IMPRESSIONS
Echoes of home abroad
PALLAVI AIYAR
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With similar modes of address, sabziwallahs and kabadiwallahs, life in the hutongs is not so different after all.
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Photos: Pallavi Aiyar
Reassuringly familiar: Things that seem wondrous and exciting to others can be simply comforting.
IT was close to midnight as I crossed the courtyard heading for my bedroom, having just tucked in our kittens for the night in the kitchen. Halfway across I sensed, rather than saw, a sudden movement on the roof to my right.
I swivelled to look and a scream froze in my throat. There slinking along the tiled eaves was a creature, bushy-tailed and besnouted. It stopped mid-slink and looked straight at me, snout quivering menacingly.
My scream unfroze, piercing the otherwise quiet night and the creature melted away into the shadows.
Fleeting encounters
With thudding-heart I realised I had just had a sighting of the mysterious "hutong animal" that other siheyuan-dwelling friends had on occasion mentioned, but given their foggy descriptions (a stoat/a fox/a ferret) of fleeting encounters, I had dismissed as fantasy. "It must have been a big cat," I remember telling one distressed soul as she recounted being terrorised in her drawing room by the tapping of the creature's snout at the window.
My shout brought out a concerned spouse. As I acted out the sinister slinking and disturbing snoutiness of our just-disappeared nocturnal visitor, my husband comfortingly patted my shoulder. "It must have been a big cat," he said.
The next morning I had a more sympathetic audience in my "Auntie", as domestic help are called in China. "You saw a "huang shu lang," she squealed in excitement, a creature the dictionary revealed to be a Chinese weasel. I felt strangely violated having had a wild animal inside my home. It was disconcerting how living in a siheyuan brought the outside world inside of what, in an apartment, would be a sealed-off, private space.
Auntie proceeded to babble on in what I thought to be an extremely counter-intuitive manner, about how lucky I was. It turned out that huang shu lang spottings are considered auspicious.
"You must welcome it into your home," said Auntie. "Feed it, worship it and then if you look after it well enough it will go away after blessing you." I really couldn't think of anything I wanted to do less.
* * *
Auntie came from Anhui province in China's southeast, one of the country's poorest regions best known for droughts and the legions of maids it exports to the rest of the country. Formerly a rice farmer, she had taken to urban life with ιlan. Toting a mobile phone and skilled in the art of vacuum cleaning, Auntie's 10 years in Beijing had given her a certain cosmopolitanism. But superstitions learned as a child clung to her like sticky rice and she was full of stories about spirits and Gods, the kinds of tales that China's urban, largely atheist crowd are derisive of.
But, for me, Auntie's stories were reassuringly familiar; echoes of home in a foreign country.
* * *
Perhaps it was an unconscious homesickness that underlay my love of the hutongs, so similar was life there to the rhythms of my childhood. The same modes of address — auntie, granny, brother — that embrace strangers transforming them into family; the same sabzi wallahs screeching out a list of vegetables.
Freelance recyclers
As a result, much of what was wondrous and exciting for my husband was simply comforting to me. The first time I heard western friends talk with amazement about the "freelance recyclers" that wandered the hutongs I couldn't stop smiling at the grandiose title given to a kabadi wallah.
But similarities only go so far, as I was to find out. Unique Chinese characteristics imbued our hutong itinerants, a fact that struck me with force in my first nostalgia-tinted encounter with a hutong kabadi wallah.
For days I had gently prevented the spouse from throwing away our accumulated newspapers and cardboard boxes. Swiftly, I had rescued a broken toaster from the dustbin. Proudly, I had horded my treasure of junk in anticipation of the kabadi wallah's knock, which sure enough came a few days later.
"How much for this?" I asked expertly, offering up my stash to the gentleman. He stared at me in disgust. "How much?" he spat out. "I should ask you, how much you'll pay me to take away this rubbish." Embarrassment prevents me from going into details but suffice to say that when the kabadi wallah left with my things without my having had to pay him, I actually felt victorious.
* * *
In my initial days in the hutongs, the pajama couture favoured by my neighbours caused me to raise an occasional eyebrow. For the pajama, the hutongs are a true liberator.
No longer kept to the confines of the bedroom, pajamas are worn by residents on the street through out the day and no one seems to think it the slightest bit strange.
Once my preliminary bemusement had passed I came to greatly appreciate this pajama-friendly attitude, given the hassle it saved me every time I needed to pop around to the corner shop in search of matches for an early-morning smoke.
Occasionally I would take one of my kittens, Caramel or Tofu, along for the outing. The cats were big favourites with the neighbours and a crowd would inevitably gather to fuss over them when I carried them along.
One morning, as I made my way home from the shop, a group of foreign tourists went cycling past on an organised "hutong tour." They smiled benignly, as they looked around curiously — until they spotted me. At this point, many looked apoplectic with shock and one fair-haired gent almost fell off his bike.
I had caused similar reactions in many Chinese when I first moved into the neighbourhood, so surprised had the locals been to see an outsider in their midst. But never before had I elicited such a response from fellow foreigners.
Then I looked at myself from their perspective: decked out in matching pajama top and bottom, cigarette dangling out of the corner of my mouth, cat tucked under my right arm, bathroom slippers slapping on the street as I strolled along.
* * *
One day I returned home to find little Wang from next door, stretched out in a makeshift hammock under the shade of a tree, blocking the entrance to my main door. On his left, he had a turtle in a glass jar; on his right, a cricket stuffed into a woven bamboo box.
Unsure of how to proceed, I tried stepping over him at which point he woke up, mortified to have been discovered napping at my doorstep.
Friendly overtures
I hastened to assure him that it was quite all right and began to make my way in without further ado. But, overcome with guilt, little Wang pressed his pet cricket into my hands, insisting I take it as a gift.
Less than fond of green, singing insects, I pushed it right back towards him, claiming I couldn't possibly accept such a generous offer.
A struggle ensued, as we both tried to force the hapless cricket into the other's bosom, until he cried out pathetically, "Please! I want to be your friend. Take it!"
The cricket was discreetly released into a friend's garden the next day but I think of it often, as a symbol of friendship so openly offered and of a people who have had it in their hearts to embrace us, despite all our imperfections.
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