I find him interesting in his amorphous and fluid form and interpretation of art, connecting what we think of as “Art” with unconvention and with blogging and microblogging (i.e. Twitter and very brief forms of connecting online), combining his artistic impulses with his gift for words, writing pithy and prophetic bits. That’s a kind of artistry I greatly admire, especially in the face of the Chinese State And All Its Men. There is quite a difference–and a kind of bold bravery I cannot imagine–between being an artist in a free and functioning democracy and being an outspoken artist in a state which does not value or embrace free speech, open access to information, or the fullest extent of self-expression–even if it means criticizing the men upstairs.

In his Time interview he was asked “What would you like to see in China?” This was part of his brilliantly explained answer:

We need clear rules to play the game. We need to have respect for the law. If you play a chess game but after two or three moves you change the rules, how can people play with you? Of course you will win, but after 60 years you will still be a bad chess player because you never meet anyone who can challenge you. What kind of game is that? Is it interesting? I’m sure the people who put me in jail, they’re so tired. This game is not right, but who is going to say, ‘Hey, let’s play fairly’?

I’ve been studying China, Chinese politics, language, culture and history, for more than six years now, and my own thoughts on its political system have shifted at times between the two most polar ends of the argument: that either the “Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics” official plan has merit, is working, can improve and continue; or that China will inevitably give way democracy because it has already given much up to a free market economic system, and its people still hold memories of the extreme poverty and problems that stemmed from early plans in the early years after the Communist Revolution. People–around the world–have spent much time waxing on the future of China’s political system. No one has explained its crucial fissure in its system so well as Ai Weiwei, himself a son of China, and the actual son of a revolutionary poet.

“There’s always been a tendency to see a place like China in very political terms. I think this is partly because it’s a communist country, it’s run by the Communist Party. And from my perspective, living in China, starting especially the way that I started, as a Peace Corps volunteer, in a small community, teaching in a small college, it gave me a very different starting point. And I really wanted to write about ordinary people in China. I didn’t want to start with an issue, or start with a political idea, I wanted to start with an individual, start with a community.”

Peter Hessler on the job as a journalist in China

Hessler is a journalist, that is an important distinction; but he writes based in a historical context, referencing the past at each step, and this is also valuable. (I will fight with people who dismiss great books written by journalists.)

Bahadur Shah Zafar, the titular "last emperor," in a complicated era in Indian and British history

I am always reminded of British writer and historian William Dalrymple’s  fantastic skill for emphasizing the individual’s experience of history, as he does in The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857,  which keeps the reader vividly engaged by showing us the Indian Rebellion of 1857 through the eyes of several key player on the ground. I have never read a book of history in which I felt so deeply connected to the characters of the era, and when they all begin falling at the hands of their enemies, I had a true emotional reaction to the destruction of this city and these lives. I’ve heard he does the same thing in one of his other works, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth Century India.  An inspiring example–though not without his critiques–of this kind of engaging historical writing.

“Shop ’til you drop” probably isn’t what Mao Zedong had in mind during the years he was in power, as Saporito points out in his piece on the Chinese middle class, a spending class that precariously faces what could wind up saving the global economy–or busting it even further.

What China is planning is a shift away from export-based industry to a consumer-spending based system, but it will not be easy and there are plenty of potential hiccups involved in fundamentally shifting an economy of 1.7 billion people. But the middle class of that country, which they are projecting to be 70 percent of the population by 2020, could be the saviors of the global economic structure; they have immense capacity for spending, a huge group like that.

Western- and Chinese-based companies combine to create the giant metropoles that dot China. This is downtown Zhengzhou, whose population was 8 million in 2007.

Companies have known for years that the developing world was an important place for them to seek new markets for their goods. Couple that with a recession across the West and other developed nations, and you see a kind of exodus now, towards those booming, growing, expansive markets–the new consumers who have their eyes on fancy goods. Gap, the American jeans company, is closing twenty percent of its U.S. stores and tripling the number it has in China.

Saporito’s most memorable bit:

If successful, the shift to consumer spending will take a good chunk of the weight of the global economy off the shoulders of American consumers and make China a gotta-be-there market for everything from video games to surgical tools to potato chips. “This generation, these strivers, they will be the saviors of the global economy,” says Tim Minges, chairman of the greater China region for PepsiCo, which is pouring billions into China in anticipation of that growth. “I really do think the Chinese middle class will be like the U.S. baby boomers.”

I, for one, am putting my faith in this Chinese middle class, as the new version of the U.S.’s baby boomers, to save us all.

Shopping with other study abroad girls at an 8-story mall in Shanghai. (We were excited because they actually took credit/debit cards in Shanghai.)

I’ve begun the process of cold-calling a list of strangers, to me, nothing more than a series of names and phone numbers that I found on a national organization’s Atlanta chapter site. And to them, I am a stranger asking to be let into their lives, who is asking to hear their stories, often quite personal and emotional. I am asking, after all, about the process of adopting their own children. This is a very strange thing to explain in a message on an answering machine to a person you’ve never spoken to.

And in several cases, I’ve had kids answer the phone, and take the message. This is even stranger, having to summarize in a brief sentence or series of key words to a child or teenager why this random graduate student wants to talk to their mother. (Note: It’s about them. Talk about awkward to explain.) “My name is Jessie, I’m a graduated student at Georgia State, and I want to talk to your mom about an oral history project I am starting, on families who’ve adopted children from China.” Hmm, random, indeed.

The first time I dialed a number, I was so thankful it was no longer in service, because I slammed the phone down and felt my heart rate come back down from through-the-roof heights. A few deep breaths, and onto name #2 on the list. Many calls later, I am slowly but surely reaching out to some families. All in its own time, I am in no hurry, and want these families to feel they can respond to my request in time. We’re all busy people.

At the risk of seeming creepy, I do take pictures of adorable children when visiting foreign countries. China is no exception. (Luoyuang, China, May 2007)

This is, by the way, preliminary work for what will be my master’s capstone project: an oral history series and podcast series, compiled and stored on a website that also allows for interaction and visitor submissions, on the stories and histories of Metro Atlanta families who have adopted daughters from China. This enormous diaspora of Chinese girls has spread far across the world, and Atlanta is just one corner of that vast space. This community, the girls and their adoptive (and biological) families, are part of an important historical event, beginning largely in the early 1990s and reaching a peak around 1999 – 2005, and waning in recent years as the process has become extremely cumbersome and slow for adoptive families. This twenty-odd-year period marks an important occurrence in China-U.S. relations that reaches directly into the homes of American families whose families have changed forever because of it; and I want to study this in that historical context, by compiling the oral histories of those living it.

To do this, I’ve had to muster up some courage I haven’t used since my days in student journalism–when it was nothing to phone a stranger and ask them some questions.

Hula-hoop skills at Best International, a bilingual elementary school

But oral histories are by nature very intense, quite distinct from a journalistic effort. And it has been thrilling so far, to find what’s at the other end of the line, when you call someone out of the blue–a total stranger–and ask them about something like the experience of adopting their own child.

Exhilaration even more enormous than calling as a journalist. No, I’m not a reporter, I’m a historian, and I want to record your oral history. Just as we have talked about in class, people immediately begin to question you (“How did you get my number?”), and question themselves, retrospect on their own life–”I haven’t done anything important.” But they have and that’s the point of oral histories. They are a part of history.

I am awestruck all over again, every time I think of the phone call I received last night, in return to one of my messages left with a woman’s daughter. She was rightfully questioning of me, but I clearly passed the test, because she became so open and willing and engaging, by the time I hung up with her my jaw was literally hanging open. I sat in shock in the driver’s seat of my car.

This family has an extraordinary part in the history of Chinese adoptions, from a very early point in the larger narrative timeline. Each of their three daughters is from China, adopted in the 1990s. I have researched this process and read books and articles, and I have never heard of a family like this, ever. And they are part of the exact Metro Atlanta community that I so want to document. I absolutely cannot wait to speak with her further, and collect her story (stories, for sure).

There is a huge difference between theorizing and structuring and dreaming up a plan, a project, and executing it–and making the final product effective, interesting, helpful to participants and the larger public. Without knowing who is out there to talk to, I had no idea if this would even work. I now feel that it is not only possible, but it has the potential of being extremely fruitful. The families who have adopted from China are an extraordinarily connected and close-knit community, across the nation. I hope this small project can somehow contribute to those within that cross-national community, and inspire other initiatives. It’s an important international event that deserves to be contemplated in its proper historical context. I’m so excited to bring us a step closer to doing this.

This happened to me when I read The Kite Runner. I would find myself laying on my bed, engrossed in the story of two young boys whose lives were forever impacted by the wars, conflicts, and tragedies that have befallen Afghanistan, and I would suddenly weep thinking of its enormity. I would literally cry for Afghanistan, big and small. It happened as well in the movie True Grit–which still kind of mystifies even me. I mean in the last sixty seconds, when the little whippersnapper girl, all grown up, visits a ruff and tumble landscape and inquires about her old travel partner, Rooster Cogburn, and it is established that he has since passed away. Their whole story culminated in my mind, and I was overcome, to tears.

I guess this is why, from a young age and with a big imagination, I have always been drawn to good stories, and long wanted to create them myself as well. I adamantly wanted to make movies–write, direct, etc.–that was what I told people in high school. I also wanted to be a journalist. I now have a history degree and want to tell stories in museums, and hopefully in books of my own. These are all careers, ways of storytelling, coming from this same spout of emotion that rests inside me, ready to well up anytime some sort of meaningful conclusion, resolution, decision, gesture, or tragedy has been proffered in a story. And in the grand tradition of learning, we discover more of the world that we just can’t begin to fathom; we know that in fact, the more we learn, the less we can really ever know. I claim to know a little bit about a few things, but man, the world is big.

I just finished reading a perfect summer book. I have referenced it several times lately, because it is about a 22-year-old fresh college graduate who takes off for China in 1986, and discovers a lot of things about herself–and many of those things mirrored in stark and hilarious ways insights I had about myself when I traveled to China as well (but in 2007, to a vastly different country). Susan Jane Gilman has gone on to do a lot of awesome things since her mid-eighties escapades, working as a journalist and living abroad now.

But her recounting of the life of a Chinese woman that she met on her memorable trek, and reunited with on a visit in 2005, brought the tears. She writes about how even when they bonded in the ’80s, she knew (she assumed) that Lisa, this young woman the same age as her, would have a very linear life, one that had almost none of the potential that her own, Gilman’s, could have, because of where she lived in the world. As it turns out, Lisa grew her small restaurant into a series of businesses in Yangshuo, China, and is now referred to as “an institution” in Lonely Planet guidebooks on China. She had coffee with President Clinton when he visited her restaurant and served on a delegation that welcomed him to China in the late nineties. She has gone farther than Gilman ever expected or could have dreamed. But she has still not the opportunities as this visiting American; as of 2005, she still cannot travel independently abroad, say, perhaps to visit her friend Gilman in Switzerland. Her whole story brings me to tears. And what makes me the most emotional, I think, is our own assumptions, the things an American might think or assume about anyone else. Assuming that a 22-year old Chinese woman would be destined to live out her life in servitude to her husband, with one child, cooking pancakes for foreigners and backpackers in Yangshuo with no foreseeable economic or lifestyle opportunities beyond that.

In the whole book, there is so much drama, so many insane travel antics that occur, yet here I am bawling at the very end over a small reunion of two fleeting friends, and over the complicated and sometimes tragic things we assume, learn, and discover about one another in this wide world. The larger plot line of her time in China, actually, has not ended in resolution, and is rather bittersweet. But in this little subplot, here, we can rejoice in the wonder, in the sadness, in the immense emotion that real, raw, and meaningful stories provide us.

I believe they are the lifeblood of our existence as humans, propelling us forward, reminding us to believe that we can be part of incredible things. Incredible stories.

(Even if, sometimes, they are made up inside out brains. Fiction has such enormous ability to transport us. I am jealous of people who can write it.)

But I hadn’t looked at it in a while, and so recently I checked back on it, and found a new publication. Susan Jane Gilman’s memoir and travelogue of her travels in China, Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven was there, in which she divulges the post-college culture and travel shock that she and her college buddy received when they headed off to China in 1986–then basically still a closed state, for all intents and purposes, and relatively untraveled by the modern American. I immediately loved her candid, honest descriptions of the way travel on your own, for the first time, really feels. (“Not at all triumphant.”)

A Nanjing street through my own camera, 2007

I read two chapters while sitting in the bookstore, ignoring the books I should have been using to do research for summer classes. Of course, as soon as I need to read about Cuba, I want to read about China. But Gilman’s narrative has been absolutely engaging, and very funny.

I wanted to share one bit, that rings so true, on the hubris, the adventure-seeking, and the irony behind The Backpacker. That timeless first-world traveler who seeks the true thrills in life. She muses on this very thought (an irony I think about often) while describing the bar scene she has found in Beijing. After three weeks of travel through southern China, Gilman and her friend arrive in Beijing and head out on their first night to toast the kind strangers who have helped them during the day, when their bicycles broke down a number of times while traversing the city. To celebrate, they wind up at the same bar as many of the other backpackers in the city, all of whom begin a story-telling competition to determine, without actually saying so, who is the most hardcore, who has traveled in the worst conditions, so as to win some sort of invented (but totally real, to them) honor among the crowd.

Soon we were all vying to establish our backpacker’ street cred, to prove how intrepidly we’d been traveling, how much discomfort we’d incurred at how little expense. The irony of this was wholly lost on us. We were too young and myopic to recognize the perversity of a logic that equates voluntary deprivation with authentic experience. We thought that by wearing burlap pajamas, contracting intestinal parasites, and opting to ride in third class with “the people,” we were somehow being less Western and more Asian. It never seemed to occur to us that only privileged Westerners travel to developing countries in the first place, then use them as playgrounds and laboratories for their own enrichment. Only privileged Westerners consider it a badge of honor to forsake modern amenities for a two-dollar-a-night roach-infested guesthouse. Only privileged Westerners sit around drinking beers at prices the natives can’t afford while sentimentalizing the nation’s lower standard of living and adopting it as a lifestyle.

The Asians we were seeing, of course, didn’t live famished agrarian lives due to some sort of Eastern spirituality or enlightenment. Give most of the world’s population our money and opportunity, and they weren’t going slumming at all. They were booking a Club Med vacation in Cancun and drinking a mai tai.

Granted, it was good, even admirable, that we young backpackers at least attempted to break through the barriers of culture and class to experience firsthand how people in Southeast Asia really lived. But we were kidding ourselves in thinking that we were somehow transcending our Western privileges by doing this.

She gets exactly at some of the complicated feelings I have about being a Westerner traveling in developing countries. All the same, I find them far more interesting than places like France or Greece. (Not dissing those places, by any means.) I just find so much irony in the whole thing, escaping lives we are so lucky to have, to feel something real. But then, I am so fortunate to have been given a life, a nationality, that allows me to explore far beyond my borders. So, I need to use this blessing, right? Being careful not to Orientalize anyone I encounter, along the way.

One of my favorite snapshots at the Shaolin Temple: monk on a cell phone. Don't know if he was tired or trying to be subtle...

That day was ridiculously hot; in retrospect, looking at my pictures of the Temple and the mountains and scenery, I wistfully forget this detail, preferring to wax nostalgic about the beauty of everything around me. This day traveling among the Song Mountains, between them on winding roads in a gigantic bus, remains one of the best days in my life. That is no overstatement. I was breathless the whole day over the beauty of the mountains, and I could not figure out why. As dusk approached, I realized internally that I had never actually been around mountains of any true enormity. These geographic giants gracing the backdrop of everything we did was an entirely foreign context for me.

A very poor photo of the landscape and scenery of the Zen Music Show. This does not at all do the mood or the evening justice.

Add to this the dinner we’d feasted on before the show: a traditional fare of what a monk would eat in a Buddhist monastery, eaten in a monastery that glimmered with fresh flowers, vines, and twinkle lights in its charming courtyard. I honestly do not care if the whole thing was a tourist establishment, because it did not feel this way, and the food was some of the very best I had in China. With meat out of the picture (traditional monks are vegetarian), all the sudden spices and vegetables were the delicious focus, and it was as if the two composed a symphony of flavors together, shining, instead of serving as sideline components to dinner. The vegetables were incredible, cooked perfectly. Nuts, rice, and other key dishes in the monk’s mix were also extraordinary. I realize this might have been compounded by my already-blissful feelings on the day, but even while eating the meal and when considered against every other night I ordered food in two months in China, it remains on a very short list of stand-out meals.

The traditional monk's dinner that we ate that night. On the quintessential Chinese lazy susan.

I have lessoned my outrage over time regarding this part of the Temple, as sometimes history happens and we just have to do the best we can with the tumultuous times we witness. Buildings get destroyed, and if they matter enough to the people around it at the time, they are rebuilt. But I had real issues with the way it was portrayed, as the “real thing.” The grounds and cemetery are the real thing, where generations of the kung fu masters have their final resting place. That is significant. I remember feeling a bit betrayed when they informed us that this temple was circa 1980s, about as old as me, right at the end of the whole spiel.

One small speck on my day though. All these memories were coming back to me this morning, and I took some time to reflect again on the way I felt that day, and reminded myself again that experiences like that have been vastly influential in my life as a whole. Bites of life like that are what give it so much meaning. And, I was so utterly thankful to be there, drinking in this country, this language, this landscape, so unlike my own.

Men and boys performing some amazing kung fu moves for an audience

And other boys during some downtime in their dorm courtyard

This horrible shot is the best I have conveying the HUGE lines of boys who began to flock the Shaolin Temple as we were leaving. The lines were miles long.

The courtyard of the monastery where we ate dinner that day

Ethereal feeling as dusk approached (helped along in the China way by a bit of cloudy sky)

Someone was nice enough to take this picture with their own camera, I think. As close to a pure bliss feeling as I've had. (And the coldest beer ever. It was a HOT day.)

Chinese children at Best International School, during my visit in Zhengzhou in May 2007.

Her questions, discussions, and stories resonated with me on many levels, as a woman, as a historian, as an American, as a global citizen, and as someone who feels strongly in favor of adoption. Some of the letters to her oldest daughter, written before she had ever seen her face, brought me to tears. “When we get together, you and I, I won’t really know what you’ve been through–who carried you and gave birth to you, what she first whispered to you, how long she held on to you before having to make a deep, sad decision. I am certain the loss of you will linger with her all her days,” she writes to Kelly. Evans does an incredibly poignant and thoughtful job imagining the lives and loss of the families that gave up each of her daughters, in response to the one-child policy, poverty, the persistent favoritism and preference towards having sons, and other cultural and social factors. Or, as one letter accompanying an abandoned infant said, due to “heavy pressures that are difficult to explain.”

Evans's book on the adoption experience, and more importantly, on the historical movement and what it means for the girls adopted from China.

It again rose in my mind throughout the discussion of these girls and their futures that the notion of nationality can only go so far. Jennifer Jue-Steuck, a young woman adopted from Taiwan and a PhD candidate at UCA Berkeley as of 2008, described her complicated position and experience eloquently, as “floating down like a feather to an unmapped country between ‘Chineseness’ and ‘Americanness.’” Nationality is once again called into question, as soon as you try to get at what it really means, and begin to determine what traits or characteristics render a person as having one specific tag. Return visits to China, by adopted children, yield questions. A bit of hypothetical conversation might go:

“Are you Chinese?”

“Nope, I’m American. But I was born in China.”

“Then you’re Chinese.”

“I’m Chinese-American.”

This is truly one of those times when the term is challenged most, and it enthralls me. What’s more, in the cases of Chinese-born adopted daughters, it also challenges the entire notion of family, as does any international (and domestic, for that matter) adoption. Some of my longing to adopt comes from the desire to expand and learn more about the people of this world, and most of all to provide for a child, already born, who needs me. But after reading more about the complexities, I realize it is also because the fluidity of a family that is based on human love, rather than biology alone, stabs very deeply to the core of our very natural and instinctual selves. Evans quotes an essay by adoptive father Evan Eisenberg, who writes:

Adoption urges is toward a more fluid sense of family, a broader sense of community. . . . We move into a richer environment than the nuclear family can provide. Although modern adoption remains firmly within the nuclear orbit, it is inherently a part of this richer notion of child raising, this soup of relations that may be thicker, even, than blood.

The stronger dose of this kind of interpretation of family, the better, in this world. Evans also comes to a personal realization regarding genetic inheritance and its actual impact in our lives. While her daughters do not know their biological families’ medical histories, they do exhibit interests and inclinations that, had they been biological children of theirs, would have been attributed to various family members.

When Kelly and Fanny turn out to love music, singing beautifully, taking up instruments, or dancing across the living room, it would be natural, were they our birth daughters, to credit the genetic contribution of Mark’s grandfather the accordion player, say, or my mother the dancer. Yet the process of falling completely in love with these girls has changed whatever thinking I might have had about genetic inheritance. Whatever Kelly blossoms into is completely hers. What Fanny enjoys and brings to our family is all hers alone, too. We’ll probably never know who their talents and inclinations come from or through, and it doesn’t matter.

Girls are often left in public places, like parks or markets, so that they will be promptly found and hopefully provided with chance for better lives than their biological parents felt they could offer.

Although adoption regulations have increased in China (through a 2000s-version set of social and economic forces that you can read about elsewhere), there are still millions of children, born and unborn yet, who need homes, love, parents, siblings, grandparents. The country of origin does not matter to me; China happens to be the country with the most explosive conditions, and the largest of-yet studied group of orphans. What matters are the children, and there are several unborn children who will someday need a home, who will be waiting on the other end of a winding, red thread, for me to be their mother.

And perhaps the most important lesson for the United States to learn, the one it struggles with most, is coming to honest terms with the fact that China is not a democracy. It functions as a fast-paced consumer economy, and does allow more economic freedoms today (like job choice and sometimes location of residency, for example), without really having changed its governmental system at all; much has been written on this unique breed of national existence, this “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” and so the basic system remains today–with obvious cracks and some severe humanitarian issues on its plate. America has trouble with this sometimes, this issue of engaging as an ally a country with fundamental differences from its own governmental policies.

Neither condoning nor condemning China’s policies, though, it must at least be admitted that China cannot be ignored. Without condoning their humanitarian infractions, myself and many Americans have been able to learn about the Chinese people’s language, culture, history, food, and customary idiosyncrasies; each American who speaks Mandarin Chinese is contributing positively to the larger relationship between these two economic powers, to the extent that it is hard for me to understand the neglect this language currently sees in U.S. schools. In urban areas, more is inherently available to students; but in smaller towns, like the one where I went to high school, French and Spanish are the only options, and only through the required level “two.” (Let’s not get into that larger discussion on our monolinguist nation.) Meanwhile there are 264 million children in China under the age of fourteen, going through school right now, and I’ll give you one guess what language they’re also learning. It just seems so very clear that we’re putting our own children at a disadvantage for their lifetime and their job choices, if they are unable to compete with the bilingual Chinese children who can communicate in both directions in the business and politics of the twenty-first century.

Photo by Mustafah Abdulaziz for Education Week; link to story: http://bit.ly/dz96t1

But naturally, given the menacing vision of China as an economic bully (granted, the fixed Chinese currency is a festering thorn in the side of economic negotiations and discussion), and given its less than stellar past of censorship, political freedom, and dissemination of information, there are bound to be cries of cultural infiltration: these Chinese will infect the minds of our kids! It’s Yellow Peril for a new age.

In a recent article from Education Week, this issue was explored. Some see it as accepting resources from a country who will provide language, with a heavy dose of propaganda on the side.

That dust-up caught the notice of Chester E. Finn Jr., a former education official in the Reagan administration and the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington think tank. He argues that public schools should not accept aid from the Chinese government.

“This is not an ally. This is the country on the planet from which the United States faces the largest and most worrisome long-term threats,” he said. “And for its government to be funding our schools to teach its language, I think, is an alarming and menacing development. And that our schools are welcoming this development strikes me as outrageous.”

Countering this, some educators see its value for the future or global relations, as well as for the schoolkids.

“It’s a great opportunity,” William C. Harrison, who chairs the North Carolina state board of education, said of his state’s program, to which China is expected to supply more than $5 million in direct aid and “in kind” services. “The best way to become globally competitive is to develop an understanding of those with whom you compete, being able to communicate with them, and being able to collaborate with them.”

He added: “We’re looking at the number-two economy in the world with prospects to be number one. … I think it’s in our best interest to develop positive relationships.”

The key lies somewhere in the balance of being economic allies while respecting differences; we don’t have the best reputation with that. Shortsightedness now will have a crippling effect on our country’s standing in the future, and the people leading it then will be the ones in school now, learning minimal Spanish and French. Our world will look mighty different then; can we find those areas of change now, and adapt?

UPDATE 12/9/2010: Here is another article on America’s trials and tribulations in building a Chinese language program in K-12 schools. From Newsweek: “America’s Chinese Problem”

The communal courtyard shared by several families

This third one sprung up in my mind as I arrived in Beijing with a study abroad group in May 2007, and I even got to see one of these tight-knit and close-quartered communities myself, with part of what I’m sure was a choreographed tour for tourists. This didn’t matter so much to me, as the hutong was the most charming thing I saw in the capital city, and I even made their rapid disappearance the subject of a paper for one of my classes while I was there. (Here’s a post from my first encounter with the hutong.)

Unfortunately, the story has only gotten worse since Johnson’s reporting, and since my visit three years ago. Government and business developers see the single-level, “dangerous” housing as an obstacle in the way of economic growth in the city, as things can be built upwards and sold as commercial space for much higher prices than any residential buildings could garner. What acres do becomes private homes will land in the price range of millionaires, out of reach to the hundreds of thousands of men and women who grew up on that same ground.

A bright and shiny paint job on one of the areas inside the Forbidden City, the old home of the emperor that is now a tourist site

“Historic” in the eyes of the commercial and governmental developers means razing the dilapidated building that has been neglected for half a century and replacing it with an “authentic” facsimile, with upturned eaves painted classic Chinese colors: reds, golds, greens. Qianmen, a fabled shopping district in the center of the city that has been replaced with a swanky doppelganger, is mourned by urban planning professor Yao Yuan in a July 20 article in the New York Times. “The renovation of Qianmen wasn’t about preserving history, but about creating a fake Hollywood version of it,” he said.

Shopping center in Shanghai

I’m not here to pass judgment or even complain, really, because some of those modern amenities made my visit more comfortable, and surely improves the living conditions and salaries of many of China’s urban dwellers. But as many others have asked before me, at what cost are these things forming? Is a newly-built shopping center doing the people of Beijing much more good than its previous shopping center? Is it really a part of the city’s history that could not have been preserved more carefully from the start? Many of these areas, deemed “dangerous” by the government, were named as such in the late ’80s and early ’90s, which means they were slated for demolition or at least known to be in need of renovation and preservation for nearly two decades by now.

Many of these areas did not survive to see the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. I hope there are people in charge who will listen more carefully to the preservationists and historians both domestically and internationally who have been offering their advice on the ever-vanishing character of the city, and I hope what little is left of the city’s pre-modern composition can survive. I hope this for the sake of outsiders who visit, but more so for the sake of its own people.

Newly constructed buildings, complete with Starbucks and westerners