From Shanghai to New York, at 55 He Is Still Running From "That Kind of Life" | Housing and Our Lives ⑪

A house is the biggest commodity a person can buy, and it is also one of the witnesses to how an individual life changes. QDaily is running a series of reports that use 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 them.

What we want to pass on is the part most worth inheriting: a firm belief in progress and development; the belief that society will keep giving individuals better and larger space; that effort earns its due reward; that freedom is worth fighting for, and that we will get there in the end.

These are simply universal values.

When a word like "history" is set in front of us, it tends to be buried under grand narratives. We hope to do what we can, through more interviews at the level of ordinary lives, to sort some of it out.

We are starting this record with "housing," the subject that gets the most attention in an individual life.

Zheng Yaohua, 55, has lived in New York for 14 years, working in television production at a local media company.

A few years ago he began writing songs in Shanghainese, recalling the Shanghai he lived in for more than forty years — from the sour, rank back streets behind the fashionable "upper corner," to the hunchbacked old man from Ningbo next door. He says he wanted to write about a set of "people who never amounted to anything." Take The Hooligan Grows Old, about a generation of hooligans now bald or stooped with their necks drawn in: "sent down to the countryside for reform through labor, no chance to study or join the army, nobody to marry, no parent's job to take over, back from a work injury to make pastries for a living."

"In Shanghainese we say 'eating hardship' — suffering, suffering at the hands of society. When you're young you watch other people eat hardship; in middle age others make you eat it; when you're old you still hope you can make someone else eat it," Zheng Yaohua says. This is the "loser" he wanted to write about.

He counts himself one of them. In 2003 he fled to New York "like a man stepping on a watermelon rind" — by then the rush to go abroad, the era of A Beijinger in New York and A Shanghainese in Tokyo, had long since passed.

Once in New York, he joined neither the Western circle nor the Chinese circle; he simply gave up on having a circle at all and settled into life as a middle-aged homebody. Every day he went between the apartment he rented in Queens and his company in Manhattan, with no more than a few thousand dollars in the bank. "In Shanghai that would practically be grounds for jumping off a building, but in New York a lot of people seem to live this way."

He does not mind admitting that he has become a man frozen in time. He once tried hard to escape a set of values and a way of living that had already been defined for him down to the last detail, and he never found some other so-called model of success either.

Family business brought him back to Shanghai from New York in November. With time on his hands, he walked us down Hefei Road, the street he knew as a child, and found that every landmark and coordinate he once used had stopped working.

What follows is Zheng Yaohua's account in his own words. It is one way to get to know him:

The sour, rank Hefei Road inside the "upper corner"

Young people today seem more nostalgic than I am — mention Hefei Road and they immediately think of the Western-style villa here, No. 376 Hefei Road. We had no such idea as children. We didn't find it beautiful, only dark, with no romance attached to it at all. People online are always saying "we can never go back." The question is, why would you want to?

As a child I lived at No. 400 Hefei Road. People now count the nearby Danshui Road and Fuxing Road as part of the "upper corner," but back then Hefei Road stank. It started with the fishy, rotten smell of the street market, then the Asia Knife Factory, where the machine oil used for grinding blades ran out across the pavement. There was also a night-soil collection station, an ink factory, a coal-briquette factory. It could not not stink. Thinking back now it is frightening — when it rained, children waded through the water and were thrilled by it, water up over the calves. Just think what quality of water that was.

The first home I remember was near here too, in Luwan District, close to Guangming Cun. (Zheng Yaohua later asked his mother, and it turned out that the attic room he lived in as a child was in Weihou Li, a Republican-era residential compound listed as an immovable cultural relic and now demolished.)

Shanghainese people describe something small as "a place the size of a fart." As a child my family kept moving, always within a place that small, and we never moved out of the area. It was only after I got to America that I learned the word "block" — really it is just a square cut out by four streets: Hefei Road, Madang Road, Huangpi South Road, Fuxing Middle Road.

The first place was that attic room, 6 square meters, one bed and one round table, three people, since my younger brother wasn't born yet.

By the time I started primary school we had moved to No. 400 Hefei Road, into an 8-square-meter front room in a shikumen house. I can't even tell you the name of that shikumen — not like the later such-and-such Li or such-and-such Cun, or the names of commercial housing compounds. As children we marked places by people: "so-and-so's lane."

Across the street was a shantytown. My mother always said "don't go over there," afraid I'd get lost. Looking back, a class line was quietly at work. The prejudice then wasn't about poverty but about disorder. Hefei Road was narrow, like a barrier, and we simply did not mix with the other side.

Later, after reform and opening up, the Hong Kong bakery Tai Pan came into the Shanghai market and put up a building right beside the night-soil station. At the time I thought it was disgusting — a place selling pastries, right there. Go and look now: Tai Pan, the night-soil station, none of it is left.

It is genuinely hard to recall where these places were. Every coordinate, every reference point is gone.

"What are you looking at? Let's go home!"

Both my parents worked, so before primary school I lived at my grandmother's and barely went to kindergarten. As I wrote in one of my songs, her home stood where Landmark Plaza on Nanjing Road stands today. If Landmark Plaza is a mold that flattened the original buildings, my grandmother's house is buried underneath it.

Looking back, Nanjing Road then was not really bustling at all, though as a child, looking up at the buildings, I was afraid I would float into the sky along with them. The whole street was lined with shops, and by the density of the stores and of the people, it counted as lively. I only remember one toy shop on Nanjing Road. I liked it not because there was anything novel to buy. I knew perfectly well my family couldn't afford it, and I didn't feel disappointed at the time. It felt like a treat only because I needed an adult to take me there.

I also remember the fireworks on Nanjing Road — though you couldn't actually watch them from Nanjing Road; you had to stand on Shanxi Road behind it. They were set off at People's Square. People's Square then wasn't crowded the way it is today; it was wide open. The mortars were probably set up right there. We stood on Shanxi Road looking straight toward People's Square and could see the fireworks up close. Later, as an adult, even after I had moved to America, if a friend said we're going to watch fireworks tonight, I had no interest at all. Nothing has ever matched how it felt then, the fireworks bursting right over my head, so big, so near.

They would have been set off around National Day. If I remember right, never for Chinese New Year — back then Spring Festival did not rank so high; it had no political standing.

Sun Yat-sen's former residence at No. 7 Xiangshan Road was the same. My middle school was right next door to it. In our school days it was nowhere near as busy as it is now. If a crowd gathered at the entrance, it was certainly a government-organized study visit, or a reception for foreign guests. We had no way to go in and look around — it was, after all, the residence of a Nationalist Party leader.

Nanjing Road got busy one other time: the send-off of educated youth to the countryside. I climbed onto the crossbar of a shop window trying to spot my young aunt in the crowd; she was being sent to settle and farm in Jiangxi. I was excited, clamoring to go watch the parade, and before I even found her my grandmother pulled me down.

"What are you looking at? Let's go home!" she scolded me in her Chaoshan-accented Shanghainese, and burst into tears.

Only then did I understand: the whole street was full of gongs and drums, but for my grandmother this was a sorrowful thing. That wasn't even the first cohort of educated youth. In the cohorts before, children from neighboring families had already been sent away, and the news that came back was nothing but suffering — brutal suffering.

I remember nothing of what the parade looked like, probably nothing but people in military uniforms, belted, in army caps. I can't even remember the year. The one thing I remember clearly is that line: "What are you looking at? Let's go home!"

"In the histories we describe as a surging flood, you find so many bubbles"

My grandmother's home was inside a building that looked grand from outside, with marble staircases whose banisters were wide enough to slide down. Its structure was like a lot of department stores today, with a huge hollow atrium in the middle. The difference was that packed tightly around that atrium were ordinary working households. Shanghainese call it a "pigeon coop" — small, and dense. My grandparents had fled from Chaoshan in Guangdong to make a living in Shanghai, and their work unit assigned them this pigeon coop.

Later, doing research for a song, I found out that this building had been a financial trading hall in the Republican era. Before Liberation it had already been carved into countless rooms, first as company offices, later as homes. I don't know whether I could still find that old floor plan; the building was covered with the names of dozens of companies.

From inside our pigeon coop you could still see the ceiling: enormous Western-style relief flowers, like a pattern on a bolt of cloth.

There was no separate kitchen here, not even a shared cooking room. The corridor became everyone's kitchen. Each family opened its door and there, right up against the hollow atrium, was its own stove, with coal briquettes stacked beside it. Making use of the cramped space tested each household's "skill": an adult stretching out one arm, that was the "legal" width belonging to your family. You couldn't stretch out the other arm, because that belonged to the neighbor. You couldn't cross the line.

The "wall" between households was plywood, with no soundproofing. A light knock and you could feel the panel shake — not that it was about to collapse, it simply had give. Almost nothing around you was a solid wall; at least three sides were made of something soft.

On the other side of the plywood lived an old woman and her three children. We never once saw her husband. We called her Madame Zhu. Years later I heard she had been a concubine of the owner of the Hengdeli watch shop, though I don't know which one.

"Oh no, they're lighting the stove at No. 5, shut the door, quick" — that is the kind of thing I remember. Smoke in the corridor was completely normal. Can you picture it? A huge dome with Western floral patterns overhead, and beneath it a hall where people once danced, with giant floor tiles. It was bizarre, utterly bizarre. I don't know what Madame Zhu next door made of it — she must have seen the un-bizarre version of things — but to me that was simply what the world was.

It is a bit like seeing foreign children in New York now. Outdoors in winter I'm in jeans and a down jacket, and a foreign child is lying in a stroller in a single pair of thin trousers. He kicks, and his legs are completely bare. Just looking at it makes me cold. But to him, maybe that is simply the temperature of this world.

Madame Zhu's three children were my aunt's age, and they had a camera and often took me out to take photographs. That looks ordinary enough now. This family's political standing was entirely black, or at least gray — their home had reportedly been raided twice, yet the camera was still there. They passed it up and down the corridor without much care for who saw, and they even had a makeshift darkroom where they developed their own photos.

I don't remember whether it was Hemingway or someone else who said this. I can't recall the exact words, but roughly: however sweeping and destructive the process, however completely a city turns into hell, there are always bystanders who stand outside the thing. When we define something — that day was wretched, that stretch of years was wretched — that is an abstraction. Look closer at each person's experience, each detail, and you really do find "exceptions." Note that I put "exceptions" in quotation marks, because it is an exception only in the sense that we have long been far too fond of abstractions; and you also can't turn it around and use these "exceptions" to prove that era was fine. This is the true face of life.

Another "exception" was an old man from Ningbo, later our neighbor at No. 400 Hefei Road. His family reportedly had ties to the Nationalist military, and after Liberation he spent several years in prison. By the time he was released his body had been deformed into a V, the spine twisted from head to buttocks. Even lying down he stayed in that V; he couldn't lie flat. It never occurred to me to ask about his story. In my memory he was always reading.

This is the part that may surprise us. Wasn't it an era of total repression? Everything banned! And yet here was a man classed among the "four bad elements," about as low as you could sit in the hierarchy of the time, openly reading at home the books then branded "feudal, capitalist and revisionist" contraband. The Song of Youth, say, which back then was considered shot through with bourgeois sentiment, a poisonous weed. Not to mention Western works — Spartacus, Carmen, utterly reactionary — and there he was, reading them at home. Some young men a bit older than me would even bring books to trade with him. If I remember right, he even had a full set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

I put the old man from Ningbo into a song too. This is the part that really interests me. In these histories that we describe as a surging, all-sweeping flood, you find so many bubbles. Inside each bubble is its own small world, seemingly unrelated to the flood, and the flood never manages to crush the bubble flat.

Madame Zhu's political classification was probably a shade better than the old man from Ningbo's. The family of a capitalist counted as oppressed too, in a sense, so the treatment may have been somewhat more lenient; the categories back then were very fine-grained. The old man from Ningbo had actually served time, which made him a true "bad element." Yet he got by about as well as Madame Zhu did. I read a lot of books at his place. Every time his son came back from the farm it was a chance for me to have my eyes opened. The son liked to draw, copying pictures out of books, all of them foreigners dressed in Napoleonic-era costume.

"What do you mean? What does 'creak-creak' mean?"

Of course there was still plenty of caution. There were crystal radios then. We couldn't afford one, but my young uncle, who did well at school, assembled one himself and hid it in the attic. He had also got hold of a pair of headphones somewhere, the kind that would look striking even today, wide and heavy. They had probably come out of a raided household, ended up in the secondhand market, and could be had cheap.

Once my aunt wanted to let me hear a foreign song, warning me, "one or two minutes only." As a child I wasn't especially eager to listen; I was just curious. It ended up scaring her half to death. Only afterward did she realize that the window of my grandmother's home faced another building, straight into somebody else's window. Those few moments we spent with the headphones on could easily have been seen from across the way, and someone could have reported it as "listening to an enemy station."

I remember how tense she was afterward, guessing over and over: was anyone there just now? Did anyone see? Informing on each other was an extremely common social habit during the Cultural Revolution.

In truth ordinary people did not care about "enemy stations" at all — but at even a hint of reactionary language, they were scared out of their wits themselves.

The end of the Cultural Revolution was still a long way off then, but in its later years the social mood was quite different. People knew — in Shanghainese we say "messing around" — that at the start people follow the tide, and even those who felt nothing about it went along. But eventually they tired of it. However loudly the calls came from above, once someone realized "this is just messing around," they stopped following you. Whatever fervor there had been, stirred up from outside or arising on its own, the fire had gone out.

I also remember a very different Chinese-language teacher in the late years of the Cultural Revolution. He had us write about anything at all. You could write about how the sun felt hot on your skin today, as long as you could get that feeling of heat onto the page; or how you saw someone do something funny yesterday, as long as you could write it so that people really found it funny. That was enough.

He never said outright that we were no longer writing on revolutionary subjects. He stepped around it. He didn't ask you to have a theme; write whatever you want.

Our teachers before him were nothing like that, and some probably still aren't today. I remember one middle-school writing exercise where other students would write something like "he stood up a little hesitantly." I didn't want to use the word "hesitant," so I wrote, "he stood up, and the chair went creak-creak for a while." The teacher circled "creak-creak" in red pen and wrote in the margin: "What do you mean? What does 'creak-creak' mean?"

What I had pictured in that instant was a person standing up slowly, and an old-style chair making that sound. I wanted to use a pile of details to work on you, to make you picture exactly what I pictured. That is still how I write songs today, though it may well be futile.

"Our generation had no space of our own"

We always lived in rooms the size of a fart — from the 6-square-meter attic room to the 8-square-meter shikumen front room, from three people to four, with barely room to turn around. My father was good with his hands, and he got a few coworkers to help him build a loft, an L-shaped corner attic. My brother and I slept on one side; the other side held junk.

The biggest frustration for our generation was having no space of our own. You couldn't shake it.

What did we want the space for? Hard to say. Certainly not for homework; nobody then cared about doing homework properly. It was probably just a demand that comes with being a teenager. Unlike today, when a child practically has a room of his own from birth and doesn't carry that particular burden. For us it was the most basic source of frustration.

In the 1980s I got into Shanghai Normal College and started writing songs, and even formed a band, Four Ears, in 1986. I thought I was doing something very modern. But while I wrote, the accompaniment in my ears was the Yue opera and Shanghai opera my mother liked to play while she sewed. I had no earplugs; the most I could do was hide up in the attic.

Even that was strange. In Shanghai people thought the attic was purely a place to sleep. Hiding up there in broad daylight with no illness or emergency was abnormal, something you could only do once in a while. And even up there the sound still came through. Looking back it's hard to believe: someone singing at full volume nearby while you try to compose your own tune and hum it in key. That is how we got through our days, how we made it through.

The only other option was to escape into a bigger space — go out and wander with nothing particular to do, on streets full of strangers. That was how you got a bit of space that was truly your own. It wasn't only the troublemakers who did this; good students did it too. I had no destination when I wandered the streets. I just wandered, and at most I'd go sit at a classmate's place whose parents were out. By my freshman or sophomore year the national mood had shifted and there were disco halls where young people went to dance, but that was never my thing, and I wouldn't really go to a place with such a mixed crowd; people thought those places were full of thugs and every other kind of unsavory character.

Later a close friend of mine went to America. He had lived on the same block as me, and once he was abroad he left his room to me. Not rented — free. That is how I got my own space for the first time, an extravagant kind of happiness. I now live in Queens, New York, and he is still my landlord. He went to America more than a decade before me, worked hard, and lives very much like a "local Chinese," with a few properties to his name.

Back in Shanghai this time, I was struck by how fast the "new buildings" are aging. After I married I was allocated a room on Fuxing Road, later torn down to make way for a commercial housing development. Passing by there the other day, what struck me wasn't that it had been buried again. It was that the thing that buried me back then had itself already grown old, in only a few years.

A little over a year after I arrived in New York, a local ABC asked me why I liked it. He couldn't see what there was to like about New York, and I said, precisely because it's a mess. Before I left I had worked at a television station in Nanshi District (which once covered the old town, Lujiabang and the Shangnan area of Pudong, and was abolished in 2000 and merged into Huangpu District and the Pudong New Area), recording how people argued back and forth over the redevelopment of the old town. Parts of it were foolish, but on the whole it was a serious discussion about how to preserve Chinese character. My ears had grown calluses from it, and I thought that was simply how it ought to be done. Then I got to New York and found that people there just do whatever they like. What that really means is juxtaposition: a very old church, and next to it, out of nowhere, a glass curtain-wall tower. The whole is a jumble. So you can watch a city, as a living thing, show you how it got to where it is. I worry that China won't have this anymore, that everything old will be wiped clean for the sake of the new.

"Getting out"

I left the country in 2003. A classmate had gone to America first, working at a media company in New York, and later brought me over.

Shanghainese people say "step on a watermelon rind and slide wherever it takes you." That was me. I gave it no thought before or after; I simply wanted to go and look. I had never seen the truly Western world. I had read so many translated novels, and although my English was terrible, I knew the names of so many foreign streets.

There was another reason too. I didn't like the atmosphere around me in Shanghai; it was very worldly. I don't mean "worldly" as an insult — I mean the atmosphere of ordinary people getting on with their lives. A house, a car; everyone was defining "what you ought to be doing." If I went to a new country, could I get out from under the way of life, the values and the relationships that had always surrounded us?

Once I got to New York, nobody cared how you dressed, how you behaved, how you lived, how you saved, or when you were supposed to be chasing after this or that. It seemed nobody would say anything even if you never bought a house. That's only one example — and in fact not buying a house didn't feel quite right either. But at least nobody would demand, "how can you not buy a house?!"

In the end life in Shanghai requires you to be a hardworking person. Even the old aunties have ambitions. I am not like that. Sometimes you feel Shanghai has become tremendously impressive and people have become quite "comfortable," but some things just don't change. This time back, one evening around eight or nine, on a pitch-dark little street, two middle-aged women walked past — "hey, that apartment of his..." — then an old man went by, still on the subject of housing. You can always hear that word explode out of somebody.

But I've made my peace with it. If talking about housing brings you something, fine. If you can never get it and keep talking about it forever, that isn't very healthy either.

After I got to New York I had almost no circle left. My best friend and I can go half a year without exchanging a word, and I've lost even the urge to travel.

Last year, back in China, there was a moment of ease. One evening my wife and I wandered down Nanjing Road with no aim at all. We never used to go shopping; we never went to Huaihai Road either. Both of us are homebodies, in Shanghai or in New York. We walked for hours, the way we did when we were courting. Nobody on that street knew us, nobody minded us. Everything around me had nothing to do with me, and for that moment I didn't have to worry about New York either. It was a strange kind of emptying out. Maybe at bottom I'm still that middle-school boy, still not grown up.

If anything makes me want to stay, it's my daughter. I can feel that life in Shanghai would exhaust her. She may share the same block I have: she can't take pressure sprung on her, that "quick, quick, quick, work it out, work it out" kind of thing.

That is a skill, really — like being handed 100 problems in primary school with someone starting the stopwatch. I'm not calling this resistance to exam-driven education crushing human nature; let's not put it on so high a pedestal, everyone went through the same thing. It's simply that this particular kind of nerve isn't there, and she may be the same as me. Once I had moved to New York I thought, maybe this can change for her.

When my wife asked me, "what do you think it's like over there?" I said, "I think it's pretty good," and just like that, muddling along, we moved. I don't regret it, of course. My daughter certainly got things in America that she would not have got at home. At the very least, that terrifying thing is gone.

I've always said that I just ran away. Unfortunately I haven't built anything of much use myself. At least my daughter didn't suffer too much in the first half of her life; as for what good it will do later, there is no way to reason it out.

When my daughter went to college she went to Parsons to study fashion design, on borrowed money. Four years later she finished and announced, without the slightest embarrassment, "I'm not going to do fashion design." She wanted to do graphic design instead. You have to look at her as an American; there's no way to apply the Chinese line of "we spent all that money" or "is it worth it." It doesn't work, and there's no point saying it.

She never studied graphic design formally and could only pick up internships bit by bit, and by now she has something to show and has had a few offers. At school her classmates were often much older than her, people who seemed to have knocked about in the world and come back to study anyway. So she doesn't find it strange that two years after graduating she still hasn't found a proper job. I don't know whether young people in Shanghai still feel that kind of pressure. If they do, then I suppose I came out ahead.

Illustrations: Lin Yuyao

Cover image and banner: Wikimedia Commons