friends.) I had, but declined, another chance to visit before the Three Gorges Dam was completed. By which chance I got to watch live the reentry and loss of Columbia on Feb 1st 2003.

On the other hand I've spent a fair amount of time in the back lanes of some other older Asian cities. So, while I don't have any direct knowledge of the area that existed before the Front Gate, I am attuned to the living conditions and how people interact.

I do and I don't envy the author. I do envy his far greater skill in spoken and written Mandarin. I also envy his ability to eat authentic cuisine pretty much any hour of any day. And I also envy his working with students teaching English. At the same time, I generally like the challenges of "engineering". Discovering or defining problems and coming up with appropriate and often creative solutions is something I would rather do. I'm also enough of a materialist that indoor plumbing is hard to give up.

But in the end I would have liked to immerse myself as he did in a place that I could call home instead of constantly living out of a bag. I never shied away from going out on my own to explore (often on foot), I was also never in one place for longer than 3-4 weeks. But If I changed jobs and had to travel more frequently again, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

My experience in China was long before they were awarded the 2008 Summer Olympics. I went there for a couple of weeks in December to oversee the installation of some equipment in a customer's new factory (a Motorola plant in a new science/industrial park outside if Tianjin.) I had just been over in Taiwan (Chung Li) in a different Motorola plant (one I had visited many times). It was interesting to observe how similar the workers were in both places. Given that only a fraction of China's population is members of the CCC, it wasn't too surprising. But above all, the people are people - just like everywhere. And that is what I took away from this book.

Yes, it is all about the "improvement" that Beijing's faceless authority was inflicting on itself and how it created a soulless, me-too, urban center of traffic jams (get in line with Bangkok, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, Taipei, and Singapore) and high-rises. But it is also about the people who were the city that Mao had desired, but were now being cast aside for "modernization" and greed. (The book correctly points out that the majority of public official corruption cases are tied to real estate development.)

When deciding to "clean up" these people were shunted off into remote, sterile housing communities (hi-rises) that stacked them vertically instead of horizontally as in the hutongs. The book details how a number of neighbors and friends were affected by this transformation and how surprisingly some (for the duration of the narrative) were not. It is these people that keep the story fresh as similar incidents are played out over a few years.

Since the destruction of an area is seemingly capricious and can occur with little warning, the residents act and talk as if they are under siege. And in a very real sense they are. One thing can be interpreted as indicative of their state of mind is the almost constant litany of "do you know when they are…" they are asked. When I was reading the book (in very small snatches) I kept thinking that the author was being asked this more often than most, because as a foreigner he must have some special knowledge or insight. Now, after reflection, I think it was just a stylistic thing and that the question was probably asked of everyone just as "Chi Fan" would be.