Another Hutong Exploration

Made another trip to the hutongs today because I had extended my residency and changed my visa status. So I had to go to the police station to re-register my residency. While there, I struck up a conversation with the two registrar ladies asking how I should go about finding a hutong to live in. They warmed up to me quickly to my surprise, as they recognized me from the previous visit and filled me in on hutongs to visit, how to check them up online and getting a chinese friend to initiate the dealings for me with real estate agents to I don’t get screwed. In the end, the lady who gave me the hardest time when I first walked in a month ago asked me to be her ‘MSN friend’ (which is the main form of internet chat between friends in China)! It was a surprise. Never know when I might need a helping hand with sticky situations, I guess.

While making my way out of the hutong, I once again picked up enough courage to stop and walk into more 四合院( 4 walled compounds) to wander around. There were all types. Some that were really old. Many looked daunting from the outside but seemed cozy once I peaked through the dusty windows. Most were very small living spaces. I guess it's because hundreds of years ago, the bedroom was only used for sleeping. Everything else took place outside in the open spaces of the courtyards. There was minimal effort at interior or exterior decoration and most of the walls were carelessly stacked with boxes covered in dust. Some were just drop dead adorable, clean and pristine with nicely kept miniature gardens in the compounds where I could imagine people sitting around as kids play in the evenings. What I mostly appreciated was how these hutongs were built around the trees that used to grow there hundreds of years ago. It was common to see a huge tall tree just outside the entryway or around the exterior of the apartment wall. As it was mid afternoon, many of the doors were locked as people were at work. So it was mostly elderly ones home eating, sitting around or watching TV. And to be honest, the public toilets I cycled past didn’t stink as I thought they would, as they are all manned 24/7 by a cleaning person.

As living spaces are scarce, furniture used are geared towards multipurpose use, such as fold-up tables that can be used for dinner, then put away and hardback beds, (some with coal hearths underneath to keep warm in the winter) that are used for sleeping as well as sitting.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that people were very chatty and literally stopped what they were doing to just chat and tell me about life in the hutongs. I couldn’t help comparing how ‘unfriendly’ (for lack of a better word) people are around the home environments I’m used to, myself included. I wondered if I would do the same with a total stranger the way these people were. It’s such an unbelievably different lifestyle.

I was told most people these days preferred to live in the high rises now so it would be easy to find one. I walked into a beautiful one and when I asked this man walking in if he knew of any rooms for rent, he quietly and kindly told me this particular one was full and casually walked on. I watched him as he walked away. He was not at all rushed, suspicious or irritated that there was a stranger standing in his home. Again, I couldn’t help wondering how differently I would react to finding a stranger hanging around my home, let alone someone right at my doorstep! It was humbling.

Once, turned a corner and saw an open door so I popped my head in to have a look and saw a pretty young female in her late 20s on her computer. She turned to look at me, asked me who I was and went back to typing on the keyboard. I told her that I was just looking around, having just arrived from the States, and braced myself for a nasty response for intruding her private space. Instead, her face relaxed and she said, “Oh! OK then”, as if this was the least of all evils she could be bothered to concern herself with. When I asked if I could take some pictures, she just said, “Sure,” and continued typing. As I snapped away outside, she came out to the entryway of her room and invited me to come in and sit, mentioning that it was far too hot to be standing outside. As I walked in, she calmly pushed the only chair in the room towards me (which was the computer chair she was sitting on earlier) and sat down on the only other sitting furniture in the room - her bed. Then told me I could take my time looking around. The room was furnished with plain necessities. About 14sqm wide(10x10 ft), there was a queen sized plain wooden bed against one wall, an air conditioner above, and a double tiered computer table big enough for a desktop computer, a printer and a bunch of stationery and cigarette boxes strewn about. The walls were all white except the one with the doorway, half of which had square 3x3ft red wooden window panels looking like they’d been that way since hundreds of years ago. There were 2 huge cupboards of clothes in the adjoining room which was a little smaller but otherwise empty. That room was then also adjoined to another smaller room with a full sized bed. Across from these 3 adjoining rooms, the other wall hosted a small kitchen no bigger than 10sqm with a shelf of cooking ware and ingredient bottles, a sink, a small table and a small double top stove. This particular apartment was a lot newer than the older ones I've seen earlier. The walls looked like they had been recently renovation. They were clean and white. It was a lot more livable...for me. So there it was, we ended up chatting for the next half hour this way. Mostly, it was her sharing with me about how different life was in the hutong to what I was probably used to, her friends who had gone overseas to study and their experiences, the fragile state of the economy globally, finding work in Beijing as a foreigner, living in Beijing as opposed to living in other cities in China, among other things. If I hadn’t excused myself, she’d probably have kept me there till dinner time! In retrospect, though I had excused myself saying I'd visit again soon, I realize that we never even asked each other's names!

I learned that she was a Management graduate from the University of Melbourne. She talked about how neighbors in hutongs shared the power lines so there was a conscious effort among people not to blow it out by using appliances that consumed a lot of electricity and to pay bills on time to not hassle neighbors for outages. One could shower and cook indoors. However, the toilet facilities were outside. She talked about the reduced privacy in these settings, contrasted with the advantages of communal living style where neighbors looked out for other neighbors and put away clothes for each other if it rained and people were at work, for example. Another advantage she liked about living in these ground level homes was the convenience of growing plants. She constantly reminded me to expect that life would be vastly different and to be ready for challenges every step along the way, as the buildings were older and there would be obstacles for doing certain things that we take for granted daily. For example, she talked about her frustration in installing simple curtain hangers for her windows from struggling to hammer nails into the plastered brick and stone walls instead of the composite walls of our average modern high rises.

She told me her rent was 150Y a month because this apartment was still in the name of her grandfather who’d lived there all his life. Up until the early 1980s, before the government stopped subsidized living in China, people paid a mere 2Y/month for rent. So when cheap private housing was available in the mid 1980s, many people still preferred to live in the old government sponsored housing for this reason. Today, an apartment this size for someone like me would be around 800Y (US$120). A friend of hers just rented one like this for 1000Y (US$150). Dirt cheap by American standards.

As I listened, I heard her voicing her concerns of how different it was and yet her choice to live communally, as opposed to life in the high rise buildings her parents were living in; her appreciation for this living environment ‘among’ people as opposed to ‘away’ from people; being cognizant of other neighbors and to a certain degree, responsibility towards others; her ‘can do’ attitude towards handling obstacles and knowing that they somehow get dealt with and life moves on. Generally, it’s a simpler attitude towards life. It was freeing to think of living in such a basic terms, uncluttered by all the ‘necessities’ I’d become used to - the vast empty spaces, tidyness to the extreme, the huge flat screen TV, the sound system and high quality speakers, big expensive cabinetry, reliable insulation, unique electronic appliances, etc. And most of all, to not be tied down to the constant concern about getting all these expensive goods damaged or stolen. It made me reconsider what 'necessities' are for comfort and being happy. Is it really about everything money can buy or is it more about meaningful human connections? Or do we consume these 'toys' to replace a certain emptiness that's lost in the process of modernization, thereby isolating us even further from each other.

Despite the vast change in lifestyle, I’m still open to trying it once in my life. If I didn’t, I’d always wonder what I could have learnt from it; what memories I could have taken with me; and more importantly, what I could have learnt about myself. And perhaps this opportunity will never come again. Isn’t it just human nature to be wary and distrusting of the unknown? Especially when it comes to something so vastly different and personal in nature. I’m curious about my ability to cope, as much as I’m confident of my ability to adapt quickly. On the other hand, isn’t it just human nature to somehow survive? I know one thing for sure. If I do pull it off, I know I’ll look back on my life one day and be very proud of myself. Perhaps I could find my own little surrogate Chinese ‘family’ in my neighbors, albeit on a micro scale in this vast country. Forget about the ‘Survivor’ series with fake obstacles. This would be true ‘Surviving’.

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