Review by New York Times Review
THIS summer, widespread Beijing fatigue is an inevitability. But it's high-flying Olympic Beijing that may become overfamiliar, a city that's appeared before our very eyes as in a scene from "The Matrix." This is not Michael Meyer's town. The Beijing he has called home is being systematically eradicated, and this book is his testament. On Aug. 8, 2005, three years to the day before the Olympics' start date - and exactly 68 years after the Japanese marched in to occupy the city - Meyer moved into a traditional courtyard home on Red Bayberry and Bamboo Slanted Street in the hutong, the "vanishing backstreets" of his subtitle. His neighborhood, Dazhalan, is six centuries old and was once known as the entertainment district, full of artisans, acrobats, antiques and brothels. Meyer assumes the role of the lone Westerner among Dazhalan's 57,000-odd residents, which provides entertainment of a distinctly early-21st-century sort: the authentic cultural immersion experience. A travel writer who hails from Minneapolis, Meyer is no dilettante. His motives certainly don't seem touristic or cynical. He didn't move to Beijing to write a book about it (or if he did, he isn't saying). "Beijing was simply love at first sight," he writes. The hutong beckons after a former resident gives Meyer a tearful tour of his half-demolished house. ("It wasn't just a building," the man says. "It was me. It was my family.") Meyer also acts on a perceived challenge from Le Corbusier, champion of urban renewal: to inhabit the picturesque slums whose razing both historians and tourists sentimentally deplore. And whose razing - from 7,000 hutong in 1949 to 1,300 in 2005, with 1.25 million residents evicted between 1990 and 2007 - he proceeds to record. After cutting through a mile of red tape, Meyer becomes a volunteer teacher at Coal Lane Elementary and acquires, for $100 a month, two unheated rooms lighted by bare bulbs, with straw-and-mud walls, on a five-room courtyard shared with six others. The latrine is a few minutes' walk away, as is the Big Power Bathhouse. Since using a refrigerator blows the entire courtyard's fuses, Meyer keeps his unplugged, storing underwear in it instead. In a singular feat of extreme travel, he lives like this for two years. As soon as Meyer moves in, his neighbor, known simply as "the widow," explains that there is only one rule: "Public is public; private is private!" She then proceeds to break it continuously, delivering home-cooked meals without knocking and offering a stream of unsolicited, brusquely maternal advice, always addressing Meyer as "Little Plumblossom," a diminutive of his Chinese name. The book begins with her exhortation: "Little Plumblossom! Listen, you have to eat before class," she says, handing him a bowl of steaming dumplings. From the first glimpse of this domestic routine, the book promises an insider's view, which is exactly the one you want on this rapidly metamorphosing city. And Meyer delivers - not as a memoirist might, with emotional connection and personal transformation, but as a reporter, or an unusually conscientious travel writer. As the book's title suggests, Meyer provides plenty of substantial insight into what is indeed a dying way of life. He also explains - exhaustively - why it is dying and how the demolitions happen: the Chinese character for "raze" is daubed on condemned buildings under cover of night by a spectral official Meyer calls "the Hand." Meyer is a curiously old-fashioned "watching the natives" kind of travel writer, rather than a postmodern narrator-as-character kind. In fact, he keeps himself so assiduously out of the picture that he excises even relevant personal details. When declaring his love for Beijing, for instance, Meyer also mentions having met his future wife there - an eventuality that presumably colored his experience of the city. Yet like the Hand, this fiancée never actually appears in the book. The Front Gate in Beijing, in an early-20th-century photograph. Other locals come off as colorful figures whose antics amuse and amaze, but who tend to remain unknowable. Character analysis is not Meyer's intention, which can have a clinical effect, restricting access to the city's heart. Miss Zhu, Meyer's co-teacher at Coal Lane Elementary, is his almost constant companion, but who knows what makes her tick? When the principal sends her to make sure Teacher Plumblossom hasn't been asphyxiated by the noxious coal that hutong residents burn for heat, she explains that the previous year one poor girl's parents died from the fumes. Then she looks around Meyer's room and exclaims: "You don't even burn coal! Aren't you cold?" Miss Zhu obediently and unironically sings to their students the official Olympic volunteers' song ("Smile, smile, the friendliness of friends / The lengthy smile twinkling on a face, sweat reflecting the blue sky / Gently asking in English, 'How are you?'") while clutching a plush Olympic mascot still in its plastic bag, to protect it from "the tobacco-colored air." It's a funny moment, but it makes the woman sound foolish. We learn that "becoming pregnant remained her utmost goal," but this glimpse of an inner life comes only at the end of the book, during a visit to Miss Zhu's childhood hutong, which is being torn down. Miss Zhu isn't the only person whose story isn't fleshed out until the final third of the book. Several of Meyer's neighbors get overdue close-ups - the widow's history, when it's finally revealed, is particularly moving. And one of the book's best vignettes occurs on the fourth-to-last page, when Meyer reflects on what he misses about Beijing when he's away. "I missed nonstandard English and a pride in being nonstandard, in being weird," he writes, in a rare moment of self-revelation. It would have helped to have known this all along. There is an excellent chapter about the author's hutong neighbor Recycler Wang, whom Meyer accompanies on his rounds buying plastic water bottles for one fen each ($0.0013) and selling them for 1.5 fen ($0.0020) - effectively earning 70 cents for 1,000 bottles, the cost of a bowl of noodles. "Everything can be recycled," Recycler Wang tells Meyer, who promptly dampens any noble effect, however inadvertent, by noting that as far as his neighbor was concerned, "stores like Wal-Mart were great because the products came in packaging that made him money." Also fascinating is Meyer's second encounter with the novelist and painter Feng Jicai, a historic preservation activist whose book "Saving the Old Street" records his "Jane Jacobs-esque campaign" to preserve his hometown. Since Meyer's visit with the writer four years earlier, Feng has become a star intellectual at Tianjin University, with his own research institute. "Feng had transformed from artist to collector, from a writer to an encyclopedist," Meyer laments, barely concealing a nonstandard sneer at this former housing hero's sellout. "After living in the hutong, I grew impatient with inanimate museum displays of 'culture.' " In a nice passage that underlines his point, Meyer goes looking for the Tianjin Old City Museum that Feng founded. But when he asks around, no one has heard of it. He redirects the cabdriver to Ancient Culture Street, only to find that "the bazaar, built in the 19th century, had been replaced by New Ancient Culture Street." This August, as we watch athletes gasping for breath in "Bird's Nest" stadium beneath a gaudy international skyline, Meyer's message will sound especially plangent. All in all, his record of the dying ways of a city is an impressive feat. And while the phenomenon may be most extreme there, it's not just Beijing's problem. In a way, we're all living on New Ancient Culture Street. Between 1990 and 2007, 1.25 million residents were evicted from the picturesque slums of Beijing. Kate Sekules is editor in chief of Culture & Travel magazine and the author of the memoir "The Boxer's Heart."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
One of the wonders and terrors of freewheeling capitalism is its dynamism. Old ideas, technologies, and physical structures are swept aside without sentimentality or regard for the human costs. This is especially evident in the rapidly emerging economies of India and China, where the old struggles to coexist with the new. Meyer first went to China as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1995, and he continues to reside in one of the few remaining old neighborhoods in Beijing, one that is clearly doomed, as high-rises, shopping malls, and widened avenues move ever closer. Meyer describes his adopted home ground with a mixture of affection and hard realism. Living conditions are harsh, homes are crowded, the wood in many structures is rotting, and outhouses rather than indoor plumbing are the norm. Yet residents, including Meyer, have a strong and stubborn attachment to their community; he provides touching examples of how many strive to stay put. A wistful, charming paean to a community and way of life that is soon to be swept away in the name of progress.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Starred Review. Just in time for the Summer Olympics in Beijing, the Old City's narrow lanes and shops are being bulldozed and their residents displaced to make way for Wal-Marts, shopping centers and high-rise apartments. Part memoir, part history, part travelogue and part call to action, journalist Meyer's elegant first book yearns for old Beijing and mourns the loss of an older way of life. Having lived for two years in one of Beijing's oldest hutongs--mazes of lanes and courtyards bordered by single-story houses--Meyer chronicles the threat urban planning poses not only to the ancient history buried within these neighborhoods but also to the people of the hutong. The hutong, he says, builds community in a way that glistening glass and steel buildings cannot. His 81-year-old neighbor, whom he calls the Widow, had always been safe because neighbors watched out for her, as she watched out for others: the book opens with a delightful scene in which the Widow, a salty character who calls Meyer Little Plumblossom, brings him unsolicited dumplings for his breakfast. The ironies of the reconstruction of Beijing are clear in the building of Safe and Sound Boulevard, which, Meyer tells us, is neither safe nor sound.Meyer's powerful book is to Beijing what Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities was to New York City. 25 b&w photos. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Meyer lived in a Beijing hutong (narrow lane) for two years while he worked as a teacher, having gone to China as a Peace Corps volunteer. Eventually, he was given the nickname Teacher Plumblossom. Meyer was often asked by his neighbors if he knew when their neighborhood would undergo the same razing occurring everywhere in preparation for the Olympics. To show us what this threatened neighborhood is like, Meyer takes us into his life, masterfully describing the seasons, his home and courtyard, and his students and their parents. We meet his landlady, for instance, who runs her house with an iron grip while bringing him nourishing soup. He also adds a wonderful sprinkling of humor, pointing out the sign that greets him on the way to a latrine: "No Spitting No Smoking No Coarse Language No Missing the Hole." Ultimately, the neighborhood wasn't destroyed. Now tourists are brought there to see the real Beijing, and, reports Meyer, they rank the visit as a highlight over the Forbidden City and the Great Wall. All library collections that aim for a complete overview of China must add this unusual title.--Susan G. Baird, Chicago (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An American lives side by side with the fear-stricken denizens of an ancient neighborhood that will not survive China's Olympic Games. The Old and Dilapidated Housing Renewal program, reports first-time author Meyer, has evicted 1.25 million residents from their homes in Beijing. This massive official initiative to "clean up" the city for the upcoming summer Olympics focuses on demolition and removal in Beijing's traditional hutong (lane) areas, neighborhoods of narrow paths that crisscross the heart of the city. The author, who first went to China as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1995, moved to a walled courtyard home in a hutong in 2005, when the pace of demolitions was accelerating. He makes palpable the impact of this initiative on Chinese families and the many older people who have never known another kind of home. Compensatory payment is offered when "the Hand" (Meyer's epithet for anonymous, creeping bureaucracy) stencils the Chinese character meaning "raze" on their walls, the author explains. But even those who go quietly and promptly, therefore locking in the highest settlement, find that it rarely covers their expenses in a sterile concrete high-rise that could be a two-hour commute away. And such is the pull of the hutong on its older inhabitants that many hold out and get nothing; some who are forced out simply disappear. Most Beijing residents neither abhor progress nor revile the government, Meyer stresses; it's just the total lack of transparency that depresses everybody. Few Americans would care for the hutong's basic amenities--public latrines, bathhouses, coal- or charcoal-burning heaters--and "dilapidated" is often an accurate description. But these venerable lanes shelter neighbors who truly know, trust and depend on each other, avers the author, who paints a picture of deep personal loss as the old alleys vanish. Revealing portrait of urban change, and the consequences of China's unquenchable thirst for modernization. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
