Beijing Sprawl by Xie Zechen, translated by Jeremy Tiang and Eric Abrahamsen (Two Lines Press)

To country boys in China’s distant provinces, the ones who drop out of school and have no skills, Beijing is where the money is.  Opportunities in the capital are “like bird shit--it would spatter on your head while you weren’t looking and make you rich.”

Four boys have come from the same village to Beijing, where they live together in a room that holds only four bunk beds and a desk.  The rooftop is their living room, where they meet at the end of their work day. Sitting on stools, they drink beer, eat donkey burgers, and play cards, surrounded by a city that “spreads quick, like a tropical jungle.”

They all have the same job, pasting ads on empty walls night after night, making just enough to pay the rent for their room and to buy food for their rooftop meals. They’re young enough that this seems like fun--the oldest is twenty and the youngest only seventeen. But they know that life in Beijing for people like them is a “young person’s game.” While they can still be romantic, falling in love with girls whom they see at a distance and dreaming of forming a rock band, they’re well aware that their city life has an expiration date. They see it as it claims older people who came from their village to find wealth but watched their dreams die instead. 

One of these men works on construction sites, “wiping out everything that isn’t a skyscraper,” while back in his village his little son calls every man “father,” since he has never known the man who deserves that name. Another patches a car together, building it from scrap that is discarded in the garage where he works. It looks ridiculous but it runs and when he drives it to work, it draws customers to the shop and eventually leads to vehicular homicide. 

Occasionally Beijing succumbs to an attack of “urban psoriasis” when street vendors and the boys who paste ads become the itch that the cops are told to scratch. The cleanup brings an enforced leisure that turns into gang fights where different factions arm themselves with whatever they can find. “Sticks, iron coal shovels, furnace tongs,” all become weapons and one boy dies from tripping over the sharpened blade of a hoe and cutting his own throat. 

Boredom is a dangerous occupation. From their rooftop, the boys become enraged by the barking of a neighbor’s dog that is chained up nearby. First they tease it and then become more purposeful. What begins as a game turns into cruelty and then death. 

Even good intentions turn into tragedies. A young man who lets himself worry about a little girl who begs on the street is lost forever in his attempts to take her to safety. Another who falls in love with a girl whom he only sees when he peers through the window of a tavern ends up back in his village, a drooling idiot. 

“I’d sell blood twice for that,” one boy says after treating his friends to a restaurant meal. But in fact, all of these lost boys sell their blood every day in a different form, as they scrabble to keep their expiration dates at bay. They know that, for lives like theirs, there are no happy endings. Their stories are bleak and beautiful, stark and laced with humor, interlocking to form a novella that just might break your heart.~Janet Brown

Midnight in Peking by Paul French (Penguin Books)

The new year of 1937 had barely begun when an old man, walking near one of Peking’s ancient walls early in the morning, came across the body of a dead girl. Her face had been slashed with a knife, her legs were sliced, and her sternum had been cut open with all of her ribs broken; her heart, liver, bladder and one of her kidneys had been removed. Her body had been savaged by the stray dogs that roamed the city and the only clue as to who she may have been was a blood-soaked membership card for the ice-skating rink at the French Club. Her hair was blonde and on her wrist was a platinum watch that was set in diamonds. Clearly this bizarre murder had not been prompted by robbery.

As the police made a preliminary examination of the corpse and the crime scene, an elderly man made his way to the body, screamed “Pamela” and fell to the ground. E.T. C. Werner, a scholar and former British consul, had lived in China since the 1880s. The night before, his only child had failed to return home and he had wandered the neighborhoods searching for her. When he found her at last, she was in the realm of every parent’s worst nightmare.

Peking was a city that was already gripped in fear before Pamela Werner was murdered. The Japanese had conquered Manchuria six years earlier and now they were advancing upon China’s third-richest city, with troops encamped only miles away. Most of Peking’s two thousand foreign residents were sheltered within the eight heavily guarded iron gates of the city’s Legation Quarter, a spot that was “Europe in miniature.” Terrified by the rumors that Chiang Kai-shek would relinquish northern China in hopes of retaining the south, Westerners were leaving for home—but not the widowed Edward Werner and his daughter.

The two of them lived outside of the protective gates of the Legation Quarter in a luxurious courtyard house, and both took pleasure in roaming the city. Pamela, born in China and fluent in Mandarin, rode her bicycle unaccompanied, ran the household singlehanded when her father traveled, and became so independent that her father found her difficult to control. He sent her off to boarding school where she appeared to be a typical hockey-playing, uniformed, drab teenager. At home in Peking for the holidays, she transformed herself into a glamorous woman in black, wearing lipstick and kohl.

“I am afraid of nothing...Peking is the safest city in the world,” were Pamela’s last words to her friends before she left them on the night of her murder, which took place almost a month before her twentieth birthday. Two detectives, one British and one Chinese, combed the city for clues as to who her killer might have been and discovered Pamela had been pursued by more than one man. Despite her demure schoolgirl persona, her true self was much more the seductress in black.

History was unkind to Pamela. The investigation of her murder was soon supplanted by Japanese tanks in the streets of Peking (a mere goodwill parade, the Japanese Legation assured the city) and the sky was loud with the noise of Japanese Zero aircraft, buzzing overhead. By the end of July, Peking was a conquered city.

Her father however spent all of his money and energy in his attempts to find his daughter’s killer. The decadence and cruelty that he discovered on his own would have shaken and horrified Peking’s expatriate world had the war not intervened.

Much as Erik Larson did in Devil in the White City, Paul French has taken historical true crime and given it the depth and suspense of a good novel. Midnight in Peking is a book that recreates a time and place with vivid accuracy, while bringing a horrible crime to a stunning close, seventy-five years after Pamela Werner was murdered.~Janet Brown

The Last Days of Old Beijing by Michael Meyer (Walker)

When Michael Meyer pieces together an eighteenth century map, commissioned by the Manchu emperor Quianlong to "record the outline of every building on every street" in China's capital city and that is printed today on 500 sheets of paper, the portion with his neighborhood alone fills his living room. It is also almost identical, he discovers, to the image captured by Google Earth's satellite, and on it is a house standing on the same spot as the house in which he lives.

Meyer lives on Red Bayberry and Bamboo Slanted Street,in a neighborhood of narrow lanes and low-built houses. Beijing was originally made up of neighborhoods like his, called hutong, a word that dates back to the days of Kublai Khan. His hutong is one of 114 found in Dazhalan, Beijing's oldest community. Dazhalan is the same size as Vatican City, but while the home of the Pope has a population of 557, Dazhalan has 57,000 residents, 1500 businesses, 7 temples, and 3,000 homes. It lies in the Old City of Beijing, "an area slightly larger than Manhattan...centered by the Forbidden City." Within this historic framework, the small residential universes of hutong are rapidly disappearing, being erased by the invisible--and universal-- bureaucratic entity that Meyer calls "The Hand."

The architectural wonders of modern-day Beijing are shown in breathtaking photographs in Vanity Fair and other upscale magazines, glorious buildings that make New York City look decidedly behind the times. The world's most noted architects are being used to turn a municipality that is larger than Connecticut into a city that will lead the world, while lesser known practitioners of architecture are designing high-rise suburban apartment buildings that will house those who are displaced by Beijing's new urbanity.

The hutong neighborhoods, such as the one that Meyer inhabits, are called "urban corners" or "villages in the city" by Beijing's city government, places with a "chaotic environment" that are fire hazards and potential breeding grounds for crime. They are horizontal neighborhoods that are being crowded out by the new vertical Object Buildings in what Beijing architect Zhang Yonghe calls "a City of Objects."

When Meyer describes his living conditions, it certainly seems that Beijing's urban planners have a point. His hutong home is two rooms in a crumbling courtyard house, in which the polished marble floor contrasts with the straw-and-mud walls, there is no inside plumbing, and electrical fuses are so easily blown that Meyer uses his refrigerator as a closet. His morning ablutions are performed under a cold-water faucet in the courtyard, and his first outing of the day is when he saunters to the men's latrine, which he says "is a route I have timed flat." The Big Power Bathhouse, a place where customers can drink a beer while they shower, or pay for the exfoliating services of an elderly gentleman who wields a mean scrubbing mitten, is Meyer's neighborhood hygiene center.

And yet while his living conditions are spartan, Meyer lives in a human community that is functional beyond belief, when judged by Western standards. In his neighborhood he is known as Little Plumblossom, the teacher who volunteers at the hutong elementary school, which is a four story building surrounded by so many different kinds of trees that Meyer's students cannot count them all, "a sea of grey and green." There is one hutong rule that all residents abide by, "Public is public; private is private," and it is so strictly adhered to that Meyer's security is maintained by a simple padlock. His neighbors become his friends, particularly "The Widow," a fierce chainsmoking woman in her eighties, who feeds Meyer with food and conversation. She loves the hutong, because living in it keeps her "feet on the ground" and "connected to the earth's energy" which she would lose by living in a high-rise apartment.

This is the world that is threatened by Beijing's modern transformation. Narrow lanes that connect the lives of those who live in them are being displaced by streets that are as wide as highways and virtually uncrossable by pedestrians. High-rise apartment compounds far from the core of Beijing have no courtyards in which communities can develop. Over-crowding is being replaced by severe isolation, and people who have lived in spaces that are almost medieval are being tossed into modern living conditions in a way that guarantees severe culture shock. This is a story that only a hutong resident could tell, and Michael Meyer presents it, warts and history and humor and all, with the perspective of a man who bathed under a cold-water faucet every morning for two years.