China's New Youth by Alec Ash

Author:Alec Ash
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781950691722
Publisher: Arcade
Published: 2020-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

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The hutongs at the heart of Beijing date back to the thirteenth century when the Mongols invaded China and established the Yuan dynasty. The alleyways that veined the city were rebuilt and named for the Mongolian word for well, with its throaty ‘h’. Over the last decades many of these historic areas have been torn down and rebuilt by developers, the character for ‘demolish’ painted on doors like portent of a Biblical plague. But labyrinthine blocks of hutongs remain, preserved by city planners. Those around the Drum Tower, built by the Mongols in 1272 at the exact centre of the old city, are among them.

Fuxue hutong is one block east of the Drum tower. At one end is a barracks for the People’s Armed Police, where two guards stand facing a faded stencil of Lei Feng, the Mao-era model worker. At the other end are a primary school and a pet shop. In between are a mah-jong par-lour, a training school for blind masseurs and a brothel (less than fifty yards from the school). A street market cuts the block in half from north to south, where buckets of eggs, drums of spice, tin cylinders of steamed dumplings, hanging hunks of meat, whole cooked ducks and live fish flapping in shallow pans of water are all ready to be weighed and bagged for a clutch of notes and a tinkle of coins. This is where residents overlap to shop for groceries: the mah-jong players, the blind masseurs, the off-duty prostitutes and soldiers.

Mia’s shoebox studio was at no. 21 Little Fuxue hutong, a narrow tributary of the main alleyway. Inside the street entrance, a series of connected courtyards extended deep in an intricate maze of unmarked doors. It was called a ‘big mixed courtyard’, with over thirty households squeezed into the same address. If a package arrived, the delivery boy would just yell the recipient’s name until someone opened their window or pointed at a door. Some of the flats were renovated (and rented to foreigners at a mark up) but most of the apartments were spartan and cheap, and tenants tended to be in either their twenties or their sixties.

For the older residents of the hutongs, life started early. They rose before dawn to buy vegetables in the market, walk their dogs or fly their pigeons (an old Beijinger pastime for those with a rooftop aviary). Mia, meanwhile, only had to be in the office mid-morning and slept in. The old timers didn’t leave the hutong block for days on end; she commuted by subway to the commercial district. They had lived there for decades; she was just passing through. They went to bed at 9 or 10pm with a glass of warm water, while she was getting ready to go out. The two generations lived in the same courtyard but occupied different universes.

Mia partied every weekend in those days, and some week nights too. She went out with the same three female friends—her ‘booze and meat mates’, a phrase for lads on the lash which they appropriated.

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