She Hasn't Moved House in 78 Years. Now She Has To | Housing and Our Lives 20

A word like "history" usually reaches us wrapped in grand narrative. We would rather work from interviews at the smallest scale, and sort out what we can.

Wang Shuzhen, 99, is moving. Ask her what she makes of it. She has not moved house in 78 years. She says she has plenty of thoughts. But once she starts, she cannot get out more than a few sentences.

The sun came out for once, then slid away. Wang Shuzhen sat at the mouth of the lane in a knitted beret she had sewn herself three years ago — eight panels, with a short point on top. Her head is small, her hair gray and soft against the scalp, a few ends showing under the brim. Next to the photographs of her youth, her face is thinner and flatter. In the photographs the crease of her eyelid is a single fine line; age has turned it into a dense mesh of wrinkles. Her right eye is blind, clouded gray.

Plenty of old people still live among Zhang Yuan's 1,122 households, and Wang Shuzhen is the oldest of them. People passing by who want to ask where she is moving have to lean in and shout into her ear. "To Pudong, to my eldest son's place," she shouts back. The lanes empty out a little more each day. Tricycles come pedaling in to collect old furniture, and none of them leaves until it is full. Someone walks past carrying a chamber pot — a few households still have no flush toilet, and every morning they come out to empty it.

A little over a month ago, the land-use rights to a 9,375-square-meter plot on the eastern edge of Zhang Yuan sold for 5.802 billion yuan to a group of developers led by China Resources. The Jing'an District government wants to turn the place into a second Xintiandi — a shopping district built inside preserved old lanes. Along West Nanjing Road, where Zhang Yuan sits, the district has already redone Fengshengli, one project after another, and put up the HKRI Taikoo Hui mall on the cleared site of Dazhongli; the Starbucks Reserve Roastery occupies a 2,700-square-meter round building there, in the classical style.

Zhang Yuan — south of Wujiang Road, west of Shimen First Road, running along Taixing Road — is next. "The houses will not be torn down," but everyone had to be out by March 8 this year.

Wang Shuzhen lives in a ground-floor room on the east side, about thirty square meters, off Zhang Yuan's main lane. Push open the courtyard gate and you come first to a small skywell, its boundaries marked out with stones and bricks, weeds and wildflowers growing out of open chamber pots, leaving a passage about a meter wide. Her home is on the left of that passage. Beyond the skywell there was once a main hall, though several rounds of remodeling have made it hard to recognize. Walk farther in over the small patterned floor tiles laid decades ago (fashionable again now) and you reach the staircase to the second floor, trembling, close to giving out. At the far end is the shared kitchen, called a zaopijian in Shanghainese.

Fluid in her knees has made walking hard, so Wang Shuzhen spends most of the day lying down. Her bed sits under the loft on the north side. Looking up, she can see the half of the loft added in 1948 joined to the original half, new wood against old, the line between them plain: the old wood has gone white and the planks have split. When she gets up, she sits at the square table by the door, in a rattan chair with a cushion she sewed from cotton or denim.

In front of the square table is a large glass window. Some houses in Zhang Yuan were fitted early on with colored patterned glass. Hers was not — just ordinary clear panes. The east-facing room gets sun for one stretch in the morning. There are no curtains, only a half-length of translucent white cloth hung as a screen, like the partition between booths in an old Western restaurant.

The window runs four or five meters up; from the skywell it is ringed by carved eaves. The glass used to go all the way down into the ground, but half of it came out in 1976, when the youngest son married: the family worried it could not carry the weight, so wooden supports went in underneath. A great deal happened in 1976, and it was roughly then that this room took the shape it has kept ever since — until 2008, when the government paid to build a bathroom with a flush toilet. The bathroom has a modern white facade, like a shipping container dropped into the lanes by mistake, something that will surely be hauled away sooner or later.

1

The lane houses of Zhang Yuan went up in the 1920s. Before that this was Shanghai's largest private garden, Zhang's Weichun Garden, better known as Zhang Family Garden. The merchant Zhang Shuhe bought the grounds from a British trading house and kept improving them through the last years of the nineteenth century, adding restaurants and an amusement ground alongside the garden and opening it to the public. Arcadia Hall, then the tallest building in Shanghai, was built inside it. Even now some preservationists propose rebuilding the facade of one Zhang Yuan building to bring back a version of Arcadia Hall.

The crowds Arcadia Hall drew did not last. In 1919 Zhang Family Garden changed hands, every existing building was pulled down, and rows of lane housing went up in their place. People kept calling it Zhang Family Garden anyway.

The lanes and Wang Shuzhen are about the same age. She was born in 1920 and adopted by a family in Shanghai's Nanshi District that ran a Chinese medicine pharmacy. She seldom went out — now and then to a southern opera with the family, or to the Confucius Temple, or to the Great World. The Great World was the hottest amusement hall of the day; a few years earlier it had stolen Zhang Family Garden's thunder and forced it to close for good and be sold. At home she embroidered. She had five or six years of schooling but preferred needlework. When there was a wedding banquet to attend, her father called a tailor to the house to make her a new qipao; feed the tailor three meals and the labor came much cheaper.

She had a few close girlfriends. At twelve they went to a photo studio together; one of them, a rich man's daughter, wore a Western dress, and not long after that she "went off to join the revolution."

In 1939, at nineteen, Wang Shuzhen married a man three years older and planned to move with him to Hong Kong. Her husband, Ling Zhenhua, knew a little English, and his uncle by marriage, Zhang Ruibo, a senior manager at the Bank of Communications in Hong Kong, had lined up a job for him at the same bank. They held the wedding in Shanghai first, at the Dafugui Restaurant by Laoximen, where wealthy families went. Her husband wanted her to put his surname in front of her own, and for a long time afterward letters arrived at the house addressed to Ling Wang Shuzhen.

In Hong Kong, Ling Zhenhua's shirts went out to a shop to be washed and pressed. It looked like a fastidious life, but mostly the climate was damp and nothing dried. The couple lived on Queen's Road West, in a large flat cut into three and sublet to three households. The ceilings were low and the partitions stopped short of them. One of the rooms held more than five people. Wang Shuzhen did not like going far — the ferry to Macau, say — though she went to the amusement park now and then. She expected to stay in Hong Kong for good.

That ended on the morning of December 8, 1941, when Japanese planes bombed Kai Tak Airport and the Sham Shui Po barracks. The governor announced the surrender on February 25. The Bank of Communications, where Ling Zhenhua worked, was moved to Chongqing. Wang Shuzhen was already pregnant, and she went back to Shanghai alone.

The Ling family home in Shanghai had been in Ruihuafang, on Shunchang Road, with two other women in it: Ling Zhenhua's mother, and "the old lady," his grandmother. In 1939, soon after her grandson left for Hong Kong, the old lady had engineered a move, paying gold bars to take over an east wing room from a household in Zhang Family Garden. Wealthy families still lived there then, but some had started renting out their ground-floor rooms. From Ruihuafang the old lady brought a cabinet and a square table, both made to order in Suzhou years before, along with the furniture made for Ling Zhenhua's wedding, including a redwood dressing table. It all went into this one long room.

Wang Shuzhen came back, looked at Zhang Family Garden, and thought it was nothing much. Jing'an Villa, a new-style lane compound, had been finished in 1929, and even Ruihuafang had flush toilets shared between households. Zhang Family Garden had none. Men washed in the skywell; women had to climb into a big wooden tub indoors.

There were stylish places outside — Nanjing Barber, Shanghai's biggest barbershop, for one — but she still rarely went out. She sat at the square table with her needlework, and when she could not sit any longer she went out to the balcony to see what the family across the way was up to. There was little for her to do. The household had hired a Nanjing amah to cook and wash, and the amah hung the laundry on a short, low wooden rail in the skywell. Her mother-in-law took charge of emptying the chamber pot; she thought the posture it required was too undignified for a young woman.

The eldest son was born in 1941. Ling Zhenhua could not get back from Chongqing, and did not move home to Shanghai for good until 1947, when the boy was six. But ask Wang Shuzhen which years in Zhang Yuan were the happiest and she answers without hesitating: raising a son — that was happiness. She points to a black-and-white photograph of him at two months old, wearing shoes she made herself. At other moments, looking at her old pictures, she reaches for the word "absurd." "Isn't it absurd? That a person should end up looking like this."

The year her eldest son was born, the house flooded; the rain pushed the water up to the height of the palm-rope bed. The ground-floor houses in Zhang Yuan sat low and had no drainage, and unless a family had somewhere else to stay while the floor was raised, the flooding kept coming — in some houses until after 2000. Wang Shuzhen's family never raised theirs. At the worst of it the chamber pot had to stand inside the foot-washing bucket so it would not tip. One or two days a year the old and the young took refuge in the loft, and Wang Shuzhen, in her husband's imported rubber boots, sent food up to them in a bamboo basket.

2

The year after Ling Zhenhua came home, the household was about to reach eight. Beyond the two old women, the Nanjing amah, the couple and "the precious eldest son," a daughter had been born, and a second son was due early in 1949. They could not afford a bigger place.

The loft had started as storage, half a story high, too low to stand in. Ling Zhenhua planned to double its floor area. He was not the only one extending a loft. Carpenters would ask, as a matter of habit, whether the family wanted a few flourishes worked in. Wang Shuzhen said no, people only sleep there. The old lady held the money, but Wang Shuzhen knew well enough that the family was not flush. The loft ended up at thirteen square meters. They added no bed, just laid boards and slept on them — five people at the most.

As soon as the second son was born, Wang Shuzhen hung a ham outside the door. On the night of May 26, gunfire cracked outside the windows and kept everyone awake. At first light the Nanjing amah came back from an errand and reported: "The lane entrance is full of PLA soldiers, all sitting outside No. 77 across the way." No. 77 was a large single-family courtyard belonging to a Nationalist officer. The moment Shanghai was liberated they left in a hurry, leaving behind a truckload of flour and clothing for anyone who wanted it. The amah brought home a few cotton undershirts.

The head tenants who sublet the building lived on the second floor: four brothers. They were a particular household, and in the summer heat they put up a shade awning in the skywell. Within a few years they had moved out altogether. The government had decided on the "socialist transformation of private housing," and houses would now be "leased uniformly by the state." Zhang Yuan filled up with poorer tenants, each family squeezed into a single small room. Even that did not much relieve Shanghai's housing shortage. Old tenants and new ones alike began paying rent to the state. The ground-floor hall, which had held a tea table and a bench where the Lings received guests, became the place where people handed over rent and water fees.

Life went from not-well-off to worse, and then to tight. After the government brought in the new grading-and-wage-assessment system, the salary and benefits of Ling Zhenhua, an ordinary bank clerk, no longer covered the household. The Bank of Communications used to hand out rice, cooking oil, soap and whole cases of oil for the kerosene stove every month, and to cover staff members' children's school fees up to university. By the 1950s only a few employees still drew a consolatory "retained salary" after the grading exercise, and Ling Zhenhua was not one of them.

The Lings could no longer keep the Nanjing amah. Ling Zhenhua left the Bank of Communications and went out to Minhang to pour concrete, coming home once a week. Then a vegetable market. Later he kept the accounts at a shop, sitting and taking money. Wang Shuzhen wanted work of her own to help — "even keeping the gate at a primary school would have been fine" — but her mother-in-law would not have it. In 1957 she bought a Wudi-brand sewing machine, meaning to take in sewing. Her mother-in-law died that year; people said it was grief over the death of Ling Zhenhua's sister the year before.

In 1958, at thirty-nine, Wang Shuzhen finally got out of the house, and she credits the government for it: "They wanted to free up women's labor, they wanted women called out."

1958 is usually taken as the start of the Great Leap Forward. The unrealistic steelmaking campaign changed the fronts of a lot of houses. Every iron frame on Wang Shuzhen's windows was stripped off, exposing the timber underneath. Shanghai was to be "built into the country's largest industrial city," and the reception halls in the lane courtyards were taken over by production teams. Wang Shuzhen joined a sewing team working out of a hall on Qinghai Road and carried her new machine over to it. The Ling family's own hall was turned into a barbering team, leaving only a narrow corridor to get in and out of the room.

The teams had slogans like "Seven jiao, eight jiao, the whole world in our hearts," which scanned nicely in Shanghainese. Wang Shuzhen earned three jiao — 0.3 yuan — a day. She sewed cloth swimsuits, fine work, but once the elastic went slack there was no stretch left: "the moment you came out of the water the suit fell off you." The sewing team also produced garments for Hongxiang, a firm famous in the 1930s and 1940s for making a coat for Soong Ching-ling and a satin cape for Britain's Princess Elizabeth.

The youngest daughter was born that year, into an atmosphere so cramped and strained that she understood from the beginning that she was "not precious in the slightest." The greatest privilege she got was never having to sleep in the loft. The house was thinning out; the eldest son left Shanghai the following year for university in Beijing. Before he went, the family posed for a photograph in front of Zhang Yuan's main hall.

What went on inside the house and outside it left Wang Shuzhen no time for the newborn. The old lady was bedridden until her death in 1964; she had Alzheimer's and would wake in the night shouting that she was starving. Wang Shuzhen went to the production team in the morning, took leave at two to come home and get water into the old lady, went back until half past four, then rushed home to change her diapers and cook at the same time. The barbershop in the hall had not shut for the day yet, so even getting from the room to the stove was awkward.

Yang Hongxing, who lived upstairs next door, used to say to her, "Mrs. Ling, you have a hard life." He could not have guessed that a few years later people would say the same about him.

3

One day in 1967, Wang Shuzhen looked up and saw Yang Hongxing put a foot out of his window. He jumped from the second floor during the Cultural Revolution and broke a leg. At least he lived.

Yang Hongxing's father had been a labor contractor who bought several courtyards in Zhang Family Garden years before and left them to his three sons. Yang Hongxing was the second. He used to keep a car parked at the lane entrance under a shed. But from 1966 on, teenage Red Guards came through in noisy raids, hauling private property away by the truckload. The local gazetteer records that 14 percent of households in Jing'an District were raided.

Zhang Family Garden was an uneasy place in those years. Every day somebody was paraded down the lane, banging a gong and shouting for an hour or two: "I am Xie Baiqing" — the name as heard — "gong, gong, a counterrevolutionary, gong, gong, gold, silver, treasure, murder weapons." "Then hand them over," people would call out, and he would answer, "I really don't have any."

The Lings got through the Cultural Revolution without serious trouble. The eldest daughter did two years as an accountant in Minhang and left for a farm in Anhui in 1968, leaving four people at home. Four people in thirty-some square meters is not roomy, and the neighbors still criticized them for having too much space.

In 1976 the Cultural Revolution ended. Ling Zhenhua wrote to the Weihai Road housing administration office in Jing'an District asking that the loft extension of 1948 be classed as a private loft rather than a public one, which would cut a few jiao off the monthly rent. He produced two witnesses, one of them Yang Hongxing. After the fall, Yang Hongxing's family stayed on the second floor of the courtyard next door. His wife lived in Zhang Family Garden until she was a hundred, and died in 2008.

The Lings spent a lot of money in 1976 on the youngest son's wedding. That is probably part of why Ling Zhenhua wrote the letter. The son brought in the housing office to partition off a separate room on the south side as the marital room, and cut a door into it. The whole house was repainted. The windows were replaced with short ones, half board and half glass. Wang Shuzhen had her own wedding furniture restored, at no small cost, and put it in the room.

The youngest son wanted out of Zhang Yuan more than anyone in the family, and he also cared the most about fixing it up, and was never satisfied with it. Two years later he and Ling Zhenhua fell out over exactly that. Ling Zhenhua saw nothing wrong with the place; he was used to it. In 1985 the son finally got an apartment allocation from his work unit and moved to Nanshi District as he had wanted. It was no great new flat, and not large.

The house suddenly felt empty; there was even room in the hall for a sofa. Only the unmarried eldest daughter still lived with them. Ling Zhenhua and Wang Shuzhen moved their bed into the partitioned room, facing south. Since their wedding they had never had a bedroom of their own. In the 1990s they added a television to it.

The youngest daughter had been sent in 1976 to Xinghuo Farm in Fengxian, and did not come back until 1989, when she married and had a child. By then the hall had been turned into a telephone point; people came in and out to take calls, and called Wang Shuzhen "Old Mrs. Ling of Zhang Family Garden." The big building at No. 84, the one with galleries on all four sides, was gone: a components factory working there caught fire in 1977, and in 1989 the site became the Haigang Hotel.

She also found that the room had stopped changing the year she left. Nobody wanted to remodel it any more, and nobody could afford to. "It has never been touched. It has been like this for years and years."

She married a Shanghai man she had met on the farm, and their son, Ye Yi, was born in 1989. At the wedding Wang Shuzhen gave her instructions: "In someone else's home, do things yourself. Don't call the man to do everything. Don't let people think your family raised you badly."

4

Shanghai began redeveloping its old districts in the 1990s. The government hit on land leasing: bring in foreign money for urban renewal, and in exchange help clear the residents out faster. West Nanjing Road had twenty major projects going in those years. The best-known is Westgate Mall — when work started in 1993, 146 households and 27 companies moved out within eight months. That same year the lease on Cihoubeili, also on West Nanjing Road, was signed; the municipal government said the shack housing there would be cleared before 2000.

Ling Zhenhua may well have thought about leaving Zhang Yuan then, and planned for it with some excitement. Zhang Yuan lies south of West Nanjing Road. In 1996, watching the whole block in front of them being relocated, he told his youngest daughter and his grandson Ye Yi to move their household registrations back to Zhang Yuan. "He said, your family is small and you have a son, both of you came back from the farms, you have no way of buying a big place." Compensation floor space was calculated by the number of registered residents at the time. The room in Zhang Yuan suddenly had five.

That year the residents of the curved Central Building at the Wujiang Road junction were also relocated, though the building itself was kept; construction started on Metro Line 2, with a station at West Nanjing Road. Still no word about Zhang Yuan.

Because of the change of registration, Ye Yi was assigned in 2001 to Minli Middle School, a junior high near Zhang Yuan. To make the trip easier he moved into the room and slept under the loft with his aunt. Conditions were bad. At night rats ran across the quilt with a dry rustling sound, and he slept with his head covered. In the morning he sometimes emptied the chamber pot, but he had to wait until the whole family had used it. Xiao Yang Shengjian had just opened its first shop on Wujiang Road; shengjian, pan-fried pork buns, cost one yuan a liang, and that was his breakfast.

Ye Yi moved out of Zhang Yuan in 2004 after finishing junior high; most of his friends from Minli Middle School moved out too, in the Dazhongli relocation of 2006.

Ling Zhenhua died in 2005. He did not see Dazhongli come down and the outcry it caused, and he did not see the washroom the family got in 2008, with its flush toilet and shower. It went into the partitioned south room and swallowed roughly half of it, as though it were the most important thing in the house.

After Ling Zhenhua died, only Wang Shuzhen and the eldest daughter, who never married, were left in the room. They sold the big wooden bed and put two small iron bedsteads under the loft. Only a little light comes in through the window at the head of them.

In 2010 Wang Shuzhen went to Hong Kong with her youngest daughter. She wanted to see where Ling Zhenhua had worked. Passing Victoria Park, she recognized that it had not been a park before. It had been a river.

Wang Shuzhen's memory is striking. Packing at the end of February with her son and daughter, she could give the provenance of nearly every object, which made it harder to throw anything away. She kept two qipao from her wedding; only a figure as slight as hers could still get into them.

Perhaps she thought about leaving Zhang Yuan too, but Wang Shuzhen says little, and in any case it has come too late. Moving is punishment for an old person. The government's resettlement housing is on Gaojing Road in Baoshan District, at the Pujiang site in Minhang, north of Sheshan in Songjiang, at Sanlin in Pudong and north of Xujing in Qingpu. Wang Shuzhen took the cash instead: by built floor area, the government was offering roughly 160,000 to 180,000 yuan per square meter. That is enough to buy a place the same size in the city center — but wanting an elevator, so she can get in and out, makes it complicated.

For now she has decided to move to her eldest son's home in Zhoupu. The eldest daughter goes with her, as always, to look after her. The old cabinet and the square table go too. The eldest son is seventy-eight this year. He was born in Zhang Yuan, though he disappeared from the house at seventeen.

Her grandson Ye Yi is a fund manager. He worked for an investment bank in Hong Kong after university and came back to Shanghai a few years ago. Standing beside her, he announced a plan he clearly means to carry out: once Zhang Yuan has been redeveloped, he will rent this room and open a cafe, or something.

Photography: Jiang Tianya