Related stories

Tongchunyuan Restaurant: Fine Dining Jiangsu Style Individuals encouraged to buy Courtyard Houses Sightseeing The parks of Shijingshan District The parks of Dongcheng District

The Hutong and Me

Like almost any other expatriate living in Beijing, I am enamoured with its hutong. There were many more when I first got to Beijing in 1998 than there are now, but after I discovered them, I spent a great deal of time just wandering in them, trying to become better acquainted with the city. I was never bored back then, and my photography processing bill was high.

I became even more personally acquainted with them after I met an artist who would become my wife: she lived in a solid one-room structure in the former Xiertiao Hutong, just south of the Xizhimen Subway Station. A few of the structures there still remain, although most of the hutong is gone.

There, as a visitor, I experienced the best and the worst of hutong life. The best? I recall one clear night in November. The sky was cobalt blue and full of stars. Trees were bare and starkly outlined against the sky. VanGogh's painting, "The Starry Night," came to mind. Entering a gate off a lane, I passed the water spigot that served the 20 or so families living there and turned right walking between the tiny rooms that lined the trail, trying not to dislodge the varied items that rested on tops of roughly made cabinets or that hung from its walls. People recognized me and paid me little attention, or so it seemed.

There was little privacy for the residents. Without prying, I could easily see water steaming on coal-fired stoves (luzi), a family gathered around its television set that cast a blue glow over the room and out into the lane. Anything said could be heard by everyone else, unless you spoke in hushed tones. I became aware of one resident in the darkness when he removed the lid of his cooking stove: the coal fire cast a red glow on is face.

I recall feeling very happy to be in Beijing and the privilege of seeing these things. I was glad I didn’t have to live that way.

I relished the warmth of my wife-to-be’s little room, and I loved to read my books by Lu Xun and Lao She as she painted, but only days after the events related above she would be overcome by coal gas, and she would have perished had her cousin not come to visit, finding her unconscious on the floor.

Of course, it was a low point in my life on the day when suffering a sudden onset of diarrhoea, I had to share the six-hole public toilet in the lane with five guys who had never seen a laowai in their toilet before, not to mention in that sad condition. I’m still not sure what my correct emotion should have been: I do recall being wildly out of place.

Now, the time of the hutong is passing. Even if some are preserved, and there is precious little to preserve in some of them; the environment so eloquently captured by Lao She in Four Generations under One Roof, is rapidly fading away. Whether more or fewer of them should be retained, I will leave to Beijingers to decide without interfering in their decision. I hope the people living in them happen upon a better life.

But I still photograph them at every opportunity, and when they’re gone, I’m going to miss them. 

Do you have a tale to tell about your business or personal life experience as an expatriate in Beijing? If so, contact us at: lastword@btmbeijing.com. If we use your story, a special prize awaits you.