She Left the Place She'd Lived in for 66 Years, and Never Wants to Go Back | Housing and Our Lives #18

Gongyi Fang, at Lane 989, Sichuan North Road in Shanghai, was built in the 1920s. This is the story of one household there.

On a blazing afternoon in mid-July, Xu Dazhi traveled from her new home in the northwest corner of Shanghai's Hongkou district, on the Baoshan border, back to Qiujiang Road, a street she knows well, to buy discs at the last disc shop left in the area. She picked out a few live classical recordings, a BBC documentary and some feature films the shopkeeper, an old acquaintance, recommended, spent more than 200 yuan, and then took me on a tour of Qiujiang Road.

By now Qiujiang Road had been swept clean of the stalls that had crowded its pavement for years; on some side streets every storefront was sealed off, and word was going around that some shopkeepers in the indoor market would close for good before the Lunar New Year. She helped me pick out a yellow, egg-shaped Yixing clay teapot — a "beauty's shoulder" — and praised the workmanship, though she herself only ever drinks jasmine tea out of a thermos cup. Familiar ground put her at ease. But she would not walk on east along Qiujiang Road, turn south at Sichuan North Road and go to Gongyi Fang, where she had lived from the age of four to the age of seventy. She was afraid of what the sight would stir up.

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Gongyi Fang is an upscale shikumen (stone-gate) lane-house compound developed in the 1920s by Cantonese merchants. It sits in the eastern part of a large, squarish block bounded by Sichuan North Road, Haining Road, Jiangxi Middle Road and Wujin Road. In Hongkou district's land registry, the block is "Block 18."

Not long after it was finished, Gongyi Fang became an important base for leftist writers and for the New Sensationist school. Three leftist publishing houses in the compound — Shuimo, Xinken and Nanqiang — brought out a large body of literary and philosophical work, translated and introduced Marxist classics, and printed leftist periodicals. It was also an important meeting place. According to letters by the writer Lou Shiyi, a member of the League of Left-Wing Writers who once lived above the Shuimo Bookstore at No. 16 Gongyi Fang, Lu Xun met Chen Geng — just arrived in Shanghai from the Soviet base area — on the second floor of the Shuimo Bookstore in 1932.

In 2012, Gongyi Fang was designated a "heritage protection site" in Shanghai's third national census of cultural relics (known as "San Pu"), which made it a candidate for full heritage-site status. In 2015, the compound's commercial buildings along Sichuan North Road (Nos. 975-987 and 1297-1311) were listed in Shanghai's fifth batch of outstanding historic buildings.

In March 2014, Hongkou district issued a housing expropriation order. Its stated purpose was "to improve residents' living conditions," and it swept the historically significant Block 18 into a "shantytown renovation" project. Xu Dazhi, who lived alone in the front room of No. 68 — the big room on the second floor — believed the expropriation broke the law in many ways, in procedure and in substance, and with more than thirty other households she refused to move. Over the next two years she first talked to the expropriation office; when that got nowhere she applied for an administrative review of the expropriation decision; when that was rejected she went to court, taking the case all the way to the Shanghai High People's Court, which threw out her appeal at the end of 2015.

In April and June of 2015, before the expropriation process had even finished, Gongyi Fang was hit by two surprise demolitions. Footage shot from a distance shows great clouds of dust rising over what had been a quiet lane; it took journalists and academics working together, and arguing hard in public, to stop the destruction. It was the plum-rain season, and the house next door was coming down. Xu Dazhi reasoned gently with the demolition crew: "We're still going through the legal process, we're still living here. Please leave the roof next door for now, or rainwater will seep through the wall into my home." The crew agreed. It was a shrewd request: the households that said nothing later had to fight a long war against leaks.

Thieves came at night to the nearly emptied lane. Xu Dazhi would sometimes wake to the sound of drawers being pulled open and tables dragged around next door, and through her window she could see figures moving across the roof and the terrace opposite. She found some planks and had someone nail the back window beside her terrace shut, then went on living as if nothing were wrong — still listening to music, reading, tending the dendrobium orchids she loves, and pushing ahead with the administrative review and one lawsuit after another alongside the neighbors who had stayed.

At the end of December 2015, after the High Court rejected her appeal, Xu Dazhi felt she no longer had the strength to keep going, so she signed an agreement with the relocation office, which in return let her stay in the old house until her new apartment was ready. One day the following September, the demolition team suddenly carried out a forced eviction on her downstairs neighbor, Teacher Cai, a retired police officer who had refused to accept the relocation terms. She had long known this day would come; before it did, she and Teacher Cai, her playmate in childhood, had agreed that each would keep one of the two house-number plates from the front and back doors of No. 68. Not long after, she moved from the southern tip of Hongkou district to Rainbow Bay (Caihong Wan) at its northern edge, one road away from Baoshan. Built on the industrial land of the old No. 2 Textile Machinery Plant, this vast complex was reported, when construction began in 2013, to be on course to become the largest subsidized-housing site in Shanghai's central districts, with room for 10,000 residents.

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Xu Dazhi moved into Gongyi Fang in 1950. She had been born in Beijing four years earlier, the third child in the family. Her father, Xu Huizu, was an underground Communist Party member who had worked under Pan Hannian turning enemy agents. In May 1949, when Shanghai was liberated, Xu Huizu was posted to the Shanghai Municipal Public Security Bureau and moved the whole family to the city. They were first housed in Xinping Li on Longmen Road, near what is now the southeast corner of People's Square. Xinping Li was an old-style lane compound, its houses small and worn. In 1950 her father used gold bars to "ding" a single-bay, two-story house at No. 68 Gongyi Fang from the family living there, leaving only the tingzijian — the small mezzanine room — for the second landlord to live in. Buying the right to occupy a house in Shanghai's concession areas was called "ding." Next to Xinping Li, Gongyi Fang was an upscale, modern lane compound: clean, roomy, with gas and telephone lines running straight into each home.

The two-story row house had been designed for a single family. On the ground floor, running south to north, were a courtyard (10 square meters), a parlor (24.8 square meters), a bathroom (4 square meters), and a stairway and kitchen (10 square meters). Upstairs, the south side held the front room (the large second-floor room, also 24.8 square meters) and the north side a roof terrace (10 square meters). The tingzijian sat directly above the kitchen, at mezzanine height. The whole house was roomy, high-ceilinged and bright.

A happy childhood left her a handful of flashes she cannot forget: tearing up and down the stairs with her older sister; sitting on the flat-tiled roof looking out at the Bund; wrapped in an army greatcoat on National Day nights, watching fireworks go up at the same moment from the Sichuan Road Bridge and the Bund to the south and from Hongkou Park to the north; being taken to a Japanese-run clinic at the corner of Sichuan North Road and Kunshan Road, where a spiral staircase inside made her linger and refuse to leave.

Her father was then chief of the sixth section of the Shanghai Municipal Public Security Bureau, her mother a full-time homemaker. She once saw a photo of herself as a small child, sitting on a windowsill of the bureau's building on Fuzhou Road, looking down at busy Nanjing Road not far off.

She isn't sure her eldest brother ever set foot in Gongyi Fang; probably he never did. Of the family's first great grief in her childhood she remembers nothing at all. All she knows is that her eldest brother went to the front as a war photographer at the very start of the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea, and was killed on the Korean battlefield in 1951.

Her father's disappearance came soon after. She can't remember which year it began, but he was put under house arrest in a building on Fuxing Middle Road. During the demolition years she went to Ruijin Hospital for treatment and, waiting at the No. 17 bus stop on Fuxing Middle Road, was startled to realize that the four-story building across the street was the very place her mother had taken her and her sister to visit their father every week when they were small. Her father was later demoted and sent to work at the Dafeng labor-reform farm in Yancheng, and it was there that he was arrested in 1955, caught up in the Pan Hannian-Yang Fan case, one of the era's notorious miscarriages of justice. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and held for twenty years in Tilanqiao Prison, three kilometers from Gongyi Fang, until he was let out in a special amnesty in 1975. After his release he described how, at his trial twenty years earlier, he had demanded of the judge: "Where were you when I was fighting for the revolution? What right do you have to try me?" For that his sentence was made heavier, and only then did he get life.

Xu Huizu's fury is not hard to understand. As a young man he had come to Shanghai from his home in Suzhou, joined the Commercial Press as a typesetter in 1921, joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1924, and taken part in Shanghai's early labor movement.

According to A History of the Labor Movement at the Shanghai Commercial Press (《上海商务印书馆职工运动史》), published in 1991, Xu Huizu, then 24, was sent by the union of the Commercial Press printing works to Guangzhou in April 1926 for the Third National Labor Congress, which opened on May 1. "The congress summed up the lessons of the May Thirtieth Movement and of the year of labor struggle that followed it, and called on the working class nationwide to organize further and fight the reactionary warlord forces in league with imperialism." According to the Chronicle of the Shanghai Labor Movement (《上海工运志》), on July 4 that year Xu Huizu and twelve others were elected to the third executive committee of the printing works' union.

The Northern Expedition had already begun, and the Nationalist and Communist parties decided to mount a joint uprising in Shanghai against Sun Chuanfang, the Zhili warlord who controlled the city. That October the First Shanghai Workers' Armed Uprising failed for want of experience and coordination. In February of the following year, under Zhou Enlai's leadership, the Communist Party's Shanghai District Committee again prepared a general strike and an uprising. The Commercial Press union put Xu Huizu in charge of reorganizing the picket corps and making it ready to fight while it waited for orders from the Shanghai General Labor Union. On the 19th the general strike began and the city ground to a halt. But the second uprising that followed failed when the Northern Expedition army reached Jiaxing and then sat still instead of advancing.

The Communist Party at once began preparing another uprising, which meant stepping up military training for the workers' pickets. The Commercial Press pickets were split into two battalions, and Xu Huizu commanded the first. According to Shanghai on Strike, the American historian Elizabeth J. Perry's study of the city's early labor movement, the Commercial Press supplied more than 100 pickets to the third uprising and played a leading part in it. As early as October 1926, one in ten of the Commercial Press's 4,000 employees was already a Communist Party or Communist Youth League member. Contrary to the standard account, Perry found, these well-educated, decently paid craftsmen were more revolutionary — and readier to work with a revolutionary party rather than with the secret societies — than the more oppressed workers at the bottom.

On March 22 the Third Shanghai Workers' Armed Uprising succeeded. The Zhabei District Gazetteer: Chronicle of Major Events records that two days later Xu Huizu and eighteen others took seats, by negotiation, on the provisional executive committee named at the Zhabei citizens' representative assembly. But according to A History of the Labor Movement at the Shanghai Commercial Press, in the fighting on the night of the 21st the pickets Xu Huizu led first attacked the Oriental Library on Baoshan Road, then held by a platoon from the Zhili-Shandong warlord Bi Shucheng's army (the library was burned down later, in the January 28 Incident of 1932); afterward, to protect the library, they stopped attacking and simply surrounded it. In the standoff Xu Huizu was shot in the neck and rushed to hospital by a rescue team.

Xu Dazhi does not know what became of her father after he was wounded, or whether he ever served on the executive committee of that citizens' self-government body in Shanghai. She knows only that he later went to the Soviet Union, and that after coming back he went to Beijing, where he met her mother. He brought a gun home from the Soviet Union, wrapped in a blanket. After his death, several young scholars from Fudan University came to the family to interview them for a Party history project and took away that blanket and a pair of shirt cufflinks Zhou Enlai had given him. With no one to confirm its provenance, the blanket was not recognized as a cultural relic and was returned; the cufflinks vanished.

In 1955 her father was labeled a "historical counterrevolutionary." To "draw a clear line" from him, her parents were forced to divorce, and Xu Dazhi took her mother's surname. At her own request, this article uses her original name.

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After her father's arrest, the second landlord in the tingzijian came to her mother and told her to give up the parlor downstairs. A "family member of a historical counterrevolutionary" did not dare refuse, and the landlord sublet the parlor to a family named Cai. Later that landlord went to prison himself, over politics. The downstairs neighbors then asked for the tingzijian, saying their family was large, and her mother agreed to that too. From then on the family's living space was the front room, the terrace, the bathroom and a kitchen shared with the neighbors below.

Because her husband was in prison, her mother always gave way to the neighbors and kept her head down in the lane. Misfortune found her anyway. During the Cultural Revolution a squad of Red Guards came south from Beijing looking for her, set on denouncing her for reasons no one understood, and the lane's local cadres threw themselves into it. That drove her mother to attempt suicide; Xu Dazhi came home in time and found her. It was enough to make the accusers fold up their banners and go back to Beijing. Her mother, it seems, had decided to use one tragedy to stop another.

After middle school Xu Dazhi went to work as a lathe operator at the Dalong Machinery Factory, grinding joints for oil pipelines; the plant stood where Zhongyuan Liangwan City now stands, on Guangfu West Road. Because of her father she was always a nobody there — production team leader, union group leader, none of it ever came her way. Many years later, after her father was finally cleared by the Supreme People's Court through his repeated appeals, the family asked the labor-reform bureau to send the rehabilitation papers to the workplaces of both sisters. The Party branch secretary of Xu Dazhi's workshop read her father's file and said: "So it turns out we've got a big shot's daughter here!" Even so, when she retired from the factory two years early in 1994, at 48, she was still just an ordinary woman at a lathe.

In an effort to save Gongyi Fang, the magazine Urban China published a series of pieces on the compound's history in 2015, among them one about Xu Dazhi's family, "In the Name of the Father" (《因父之名》), which described Xu Huizu's revolutionary past. A neighbor who knew her well read it and said: "Your father was really something. We never knew, all these years." Xu Dazhi answered: "What's there to show off about? We were a historical counterrevolutionary's family; we could only keep our heads down, or people would say we were putting on airs." The neighbor agreed at once.

Gongyi Fang gained a good many new residents during the Cultural Revolution. Some lived in the "overpass houses" the housing bureau built above the lane; others arrived by what people called "house-grabbing" — poorer families from outside would suddenly break into an empty room and settle in. Xu Dazhi suspects the housing bureau pointed the way, because the intruders always knew exactly which rooms were empty. It pushed the "class background" of Gongyi Fang's residents to two extremes.

Among the compound's old residents, Xu Dazhi says, everyone's "family background" was a little questionable; people had heard a bit about one another and never dug further. It was the demolition, and the arrival of the media, that finally let light fall on the sealed-off family histories of the households that had inherited their parents' private houses and would not leave.

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In middle school Xu Dazhi boarded the tram at the entrance to Gongyi Fang every morning, rode north the whole length of Sichuan North Road, got off at Hongkou Park at the end of it, and crossed Huayuan Road to Changfeng Middle School (now Lu Xun Middle School), at the corner of Zhongshan North Road and Guangzhong Road — open fields lay not far away. She often walked home from school along Sichuan North Road too, dawdling among three kilometers of shops and the lanes threaded between them. She loved everything about Sichuan North Road then.

What she loved most was the stretch around Gongyi Fang: the Cantonese pastry shop Yidinghao at the Tiantong Road junction just to the south, whose pastries were heavy with sugar and oil, crisp-skinned and generously filled; and the Cantonese roast duck shop Guangmaoxiang, which was said to roast only thirty ducks a day, every one of them snapped up. Then there was the newcomer, the Daxiang Food Store, which took the corner of Sichuan North Road and Haining Road right outside Gongyi Fang, its dazzling stock of foods a holy land for children.

The area was once thick with movie theaters. She remembers the Lunar New Year queue for tickets at the Guoji Cinema on Haining Road stretching all the way to the mouth of Gongyi Fang. The Shengli Cinema on Zhapu Road was small, two tight floors, but its films were good. Zhapu Road also had a Jiefang Theater, which served as both stage theater and cinema. At the corner of Haining Road and Zhapu Road, the Hongkou Cultural Center — the old Hongkou Grand Theatre, said to have been China's first movie theater — was torn down as well; a single stone on the site now stands in for it.

Sichuan North Road, once Shanghai's third great shopping street after Nanjing Road and Huaihai Road, declined all the same in the 1990s. The stretch from the Sichuan Road Bridge to Wujin Road, where Gongyi Fang sits — the liveliest part of it once — is now precisely the emptiest. "I've noticed you can't widen a street. Widen it and its character is gone," she said, meaning that the widening of Haining Road and then Sichuan North Road in the late 1990s had something to do with the street's decline.

But she thinks there is a more important reason: the demolition of lane compounds like hers along Sichuan North Road, and the departure of their residents in great numbers.

The vanishing of the wet markets may be a reflection of the vanishing lane community — or it may have been a method. As Block 18 was cleared, the Wujin Road market was demolished first, so people went to the Anqing Road market; the Anqing Road market was demolished too, in March 2016, so people went to the Xinguang Road market; once Xinguang Road came down, everyone went to Rehe Road. "It's tiring, being an ordinary person," Xu Dazhi said.

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Before he was arrested her father left behind a stack of vinyl records and an American radio, and Xu Dazhi thinks her love of music comes from them. The records were mostly dance music, but on shortwave she could pick up classical music, and that became her chief pastime every summer vacation. The set gave her her first hearing of Carmen, of Strauss, and of other pieces whose names she never learned. She had no way of knowing how one was supposed to appreciate them; she only found them beautiful. Under the pressure of making ends meet, her mother sold the records off one batch at a time to a secondhand shop called Tianyi on Qiujiang Road. The radio was the last thing to go. Her mother was short of breath all day back then, always ill.

By the 1990s she was a regular at the disc-hunting spots on Jiangning Road, on Qiujiang Road and under the Haining Road overpass, searching out the classical, new age and cool jazz she loved, from cutout discs to pirated copies — though she never once went to a live concert. Her biggest splurge was a licensed Wynton Marsalis trumpet album she bought for 115 yuan at the Shanghai Book City.

The reading habit she could not curb even as a child also came from the books her father left at home. During the Cultural Revolution she read a number of Soviet novels — The Young Guard, Two Captains, An Open Book — and after excitedly telling coworkers what was in them, she was made to spend a week in a "study session" and had to find a way to break her book habit. After the Cultural Revolution she could finally read Western writers, and to this day she can retell, with passion and in fine detail, the plots of Victor Hugo's Ninety-Three and The Man Who Laughs and Thackeray's The History of Henry Esmond.

Both listening to music and reading, she says, were very lonely things, because in her circumstances there was almost no one to talk to about them. Music got better over time, because at the disc stalls you could run into someone who would tell you a thing or two; reading stayed a solitary experience throughout. And her range of reading seems to have no edges.

What surprised me a little, for instance, is that she had recently read The Book of Snow Mountains (《雪山之书》), a work of cultural anthropology about Kawagebo (Meili Snow Mountain) by Guo Jing, a researcher at the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences and founder of the Yunnan Multi Culture Visual Festival. The Tibetan culture recorded in the book filled her with admiration, she told me, and the snow mountains it described struck her as majestic. Because the book mentions the 1991 mountaineering disaster that killed a joint Chinese-Japanese expedition, she found online a documentary Guo Jing made about it, Kawagebo (《卡瓦格博》), and watching it left her "fired up." The reverence the Tibetans in it hold for the sacred mountain, she felt, stands in sharp contrast to our own conviction that everything must be developed. When she went back to watch it again, she found the page where she had saved it deleted, and she could not understand why even this had to be banned. Hearing that I had met Guo Jing a few times, she asked me to find out on what grounds a film like this would be banned. Fortunately it had not been; I found her another link and she could watch it online.

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In 1975 her father, Xu Huizu, was released in what was the last special amnesty in the history of the People's Republic. Yet on his release the authorities still held that this 73-year-old man, with nowhere else to go, should return to his old home. Her mother could not make sense of it: "You were the ones who made us divorce, and now you're the ones sending him back?" She held so much against him for the misfortune his imprisonment had brought the family that by then she could barely accept him. But the labor-reform bureau, ignoring her wishes, ordered the housing bureau to partition off a 6-square-meter cubicle inside the family's one and only room for the father to live in alone. His name went back onto the household registration book as well, his listed status, absurdly, "divorced husband."

"What if my mother had remarried by then?" Xu Dazhi asks. An order handed down from above, with all the strain left to an already battered family to work out on its own. Xu Dazhi has heard that the amnesty caused a great deal of family conflict, with some households quarreling bitterly. One old man in Gongyi Fang who had once worked for the Nationalists came home from prison to a son who blamed him for wrecking his own prospects with his political stain, and the two often came to blows.

Amnesty meant only release, not absolution. For years after he got out, her father assembled documents single-handedly to fight for rehabilitation. The going was extraordinarily hard, by all accounts: Zhou Enlai and Pan Hannian, his former superiors, died one after the other in 1976 and 1977; he went to see Chen Yun, and Chen Yun shook his head; Yang Fan had gone mad by the time he left prison; and a former liaison officer refused, for reasons unknown, to testify for him.

In those years the relevant authorities assigned him a job washing dishes and minding the counter at a small restaurant on Tiantong Road, for a living allowance of just over twenty yuan a month. Xu Dazhi remembers looking in from the restaurant's doorway one winter night and seeing her father burrowed into a thin quilt on two tables pushed together.

Years later he was finally rehabilitated, granted veteran-cadre retirement benefits, and given a room in Pudong. Only after his death did Xu Dazhi learn that he had spent his last years still pressing to have his Party membership restored — rehabilitation had not given back the membership stripped from him at sentencing. She used to think her father simply didn't like to talk about himself; looking back, she realized it was that no one in the family had cared enough about him, let alone helped him. It leaves her feeling in his debt.

Distant from him as she was, her mother also said to Xu Dazhi in old age: "Your father never had more than a few settled days in his whole life."

Xu Dazhi remembers that after her father came home under the amnesty, a woman a little older than herself used to come to Gongyi Fang to ask him where her own father had gone. The woman's father, Xu Dazhi learned, had been a Nationalist intelligence officer named Chen; on the eve of Liberation, Xu Huizu's assignment in Beijing had been to turn enemy agents, and this man was one of his targets. All Xu Huizu knew was that he had later gone to Hong Kong, after which there was no word of him at all. "Nothing good ever comes to people who work as spies," her mother said at the time. Not long ago, watching the espionage drama The Kite (《风筝》) in her new home at Rainbow Bay, Xu Dazhi thought again of her father's unjust case and of her mother's words. "Spies never come to a good end; all they have holding them up is their faith," she said, and would not keep watching. She won't watch any spy drama at all.

Before she moved out of Gongyi Fang, she came across "My Mother on the River" (《江上的母亲》) at the Hongkou District Library on Zhapu Road, an essay by the writer Ye Fu (real name Zheng Shiping) collected in his book This Mortal World: An Elegy (《尘世·挽歌》), and it struck a powerful chord. In under five thousand characters, Ye Fu mourns and remembers his mother, who as a young woman broke with her father, a Nationalist general, was later branded a rightist of "unclear history," and steered her family with quiet endurance through the political ordeals of one era after another — only to walk into the Yangtze in old age, ill and unwilling to be a burden to her children. In another essay in the same book, "The Death of a Country Gentleman" (《乡绅之殇》), Ye Fu digs up the buried tragedy of his father's family: while his grandfather, a small landlord, was being hounded to death by a land-reform work team back home in Badong, that grandfather's son — Ye Fu's father — was not far away in Lichuan, putting down an uprising the same land reform had provoked. It made Xu Dazhi think of her own father and mother, and she put every one of Ye Fu's books on her reading list.

In 2009 her mother, who had lived with her, died at 97. In 2012 Xu Dazhi ended eighteen years of post-retirement work — shop clerk, then cleaner, then dormitory supervisor — and finally had time at home to listen to music, to read (including every tomb-raiding novel she could find), and to look after the potted plants she loves. A year later the demolition began. She is grateful her mother died before it started.

Playing Refinement, a piano concerto with a Rachmaninoff feel by the Japanese composer Yuki Kuramoto, in her new home, she said that after her mother's death this disc could stir a violent grief in her.

7

Under Block 18's resettlement plan, Rainbow Bay counted as "resettlement nearby." It is still inside Hongkou, but it looks nothing like the Hongkou Xu Dazhi knows. There is no street market; the nearest place to buy daily necessities is a kilometer away, and bare, wide roads carve up the huge new housing blocks. The nearest bus stop is 800 meters off, with one route running every twenty minutes. Even though the resettlement buildings are full of old people, there is no real hospital nearby, only a clinic that cannot even take an X-ray.

She grants that the demolition brought "joy to some households, sorrow to others." Families who had been living on top of one another — many of them people the housing bureau moved in during the Cultural Revolution — really did end up better housed. But for the owners of the roomier private houses, the demolition sharply lowered the quality of their lives and erased family memory. Gongyi Fang's last holdouts, including a few households that still have not signed today, all inherited entire private houses their families had owned, even if history had long since turned those families, on paper, into "public-housing tenants."

"The day I got the property certificate and saw that the right of use runs for 70 years, I was dumbfounded. It's not that I didn't know commercial housing rights run for 70 years, but seeing it there in black and white still made me furious," Xu Dazhi said.

Just as she was saying this, on July 24, 2018, the Block 18 site was auctioned off ahead of schedule, bought by the only bidder at the floor price of 7.1 billion yuan, making it Hongkou's new "land king." Nearly 180,000 square meters of retail and office space will go up here. The new plan drops the original scheme of total demolition and keeps about half of Gongyi Fang's shikumen buildings — but the residents have all been cleared out. A 14,000-square-meter "literature museum" is to be built on the site, even though the site of the Shuimo Bookstore has already been leveled.

Some predict this will become Hongkou's Xintiandi. In a sense it already is.

(Thanks to Yuan Jing, an editor at Urban China, for her help in reporting this article.)

The homepage cover image shows the flat-tiled roofs of Gongyi Fang, photographed by Zhu Di of Urban China; the inline cover image was taken at Liulin Li on Sichuan North Road, photographed by Jiang Yifan; all in-text images, unless otherwise noted, were taken by Jiang Yifan.