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.