The Liu Xiaobo Project

Sunday

Checked baggage had to be outside our doors at 7:00, if we were going out on the morning tour (9:00 if one chose to sleep in). Then down to breakfast, and the bus.

On the way to the hutong Jia told us not only about some 80% of the traditional neighborhoods having been demolished in just the past twenty years—which I’d already been reading about from a preservation standpoint over the past few years—but spoke of her own experience growing up in one. One of the first groups Mao went after in the Cultural Revolution was middle-class property owners; when it was over, courtyard compounds that had once housed one extended family now housed up to ten families—all of them poor. She talked about the one common neighborhood toilet (a hole in the ground), cleaned out daily by a cleaning crew; of people bringing their chamber pots to empty in the morning; of having to choose, upon waking, between staying in bed a little longer and getting there before a line formed. In the crowded, narrow courtyards everyone knew everyone’s business, and as is human nature, invariably there was at least one unpleasant neighbor (once when her family’s precious coal began disappearing, she and her brother dug into a block of it and put firecrackers inside, and then waited to hear whose fire went off).

But in the good sense, too, everyone knew everyone, and if the old people wanted to get together a game of mah jongg there was always someone available. Jia’s parents, both retired M.D.s living now in a high-rise condo, don’t really know their neighbors any more than in any big city anywhere, and are reduced to playing mah jongg online with strangers.

When we arrived at the square between the Drum Tower and Bell Tower by foot from our bus, we had sprung on us a delightful surprise: we were going to our destination by pedicab (the modern version of the old rickshaws). I had one all to myself, so I don’t think was too heavy a load for the young man. Red fringe swinging, we set off in a long single-file parade through the hutong, laughing.

Most of the streets there are barely wide enough for even the pedicabs to pass, though in some stood dusty parked cars, and later, when we were on foot again, a couple of cars actually came down one street, so that we had to stand next to a building to let them pass. All the buildings are still gray—gray brick, gray stone, gray paint if necessary—as in the past, by law. In the past this was because red and gold were imperial colors only; color itself was apparently reserved for the upper classe. Doors, now, are red; window frames; and red paper lanterns are everywhere. Minuscule neighborhood bakeries had fresh-baked or fried pastries on display, the scent wafting out to us. Bathrooms are now modern, labeled “men” or “women,” looking like rest stops anywhere—but still communal, and we passed one or two people bearing chamberpots.

Our destination was two small rooms—one room and a sleeping alcove, really, plus what had been a porch, enclosed to make a tiny kitchen: the home of an elderly woman. She was out walking her dog when we arrived, but her niece greeted us, served us tea, and gave us the history of the home, Jia translating. In 1903 her aunt’s great grandfather had bought this property. A wooden model shows it as it once looked: a double courtyard surrounded by buildings of various sizes. The main family dwelling was in the rear, the most desirable location, where it received afternoon sunlight.

Where we now sat, these two rooms, had been part of the servants’ quarters in the very front, next to the street—the only part not confiscated in the 1960s and redistributed.

The family are the equivalent of “Living Treasures” in Japan, practitioners of the disappearing art of painting on the inside of glass containers. That great grandfather had been a court painter in the Forbidden City. For this reason they are permitted to give these talks to tourists, and three days a week give painting lessons there in the house. Unlike residents of all the new condos, who hold seventy-year leases only, they own what is left of their home in perpetuity (though not the land under it). The niece, the only family member of her generation to continue the painting tradition, lived there with her aunt until she married. She demonstrated the technique for us, with a long-handled brush with right-angle bristles of wolf hair. The work is incredibly detailed and fine; by fifty most such artists’ careers are over because their hands are no longer steady enough.

More than one of us said this visit was the high point of the entire trip.

Back we went in our pedaled procession to the square. There was time enough left to visit just the Drum Tower. Dating to the fifteenth century (replacing a thirteenth-century one) it dominated the Beijing skyline for centuries. It and the Bell Tower, on an axis with the distant Forbidden City, once kept time for the area, either bells or drums sounding every other hour. In front of each is, not steps, but a large stone slope—excellent drainage, I’m sure, but seeming madness in a climate of annual snow and ice.

The number of steps inside given was seventy—very steep, high ones, straight up. But at the top one emerges into a high, long room with rows of massive red drums on their sides in cradles—yet another “wow” moment. From the narrow balcony outside there are views of the surrounding hutong; of the city beyond, I’m sure, if it were ever clear (though the sun was actually threatening to break through just then); and, indeed, on a straight line, the temple at the Summer Palace beyond the Forbidden City, on its manmade hill.

We had a plane to catch, so back to the hotel we went one last time, to pick up the rest of our group and make a quick restroom (“happy room,” as they say in China) stop. In the square at the Drum Tower, as we left, several groups of young men were playing the ubiquitous “hacky sack”-type game (jianzi), with a feathered object like a large shuttlecock.

From Beijing to Yichang was about two and a half hours by air. There, we had clearly left the megalopolis behind for a small-town airport out in the country—small town/city by Chinese standards, we were soon informed: only some four million. And we did soon find downtown—a little scruffy, buildings in the process of being demolished (and I saw one woman cleaning a pile of bricks by hand), others being built. A boomtown of the Three Gorges project, having been at one time not much more than a fishing village.

We had a very good dinner at a rather posh hotel (a wall of fish tanks outside where we exited afterward, full of all manner of aquatic life waiting in uncomfortable circumstances to become someone’s dinner—including one turtle trying desperately, again and again, to surface, but it couldn’t quite make it), then rode down—and I mean down—to our boat waiting on the Yangtze: narrow road, dizzying height we discovered ourselves at in the failing light, no guard rail.

After a little orientation session in the dining room of the Katarina, we got our passports returned once more, along with our cabin assignments. When I located mine, on Deck 4, it was freezing. Tiny, pleasant, very clean, with a balcony—but freezing. It all was rather disorienting at the moment. From my balcony, which was to starboard, I could make out almost nothing in the deep darkness and fog: the water itself, a looming hill across. I left and went up to the observation deck—alone; everyone else was apparently settling in for the night. More darkness, fog, water, mountains. An ominous subconscious identification with the accident in John O’Hara’s BUtterfield 8 made me hang onto the not-quite-high-enough for 5’10” railing in the dark.

I went to bed first in the thermal underwear, and fell asleep quickly—only to be awakened at around 11:00 by Jia’s voice over the loudspeaker. The staff had finally finalized the next day’s schedule (which was supposed to have been already posted via the ship’s TV channel; I’d thought just my set wasn’t working earlier, had had someone in from housekeeping who spoke very little English and couldn’t figure it out, either, had called Jia—and poor Jia, I’m sure I wasn’t the only one). But at that point the room had gotten really warm—hot—requiring a change of attire.

All the rest of the night, sleep interrupted, I was intensely aware of our non-earthbound condition: the gentle unsteadiness; the boat rocking in the wakes of other ships that passed; in the early morning, the engines revving and our setting out in the dark; the rush of our own wake.