Oracle Bones (31 page)

Censorship of the press was one reason why relatively few Beijing residents seemed to worry about the destruction of the old city, but there were other factors that contributed to the passivity. In the
hutong
, many homes were without plumbing; residents used public toilets, and they were often happy to move to new apartment blocks. It was hard for them to conceive of the other option: modernize without destroying the ancient layout, the way European cities had. Finally, it was rare for a structure to embody a straight line of human history, like Old Mr. Zhao’s courtyard. During the political campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s, squatters from the proletariat class had been encouraged to occupy the homes of the wealthy, and many courtyards had been subdivided by makeshift structures. After Reform and Opening, it wasn’t hard for developers to remove these squatters, who generally didn’t hold legal title to the property.

Even when contracts were well documented, as in Old Mr. Zhao’s case, the law didn’t provide complete protection. The national constitution—which had been adopted in 1982, after the Zhao family had already owned their home for more than three decades—stated clearly that all land belonged to the nation. Individuals could buy and sell land-use rights, but the government could force a sale if the property was necessary for national interests. But the national interest was a murky concept in
Chai nar,
where power was being decentralized. Often local authorities were the ones who really mattered, and they could twist the “national interest” to serve their own ends.

According to Old Mr. Zhao’s lawyer, if the courtyard was demolished, the land-use rights would be sold three separate times. First, the district government would acquire the rights from the old man, and then it would
immediately resell them at a profit to the state-owned developer. Finally, the developer would raise the price again, selling them to the bank, which was also government-owned. In other words, three different government bureaus would buy and sell the land among themselves before anything was built. Along the way, the price would increase roughly ten times the amount that had been paid to Old Mr. Zhao.

The second lawsuit focused on this arrangement, accusing the government of not offering the true market value. The suit was decided on the morning of September 21, at the Number Two Intermediate People’s Court. At 9:15, the judge entered the courtroom, told everybody to stand up, and read the decision: Old Mr. Zhao and his wife must vacate the courtyard within five days. If they refused, the local authorities had the right to forcibly remove the couple and tear down the structures.

Outside the courtroom, where a Beijing television crew waited, an argument broke out between the old man’s lawyer and the government representatives. The lawyer swore he’d find a way to appeal; the two sides shouted back and forth. The television crew filmed the argument. It did not appear on the evening news.

September 25, 2000

Old Mr. Zhao and Huang Zhe still hadn’t left. The old woman looked nervous; she told me that there were rumors the police might come any time. But her husband seemed invigorated. “They’ll have to force me to move,” he said. “Otherwise, I’m not leaving.”

Late September is one of the best seasons in Beijing, and the temperature on that day was perfect. We met in the main courtyard, just as the afternoon shadows were starting to slip eastward, toward the building where Lucy Chao had translated Whitman. Some rose bushes stood out in front, bare for the coming winter. A huge yellow crane loomed high above us—construction was already under way on one of the bank buildings next door. Almost all of the neighbors had already moved out.

Earlier that morning, Old Mr. Zhao had played a tennis match at Tsinghua University, against some other retired teachers. He told me that he had won, six games to two. He seemed upbeat, showing me a number of anonymous letters of support that had been dropped into the mail slot of the courtyard’s front door. One note had been signed “A Citizen of the Capital.”

The couple had no children, and friends had told me that they suffered a great deal during the Cultural Revolution. Old Mr. Zhao never spoke in detail about that period; whenever the subject came up, he brushed it aside. When I asked about his brothers in the United States, he said that one was a retired freelance writer. The other brother was a retired geologist named Edward C. T. Zhao, who had spent his career with the U.S. Geological Survey.

“You know how the U.S. landed on the moon,” Old Mr. Zhao said. “They brought back moon rocks, and there were many geologists who wanted to study them. Four geologists were chosen, and my brother was one of them. He was quarantined afterward for two weeks. They didn’t know what kind of germs might be on the rocks.”

The afternoon shadows crossed the courtyard, and we moved inside, to the main living room. I asked Old Mr. Zhao if he had ever had second thoughts about his decision to return to China after the war.

“None of us has any regrets,” he said. “My brothers took their road, and I took mine. Of course, in 1998, when the government first said they were going to
this home, my brothers invited me to go to America, but I didn’t want to. I’m a Chinese, and even if I went to America, I’d still be a Chinese.”

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Old Mr. Zhao hadn’t seen his brothers. In 1972, the geologist made his first trip back to China, as part of an American delegation that arrived in the wake of President Nixon’s visit to Beijing. Inside his living room, Old Mr. Zhao pointed out a gift from one nephew: a commemorative plate from Springfield, Illinois, with a sketch of Abraham Lincoln in the center.

Every time I passed through the courtyard, there was something soothing about its regularity: the right angles, the square buildings. I imagined what it had been like with the patriarch in the west, the daughter in the east, the son in the north. But the sense of order broke down once I entered the living room, whose walls reflected the different worlds that had passed through this single home. Alongside the Abraham Lincoln plate hung an award from the Beijing Tennis Center. Near that, an orange plastic Wham-O Frisbee dangled from a television antenna. Above that, two calligraphy scrolls, memorials to Old Mr. Zhao’s father. A black-and-white photograph of the patriarch. A painting of Jesus teaching the Pharisees. A Chinese landscape. A plastic Santa Claus. More calligraphy. Another tennis trophy.

Outside, the September evening settled silently, and the old man kept talking, always shifting back and forth, English and Chinese, Chinese and English.

THE CHINESE TOOK
enormous pride in their history, especially around foreigners. The descriptions of a continuous civilization could be lulling, and it took me a while to realize that in fact I had seen almost no buildings that were truly ancient. Initially, I believed that this was simply because they had all been demolished. The twentieth century had been destructive, and I assumed that architecture was one of many elements of Chinese culture that had suffered.

But when I saw old buildings that had actually survived the centuries, like Old Mr. Zhao’s courtyard, they usually consisted of materials that had been replaced over the years. His home, like the Forbidden City or any traditional Chinese temple, was built of wood, brick, and tile. In China, few buildings had been constructed of stone. Some sections of the Ming dynasty Great Wall were faced with stone, but that was a defensive structure, not a monument or a public building. Chinese structures simply weren’t designed to withstand the centuries.

Many of the people who seemed most concerned about architectural preservation had links with the West. Old Mr. Zhao spoke in terms of cultural preservation, and he put me in contact with another Beijing activist, a half-Chinese, half-French woman who was trying to preserve the
hutong
. But average residents of the old city seemed less interested in these issues, even when they were forced to vacate their homes. Often, they were angered by the corruption of local officials, and they complained that they had been unfairly compensated. But the issue tended to be personal rather than cultural; I rarely sensed a deep attachment to the
hutong
.

In the past, the Chinese had paid remarkably little attention to architecture. During the Song dynasty (960-1279), there had been some effort to identify and classify the features of traditional structures, but otherwise there wasn’t much methodical study. Architecture remained an open field in the 1920s, when two young Chinese, a man named Liang Sicheng and a woman named Lin Huiyin, went to the University of Pennsylvania to study. In 1928, after completing their degrees in architecture, they married and returned to China.

For much of the following decade, the young couple developed the first systematic classification for native Chinese architecture. They traveled throughout the north, searching out old buildings and making painstaking sketches. Not far from Beijing, they found the Temple of Solitary Joy, which dated to 984. In Shanxi province, they located the Temple of Buddha’s Light, which had
been built in 857. This remains the oldest known wooden temple in China. Later, after the Communists came to power, Liang Sicheng unsuccessfully campaigned for the preservation of the old city wall.

In 1940, he described the difficulty of his and his wife’s research: “Since there existed no guides to buildings important in the history of Chinese architecture, we sought out old buildings ‘like a blind man riding a blind horse.’”

Often, the couple depended on peasants for information:

My experience was that local people were not interested in architecture. When I told them I was interested in antiquities they would guide me to their stone stelae inscribed in earlier times. They were interested in calligraphy…, impressed by the written word, not the carpenter’s handiwork.

After reading Liang Sicheng’s comments, I thought of my former students in Fuling. Even in the English department, they had been assigned hours of practice in Chinese calligraphy; often I walked into the classroom and saw dozens of students hunched over their brushes, writing a single character over and over. They could tell me immediately who had the best calligraphy in the class, and who was second, third, fourth. And it had shocked them that my own English handwriting was so sloppy. They couldn’t believe that somebody with my background—educated in literature at two universities—still couldn’t write.

In Fuling, my students had recognized some beauty in the written word that wasn’t apparent to a Westerner like me. And in Beijing, I sensed that I saw something in the old city that wasn’t obvious to most locals. Ever since childhood, like any Westerner, I had learned that the past was embodied in ancient buildings—pyramids, palaces, coliseums, cathedrals. Ionic, Doric, gothic, baroque—words I could recall from junior-high lessons. To me, that was antiquity, but the Chinese seemed to find their past elsewhere.

October 20, 2000

The old man was irritable. He had dressed neatly, in a gray turtleneck and blue blazer, and he received me in his living room. But his eyes moved impatiently and he resisted my attempts at small talk. He had won a tournament match that morning, but he refused to tell me the score. “If I play eighty-year-olds, it’s not interesting,” he said with a wave of his hand. “They’re too old.”

All legal appeals had been exhausted. The final hope was that a top-ranking cadre would take a personal interest in the case, but that was unlikely. Old Mr. Zhao told me that some friends had arranged
another apartment, in case the
command was made. All around their courtyard home, other buildings had already been reduced to bricks and dust; earlier in the day, the final neighbors had moved out. The elderly couple were the last people in the
hutong
.