IMPRESSIONS
Choice of a new generation
PALLAVI AIYAR
|
A globalised world, on the one side, and crumbling hutongs, on the other, China straddles two worlds.
|
Cocooned from the harsh experiences of their parents, today's little emperors crave and increasingly live a life of Star Bucks-scented prosperity. As a result, the hutongs, crumbling and archaic and sans KFC, are disproportionately peopled wit h the elderly and their pets.
Slowly vanishing: Most youngsters have left for smarter addresses. Photo:Pallavi Aiyar
IT started as the faintest swooshing, causing my husband and I to look up from our Saturday afternoon lounge in the courtyard. Putting down our coffee cups and novels, we waddled off to explore in the spirit of languid curiosity towards the kitchen from whence emanated the sound. The gentle swoosh turned to a startling roar as we found ourselves ankle deep in flowing water.
The essential truth about even renovated siheyuan was that with Yuan dynasty charm came Yuan dynasty plumbing. "Turn it off, turn it off," I shrieked running around the kitchen in a particularly unhelpful manner. "I'm trying," replied the spouse, frantically spinning various rusty knobs, tucked away beneath the sink. But the leaking pipe only expectorated with increased vigour.
Language failure
Visions of our precious possessions drowning in a gush of hutong sewage filled us with terror and we rushed into the alley with swivelling arms, startling a number of residents on their way for a leisurely afternoon at the public loo. "Does any one know a plumber," I queried wild eyed. At least intended to, but at this crucial juncture my Chinese failed me. While I could remember how to say "lawyer", "doctor", even "tailor" from distant Chinese classes, the word for "plumber" in Mandarin proved elusive.
The neighbours smiled indulgently with that maddening "foreigners are strange but harmless," look, as I repeatedly demanded, "Does any one know a ..aahhhh?" My husband in the meantime had managed to reach our landlord, Mr. Xu, on the phone and a temporary solution had been found.
All that was needed was for us to somehow prise open a heavy, steel-covered, rat-infested, manhole just by the entrance to our courtyard. Then we needed to descend into the vermin-ridden pit and cut off the entire water supply to the house after which we were to sit back in our semi-flooded siheyuan and await the arrival of Mr. Xu, who promised to be there as quickly as his trusted moped would allow.
* * *
An hour or so later the cavalry had arrived comprising not only Mr. Xu, but also his wife and 27-year-old son. As Mr. Xu busied himself with wrenches and the like, his Mrs. looked around the courtyard with approval. "Oh! You foreigners have such lovely taste," she exclaimed. "One look and I can tell you are from cultured stock. Just like my family." She smiled brightly but brittley and there was something imploring in her eyes.
At 60, our landlord's history mirrored that of China's recent past, with all the wrenching pain and dislocation that revolution brings. Mr. Xu was born in 1946 into a wealthy merchant's family that lived in a large siheyuan to the city's West. "It had a pond and trees and rockeries as high as a mountain," he told me once, his usually stern countenance softened by nostalgia.
Pain of dislocation
Once the communists came to power in 1949, Mr. Xu's courtyard like all the others, was summarily expropriated and he lived out the next decade in a dank, cramped one-bedroom apartment.
Mrs. Xu's family, on the other hand, were Kuomintang loyalists and while several of her relatives fled to Taiwan along with Chiang Kai Sheik, her parents stayed on in mainland China, left with little save their pride. A pride, evident even today as Mrs Xu fixedly repeated, "I am from Kuomintang people. I am very cultured," at virtually every opportunity she got.
Most Chinese people are guarded when talking of either their own or China's past but Mrs. Xu seemed impelled by a force beyond her control. "We lost everything during the Cultural Revolution," she said quietly. "We were alive but it wasn't really living."
Given their family profiles both Mr. and Mrs. Xu were branded class-enemies and lived out the Cultural Revolution (1968-78) exiled from their homes, sentenced to hard physical labour in the wind-swept grasslands of Inner Mongolia. "I am uneducated," said Mrs. Xu, "I never had the chance to study. I was sent to work in the countryside you see." Then with a defiant toss of her head, "But I am from a cultured family, not peasant riff-raff."
* * *
"Why do you always have to bring up boring history? Especially in front of foreigners? Why do you give foreigners a bad impression of China?" interrupted her son angrily.
At 27 and over six-feet tall, little Xu (as he was affectionately, if inappropriately called by his parents) was the very embodiment of a "little emperor": the army of over-indulged, single kids born post the implementation of China's one-child policy. Mr. Xu had spent the latter part of his life as a mid-ranking official at the railway ministry. Every penny that he scrimped to save went towards getting his son the opportunities he himself was denied.
While he rode around town on a battered old moped, his son drove a spanking white Fiat. The courtyard we rented was in fact in the son's name who seemed to do little save spending his parent's hard earned cash.
Little Xu was unemployed, ostensibly studying English, although unable to string together a single sentence in the language his parents were paying through their nose to get him fluent in.
"Oh! Little Xu is a little shy," explained his mother in embarrassment. "But he's a good boy. Let us know if you can introduce him to any nice foreign girl," she said as the family departed, Mr. Xu having successfully stoppered the leak.
* * *
Out in the hutong the ebb and flow of life played itself out as summer turned to fall. The trees took on a fiery orange hue and the nip in the air brought out the coal-vendors on their tricycles in full force. Little Wang from next door wore a jacket in the evenings when taking his turtle out for a stroll. Old lady Fang from down the street wrapped up her pet poodle, Guai Guai, in pink wool. "Ma ma", she patiently repeated to Guai Guai throughout the day, convince that one day Guai Guai would miraculously be able to talk.
China today is a country of only children. Educated, well-off and fiercely nationalistic, life for the younger generation offers myriad choices. "I have a question ma'am," announced an earnest young college student who attended a lecture I gave in her college on news writing. Preparing to parry queries regarding the agenda setting function of the press, I nodded in encouragement. "My classmates and I were all wondering: do you prefer KFC or McDonalds?" she continued with wide-eyed curiosity.
Cocooned from the harsh experiences of their parents, today's little emperors crave and increasingly live, a life of Star Bucks-scented prosperity. As a result the hutongs, crumbling and archaic and sans KFC, are disproportionately peopled with the elderly and their pets; the younger generation having taken off for smarter addresses.
That night as we drifted off to sleep exhausted by the day's burst-pipe events, the last thing we heard was old lady Fang's tender chant of "ma ma" and Guai Guai's yapping replies.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Magazine
