Born in 1984, He Became the Third Generation in China's First Workers' New Village | Housing and Our Lives ④

Housing is the largest commodity a person can buy, and it also bears witness to how an individual life changes. QDaily will run a series of reports that use housing as the 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 only through the tail end of it; most of the story was written by the generation before us.

What we want to pass on is the part of it worth keeping: a firm belief in progress and development; that society will keep giving the individual better and larger room to live in; that effort earns its due reward; that freedom can be won, and that we will get there in the end.

These, in fact, are universal values.

A word like "history," set down in front of us, tends to get buried under grand narrative. We would rather do what sorting-out we can through interviews at the small, human scale.

We begin this record with the thing people pay the most attention to in their own lives: the house.

Reno, born in 1984, grew up in Caoyang Third Village in Shanghai. He is the third generation of his family to live there.

Say "Caoyang" and you probably think of Caoyang New Village, the first workers' new village completed anywhere in China, finished in 1952. It became the show home for how a socialist state houses its workers, and the Caoyang Road subdistrict even set up a foreign affairs office to receive visitors from around the world.

The first generation of residents in Caoyang New Village were 1,002 households of frontline workers, model workers, and advanced workers. They came from factories at every level across Shanghai and were sent to Caoyang after rounds of selection. Jiefang Daily once followed the story of Caoyang New Village with its cameras; the leads were Lu Agou, a worker at a textile machinery plant, and Kong Aju, a woman who worked at a cotton mill.

But all that glory sits a long way from this man born in the 1980s. Reno has at times doubted what people are really after when they lay the colors on so thickly about that era. In his telling, the origin of the house is flat and plain: "It was allocated by my grandfather's work unit at the time, State Cotton Mill No. 7."

"Big families care about compiling genealogies; a working-class family has never heard of anything called 'family history.' The people at home never bring it up on their own, and when we go back and ask, their accounts contradict each other." Reno's uncles can't even say clearly how his grandmother, whose family came from Siyang County in Jiangsu, ended up in Shanghai. His second uncle said she had once joined a women's anti-Japanese group and later fled to Shanghai as a refugee; his youngest uncle said she had simply come to Shanghai for work, and shot back at Reno, "Why are you asking about that?"

The 1980s: The First Generation of New Village Residents, Retired Early

Reno's parents were sent-down youth, assigned to a production team in Jiangxi. He was left in Shanghai with his grandparents. "In a sense, I count as a 'left-behind child' too."

The first house the three generations of Reno's family lived in at Caoyang Third Village was one of the "20,000 Households," a large public works program from the early years of the People's Republic. After the original 1,002 units at Caoyang First Village, the Shanghai municipal government built a second batch of workers' housing across the city.

The 20,000 Households buildings were plainer: brick walls, wood floors, two stories, five rooms to a floor. Each room ran 10 to 20 square meters, with a shared kitchen and bathroom. One such building held 10 worker families. In all, 17 workers' new villages went up near the industrial districts of west, east, and south Shanghai — 2,000 buildings, 10 families to a building, hence the name "20,000 Households." At the time it solved the housing problem for nearly 100,000 people.

The room Reno's grandfather was given by State Cotton Mill No. 7 was about 20 square meters. The old couple had five children. By the time Reno was born, most of his uncles had married and moved out of the Third Village. His parents were still in Jiangxi; his youngest aunt had also been sent down, though not far — to Chongming Island, still in Shanghai. That left the unmarried youngest uncle. "Three adults and one child living together — back then that wasn't considered crowded."

The 20,000 Households buildings lasted into the 1980s. Reno still remembers people bathing in the zaopijian, the kitchen. "This has to be a collective memory for a lot of Shanghainese. We'd drive a hook into the roof beam, hang a shower curtain from it, and set a big wooden tub underneath. In summer you bathed there; in winter the drafts came through, but somehow it didn't feel cold. The doors on those old kitchens were thick — the stuff felt like an army greatcoat wrapped around you."

Lu Agou and Kong Aju are too far away; Reno never lived through that good era that belonged to the workers, and he rarely heard his elders mention the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution years. In his memory, the leading figures in the new village through the 1980s and 90s were middle-aged and older people who had retired early.

"Dingzhi" — taking over a parent's post — is a word that sounds entirely foreign now. In the 1980s many workers stepped down before retirement age so a son or daughter could take their job at the work unit. That sent a wave of middle-aged and older people into the workers' new villages with nothing to do, and mahjong became the village's favorite entertainment.

"My grandfather had stomach bleeds eight times, entirely from the irregular eating that came with mahjong — he was obsessed, like a kid hooked on the internet today. He retired from State Cotton Mill No. 7 and handed his post to my second uncle. Every day he'd stuff a few walnut shortbread cookies in his pocket, brew a pot of tea, and sit down at the mahjong table. The new village had no mahjong rooms or card rooms then — people played wherever there was room, in someone's home, even outdoors. They played from daylight until dark. My grandmother used to send me to call him home, and if he'd won money he'd buy me a toy car."

A Down Payment Saved Up With One Pair of Barber's Scissors: A "New Village Legend"

Reno's grandmother, known in the Third Village as "Fat Auntie," liked to gather people for dice after she retired — one big bowl, three dice, three of a kind wins.

Before she retired, though, Fat Auntie drove herself hard, working several jobs at once. She started at the Shanghai Firewood Factory; later a machine took off one of her toes, and after that injury she moved to the sanitation depot right downstairs from her home in Caoyang Third Village.

"I used to go sweep the streets with her, which is why I still show street cleaners a lot of respect when I see them today. The garbage carts back then looked much like today's — today's are a bit lighter, the old ones were a lot clunkier. Talking it through like this, it's coming back to me: she worked in the daytime, and at night she'd come home and still do needlework, slippers and socks and so on, to sell."

Besides sweeping streets, Fat Auntie cleaned for the depot. The manager's office became her and Reno's "summer resort" for a while. "Air conditioning had only just arrived in Shanghai and most people couldn't afford it. Our family wasn't well off either, so my grandmother would sneak me into the manager's office to sleep — it had air conditioning and a sofa, and we could help ourselves."

"Later the manager seems to have found out, but nobody said anything and he let it go. There was more human feeling back then. Do that today and someone would report you for helping yourself to public property, and you might even be fired. Back then people probably didn't fuss over small things like that."

The depot had once thrown up an extra room without deciding what to use it for, and it sat empty after it was built. Fat Auntie pointed a newcomer to the Third Village toward it. The woman, surnamed Bao, was divorced and had come to Shanghai with her daughter to make a living. On Fat Auntie's recommendation she took the room over and opened a barbershop.

"Auntie Bao charged very little, and people in the Third Village and nearby loved going there for a haircut. She never took my grandmother's money — her way of saying thanks, I suppose. My grandmother liked a small bargain, so every few days, whenever she had nothing to do, she'd take me over there: a haircut plus a chat. Later, after my grandmother was paralyzed, Auntie Bao would even come to the house to cut her hair."

"That room at the depot was technically an illegal structure, but they let her run a barbershop in it anyway — that's the human feeling of those years too. I really admire her. She worked day and night, day and night, and with nothing but a pair of scissors she finally saved up a down payment and bought a place right there in the Third Village. Of course, down payments were lower then." Seen from today, with prices soaring and two generations often pooling their savings to scrape together a down payment, Reno calls this a "new village legend" that belonged to that era.

The depot later took the illegal structure back, and not long after that the depot itself was taken over by Caoyang No. 2 Middle School. The place Auntie Bao bought was on the ground floor; she stood an old-fashioned striped barber pole outside, cut a doorway, and went on cutting the neighbors' hair.

Sent Down, Taking Over a Post, Laid Off: The "Lost" Second Generation

Reno has complicated feelings about parents who were largely absent from his childhood; there is still some resentment when he talks about it. Being sent down to the countryside opened a gulf between the sent-down youth and children like Reno who stayed behind in Shanghai. "I once watched a CCTV documentary called Mirror. A Taiwanese education expert in it said being a parent doesn't require a license or an assessment — some people just become parents and that's that."

He still remembers that his father would appear briefly at holidays and leave again before dawn the next morning, and rarely wrote. "My parents never had that awareness, so I raise my own children myself, with my wife — at most with her mother helping. Every day after work I try not to touch my phone."

"Being sent down caused a lot of family conflict, too — who went down and who stayed in Shanghai. There was always a rift, and it was like that all over Shanghai." But all of this happened before Reno was born, and he rarely heard his parents talk about their life in Jiangxi.

"My dad always told me, 'You're Shanghainese, you were born at the Changning No. 1 Maternity and Infant Health Hospital.' But on my household registration booklet, my birthplace is Jiangxi."

Because of that registration, Reno nearly couldn't get into kindergarten. "The policy then, as I understand it, was that if your parents had been sent down, the child couldn't go to school back in Shanghai — no kindergarten, no primary school. In the end my grandmother got down on her knees and begged, and the principal let me in. I joke with my wife that if kneeling still got your child enrolled today, there'd be a line of people kneeling in the principal's office every day."

Reno, left in Shanghai, had no idea he had a brother in Jiangxi, ten years older, until the brother fell ill and was dying and his parents finally brought Reno to Jiangxi so the two could meet. "They told me, 'Your brother has something to say to you.' I leaned in, and he didn't say anything — he bit my ear." After that, his parents never mentioned it again.

There were plenty of children across Shanghai in Reno's position, parents sent down, the child left behind with the generation above. He also remembers a mutual-aid group at his school called the "Le Le Le Squad," set up to look after children from sent-down families or single-parent families. "Looking back it seems fairly cruel — you're singling a child out and announcing he or she has no father or mother. I didn't feel that way at the time, though. Back then we just went for the free food at the group's activities."

In the 1980s, sent-down youth began coming back to Shanghai, and the 20,000 Households buildings were one after another reaching the end of their working lives. Many of the returnees brought with them the families they had started far from home. Suddenly several generations were packed into rooms of under 20 square meters, and the pressure on housing jumped. The two-story 20,000 Households buildings were pulled down one by one and replaced with five- and six-story blocks.

Caoyang Third Village went the same way. Reno's family moved for a time to neighboring Guixiang New Village while they waited, and conditions in the transitional housing were worse still, right up against a creek. He remembers scenes there that now seem hallucinatory.

"A few years back there was that news about dead pigs floating down Suzhou Creek, traced back to Jiaxing — it caused quite a stir. I'd already seen it as a child, living in that house in Guixiang New Village. Not just pigs floating past, but cows. As a kid I had no notion of upstream or downstream; you'd just see a cow drifting toward you from a distance."

By the time the new building was finished, Reno's family had its own bathroom and kitchen and two bedrooms — the main one went to the youngest uncle, now married, and the other held his grandfather, his grandmother, and him. "My grandmother and I slept in the bed, and my grandfather slept on the sofa beside it. By today's parenting standards a child that age sharing a bed with his grandmother isn't good, but nobody bothered about such things then. Now my grandfather has died, and after my grandmother took a fall she can't lie on her back, so she lies on her side on that same sofa. Over all these years the sofa has long since fallen apart — we just stitch it back together roughly with thread when we have to."

After she was paralyzed, Fat Auntie's weight climbed to 200 jin, about 220 pounds, and she couldn't move. The flat that once held four people has emptied out; the only permanent residents are she, in her eighties, and her caretaker. Every day the caretaker carries Fat Auntie to the toilet and carries her back to the sofa. "It's not the kind of toilet you're imagining — it's a commode frame next to the sofa. She's too heavy. Even the distance from the sofa to the bathroom is more than she can cross. This is what her old age is. No hospital will take an old person in this condition, and no nursing home either, so all we can do is hire someone to sit with her."

Reno's parents and uncles all belong to the second generation of the new village. Yang Chen, an associate professor at Tongji University's College of Architecture and Urban Planning, has studied the three generations of residents in Caoyang Third Village: "They" — the second generation — "are even more lost than the generation before them." Some of them, like Reno's parents, were sent-down youth who tried every route back to Shanghai; some made it, some didn't. Among those who made it back and those who had never left, some took over a parent's post and went into the factories, but the good years were short: the state-owned enterprise restructuring and the layoffs of the late 1990s arrived soon after.

In 2000, Reno's parents returned to Shanghai and were allocated a one-room flat of just over 30 square meters in Taopu. His father, "starting over from scratch," began driving for Dazhong Taxi. "He drove for more than a decade. At the start there were no phones and no navigation like now — for the first few years he had to find addresses and routes on a paper map."

Taopu sits where Putuo District meets Jiading District. It was once an industrial zone thick with chemical plants, and it was also famous as a "three-no-man's-land," a place no authority took responsibility for. Those factories have since moved away one by one.

"People who lived here didn't pay for water, electricity, or gas. Standards were low." Reno still remembers the popular methods: "The basic version was opening the tap to a trickle to steal water; the advanced version was putting a magnet outside the water meter so the needle stopped working. Back then, house after house in Taopu did it."

Rough as Taopu was, it was a place where outsiders and locals mixed well. "Migrants used to get off at Shanghai Railway Station, get on the 117 bus, and ride straight to Taopu. Bus fare was cheap then too, and people came hauling bags big and small." The common tongue in Taopu was a mongrel, far-from-standard Shanghainese. "Everybody spoke it. It came out lumpy, but nobody laughed at them for it."

"A place like that runs on loyalty. There were gangsters, too. Anybody with ambition to improve his life had moved out long before; the ones who didn't want to change, or couldn't afford to, played mahjong. Young people the same — if your parents had no money to buy you somewhere better, you drifted along and drifted into middle age. It's frightening."

His parents set up a small flat in Taopu as Reno's marital home, but in the end he sold it and moved to Minhang instead. "My wife wouldn't even go and look at the Taopu place. I told her my dad had bought a small flat there and she said, don't go to that place. Now I think she was right."

The "Restless" 1980s and 90s

The father Reno saw as cautious and dutiful also briefly "jumped into the sea," leaving his job to try business in Shenzhen, but he came back to Shanghai in the end.

The youngest uncle, born in the 1970s, was fashionable — he wore bell-bottoms. Unlike his eldest brother driving a taxi, or the second brother with a safe job in a government office, he was as restless and eager to try things as the 1980s and 90s themselves.

"He's ten years older than me — part father, part big brother." Reno's parents once took him to Jiangxi for a year of school, and it was the youngest uncle who brought him back to Shanghai. "When he came to see me in Jiangxi I thought my grandmother was dying and he'd come to take me back to see her one last time. It turned out he just thought life in Jiangxi was too hard on me — every time I got sick they gave me penicillin shots, and he said if they kept shooting me full of it I'd end up simple. Only now do I know that's called antibiotic overuse."

"Back then he bought a lot of Japanese textbooks and kept them at home — he badly wanted to go to Japan. That was the fashion of the day, you know: A Native of Beijing in New York, Shanghainese in Tokyo. The earliest people going to Tokyo were probably mostly northerners, and then Shanghainese started going too, one after another."

During his father's short spell in business in Shenzhen, the youngest uncle tried to talk his eldest brother into smuggling cigarettes, shipping them from Shenzhen to the interior for the price difference. "Around then the story of Yang Baiwan — 'Millionaire Yang,' who made his money scalping government treasury bonds — was everywhere, like a shot of adrenaline for everybody, but my dad was timid and in the end didn't dare. As kids, all we heard on 803 — Criminal Police 803, a 1990s radio drama based on real cases handled by Shanghai's criminal police — was this sort of thing, smuggling on the high seas and so on."

The youngest uncle never did get to Japan, and threw himself into the stock market instead.

"At first the family thought little of him, figured he'd never amount to anything, and he even took my grandmother's pension money to trade stocks — borrowing 50,000 yuan here, 100,000 yuan there, which really was too much; what if he'd lost it all? But after more than a decade of trading, he actually pulled it off." The year he pulled it off, the youngest uncle spent more than 4 million yuan on a commercial flat near Caoyang New Village — you could say he had "jumped out" of the workers' new village.

"After that the family started letting him trade for them. I have money with him too, but I never ask how much he's made. Money does a lot of damage to family feeling. He always says he understands the patterns, that he only trades short-term, but that's a gambler's frame of mind too — go for it, bet the lot. Most people never win that bet."

"The Way the New Village Has Changed Is Pretty Grim"

"When I was dating I still went back to Caoyang every week to see my grandmother. After I married and had children I went less often, but still once every two or three weeks, and I could slowly see things change. But the way the new village has changed is pretty grim."

Compared with the early wave of work — renovating and demolishing the 20,000 Households buildings and putting up new ones — there have been few big moves in recent years to repair or remodel this stock of old public housing. The most recent large-scale repair is still the "flat roof to pitched roof" conversion.

The workers' new villages all had flat roofs to begin with, and the top floors baked in the sun and leaked. The conversion added a pitched roof over the original flat one. When Caoyang Third Village had it done, Reno's grandfather had just died, and he remembers sitting by the window drinking. "There was scaffolding all over outside the window. I was young and cheeky then, and I'd climb up it. Residents also complained that the workers putting up the scaffolding would be walking back and forth outside while they were napping."

Nobody talks about a comprehensive renovation anymore, and the property management for these old public blocks couldn't carry the enormous cost of one either.

"Anyone who could 'jump out' moved away long ago; the ones left are middle-aged and older people who can't leave." Waiting for demolition used to be their one thread of hope. The father of a friend of Reno's bought an old flat in Caoyang and waited for the bulldozers. "Now I reckon it'll never be torn down. He must regret it terribly." The once-glorious 1,002 households of Caoyang First Village have been listed as immovable cultural heritage and preserved intact. People still live in them; they can't be demolished, their structure can't be altered, and the residents have no money for the work anyway.

"Conditions in that row of buildings in the First Village are even worse. To put it bluntly, migrant workers from out of town wouldn't want to live there — it's only old people, who have no choice."

"What the neighborhood committee can do is small things — put handrails on the stairwell walls so older people can get up the stairs, or a ramp at the stairwell entrance so residents in wheelchairs can get in and out, or switch to an electronic door entry system."

Reno brings up Wang Weiqiang, a professor at Tongji University's College of Architecture and Urban Planning, who has done fieldwork in Caoyang New Village and remade some of its public space. "I really admire the man — I went and found recordings of his lectures to listen to. He's where I learned what 'urban renewal' actually means. But even his work in Caoyang New Village was limited: flattening out the signboards, building a few presentable little terraces. The ring creek used to be a place you could reach the water — you could walk down to the bank and put your hand in. Now, after the renovation, all of that is fenced off. They put in some benches and redid a few flower beds."

"There's one really bad piece of design: they fenced the garden with steel panels. Right after it was finished it photographed well, with a real sense of space, but before long you could see how crude it was — dangerous for children, who can run into the panels or get cut on the edges. They did something ridiculous about it: stuck on a strip of bumper padding. How was a stick-on strip ever going to hold? Sun and wind had it peeling off in no time."

"As for the friends we grew up with, they scattered who knows where a long time ago. There's a line online that puts it well: Shanghainese move around so much, from here to there, that you couldn't round up enough people for a street brawl anymore."

Illustration: Lin Yuyao

At the interviewee's request, "Reno" is a pseudonym.