The Last Days of Old Beijing Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed. By Michael Meyer. Illustrated. 355 pp. Walker & Company. $25.99. THIS summer, widespread Beijing fatigue is an inevitability. But it's high-flying Olympic Beijing that may become overfamiliar, a city that's appeared before our very eyes as in a scene from “The Matrix.” This is not Michael Meyer's town. The Beijing he has called home is being systematically eradicated, and this book is his testament. On Aug. 8, 2005, three years to the day before the Olympics' start date — and exactly 68 years after the Japanese marched in to occupy the city — Meyer moved into a traditional courtyard home on Red Bayberry and Bamboo Slanted Street in the hutong, the “vanishing backstreets” of his subtitle. His neighborhood, Dazhalan, is six centuries old and was once known as the entertainment district, full of artisans, acrobats and antiques. Meyer assumes the role of the lone Westerner among Dazhalan's 57,000-odd residents, which provides entertainment of a distinctly early-21st-century sort: the authentic cultural immersion experience. A travel writer who hails from Minneapolis, Meyer is no dilettante. His motives certainly don't seem touristic or cynical. He didn't move to Beijing to write a book about it (or if he did, he isn't saying). “Beijing was simply love at first sight,” he writes. The hutong beckons after a former resident gives Meyer a tearful tour of his half-demolished house. (“It wasn't just a building,” the man says. “It was me. It was my family.”) Meyer also acts on a perceived challenge from Le Corbusier, champion of urban renewal: to inhabit the picturesque slums whose razing both historians and tourists sentimentally deplore. And whose razing — from 7,000 hutong in 1949 to 1,300 in 2005, with 1.25 million residents evicted between 1990 and 2007 — he proceeds to record. After cutting through a mile of red tape, Meyer becomes a volunteer teacher at Coal Lane Elementary and acquires, for $100 a month, two unheated rooms lighted by bare bulbs, with straw-and-mud walls, on a five-room courtyard shared with six others. The latrine is a few minutes' walk away, as is the Big Power Bathhouse. Since using a refrigerator blows the entire courtyard's fuses, Meyer keeps his unplugged, storing underwear in it instead. In a singular feat of extreme travel, he lives like this for two years. As soon as Meyer moves in, his neighbor, known simply as “the widow,” explains that there is only one rule: “Public is public; private is private!” She then proceeds to break it continuously, delivering home-cooked meals without knocking and offering a stream of unsolicited, brusquely maternal advice, always addressing Meyer as “Little Plumblossom,” a diminutive of his Chinese name. The book begins with her exhortation: “Little Plumblossom! Listen, you have to eat before class,” she says, handing him a bowl of steaming dumplings. From the first glimpse of this domestic routine, the book promises an insider's view, which is exactly the one you want on this rapidly metamorphosing city. And Meyer delivers — not as a memoirist might, with emotional connection and personal transformation, but as a reporter, or an unusually conscientious travel writer. As the book's title suggests, Meyer provides plenty of substantial insight into what is indeed a dying way of life. He also explains — exhaustively — why it is dying and how the demolitions happen: the Chinese character for “raze” is daubed on condemned buildings under cover of night by a spectral official Meyer calls “the Hand.” Meyer is a curiously old-fashioned “watching the natives” kind of travel writer, rather than a postmodern narrator-as-character kind. In fact, he keeps himself so assiduously out of the picture that he excises even relevant personal details. When declaring his love for Beijing, for instance, Meyer also mentions having met his future wife there — an eventuality that presumably colored his experience of the city. Yet like the Hand, this fiancée never actually appears in the book. Other locals come off as colorful figures whose antics amuse and amaze, but who tend to remain unknowable. Character analysis is not Meyer's intention, which can have a clinical effect, restricting access to the city's heart. Miss Zhu, Meyer's co-teacher at Coal Lane Elementary, is his almost constant companion, but who knows what makes her tick? When the principal sends her to make sure Teacher Plumblossom hasn't been asphyxiated by the noxious coal that hutong residents burn for heat, she explains that the previous year one poor girl's parents died from the fumes. Then she looks around Meyer's room and exclaims: “You don't even burn coal! Aren't you cold?” Miss Zhu obediently and unironically sings to their students the official Olympic volunteers' song (“Smile, smile, the friendliness of friends / The lengthy smile twinkling on a face, sweat reflecting the blue sky / Gently asking in English, ‘How are you?'”) while clutching a plush Olympic mascot still in its plastic bag, to protect it from “the tobacco-colored air.” It's a funny moment, but it makes the woman sound foolish. We learn that “becoming pregnant remained her utmost goal,” but this glimpse of an inner life comes only at the end of the book, during a visit to Miss Zhu's childhood hutong, which is being torn down. Miss Zhu isn't the only person whose story isn't fleshed out until the final third of the book. Several of Meyer's neighbors get overdue close-ups — the widow's history, when it's finally revealed, is particularly moving. And one of the book's best vignettes occurs on the fourth-to-last page, when Meyer reflects on what he misses about Beijing when he's away. “I missed nonstandard English and a pride in being nonstandard, in being weird,” he writes, in a rare moment of self-revelation. It would have helped to have known this all along. There is an excellent chapter about the author's hutong neighbor Recycler Wang, whom Meyer accompanies on his rounds buying plastic water bottles for one fen each ($0.0013) and selling them for 1.5 fen ($0.0020) — effectively earning 70 cents for 1,000 bottles, the cost of a bowl of noodles. “Everything can be recycled,” Recycler Wang tells Meyer, who promptly dampens any noble effect, however inadvertent, by noting that as far as his neighbor was concerned, “stores like Wal-Mart were great because the products came in packaging that made him money.” Also fascinating is Meyer's second encounter with the novelist and painter Feng Jicai, a historic preservation activist whose book “Saving the Old Street” records his “Jane Jacobs-esque campaign” to preserve his hometown. Since Meyer's visit with the writer four years earlier, Feng has become a star intellectual at Tianjin University, with his own research institute. “Feng had transformed from artist to collector, from a writer to an encyclopedist,” Meyer laments, barely concealing a nonstandard sneer at this former housing hero's sellout. “After living in the hutong, I grew impatient with inanimate museum displays of ‘culture.'” In a nice passage that underlines his point, Meyer goes looking for the Tianjin Old City Museum that Feng founded. But when he asks around, no one has heard of it. He redirects the cabdriver to Ancient Culture Street, only to find that “the bazaar, built in the 19th century, had been replaced by New Ancient Culture Street.” This August, as we watch athletes gasping for breath in “Bird's Nest” stadium beneath a gaudy international skyline, Meyer's message will sound especially plangent. All in all, his record of the dying ways of a city is an impressive feat. And while the phenomenon may be most extreme there, it's not just Beijing's problem. In a way, we're all living on New Ancient Culture Street. – Kate Sekules is editor-in-chief of Culture & Travel magazine and the author of the memoir “The Boxer's Heart.” __
