Barbarian Lost (3 page)

As we glide along the Second Ring Road now, I realize that the blacksmith's
hutong
neighbourhood is gone. An area two arteries deep into the old city—hundreds of shops and houses, laneways and ancient trees—has been wiped off the face of the earth. In its place, a pleasant park has been installed. It just appeared out of nowhere: big old trees, lawns and flower beds, park benches and mood lighting, even sections of old stone walls that provide pleasant little obstacles for the walkways to wind around. The illusion of permanence is so great that I get Viv to ask the cab driver if the park is in fact new or if my memory is playing tricks on me.

“It's new,” the cabbie says with a knowing smile, perhaps even proud of what his government can do.

Gone. Gone are the blacksmith and his shop, I start to imagine. Gone is the poultry seller. The old widow and her minuscule home behind the barber shop. Gone, all gone. Gone and forgotten. I turn to Viv and admit that the destruction of
hutongs
is an important subject.

“Yes, and I won't need to translate. Madame Hua speaks good French,” she tells me.

“Really? How come?”

“Her grandfather was the first Chinese man to study in Paris. He studied civil engineering and married a Polish woman. They lived in China. But their son went on to complete his architecture studies in Paris. There he married a French woman. They returned to China to raise their daughter, whom you'll meet.”

“But how Chinese is she?” I wonder aloud.

“She has said that sometimes people question how Chinese she is to undermine her. She considers herself Chinese.”

Catherine Hua meets us at a café in the diplomatic quarter. She's in her fifties and has a motherly look about her. She has Asian-shaped eyes that are blue and grey-tinged hair that was once light brown. We exchange a few niceties and then she gets straight to the point.

“Do you know who owns the land in Beijing?” she asks in proper if slightly rusty French.

“I assume the state does. That is, the people.”

“No,” she quietly corrects me, “that's a mistake that most people make about China. The Communist government only went about systematic land reform in the countryside. It did not collectivize the land in big cities.”

“So people—I mean, individuals—still own their residences in the
hutongs
?”

“Yes, many of them,” she says in a matter-of-fact tone. “Until recently, I owned my house in the
hutongs
. It was the house of my grandfather and of my father. I grew up there, playing in the gardens.”

“What happened?”

“Well, the state demolished my home. I guess I can still claim to own the land under the demolished house, but it has built a giant shopping mall on the site. It demolished a whole neighbourhood.”

“You couldn't stop it?”

“We tried. But we failed. In this instance.”

“Was it an expropriation?” I query.

“Here's how it works,” Madame Hua says. “The city is already divided up into exploitation areas. The top developers have designs on everything. They cut a deal with the city and state officials to share some of the immense profits to be generated by the sale of condos, offices and commercial space in the new structures. We're talking hundreds of millions of dollars. Then the state issues an expropriation notice for a given area and imposes a strict time limit for evacuation. It relocates the inhabitants to apartment blocks on the outskirts of the city and pays out tiny sums for the lost property. You must leave your home, your gardens, your neighbours, everything. If you don't leave, you're arrested. Then your home is demolished.”

“What can you do?”

“Luckily, things tend not to be done very carefully,” she says. “The developers hold land titles and building permits that predate the expropriation acts. They mostly concentrate just on taking the land, not on the legal procedure for doing so. Which means the
state's paperwork is full of inconsistencies. I'm fighting the state in court. But the courts often refuse to hear the cases. So I talk to the media. I make a fuss. I go to friends in high places. I show up at cocktail parties and belittle the developers. They're criminals. It should be known.”

She pauses, thinking about her loss, then says, “I could not save my own home. But I may be able to save some of the
hutongs
. Come, I'll show you,” she says, urging us to go to her house nearby.

Catherine Hua lives in a modern apartment building just around the corner from the café. The interior confirms that she is a woman of culture. The space is simple and graceful, the walls decorated with old paintings and silk screens. I imagine her personal history. She's from an old family, and her grandfather must have been an exceptional man. If he studied in Paris in the earliest years of the twentieth century, he must have been born into the Chinese elite. A famous builder in old Peking, he was surely quite the gentleman. His son was raised in the best of Chinese and Western traditions, trained in the old arts and then educated like his father at the best Parisian architecture school. In Madame Hua's family, one was clearly expected to respect art. I ask her about the Cultural Revolution, that brutal time when such people of culture were targeted and purged.

“Ah, that was an interesting time,” she begins with a smile. “Before then, we had a big house with a big garden around it. As a child, I used to pretend that I was in the jungle in that garden. During the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards forced a lot of families from the countryside into our big house. My family retreated to the servant house at the back of the compound. It could have been a lot worse: my father had been a quiet servant of
the revolution—the original one, that is—so we were luckily not subjected to any further measures.”

She retrieves a large photo album, places it on the coffee table and begins to guide me through it. There are photos of old stone houses, of courtyards, trees, delicately carved wooden eaves, stone dragons and intricately cobbled walkways. These are glimpses of the treasures of the
hutongs
, the precious private spaces where great poems were composed and passionate love affairs conducted, where people were taught how to think, how to honour their ancestors properly and how to be good scions of a great culture.

“This house,” Catherine tells me as she points to a series of photos, “once belonged to a famous general. He was also a master calligrapher. The house had the most amazing garden walkway, with incredible arches. Look at this photo; you can see them.”

“What happened to it?” I ask.

“It's gone. They didn't even salvage the stonework.” She turns the page.

“Look at the gate to this house,” she says, directing my focus to a stone gateway in the photo that has an elaborate wooden roof over it. “It too is gone, crushed by a bulldozer. I was there to see it happen.”

“Who lived in these houses?”

“Many families. Normal people,” she continues. “They call me for help. Or at the very least, they tell me to come and take pictures of their treasured homes. ‘Come quick,' they say, ‘the bulldozers are here!'”

There are pages and pages of photos. Catherine occasionally points out a house and tells me that she managed to save it. But the vast majority of the photos are of ghosts: homes, ways of life,
banished into nothing. I nod my head sympathetically as I flip through the album.

“I guess the developers, the state officials, have no sense of history,” I comment.

“No,” she says, “they are without sense, without culture. They are motivated by one thing alone. Greed.”

Catherine Hua feels the need to say one final thing: “Earlier in the revolution, great changes were made. Things were turned upside down, yes. But I feel that we are now going somewhere totally new and even more radical—yes, even compared with the Cultural Revolution. Then at least, when temples and historical houses were destroyed, they were destroyed for a reason. There was an ideology. Now Chinese history is simply being eradicated without thought. This is barbaric, nihilistic even.”

Welcome to modernity
, I think.

Over the next days, Viv and I criss-cross the capital preparing for our trip, getting plane tickets, doing research. Beijing is a sprawling megalopolis; we are stuck in traffic a lot, sometimes for hours. This gives us time to throw ideas around and get to know each other more. Vivien doesn't make it difficult for me to assess her opinions about the government. She loathes and distrusts the Communist Party and tells me so point-blank.

“I'm not the ideological type and certainly not a Communist,” I tell Viv, “but then again, nor is China anymore. I just don't want to try draw conclusions too quickly about this place.”

“I assure you that if you stay a while and see how things work here, you couldn't support the party,” she says somewhat fiercely.

“Well, one thing I'm fairly certain of is that China cannot simply copy the political system of some other place.”

“So how do you feel about Tiananmen?” she asks pointedly.

“I would like to think that if I were Chinese, I would have been on the square, facing down the tanks for my freedom. But at the same time, I'm not blind to the benefits that stability has brought China since Tiananmen.”

“Sacha, trust me, I've lived here my whole life. I'm familiar with this government and its ways,” she says with conviction. “I don't see any good coming from corruption and injustice.”

“But look around,” I argue. “I see tremendous wealth creation. The economy is getting freer, and China is getting more and more rich and powerful.”

“It's not all like this,” she says with a small smile. “Anyhow, you know that Confucius had nothing but contempt for the pursuit of wealth?”

“I didn't know that. I always thought Confucius told us to seek harmony. Prosperity is a kind of harmony, I thought.”

“No. Confucius taught that harmony comes only from virtue.”

We head to a seafood restaurant called Ten Thousand Dragon Continent. Passing through the ornate entrance, we enter a big room filled with aquariums. A selection of exotic creatures squirms in the open tanks: fish of all sizes and colours, squid, octopuses, eight types of crab, four kinds of lobster, half a dozen varieties of shrimp, every kind of mollusc imaginable, a healthy selection of insects: bee pupae, silk larvae and dangerous-looking scorpions. The aquariums take the place of a menu; to order, you point at a tank and specify a quantity and cooking style: poached, steamed or fried, with black bean, imperial sauce, or garlic and ginger. The waitress then nets your selection and sends the live seafood to the kitchen.

For the Chinese, it seems there's no greater joy in life than sitting down to a rare feast with friends and family. Even given
Vivien's discreet manner, it's clear she loves food as well. Over tender razor clams with shallots and ginger and spiced baby octopus, I ask Vivien about her father.

“He was a mathematics professor. And later a high-school principal.”

“What did his father do?”

“He was a peasant. A farmer.”

“I could say my father's father was born on a farm as well. But he died in 1934. So I hardly consider myself a farmer. You?”

“Not really,” she says, laughing. “I'm a city girl. But I did spend a lot of time with my grandparents on the farm when I was a child. So country life is not at all foreign to me.”

“Are your grandparents still alive?”

“Oh yes, all of them.”

“I'm curious what it was like for your family during the Cultural Revolution.”

“Well, for my grandparents nothing much changed. They were classified as ‘low to middle' farmers. So they were spared any attacks. As for my father, since he was of peasant stock, at the university he was one of the few people who benefited from the Cultural Revolution. While the so-called intellectuals were being chased from the universities, my father did his doctorate.”

“Can I meet him?”

“Certainly not!” Viv says unequivocally. “I haven't talked to him in several years and am not planning to. In fact, he's not a topic of conversation that I enjoy.”

After lunch, we head back to Deryk's apartment to book more flights for our journey. We ride the elevator to the seventeenth
floor. I comment that it's actually the fourteenth floor, since the fourth, thirteenth and fourteenth floors are missing.

“It makes sense that Deryk lives on this floor and it's partly empty. Anyone Chinese would hesitate to live on the fourteenth flour, even though it's listed as the seventeenth flour. Four and fourteen are very bad numbers. The words in Mandarin sound like death.”

“That strikes me as rather foolish. Not you?”

“Oh, come on! It's tradition. We Chinese are raised to be superstitious.”

“But you seem so rational.” I say teasingly.

“You don't get it. I choose to be superstitious,” she counters. “It's a way to honour one's ancestors by carrying forth their beliefs. Superstition is an act of awe. Ancestors should be held in awe,” she says, a little unsure of her footing in English.

“
Awe
? Are you sure you intend to use that word?”

“It means fear and respect, right?”

“Yes. And that's how you would describe your feelings toward these beliefs?”

“Yes,” she says firmly.

Vivien certainly has no awe for the Chinese Communist Party. She has even cultivated a group of friends who have distinguished themselves through their opposition to the central government. Many of her contacts in activist and intellectual circles are from her days at Peking University. She was clearly a dedicated student and has maintained ties to many of her professors.

She sets up a meeting for us with her former professor, Hé Weifang, at a place called Thinker's Café, a hangout for students of the humanities. As we approach, Viv explains the café's real name: “
Xing Ke
means sober guest, probably after one of the greatest of
Chinese poets, Qu Yuan, who was persecuted and committed suicide twenty-three hundred years ago. He wrote: ‘I was banished because everyone is drunk while I'm the only one sober.'”