Slate.Com Table of Contents Fighting Words the Man Who Kept on Writing
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Slate.com Table of Contents fighting words The Man Who Kept On Writing five-ring circus Advanced Search Hot SI Medal Pick: Im Over Park in Men's Archery books five-ring circus The Vanishing City The 2008 Olympics books five-ring circus Ready, Get Self, Go! China Goes for (All of) the Gold books five-ring circus The Party vs. the People The Beijing Olympics: a Visitors' Guide books five-ring circus China's Tell-Nothing Ethos Summer Olympics Disaster Guide: Opening Ceremony Edition chatterbox five-ring circus The Adventures of Jimmyflathead Full Speedo Ahead chatterbox food When "Skinny" Means "Black" Beyond Wontons corrections foreigners Corrections Death of a Writer culturebox gabfest Dude, You Stole My Article The Risky Man Gabfest culturebox human nature "Baboons Are Simply Too Small for Leopard Bait" The Price of Survival dear prudence human nature Hubby's My Future Step-Brother Breast-Feeding Kills did you see this? human nature The Seinfeld Reunion Show, 2027 Fast-Food Conflation dispatches map the candidates On the Front Lines of the Global Food Crisis Vacation Eve dvd extras moneybox Candid Camelot Harming Farming explainer moneybox Will Respirators Help Our Olympic Athletes? Always Dumb Politics. Always Wal-Mart. explainer moneybox Why Do Banks Fail on Fridays? America's Smartest Banker explainer movies Can You Stockpile Gasoline? Eminently Quaffable explainer movies Can My Shrink Rat Me Out? Bud Movie faith-based other magazines Let the God Games Begin Watch Out, Michael Moore Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC 1/85 podcasts today's business press R. Kelly: the Audio Book Beware of Cheap Oil poem today's business press "The Intention of Things" Goodbye Subprime, Hello Prime politics today's papers Lifehacking for Candidates Prison Break politics today's papers No Penalty Case Closed? reading list today's papers Olympic Marathon Gonzalez's Eleven recycled today's papers August A Farewell to Arms shopping today's papers You Are Now Free To Move Your Kid About the Country Beyond Subprime slate fare today's papers Introducing the SlateOlympics Twitter Feed The Deported slate v today's papers The Chinese Are Coming! Scientific Inquiry slate v war stories Damned Spot: Drilling McCain on Oil Annual General Meeting slate v webhead Bookmark: Pressure Kicker The Lazy Man's Guide to Web 2.0 technology webhead The Anthrax Truth Movement How To Talk to a Search Engine technology Wandering Through the Desert With Windows television Gangsta Pap Advanced Search Friday, October 19, 2001, at 6:39 PM ET the audio book club The Audio Book Club on Brideshead Revisited the chat room books Broken Windows The Vanishing City the green lantern The life and death of Beijing's alleys. Video Stores vs. Online Rentals By Rob Gifford Thursday, August 7, 2008, at 6:50 AM ET today's business press China Slows Down Once upon a time Beijing, like China, knew what it today's business press Chrysler Turning Japanese was. It was static, it was poor, but in the minds of its mandarins, it was a brilliant civilization, and it today's business press was the center of the world. Peasant revolutions, Stocks Roar Back new emperors, nomadic invaders came and went, but the Celestial City remained the same, its order Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC 2/85 set in stone, as immovable as the walls of the city divided up among the masses as land and property itself. and housing were nationalized. But the hutong themselves remained, saved by the continuing Beijing as we know it today—including its famous poverty of a country that could not afford to hutong, or alleyways—was initially built by Kublai destroy any form of livable housing. Khan, the great Mongol emperor, in the 13th century. Then, between 1405 and 1421, the Yongle It is only now, in the last 10 years, with Mao long emperor of the Ming dynasty supervised the dead and gone, that the Beijing government has construction of the Forbidden City, where he and set about destroying the city's famous lanes. Their successive emperors would reside. This beautifully central location has made them prime real estate, symmetrical edifice—formidable, impenetrable, and many have been demolished to make way for ordered—symbolized the harmony of the capital, shiny new office buildings and apartment blocks for balancing Heaven and Earth. the emergent middle classes. The lanes that survived so much else could not survive the assault But it was in those Mongol-built hutong outside the of the market. imperial city where real life went on. There were richer hutong neighborhoods and poorer ones, but Residents are compensated for their homes, but most were made up of courtyard houses, walled not enough to buy an apartment in the block that and enclosed, the architecture mirroring the is then constructed on their land. So, most people inward-looking nature of Chinese civilization. Many are forced to relocate to the farthest outskirts of of the narrow lanes were arranged in grids, running the city. Many have welcomed the upgrade—the from east to west, and, though the houses were offer of an apartment with heating and indoor enclosed, they formed close-knit communities. plumbing—but some have resisted, holding out for Children played out in the lanes, and the shouts of more compensation. They hold residents' meetings vendors selling their wares echoed off the and attend public forums to discuss how some of crumbling brick walls along the alley. Life for the hutong can be saved. But the combined power centuries in Beijing was lived very close to the of the Communist Party and the wealthy real- ground. estate developers is always too great for the little people to resist, and everyone is forced out in the Westerners, arriving in large numbers for the first end. time in the 19th century, were unimpressed. "There is not a more squalid collection of houses in an There were 7,000 hutong in 1949; now there are Arab village or in the old City of Limerick," wrote a fewer than 1,300. More than 1 million residents out Western journalist in 1861. They set about trying of a population of some 17 million were evicted to change Beijing, as they set about trying to prize between 1990 and 2007, as the old parts of the China open to the outside world. city were razed. It has all been part of the $22 billion makeover to change Beijing's identity Slowly, reluctantly, the city, like the country, forever and to make the 2008 Olympic capital a began to change as it searched for a new, modern faster, higher, and stronger city. identity. In the early 20th century, railroads, telegraph lines, tarmac roads, and street lighting Michael Meyer records this orgy of destruction and began to appear. But the hutong remained, largely the ongoing struggle for a new identity in his untouched even through the Japanese occupation excellent book The Last Days of Old Beijing. Like of the 1930s. The Communist Party, after its Peter Hessler's River Town, it is a haunting portrait conquest of China in 1949, launched an assault on of the interaction between change and everything old, as it pushed toward its new changelessness in China. Meyer, like Hessler, was utopia—a modern, proletarian identity. It wrenched a Peace Corps volunteer in southwest China in the the Chinese from their obsession with the past, mid-1990s, and on arriving in Beijing a few years tearing down the ancient city walls, and turning the later, he says it was "love at first sight." Indeed his temples into barracks and workshops. New book reads like a love letter to the hutongs and to utilitarian apartment blocks were constructed Old Beijing itself, a snapshot snatched before the around Beijing, and old hutong courtyards were scene disappears for ever. Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC 3/85 For two years, while he volunteered as a full-time meetings and public forums. The Hand just erased English teacher in a local school, his home was two and drew, erased and drew." small rooms without a bathroom in a hutong in Dazhalan, one of Beijing's oldest and poorest The main characters are also the Dazhalan hutong neighborhoods. This, writes Meyer, is one of the themselves—the living, breathing communities that world's densest urban environments, half a square are disappearing. As the traditional courtyard mile made up of hundreds of alleyways housing houses are destroyed, the residents are forced to "57,000 people, including one foreigner." exchange their close-knit, horizontal existence for the vertical loneliness of a high-rise apartment on In The Last Days of Old Beijing, you can smell the the outskirts of the city. Meyer beautifully dissects public latrines. You can taste the dust in the lanes the tensions between tradition and modernity in and feel the claustrophobia. You can hear the the minds of the Chinese people and examines the shouts of the recyclers as they prowl the identity crisis that still persists, for Beijing, and for alleyways, collecting plastic bottles and cardboard. China. A question lingers throughout the book: The locals have a name for the bearded American How much of your history should you hold onto, in their midst—Little Plumblossom—and adopt him and how much should you leave behind? as one of their own. In return, he details their lives as they deal with the change all around them. Perhaps it will all work out. You feel that, in the end, Michael Meyer thinks it will. Perhaps Dazhalan is a world unto itself, partially insulated Beijingers will find the balance between the past from the convulsions taking place in the wider city and the present and the future, and the Chinese but aware that it lives on borrowed time.