There’s a part of Beijing between the second and third walls of the city called “Old Beijing.” It is what it sounds like: ancient, dirty, and destitute. You can’t find a single blade of grass in this four-mile radius, and trees appear barren even during the summer. There’s not been a single new structure built here since the days of the last emperors of the Qing Dynasty. All the houses are single story, unpainted, and without plumbing. Communal restrooms sit at the end of most avenues, and on Thursday mornings a cesspool truck rumbles up and down the blocks, parking behind moss-covered walls to suck up the previous week’s feces. Kids prefer to defecate outside in their backyards, wearing pants with the bottoms cut open for convenience, because the bathroom fee for patrons without an ID is one yuan per use, with users providing their own toilet paper.
The locals are for the most part lazy—their homes are inherited, passed down from generation to generation—and they play no role in China’s rapidly growing economy. At any given time, standing anywhere in this four-mile radius, you can see at least five tables of Mahjong being played, with groups of urchins and adults overlooking each game. Old men are the most common players. They wear white wife-beaters and have buzz cuts and sit on two-feet-high stools, hunching over to study the game and waving their fans. Many of the observers are women—the nieces, granddaughters, and wives of the players. They wear flour-caked aprons and hairpins glittering with plastic opals, and for some reason, they always have towels on their shoulders. A steady stream of Chinese opera can be heard accompanying the games, sometimes from a radio, but more often played live by the bum across the street slowly dragging the stick of his Chinese violin.
Old Beijing is in many guidebooks but tourists do not come here often. If they do, it is usually for the authentic Beijing food. You can’t find Peking duck or sesame chicken here. What the Old Beijingers really love are noodles. You can get every kind imaginable, and everything is handmade. You won’t find a place in all of China where the noodles are pulled longer, where the sautéed meat sauce has more garlic, or where the stomachs of even the most veteran tourists have more trouble digesting. The bowls and chopsticks at these restaurants are always dirty, and forget asking for a fork, because they’ll kick you right out, as they did my parents when my mother asked for a fork for my little brothers.
I have to admit, the first time I was in the area, I thought it would be a nice place to find my future wife. In my head she’d be some local Mahjong player’s daughter or granddaughter, ravishing of course, dressed in plain, earth-colored attire, no apron on her shoulder, with two black braids dropping down her back and without a touch of makeup. No doubt she would be a little naïve, and I’d take her to the United States and teach her English. But she probably wouldn’t learn it very well because she’d have been too old and so she’d have to rely on me for almost everything. We’d have children and she’d love me, and when we’d become old and wrinkled she’d look back and remark on how lucky she had been for me to find her.
Never mind that this picture in my head resembled less like a girl from China’s capital and more like an illiterate peasant from the 1930s, someone Chairman Mao might have encountered while conducting guerrilla warfare during The Long March. Never mind that my understanding of the values and culture of Old Beijingers was nonexistent then. And never mind my parents’ advice that I should find a nice girl at a university, someone who shared a similar experience as me.
As I waited at bus stops or ate at restaurants, though, the girls I saw became only people I wanted them to be, possessing only traits I deemed they should possess. I believed their expectations in life were low. Most of them were cooks or the daughters of cooks, and I assumed they didn’t try very hard in school or think of themselves as anything more than just citizens of Old Beijing, a part of China that clung to the dynastic past, an area without any sense of urgency. In my mind, if I walked up to the most beautiful girl in Old Beijing, she’d be happy and her parents happier.
All I could think about the first time I was here was how these Old Beijingers lend themselves to such mockery, how they could let the rest of the world advance so far while they idled away in the past. My parents’ views on the locals were along the same line, that they were lazy, dirty, land-inheriting bums. My parents thought themselves miles ahead of them, having a college degree and getting their PhDs in the United States. I knew they wouldn’t consider letting me bring one of these girls into the family. For sure my parents didn’t like them, but in some ways my own views were equally deriding: the only reason I wanted to marry one was because I thought I’d be better than her, too. I came to this realization after staying in the city for a week, and my desire for a wife changed to a deep and intractable sense of guilt, one that colored all my experiences in the area to come.
One of my uncles on my mother’s side grew up in Old Beijing. He offered to be my tour guide the day before I left China. This uncle, like many of my uncles, was a great failure in the family. He’d spent most of his life in the Chinese army, where he was forced to resign because of his wife, my mother’s younger sister. He was often away on military assignments and didn’t see much of my aunt. But he did see a lot of other women. They caught up with him when one of them found his phone number and called the house. My aunt, crying, went to my uncle’s superior officer and told him about the situation. My uncle was given the choice to either resign or face a military trial discussing his bourgeois tendencies. After resigning, my uncle left my aunt unofficially: that is, they never got a divorce. Instead, he moved out and stayed with one of his old girlfriends here in Old Beijing. My aunt was left to raise their daughter by herself. A few years passed and my uncle had no money left and so the girlfriend kicked him out. With nowhere else to go, he came back to my aunt, who he was still mad at for her betrayal.
Old Beijing was an entirely different place when I was with him. Everybody seemed to know him. He took me to a restaurant and the waitress was actually nice to us. He was trying to make some money, working on a hopeless real-estate deal. He wanted to use his connections and, acting as a middleman, buy land for contractors. Private entrepreneurs had been trying for years to develop the area, located in a prime spot in downtown Beijing, but the residents refused to sell. That day, my uncle asked a waitress what the average price per square meter of a house in Old Beijing was, and the waitress said somewhere around a hundred thousand yuan (roughly twenty thousand dollars). “That’s murder,” my uncle told her, and she said, “This is Old Beijing you’re trying to buy. Nobody has bought us for two hundred years.”
After the meal we stepped outside the restaurant and, sure enough, four old men were playing Mahjong with women in aprons looking on. Some boys dribbled a rubber ball with stars on it and the ball smacked their bare bottoms. My uncle stopped to analyze the game.
“Why don’t these people want to sell their land?” I asked him. Most locals owned fifty to a hundred square meters, which would net them around two million US dollars. An enormous sum, enough to buy them a high-end apartment with money left over to live on comfortably for the rest of their lives.
My uncle looked at me. His look was one I hadn’t seen before. For the first time I was there, he saw me as a foreigner. “If they sell their land they won’t have anything left to pass down to their children.”
“It would be so easy for them,” I said.
My uncle turned back to the game. “Watch this old man,” he said. “I’ve seen him play so many times before. He plays like he’s losing when he needs only one more slot to win. He is very tricky. Watch him carefully.”
I saw this old man with yellow crooked teeth, a white wife-beater on his back and his hands on his knees, sitting on a two-feet-high stool. When his opponent was about to make a move, he ran his fingers through his scalp, as if the game had turned for the worse. Then the other player dropped a slot. The old man revealed his hand, and all his Mahjong slots clicked onto the table like so many gold coins, and he looked up and gave me the best, most-wrinkled smile I ever saw.
