"Back then I felt the house was translucent, and everyone was translucent too" | Housing and Our Lives ②

A home is the largest thing a person ever buys, and one of the witnesses to how a life changes. QDaily is running a series of reports that follow housing as a thread, to see what happened in the years behind us.

It is time to sum up a stretch of history.

Most of our readers lived through only the tail end of it. Most of the story was written by the generation before.

What we want to pass on is the part of it worth keeping: a firm belief in progress and development; a faith that society would keep giving individuals better and bigger room to live in; that effort would be repaid in kind; that freedom was worth fighting for, and that we would get there in the end.

These are, in fact, universal values.

A word like "history," set down in front of us, tends to disappear under grand narratives. We would rather use interviews at the small scale to sort out what we can.

We begin this record with housing, the subject that occupies more of private life than any other.

Thirty years after he moved out of Anshan Fourth Village in Shanghai, Mao Shi'an can still describe the place in detail — 30 years lived there, 30 years away. A handful of factory housing blocks, each belonging to a different works, string his memory of the place together. The Shanghai Tool Factory, the Xinhu Steel Plant, the Xinzhong Power Machine Factory — those factories are long gone, and what they left behind are large tracts of look-alike walk-up blocks standing in even rows.

It is hard to count how many "new villages" Shanghai actually has. People rarely bother with the differences in when and why each one was built, lumping them together as "old public housing" — or, in the phrase that travels furthest, three adjectives stacked into one: old, run-down and small.

Birdhead, the photography duo of Song Tao and Ji Weiyu, published a photo book called New Village more than a decade ago. Leafing through it today, most of the new villages still look the same: five- and six-story buildings ringed by greenery, cats on the wall tops, exercise equipment scattered around the compound, and it seems every stairwell has an abandoned bicycle of uncertain ownership parked beside it. The jacket of New Village carries a run of exclamation marks: "Of course we're going to photograph you! Our six-story buildings! Our six-story buildings that still smell of fresh cement!! Our six-story buildings that were thrown up fast and torn down fast!!! Because we are you!"

In the 1950s, this city's model workers and advanced laborers were delivered into the workers' new villages to the beating of gongs and drums. Mao Shi'an still remembers the day his family moved into Anshan Fourth Village: "People today can't understand this, but I felt the house was translucent, and everyone was translucent too."

Sixty-odd years on, the glory has worn down into the ordinary.

"By the age of 9, I had already moved four times"

In 1957, nine-year-old Mao Shi'an moved into Anshan Fourth Village, an apartment the Shanghai Tool Factory had assigned to his father. It was the fifth "home" of his first nine years.

The first was in Dapuqiao, Shanghai, where he was born. In 1949 his father lost his job as a fitter in Shanghai and found work far away in Mudanjiang, in Heilongjiang Province, so the whole family moved there. "I don't remember much of the northeast, except the cold, and the one time my mother took me to Harbin on an errand — we rode a train that seemed like it would never end."

After the founding of the People's Republic, Shanghai's industry recovered fast and needed workers in large numbers, so the family moved back and rented near the old North Railway Station. "I still remember a blacksmith's shop at the mouth of the alley, privately run — this was before the joint state-private ownership campaigns. At night it was so quiet you could hear nothing but the clang of the hammer."

Before the public housing at Anshan Fourth Village was finished, Mao Shi'an transferred to Siping Road Second Primary School (today's Tongji Primary School) and rented a room nearby with a few apprentices from his father's factory. Siping Road Second Primary sat inside Tongji New Village, which, unlike the housing then going up for workers, was a compound for the faculty and staff of Tongji University; the primary school inside it doubled as the university's school for staff children.

"There was a very clear line back then — 'inside the village' and 'outside the village.' The inside kids were sorted further, by whether their parents taught or cleaned. Even soccer teams split along that line. But broadly speaking, the kids inside the village were better mannered and better at schoolwork than us outsiders — though of course I was an exception."

Before moving into Anshan Fourth Village, the family also spent a while in the firewood shed of a nearby farmhouse. Some of Mao Shi'an's "outside the village" classmates lived in worse conditions still. "One classmate lived in a straw hut. His family pounded rice for a living — back then you couldn't buy glutinous rice ready-made, so the rice balls people ate at festivals were all pounded by hand like that.

"And another boy lived with his father in a pillbox. The war between the Nationalists and the Communists left a lot of pillboxes behind — most have been torn down since, though some are still there. That whole area was countryside then, fields and open ground, and the round pillboxes looked like burial mounds. They hung a cloth curtain for a door and lived inside."

"Look at Shanghai now, buildings everywhere, but back then there was nothing at all. I remember a dead tree out in the fields that had been struck by lightning, and a ruined temple near Anshan Middle School — Xiaowang Temple, by where Xinhua Hospital is today. Whenever someone died you would see Taoist priests in bright robes performing rites under that dead tree. People weren't fussy either. In summer the old women went without a top, breasts hanging, fanning themselves with cattail-leaf fans. Children had nothing like what children have today — in winter we wedged tree knots into the soles of our shoes and skated on the river. Winters were much colder then. By the end of January the ice on the river was already thick."

"Back then I felt the house was translucent, and everyone was translucent too"

Professor Luo Gang of the Chinese department at East China Normal University has studied Shanghai's workers' new villages. Before 1949, apart from a handful of factories that built staff dormitories under pressure from the early labor movement, most workers and ordinary people lived in shantytowns, like Mao Shi'an's classmate. Solving the housing shortage was one of the challenges facing the new socialist government in its first years. The Soviet Union faced the same challenge at the same time, and its answer was a public-housing program known as the Khrushchyovka — small, plain five-story blocks replicated across Soviet cities. Shanghai aimed specifically at workers, building housing for them to make good on the promise that every resident would have a roof overhead.

In 1951 the Shanghai municipal government set up the Shanghai Workers' Housing Construction Committee. Pan Hannian, then deputy mayor, organized the building of the workers' new villages to relieve the housing shortage for the city's three million industrial workers. Caoyang New Village (Village 1) was finished first; 1,002 households — model workers and advanced laborers from factories across the city — were delivered into it to the beating of gongs and drums. The whole of the 1950s was the peak of new-village construction.

The Mao family was among the first residents of Anshan Fourth Village. A family of five was assigned a two-room unit. His parents and younger sister took the south-facing main bedroom, about 17 square meters; Mao Shi'an and his three younger brothers were packed into the north-facing second bedroom, about 14 square meters. Unlike Caoyang New Village, this building had its own bathroom and kitchen, though gas had not been connected when it was first built.

"That apartment was 33.8 square meters — usable floor area. Nobody talked about 'built area' then, and they counted only the parts 'people lived in,' meaning the bedrooms. The kitchen and bathroom weren't counted at all. The rent was only eight or nine yuan a month back then; by the seventies and eighties it had gone up to twenty or thirty."

The original Anshan Fourth Village had only three floors, four households to a floor, laid out symmetrically. The two ends held two-room units like the Maos' — a south bedroom, a north bedroom, and a kitchen and bathroom of their own. In the middle were two single rooms for newly married young workers, who shared a kitchen and bathroom. "My father was a Grade 7 fitter, very young, and later made Grade 8. The workshop director at the tool factory lived here too, in No. 8. My family had five people at the time, and later my sister came along; his family had four. Our apartments were exactly the same. His rank made no difference at all. I wouldn't call it absolute equality, but things back then were relatively equal."

"The day we moved in, I felt like I'd walked into heaven — and I mean that with no exaggeration. Red wooden stairs, wooden window frames with blue sky and open fields outside them. My father, my brothers and I painted the walls together. People today can't understand it, but back then I felt the house was translucent, and everyone was translucent too."

Trawling the secondhand stalls for furniture was a pleasure of its own. Mao Shi'an remembers his father taking them around and coming home with a mottled-bamboo bookshelf, a square dining table, a writing desk — a household pieced together bit by bit, out of nothing. "There were secondhand shops on Zhoushan Road and Daming Road. These days when people say secondhand furniture they think of the shop on Huaihai Road, which was of course grander. We weren't shopping anywhere that grand, we just bought from these places."

"We were poor in material terms, but everyone had something to look forward to — there really was a sense of owning the place." In an age of scarcity, people never lost their appetite for building things. The coal-ball stove was a household necessity, and windows had to be left open to avoid gas poisoning. "At first everyone was too poor to pay for proper piping, so people gradually started running a tin pipe out through the wall themselves." That kind of stove stayed in use for years, until the gas lines arrived in the 1960s — a grand occasion at the time. Mao Shi'an and his younger brother even built their own gas stove out of old furniture, a little larger than a standard one, with space underneath for bowls and dishes, a cooking surface on top, and an extra shelf to one side for prepping vegetables.

Filling each other's gaps

"The uncle in No. 3," "the auntie in No. 4" — these were the usual forms of address in the workers' new villages, more current than "Auntie Wang" or "Grandma Zhao." One stairwell at Anshan Fourth Village held 12 households; the Maos lived in No. 5, and Mao Shi'an, as the eldest son, went by "Big Brother of No. 5."

Big Brother of No. 5 still remembers that Nos. 7 and 8 held two relatively respectable families. No. 7 belonged to one of his father's apprentices at the Shanghai Tool Factory, who had married a woman from a comfortable background. Unlike the Maos, forever picking through the secondhand stalls, the No. 7 couple bought a complete set of new furniture when they married, and they had a radio of their own.

"The uncle in No. 8" was the workshop director at the tool factory, better educated than most — he had been to high school in Hangzhou — and his wife was a nurse. "By today's standards they'd count as quite Westernized for the time. The ordinary uncles and aunties in the new village thought they were odd. Women generally wore shorts and undershirts back then, but 'the auntie in No. 8' already wore a bra and briefs. How did people know? She washed them and hung them on the enclosed balcony off the bedroom. They weren't hung right outside the window, but people could still catch sight of them from various angles down below, and the talk would start."

"There wasn't even a word for privacy then — nobody had heard of it." Mao Shi'an and the other children wandered in and out of each other's homes, and one place they haunted was a single-staff dormitory at the nearby Xinzhong Power Machine Factory, fenced off on its own behind a hedge. "In the sixties that factory even put in a public television set for its unmarried staff, and children from the new villages nearby would crowd around in front of it."

Mao Shi'an's mother had heart disease and did not work; she brought in extra money by washing workers' overalls — heavy canvas that had to soak in lye water to get the machine oil out. Wringing them dry was a job in itself.

There was a habit of filling each other's gaps in the new village. Beyond everyday food like wontons and dumplings, "the auntie in No. 8" had connections of her own. "At the hospital she could get hold of placentas left behind after women gave birth, which today would of course be illegal. But back then she would bring one home for my mother, to build her strength back up. It didn't work in the end — she still died young." In exchange, Mao Shi'an's mother looked after the No. 8 couple's twin sons on the days both of them had to work late.

Collecting candy wrappers was one of the children's games — "but there were no candy wrappers in the new village, candy was too much of a luxury for workers." Mao Shi'an remembers taking his younger brother out of the compound and walking along Dahushan Road, Kongjiang Road, Dalian Road, Zhoujiazui Road and Shangqiu Road to the Yalujiang Road Bridge (today's Haining Road Bridge), and on to the Bund.

"There were a lot of tourists there, and people weren't fussy — they'd eat a candy and toss the wrapper by the side of the road." He still remembers the exact procedure for keeping one: first wash the dirt off with warm water, especially the cellophane ones, then stick them one by one to the glass window between the kitchen and the balcony to draw the water out, then peel them carefully off the glass. "You had to go slowly, they tore easily." Once you had a wrapper clean and new again, you pressed it between the pages of a book.

"During the three years of natural disasters there was a green-leaf milk candy, expensive at 24 fen, with a diagonal leaf pattern printed on blue cellophane that rippled like water. There were Mickey Mouse wrappers too, which were very popular — all made locally, nothing to do with Disney, just lifting the Mickey Mouse image without permission."

The adults had a game of their own: a rotating credit society, a biaohui, that ran quietly in the stairwells for a time, even though small-scale informal lending of that kind was expressly banned. "Each household put in 15 yuan, we drew lots for the order, and every month the pot went to one household, which could use it to buy something it otherwise couldn't afford." Mao Shi'an can't recall the exact rules, but some families bought their children secondhand winter coats that way; the Maos got a writing desk out of it — secondhand, of course. "Poor as we were, our family had a writing desk!"

"You have to read!"

"The Shanghai Tool Factory was a big plant, more than 3,000 workers. My father made Grade 7 fitter very young and reached Grade 8, the top grade, in his thirties. Unlike most workers, he liked digging into technique, and into culture generally. He had only finished elementary school, but he taught himself up through high school level. What I got from my father was this: you have to read!"

In third grade, when the family's finances were still decent, his parents even threw him a birthday party at the Park Hotel; the present was a copy of the magazine Children's Era, which carried a piece on Qi Baishi, who had just won the International Peace Prize in 1956, and a comic strip about Ban Chao's mission to the Western Regions. "The first book I bought with my own money was The Black Flag: Song Jingshi, 30 fen, from a stall outside Siping Road Second Primary — about a peasant uprising in Weifang, Shandong."

Not long after moving into Anshan Fourth Village, Mao Shi'an transferred out of Siping Road Second Primary and its inside/outside divide to Dahushan Road Primary School (today's Dahushan Road First Primary School); his family's balcony faced straight onto its playground. He went on to become a writer and literary critic, and now, close to 70, he still remembers a composition contest in fifth grade where he placed third. His essay was displayed in every school in the district and eventually reached Siping Road Second Primary, which made the Tongji faculty children "inside the village" look at him differently. "I just refused to lose. Why should I be any worse than anyone else?"

"Big Brother of No. 5" was a reader. "Everyone in the fourth village knew it — wherever I went I had a book in my hand." What he envied about No. 8 was the bookshelf. "The books I own today would fill many times the space, and my study now is many times bigger, but I will always remember how much I envied them as a child. At first I was too shy to ask the adults to lend me anything. Then one day, when the No. 8 uncle and auntie were both out, I asked the twins on the quiet, and that is how I finally got to borrow some."

Among the books he borrowed were The Gadfly and a Collected Works of Pushkin. Many years later, taking part in a discussion that looked back on literary criticism and compared different translations of the Collected Works of Pushkin, he still thought the edition he had borrowed from No. 8 was the best. "It had his works, the poetry, the fiction, the criticism, and a chronology. More than sixty years on, I can still see the illustrations — Pushkin sitting under a tree at Tsarskoye Selo, and one for 'To the Sea,' where he stands on the rocks in a coat with the waves breaking against them."

He finished high school as the Cultural Revolution began, and was assigned to the Shanghai Red Flag Electromagnetic Wire Factory. He still remembers the walk he made every day between Anshan Fourth Village and the factory on Jungong Road. "Up at 5:30 every morning, breakfast finished by a quarter to six, then out the door. In winter the road was still pitch dark. I'd go along Fushun Road, past Fengcheng New Village by the Shanghai Copper Materials Factory, out onto Ningguo Road, then across into open fields. By 6:20 I'd have worked up a sweat. There was an army base at Wujiaochang, and the bugle calls carried over from a distance, then the weather forecast, then the model operas. In those days people borrowed books wherever they could and smuggled them home. At night I'd read and copy books out by hand, borrowing from classmates, borrowing from the young workers at the factory, passing them around. Most of them had been through who knows how many hands, tattered and falling apart. In summer you copied them drenched in sweat, in winter you copied them shivering." Mao Shi'an still keeps more than a dozen of those hand-copied books; to save paper, the writing is tiny.

"That was adolescence, and a repressed time too. I'd sing and play the harmonica alone on the balcony — 'Red River Valley,' or 'La Paloma,' whether that's Spanish or Cuban. The sheet music was borrowed on the sly as well. The harmonica was a present from the No. 8 uncle's nephew, who had come from Hangzhou to study in Shanghai and sit the college entrance exam. When he finished and was heading back to Hangzhou, he gave me that harmonica, along with a set of revision materials from the high school attached to Gansu Normal University — a school known for its teaching at the time."

"I lost the harmonica later. I remember it was August 4, 1967 — there was a big armed clash in Shanghai that day, fighting from morning until dusk. I'd taken the harmonica to school to watch, and lost it in the confusion."

"When the college entrance exam came back, I sat it twice. My scores were good both times, but I failed the political background check, twice. There was an admissions officer willing to help, who kept putting my name forward, making trip after trip between departments. In the end I started a month later than the other new students — they started in October, I started in November." Mao Shi'an entered East China Normal University, and after that the road ran smoothly: literary criticism, the Writers' Association, later a standing committee seat on the political consultative conference.

Mao Shi'an, who never liked to lose, counts himself lucky: "You could say that from the new village to today I have never once let up — every single time I put in 120 percent. But I also know perfectly well that not everyone who puts in 120 percent succeeds."

He once wrote in Wenhui Daily about his high school classmate Changlong, who never went to college and worked as a photographer for a government office in Baoshan District. "Last year, unfortunately, he was diagnosed with cancer, though he's holding up all right. Most of the people from the new village have gradually sunk to the bottom of society. Who is listening to their voices?"

"Anyone with the means and the opportunity moved out of the new village long ago"

Mao Shi'an stayed in Shanghai; two of his younger brothers were sent down to the countryside in the northeast and in Anhui. By the time he married, his mother had died, his father had remarried and moved out, and his sister had married and moved to North Sichuan Road. Only Mao Shi'an and his youngest brother remained, each with a spouse, in the north and south bedrooms. "There was some friction later on, so we applied to swap with a family in an identical unit in the building next door."

"In the late 1980s we bought the Anshan Fourth Village apartment outright. What had been 'assigned' to you was really rented — you paid rent every month until then. We lived there two more years, and then my wife's work unit allocated her an apartment, so we sold the Anshan Fourth Village place and moved to Liangcheng Fourth Village. Our daughter was at Anshan Middle School then, and taking her there every day was inconvenient — we had to change buses — so we moved again, to Quyang New Village."

The Quyang New Village apartment was not big, only 26.8 square meters, but the layout was fashionable. "That was the first time Shanghai had split-levels. We were on the eighth floor, and ours split upward — bedroom above, living room below. The neighbors across the landing had the opposite, splitting downward, so the two units interlocked. Seeing a home like that for the first time, it felt completely new."

His daughter later got into the high school at Fuxing Middle School. Mao Shi'an made a point of inviting writer friends — Wang Anyi, Zhao Changtian, Lu Xing'er, Ye Xin — over to eat crab and drink in that novel split-level apartment. "Every time we 'changed apartments,' I'd get friends from the Writers' Association to buy in the same place. Some of them weren't keen, so we'd borrow money and buy anyway."

"My wife had one wish her whole life: to live a little better." In 1997 Mao Shi'an moved to the Cultural Bureau. "Commercial housing had started selling by then. The state gave us a small subsidy, and we scraped together enough for an apartment on Longhua West Road. After that we moved again, to South Ruijin Road." One purchase and one swap after another, and in 2009 the Mao family moved into a new apartment in Gubei, 157 square meters, where he finally had a study of his own. Gubei began to be built up in the 1980s, right beside the Hongqiao business district. The first high-end residential district developed all of a piece was there, and its earliest "housing for foreign sale" drew the expatriate staff of multinationals. The area came to be known as a rich people's neighborhood.

"I have to say it — anyone with the means and the opportunity moved out of the new village long ago. Some of the people still living in Anshan Fourth Village probably don't even know Gubei exists."

Every so often in recent years Mao Shi'an has gone back to look at Anshan Fourth Village. The No. 8 uncle and auntie he once envied moved away for a while, but in the end came back to live there. The apartment he once lived in has been rebuilt too: the original north and south rooms are now two separate homes. The new village that "didn't believe in privacy" now has a wall running down the middle between them, splitting the place in two, each half with its own bathroom and kitchen.

Anshan Fourth Village originally had only three floors. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, to add housing, two more floors were built on top of the three. Floors 1 to 3 still have their original wooden staircases; above that the stairs are concrete, and most of the workers' new villages around Anshan carry the same mark of that conversion. Associate Professor Yang Chen of Tongji University's College of Architecture and Urban Planning has studied this kind of building-on. Unlike most of today's projects, which move original residents out to the suburbs under the banner of "old city renewal," this approach kept the residents in place and added housing at the same time. "It may not have been 'worth it' in economic terms, and after that era you essentially never saw this kind of building-on again."

But the pace of renovation keeps slowing. On floors 1 to 3 of these new villages today, the wooden stairs have gone years without repair and creak when anyone walks on them. Tongji University is close by, and its College of Design and Innovation has designed and rebuilt public spaces in the surrounding blocks. On Sujiatun Road, beside Anshan Fourth Village, a huge glass sphere now hangs in a tree — a motion-sensing lamp that glows brighter the more people gather under it. The designers hoped the piece would build some sense of community.

"But these little patch-ups don't amount to much," Mao Shi'an says. After a long time in Gubei, he finds each return to Anshan Fourth Village harder to get used to. "The pipes and wiring are worn out. The exposed wires are bundled up like loose straw — a spiderweb at least has some order to it. Parking is a mess. From outside the buildings the paint looks fresh, but step in and it's dark and grimy. Property management can't keep up, the meter boxes are a disaster, the stair treads wobble underfoot, and every time you step on one you worry it might give way."

Even so, prices at Anshan Fourth Village are not low. Besides the original residents who have nowhere else to go, young people from out of town with some money are buying there: this "old, run-down, small" housing is relatively affordable, and for them it is the first stepping stone into the city. Dahushan Road Primary School, where Mao Shi'an once studied, is now a key school in Yangpu District, and being in the right school district is the new value of this old, run-down, small housing.

Graphics: Lin Yuyao

Cover image: stocksnap, Maxime Amoudruz on Unsplash