Hutong Karma(2)
7 After a while, there was so much furniture, and so many people there every night, that Wang Zhaoxin declared the formation of the “W.C. Julebu”: the W.C. Club. Membership was open to all, although there were disputes about who should be chairman. As a foreigner, I joined in the fun. On weekend nights, the club hosted barbecues in front of the toilet. Wang Zhaoxin supplied cigarettes, beer, and grain alcohol, and Mr. Cao, a driver for the Xinhua news service, discussed what was happening in the papers. The coal-fired grill was attended to by a handicapped man named Chu. Because of his disability, Chu was licensed to drive a small motorized cart, which made it easy for him to transport skewers of mutton through the hutong. In the summer of 2002, when the Chinese men’s soccer team made history by playing in its first World Cup, the W.C. Club acquired a television, plugged it into the bathroom, and mercilessly mocked the national team as it failed to score a single goal throughout the tournament.
8 Wang Zhaoxin modestly refused the title of Chairman although he was the obvious choice, because nobody else had seen so many changes in the neighborhood. Wang’s parents had moved to Ju’er Hutong in 1951. Back then, Beijing’s earlyfifteenth- century layout was still intact, and it was unique among major world capitals: an ancient city virtually untouched by modernity or war.
9 During the 1990s and early 2000s, as the Wangs hawked cigarettes in Ju’er Hutong, developers sold most of old Beijing. Few sections of the city were protected. Whenever a hutong was doomed, its buildings were marked with a huge painted character surrounded by a circle:
“pull down, dismantle.”
10 Like many Beijing people I knew, Wang Zhaoxin was practical, good-humored, and unsentimental. His generosity was well known — locals had nicknamed him Wang Laoshan, Good Old Wang. He always contributed more than his share to a W.C. Club barbecue, and he was always the last to leave. He used to say that it was only a matter of time before more buildings in our neighborhood were pulled down, but he never dwelled on the future.
11 For years, Good Old Wang had predicted demolition, and in September of 2005, when his apartment building was finally torn down, he moved out without complaint. He had already sold the cigarette shop, because the margins had fallen too low. And now there was no doubt who had been the true chairman, because the W.C. Club died as soon as he left the hutong.
12 The essence of the hutong had more to do with spirit than structure: it wasn’t the brick and tiles and wood that mattered; it was the way that people interacted with their environment. And this environment had always been changing, which created residents like Good Old Wang, who was pragmatic, resourceful, and flexible. There was no reason for such people to feel threatened by the initial incursions of modernity — if anything, such elements tended to draw out the hutong spirit, because residents immediately found creative ways to incorporate a McDonald’s or an Olympic toilet into their routines.
13 One recent weekend, Good Old Wang returned for a visit, and we walked through Ju’er. He showed me the place where he was born. “There’s where we lived,” he said, pointing at the modern compound of the Jin Ju Yuan Hotel. “That used to be the temple. When my parents moved in, there was still one lama left.”
14 We continued east, past an old red door that was suspended in the hutong’s wall, three feet above the street. “There used to be a staircase there,” he explained. “When I was a child, that was an embassy.”
15 In the nineteenth century the compound had belonged to a Manchu prince; in the 1940s, Chiang Kai-shek used it as his Beijing office. In the 1960s, it served as the Yugoslavian embassy. Now that all of them were gone — Manchus, Nationalists, Yugoslavians — the compound was called, appropriately, the Friendship Guest House.
16 That was hutong karma — sites passed through countless incarnations, and always the mighty were laid low.
