What is comfortable space is a relative term. My wife often reminds me to not stand so close to those I am taking with. The second day into my business trip to China, I found out that I don't really know what it is like to live in a city. Moving from Corvallis with a population of 50,000 to the seven-million resident D.C.-Baltimore-Northern Virginia metro area is a study of contrasts (see the blog: Far From Home), but throw Beijing into the mix, a megalopolis with its 15 million people - you just know that you must be half way around the world.
A group of us led by Bill set out for dinner in one of the hutong (衚衕) districts Beijing is know for. The Hutongs are alleys formed by lines of siheyuan - traditional courtyard residences. They make for interesting walking, looking, eating, and smelling.
Hutongs are definitely hubs of activity where tourists want to go, but they are also the compounds where real people live, work, and play. Bill, has lived in Beijing for years, so knows his way around - though if you ask him, he will say that the longer you are in China, the less you realize you actually know. Regardless, Bill knew of a traditional restaurant - just two alleys down and right until we get there - so along we walked, all the way me feeling like a voyeur as my 6'4" cruising height could easily look into the small rooms that must be home. On the wall inside one easily viewed room from the alley was a National Basketball Association poster with towering stars posing, who if we were walking together, would have had the same perspective looking down on me as I did when passing by the locals.
Even though these narrow streets and passages are for public access, I couldn't get over an uncomfortableness that I am sure I would have if some former neighbor brought his grand child and used the side gate to pass through my yard for a look at Georgetown East Elementary School just across my back fence - "Look Susy, that is where my polling place was when I voted for President Obama." Where private and public spaces end and begin in the hutong is probably a home's door. Perhaps the brightly painted designs along the eaves are a sign of the pride of ownership - differentiating a private space from the drab alley passage we just walked through to view this inner courtyard. Are there trespass laws in hutongs?
Thinking back, the layout of the restaurant we eventually arrived at probably took advantage of a cluster of what were at some earlier time a cluster of homes. Regardless, adding to the unfamiliar was the food, Chinese of course, but different than my favorite dishes at King Tin on Ninth Street in Corvallis. All the other patrons we saw there were internationals, but none Chinese. Adding to the mystery, was this another sign of Chinese economic development, an emergence on the world stage, with former dwellers now relocated to the many high-rise apartment buildings that lined the rings of beltways - real inner and outer loops, and more loops - and crisscrossing boulevards throughout this city that is the size of Rhode Island.
After eating, we stepped back out into the night, where the alleys that were earlier illuminated by dusk, now were covered by a dark sky, and the street was only lit by the lamps inside shops, and tea houses, and bars that often blared the well-known songs of eras-past rock bands. It is funny, how sounds of something relatively new seem to blend in with places that are so exotic and old.
Another in our group wanted to find the restaurant district he remembered on an earlier trip, so off we walked off in another direction, into the night, me in tow, trusting my ten-year younger friend's sense of direction.
After what have must have been a mile or so, the real nightlife of local Beijing - the real Chinatown - appeared: a plaza filled with couples dancing to music - recognizable melodies, but arranged in such as way that you were left wondering whether the recording artists had paid copyright royalties; men playing a board game that looked similar to checkers that was a kind of chess, but a scene I couldn't bring myself to photograph because the flash would, to me, seem intrusive - this was their living room; or the street corner where a man painted Chinese characters on the pavement with a water brush while other locals walked in circles around his canvas and commented. Lucky for me and my companion's reputation, we finally came on the brightly lit streets he remembered, lined by restaurant after restaurant with bins of crayfish and turtles and other specials-of-the-day by the front door;
streets with young and old men and women talking; couples holding hands; shop hustlers inviting you in; parents with children, even an occasional small dog on leash - hardly a Western or African or Arab face to be seen - streets with traffic lights that had to be obeyed, because streams of cars and buses and bicycles passed through the intersections; strings of colored lanterns and lights that hung across the sidewalk and across the street; restaurants with tables inside, and restaurant tables on the sidewalks - all lit by the neon signs above that all seemed colored red or orange; bike vendors with fresh fruit in bins; and bike racks full of bicycles - all the same, but different because each had a different seat cover....and the smell of sewage....not sewage in the street gutters I was glad to discover, but the smell of public restrooms on every block... where else would so many people go while living on and above and along these streets?
It all goes to show what is comfortable for relatively all, may not be for those who normally stand close to you. Many people living closely together, with a few strange voyeurs passing through - hardly noticed under the night sky above, on the dusty streets below. And the next morning these same streets are swept by an armada of broom pushers, and the next night.... the cycle repeats itself - but not including this voyeur.... my legs are tired and my back is sore.'.. I am not as young as my companion and guide who pressed on from his memory of a scene past, to make these streets and lives at night my memories as well.
