What does this essay tell us about the relationship between place (in this case, the alleyway) and
Question:
2.How does Hessler describe the alleyway? What kinds of details does he use? How do his descriptions express the "identity" of the alleyway or its residents?[At least 100 words]
3. Respond to a quote: include a quotation of 1-3 sentences and explain: why did this moment stand out? What sort of impact do these lines have on you as a reader, and why? [At least 100 words not includingthe quote.]
Format:300 words minimum (total).
HUTONG KARMAThe many incarnations of a Beijing alleyway By Peter Hessler The New Yorker February 13, 2006 issue For the past five years, I've lived about a mile north of the Forbidden City, in an apartment building off a tiny alleyway in downtown Beijing. My alley, which has no official name, begins in the west, passes through three ninety-degree turns, and exits to the south. On a map, the shape is distinctive: it looks a little like a question mark, or perhaps half of a Buddhist swastika. The alley is also distinctive because it belongs to one of the few surviving sections of old Beijing. The capital, like most Chinese cities nowadays, has been changing fastthe biggest local map publisher updates its diagrams every three months, to keep pace with development. But the layout of my neighborhood has remained more or less the same for centuries. The first detailed map of Beijing was completed in 1750, under the reign of the great Qing emperor Qianlong, and on that document my alley follows the same route it does today. Xu Pingfang, a Beijing archeologist, has told me that my street may very well date to the fourteenth century, when many sections of the city were originally laid out, under the Yuan dynasty. The Yuan also left the word hutong, a Mongolian term that has come to mean "alley" in Chinese. Locals call my alley Little Ju'er, because it connects with the larger street known as Ju'er Hutong. I live in a modern three-story building, but it's surrounded by the single-story homes of brick, wood, and tile that are characteristic of hutong. These structures stand behind walls of gray brick, and often a visitor to old Beijing is impressed by the sense of division: wall after wall, gray brick upon gray brick. But a hutong neighborhood is most distinguished by connections and movement. Dozens of households might share a single entrance, and although the old residences have running water, few people have private bathrooms, so public toilets play a major role in local life. In a hutong, much is communal, including the alley itself. Even in winter, residents bundle up and sit in the road, chatting with their neighbors. Street venders pass through regularly, because the hutong are too small for supermarkets. There are few cars. Some alleys, like the one I live on, are too narrow for automobile traffic, and the sounds of daily life are completely different from what one would expect in the heart of a city of fifteen million people. Usually I'm awake by dawn, and from my desk I hear residents chatting as they make their way to the public toilet next to my building, chamber pots in hand. By midmorning, the venders are out. They pedal through the alley on three-wheeled carts, each announcing his product with a trademark cry. The beer woman is the loudest, singing out again and again, "Maaaaiiiii piiiiijiuuuuuu!" At eight in the morning, it can be distracting"Buuuuyyyy beeeeeeeeeer!"but over the years I've learned to appreciate the music in the calls. The rice man's refrain is higher-pitched; the vinegar dealer occupies the lower registers. The knife sharpener provides percussiona steady click-clack of metal plates. The sounds are soothing, a reminder that even if I never left my doorway again life would be sustainable, albeit imbalanced. I would have cooking oil, soy sauce, and certain vegetables and fruit in season. In winter, I could buy strings of garlic. A vender of toilet paper would pedal through every day. There would be no shortage of coal. Occasionally, I could eat candied crab apple. One day in late April, I was sitting at my desk when I heard somebody call out, "Looonnnng haaaaiiiir! Looonnnng haaaaiiiir!" That was an unfamiliar refrain, so I went out into the alley, where a man had parked his cart. He had come from Henan Province, where he worked for a factory that produces wigs and hair extensions. When I asked about business, he reached inside a burlap sack and pulled out a long black ponytail. He said he'd just bought it from another hutong resident for ten dollars. He had come to Beijing because it was getting warmhaircut seasonand he hoped to acquire a hundred pounds of good hair before returning to Henan. Most of it, he said, would eventually be exported to the United States or Japan.
2 While we were talking, a woman hurried out of a neighboring house, carrying something in a purple silk handkerchief. Carefully, she unwrapped it: two thick strands. "They're from my daughter," she said, explaining that she'd saved them from the last haircut. Each ponytail was about eight inches long. The man picked up one and studied it closely, like a fisherman who knows the rules. He said, "These are too short." "What do you mean?" "They're no use to me," he said. "They need to be longer than that." The woman tried to bargain, but she didn't have much leverage; finally she returned home, hair in hand. The man's call echoed as he left the hutong:"Looonnnng haaaaiiiir! Looonnnng haaaaiiiir!" Not long after I moved into Little Ju'er, Beijing stepped up its campaign to host the 2008 Games, and traces of Olympic glory began to touch the hutong. In an effort to boost the athleticism and health of average Beijing residents, the government constructed hundreds of outdoor exercise stations. The painted steel equipment is well-intentioned but odd, as if the designer had caught a fleeting glimpse of a gym and then worked from memory. At the exercise stations, people can spin giant wheels with their hands, push big levers that offer no resistance, and swing on pendulums like children at a park. In the greater Beijing region, the stations are everywhere, even in tiny farming villages by the Great Wall. Out there, the equipment gives the peasants a new life-style option: after working a twelve-hour day on the walnut harvest, they can get in shape by spinning a big yellow wheel over and over. But nobody appreciates the exercise stations more than hutong residents. The machines are scattered throughout old parts of the city, tucked into narrow alleyways. At dawn and dusk, they are especially busyolder people meet in groups to chat and take a few rounds on the pendulum. On warm evenings, men sit idly on the machines, smoking cigarettes. The workout stations are perfect for the ultimate hutong sport: hanging around in the street with the neighbors. At the end of 2000, as part of a citywide pre-Olympic campaign to improve sanitation facilities, the government rebuilt the public toilet at the head of Ju'er Hutong. The change was so dramatic that it was as if a shaft of light had descended directly from Mt. Olympus to the alleyway, leaving a magnificent structure in its wake. The building had running water, infrared-automated flush toilets, and signs in Chinese, English, and Braille. Gray rooftop tiles recalled traditional hutongarchitecture. Rules were printed onto stainless steel. "Number 3: Each user is entitled to one free piece of common toilet paper (length 80 centimetres, width 10 centimetres)." A small room housed a married couple who served as full- time attendants. Realizing that no self-respecting Beijing resident would work in a public toilet, the government had imported dozens of couples from the interior, mostly from the poor province of Anhui. The husband cleaned the men's room; the wife took care of the women's. The couple in Ju'er Hutong brought their young son, who took his first steps in front of the public toilet. Such scenes occurred across the capital, and perhaps someday the kids will become the Beijing version of Midnight's Children: a generation of toddlers reared in public toilets who, ten years after the Olympics, will come of age and bring hygienic glory to the Motherland. Meanwhile, Ju'er residents took full advantage of the well-kept public space that fronted the new toilet. Old Yang, the local bicycle repairman, stored his tools and extra bikes there, and in the fall cabbage venders slept on the strip of grass that bordered the bathroom. Wang Zhaoxin, who ran the cigarette shop next door, arranged some ripped-up couches around the toilet entrance. Someone else contributed a chessboard. Folding chairs appeared, along with a wooden cabinet stocked with beer glasses. After a while, there was so much furniture, and so many people there every night, that Wang Zhaoxin declared the formation of the "W. C. Julebu": the W. C. Club. Membership was open to all, although there were disputes about who should be chairman or a member of the Politburo. As a foreigner, I joined
3 at the level of a Young Pioneer. On weekend nights, the club hosted barbecues in front of the toilet. Wang Zhaoxin supplied cigarettes, beer, and grain alcohol, and Mr. Cao, a driver for the Xinhua news service, discussed what was happening in the papers. The coal-fired grill was attended to by a handicapped man named Chu. Because of his disability, Chu was licensed to drive a small motorized cart, which made it easy for him to transport skewers of mutton through the hutong. In the summer of 2002, when the Chinese men's soccer team made history by playing in its first World Cup, the W. C. Club acquired a television, plugged it into the bathroom, and mercilessly mocked the national team as it failed to score a single goal throughout the tournament. -----------Wang Zhaoxin modestly refused the title of chairman, although he was the obvious choice: his entire life had been intertwined with the transformation of modern Beijing. His parents had moved to Ju'er Hutong in 1951, two years after the Communist revolution. Back then, Beijing's early-fifteenth-century layout was still intact, and it was unique among major world capitals: an ancient city virtually untouched by modernity or war. Beijing had once been home to more than a thousand temples and monasteries, but nearly all of them were converted to other uses by the Communists. In Ju'er, the monks were kicked out of a lamasery called Yuan Tong Temple, and dozens of families moved in, including Wang Zhaoxin's parents. Meanwhile, other members of the proletariat were encouraged to occupy the homes of the wealthy. Previously, such private hutong residences had been arranged around spacious open-air courtyards, but during the nineteen-fifties and sixties most of these became crowded with shanties and makeshift structures. The former compound of a single clan might become home to two dozen families, and the city's population swelled with new arrivals. Over the next twenty years, the Communists tore down most of Beijing's monumental gates, as well as its impressive city wall, which in some places was forty feet high. In 1966, when Wang Zhaoxin was a six-year-old elementary-school student, he participated in a volunteer children's work brigade that helped demolish a section of the Ming-dynasty city wall not far from Ju'er. In 1969, during the Cultural Revolution, the nearby Anding Gate was torn down to make room for a subway station. By the time Mao died, in 1976, roughly a fifth of old Beijing had been destroyed. In 1987, Wang Zhaoxin's younger brother accepted his first job, at a Beijing restaurant. Within months of starting work, the eighteen-year-old lost his right arm in a flour-mixing machine. Not long before that, Wang Zhaoxin had gone into retail, hoping to succeed in the new market economy; now he chose a product line in deference to his brother's disability. Fruit and vegetables are too heavy, he reasoned, and a clothes merchant needs two arms to measure and fold goods. Cigarettes are light, so that's what the Wang brothers stocked. During the nineteen-nineties and early two thousands, as the Wangs sold cigarettes in Ju'er Hutong, developers sold most of old Beijing. Few sections of the city were protected, in part because local government bureaus often profited from development. Whenever a hutongwas doomed, its buildings were marked with a huge painted character surrounded by a circle, like the "A" of the anarchist's graffiti:
4 Chai: "Pull down, dismantle." As developers ran rampant over the city, that character became a talismanBeijing artists riffed on the shape, and residents cracked chai jokes. At the W. C. Club, Wang Zhaoxin used to say, "We live in Chai nar." It sounded like the English word "China," but it meant "Demolish where?" Like many Beijing people I knew, Wang Zhaoxin was practical, goodhumored, and unsentimental. His generosity was well knownthe locals had nicknamed him Wang Laoshan, Good Old Wang. He always contributed more than his share to a W. C. Club barbecue, and he was always the last to leave. He used to say that it was only a matter of time before the government chai'd more buildings in our area, but he never dwelled on the future. More than four decades in Chai nar had taught him that nothing lasts forever. -------------- Good Old Wang was right about Chai nar. For years, he had predicted demolition, and, in September of 2005, when the government finally condemned his apartment building, he moved out without protest. He had already sold the cigarette shop, because the margins had fallen too low. And now there was no doubt who had been the true chairman, because the W. C. Club died as soon as he left the hutong. By then, three-quarters of old Beijing had been torn down. The remaining quarter consisted mostly of public parks and the Forbidden City. Over the years, there had been a number of protests and lawsuits about the destruction, but such disputes tended to be localized: people complained that government corruption reduced their compensation, and they didn't like being relocated to suburbs that were too distant. But it was unusual to hear an average Beijinger express concern for what was happening to the city as a whole. Few spoke in terms of architectural preservation, perhaps because the Chinese concept of the past isn't closely linked to buildings, as it is in the West. The Chinese rarely built with stone, instead replacing perishable materials periodically over the decades. The hutong essence had more to do with spirit than with structure, and this spirit often showed strongest when the neighborhood encountered some modern element: an Olympic toilet, a McDonald's franchise. Pragmatism and resourcefulness were deeply ingrained in residents like Good Old Wang, whose environment had always been fluid. The fundamental character of hutong life helped prepare for its destruction. In 2005, the Beijing government finally issued a new plan to protect the scattered old neighborhoods that remained in the north and west of downtown, including Ju'er. These hutong wouldn't be put on the market for developers to build whatever they wished, as they would have been in the past. The stated priority was to "preserve the style of the old city," and the government established a ten-member advisory board to consult on major projects. The board's members included architects, archeologists, and city planners, some of whom had publicly criticized the destruction. One board member told me that it was essentially too late, but that the new plan should at least preserve the basic layout of the few surviving hutong. Within that layout, however, gentrification was inevitablethe hutong had become so rare that they now had cachet in the new economy. The change had already begun in my neighborhood. In 2004, bars, cafs, and boutiques started moving into a quiet street that intersects Ju'er, where locals were happy to give up their homes for good prices. The businesses maintained the traditional architectural style, but they introduced a new sophistication to the Old City. Nowadays, if I'm restricted to my neighborhood I have access to Wi-Fi, folk handicrafts, and every type of mixed drink imaginable. There is a nail salon in the hutong. Somebody opened a tattoo parlor. The street venders and recyclers are still active, but they have been joined by troops of pedicab men who give "hutong tours." Many of the tourists are Chinese.
5 One recent weekend, Good Old Wang returned for a visit, and we walked through Ju'er. He showed me the place where he was born. "There's where we lived," he said, pointing at the modern compound of the Jin Ju Yuan Hotel. "That's where the temple used to be. When my parents moved in, there was still one lama left." We continued east, past an old red door that was suspended in the hutong's wall, three feet above the street. "There used to be a staircase there," he explained. "When I was a child, that was an embassy." In the nineteenth century, the compound had belonged to a Manchu prince; in the nineteen-forties, Chiang Kai-shek used it as his Beijing office; after the revolution, it was taken over by Dong Biwu, a founder of the Chinese Communist Party. In the nineteensixties, it served as the Yugoslavian Embassy. Now that all of them were goneManchus, Nationalists, Revolutionaries, Yugoslaviansthe compound was called, appropriately, the Friendship Guesthouse. That was hutong karmasites passed through countless incarnations, and always the mighty were laid low. A couple of blocks away, the family home of Wan Rong, empress to the last monarch of the Qing dynasty, had been converted into a clinic for diabetics. In Ju'er, the beautiful Western-style mansion of Rong Lu, a powerful Qing military official, had served one incarnation as the Afghanistan Embassy before becoming what it is today: the Children's Fun Publishing Co., Ltd. A huge portrait of Mickey Mouse hangs above the door. Good Old Wang passed the Olympic toilet ("It's a lot less cluttered than when I was here," he observed), and then we came to the nondescript three-story building where he had lived since 1969. It wasn't a historic structure, which was why it had been approved for demolition. The electricity and the heat had been cut off; we walked upstairs into an abandoned hallway. "This was my room when I was first married," he said, stopping at a door. "Nineteen eighty-seven." His brother had lost his arm that year. We continued down the hall, to the apartment where Wang had lived most recently, with his wife, his daughter, his father, and his brother. The girl's drawings still decorated the walls: a sketch of a horse, the English phrase "Merry Christmas." "This is where the TV was," he said. "That's where my father slept. My brother slept there." The family had dispersed; the father and brother now live in a hutong to the north; Good Old Wang, his wife, and their daughter are using the home of a relative who is out of town. As compensation for the condemned apartment, Good Old Wang was given a small section of a decrepit building near the Drum Tower. He hoped to fix it up in the spring. Outside, I asked him if it had been hard to leave the hutong after nearly half a century. He thought for a moment. "You know, lots of events happened while I lived here," he said. "And maybe there were more sad events than happy events." On the way out, we passed an ad for the Beijing Great Millennium Trading Co., Ltd. Later that day, returning home, I saw a line of pedicabs: Chinese tourists, bundled against the cold, cameras in hand as they cruised the ancient street.
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1 The essay Hutong Karma by Peter Hessler illuminates the deep relationship between place particularly the alleyway known as Little Juer and personal ... View the full answer
