pieces of home

"tear down"

Shikumen houses

inside

Whenever I would visit my grandmother in her Chinatown apartment in New York, she would often tell me stories about her life right before she and her sister left China for America at age twelve. She told me how the boat she was on got robbed by pirates, and how she was so scared that before they could take anything from her, she took the only gold coin she had and threw it overboard into the dark waters below. And the look that she and her father, my great grandfather, shared right before she left, not knowing if she would ever see him again; she told me that, too, but in fewer words. One of her most vivid memories is of the last night she spent in her village in Guangzhou. She went around her house, touching every piece of furniture and every object. This was so she would never forget the things that defined her home and herself, and she never did forget.

Last Saturday I went on a trip with my photography class to a neighborhood in Shanghai where some Shikumen houses still remain. The area feels almost like an inverted city, with the Shikumen buildings, usually no taller than 3 storys, in the middle and highrises surrounding them. For a moment you can feel disoriented. These houses, whose architecture is a mixture of Western and Chinese influence, were built from the late 19^th century and into the early 20^th century. And they are beautiful, these elegant, strong, stoic structures. They emanate an intimacy that you feel immediately when you wander within its narrow walkways, surrounded by stone walls on both sides.

An old woman allowed us inside her home and gave us a tour of one of these buildings. Small hanging lamps and the occasional bare bulb lit the way upstairs as we walked on squares of beautiful painted tiles. Other houses in the neighborhood are not as lucky, though. The actual plan is for most of the Shikumen houses to be torn down, so modern residential towers can take their place. Many houses are mere skeletons that look as if they could crumble at your touch, and rooms once occupied by humans now have garbage to take up floor space. Some houses are partially torn down, framed by the beams of those who once stood before them. There was life made here once, and a place someone called home. A few families still reside in these houses, even as ones are being torn down across the street from them.

Years from now, when these families have probably been forced to move out, will they come back to see what has become of their home? Maybe, like some sort of archeological dig, they would eventually uncover traces of a life they left behind. They would examine these old objects, brushing off layer after layer of dust, all the while measuring the age of its abandonment. One down, on to the next. Look at what used to be here, what we used to be. But I don’t think those families would come back. Maybe they, like my grandmother, touched every object, every piece of furniture, every texture of the wall before they left what they had always known, the image and the feeling imprinted in their minds and on the tips of their fingers. Maybe to return would mean to start rubbing the lines, blurring the image that was perfectly there.

When my grandmother was twelve years old, she left for America and never returned. She never wanted to. She married at twenty, and started a family and a home. Sometimes she and I, in her apartment on the twenty-seventh floor, will look out the window onto lower Manhattan, just as the lights of the Brooklyn Bridge turn on and the city continues to stay awake. It is difficult to have to leave home and never come back, but it is also possible to make a new home. I don’t know how long it takes, perhaps it takes a very, very long time to go somewhere else and be able to say, “This is my home now.” But I hope those who must leave their Shikumen homes imprint in their minds the image, feel, and scent of where they are now.  So wherever they go, no matter how far they must travel, this will go with them, because it should be a part of them. When the heart has been invested in a place, the mind and the memory tend to work a little harder. 

on the place that i am in

a barber shop beneath an overpass

Last semester when I was at a literary festival in New York, I heard an author say that she was not able to truly write about America until she left America. Sometimes I wonder if that could be the case for me as well. I have been in China for a little over a month now, but the longer I have stayed here, the harder it has become for me to write about China.

Before I arrived in Shanghai, I think I had this certain “idea” of China from all of the documentaries I watched and news articles I read. On the plane headed to Pudong International Airport, I had my nose stuck inside The Economist for a large duration of the trip. “China’s Paradox of Prosperity” was the title of the issue, which had a new weekly section solely dedicated to China. I underlined and dog-eared articles I deemed epic, as if I were searching for some code that was hidden in the text. And I thought I had cracked that code, too. As flight UA-87 taxied to the terminal, I had come to a conclusion: China needed to be saved. But every day I feel that my imagined China is rapidly being revised. All of those words and phrases that I safely tucked into my mental pocket when I read about China—“rapid development,” “state capitalism,” “censorship,” “disparity”—are getting stale. I am beginning to grow tired of them.

On days when I don't have too many classes, I have gotten into the habit of wandering around the neighborhoods of Shanghai, camera in hand, with no destination in mind. And whenever I return back from these trips, I feel those economic terms and euphemisms begin to slip away and get replaced by images instead. Birds and building, dirt and concrete, highway and river, brick and clothesline. These are the elements upon which this city has been built. Sure, there is “rapid development” everywhere. But when you actually stand beneath a concrete and steel structure and look up, the term “rapid development” doesn’t seem so accurate anymore. You feel small, but at the same time you are in complete awe that something so huge can be built by human hands.

But maybe they are right, all of those people who write for The Economist or report for Planet Money. China is a country of paradox and disparity. But the paradox I see is the one between the China I saw in America and the China I see here, now. Before, China was just a landmass with a lot of people, with problems that could be solved if only given a healthy dose of American democracy. This is what I thought before. But now I realize how silly that sounds. China has shown me that I am no missionary, and it doesn’t need saving. China is a complicated country, and the longer I have been here, the more infatuated I have become with this place. I feel myself being absorbed into the concrete walls, the clotheslines, rivers, bikes, and air, and my idea of China is gradually getting rewritten. Who knows if after I return America, only then will I be able to truly write about China. But for now, I think I’ll let myself be absorbed into this place. 

finding light

a circular pedestrian walkway 

Standing guard

The Oriental Pearl Tower in a puddle

Last weekend I explored Pudong, the east side of Shanghai. We went there at night, so the entire area felt a little bit like an empty amusement park. But even with the lack of visible stars in the Shanghai sky, these lights try to make up for it. They are an artificial galaxy, beautiful and lonely.