In early 2016, the Chinese government announced that it wanted to ban walled communities in cities. Below is a piece I wrote in 2012. It is tangentially related to the subsequent anti-wall policy, but I was mainly concerned with the overuse of abstractions and prejudice in understanding the built environment. This is also probably the most personal post I have ever written.
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I, like most of us, spend money on a place that I call home, and that space in return locks me within the vanishing point I am hence accustomed to. Between what I can see and what is beyond my vanishing point, there are walls, and those walls are made by many layers of rumors.
Growing up in a small city of central China, I spent the majority of my elementary school life in a very large residential community. Back then, my parents worked in a state-owned industrial company that provided 119 apartment blocks for its more than ten thousands employees. Therefore, although the city is very small and not performing so well economically, the company’s community is well built and managed. For a kid, there really was no need to go outside the community at all, simply because the sheer beauty of the place has locked me in. I remember that I once went to the rooftop of my elementary school (which was also located in the community); on the rooftop, I looked down at all those huge tree canopies filling in every single interstice between the six-floored concrete housing blocks, the sea of leaves seesawing with the breeze. Sheer sublime. It was the whole world for me.
Of course, such a community is walled. Behind the wall, there is a neighborhood called Town C. For most of us who lived in the company’s community, Town C was the equivalence of the “uncivilized” countryside. It existed as the world outside my safety zone, beyond the vast tree canopy to which I can retreat. Nevertheless, there was one point during my early childhood when I actually found a strange opening on the wall between my community and Town C, and I went through that opening with my playmates after school. That was my first physical encounter with the strange world I had never seen, and everything there was the total opposite of my familiar environment: in Town C, I saw slopes, bricks, doors that were too small, and crossroads that were too many. It was chaotic, narrow, and suffocating. Bad guys could appear any moment from the houses where doors were half-open, and they could grab me or rob my money. My friends and I were more than intimidated, as if once the sunset came we would be trapped in this upside-down world forever. We quickly ran back, almost in tears. After that encounter, just like any other tales I heard as a child, that specific “Rabbit Hole” which led me into Town C disappeared. I would never again find that opening on the wall.
In the same year, 1998, my family moved to another apartment. We were still in the company’s community, but our new apartment was right next to the wall. There on the wall was another opening. It was not an official or legal door, but my father would actually be happy to go into Town C through that door pretty often, to get a big bottle of Sprite from the small convenience store located on the side of Town C. That, I still think, is our favorite drink.
One of my classmates in elementary school actually came from Town C. We were best friends, but I am pretty sure that he must have heard questions like “Are you a farmer?” for numerous times in the school. One day, he asked me if I wanted to go to see his house in Town C. Only with him leading the way did I dare to go to that place again, and the experience that day turned out to be such a surreal adventure. All those sloped narrow brick roads which I remembered from my last horrible encounter simply disappeared this time, replaced by beautiful rice fields, soil dunes, and lakes. It is not intimidating anymore, and Town C was indeed a world of its own – it was a beautiful world, just too different from mine, and way bigger than mine. The vastness of my tree canopies and the 119 six-story concrete blocks were literally nothing compared to the sublime in the place where my friend lived, and somehow such vastness of Town C could be easily eclipsed by a concrete wall that was just two meters high.
That was my last encounter with Town C, which happened 14 years ago, and as I got transferred to a school in another city the next year, I lost contact with my friend as well.
Ten years later, 2011, I was interning at an architectural firm in Shanghai, and my first project was to transform an abandoned warehouse complex into a community center. The team sent me to do some site documentation, and when I got to the warehouse, the place was carpeted with rubbles, garbage, and fallen tree branches. Parasitizing on the rooftop of these concrete warehouses were some brick houses. Are these brick rooftop structures someone’s homes? I climbed up, went in, and saw sweepers, barrels, and big rice jars on the ground, buried partially underneath a pile of worn clothes. When I went back to the firm, the project manager curiously looked through the pictures: “Hmmmm, you’ve taken a lot of photos… You know what, now we can do some program arrangement,” he asked me to get a pen, “super-market, family restaurants, entertainment spaces, and cafes with bookshop. Oh, and a spa, too – that could be put in the violations!” I did not understand what he meant by “in the violations.” Seeing me confused with the term, he impatiently pointed at the brick buildings on the roof: “See those? They are called violations.”
So at first I was dumbfounded because he was using a legal concept to call a physical structure. Those brick homes on the roof-top were indeed illegal structures. However, when one deprives a piece of architecture from all of its physicality, so that what is left is only its legal implication, she too gives away the life and stories that had once been living in that building.
I could not help but keep thinking about what I saw inside those brick houses – the utensils, family supplies, children’s clothes, and calendars on the wall; they were so physical and real, but somehow now it is the physical things that we do not see or discuss anymore. Suddenly I felt as though I could see the family who used to live there: it was a four-people family: the mother making dinner in the kitchen (actually the entire house was one room), and the children silently sat aside, working on her schoolwork, their father still busy working on the construction site in downtown Shanghai. It was just like Town C, like my old lost friend’s home: his mother busy cooking with the stove, his sister doing homework and sometimes peeking at me, and the boy bringing in his friend from the other “mega-world” who had absolutely no idea how the invisible brick houses behind the wall really looked like.
The manager calling the brick roof-top house as “violations” is actually the same as my conceiving Town C as “countryside” and people asking my friend the question “Are you a farmer?” No one cares about what things actually do or look like anymore – it is their more abstract meanings that matter the most, especially for things blocked away from our vanishing points by walls and by misunderstandings. Nevertheless, to say that we only ignore other people’s life is also an over-simplification. In fact, we also cannot see our own places clearly, because, too often, the places we occupy become rather invisible – they are becoming immaterial, metaphorical, and sometimes rhetorical.
I can hardly notice the street surface I step over everyday on the way to work, or be aware of the material of my apartment’s hallway. Those things do not matter that much – my checks and the rent are the ones that need attention. Buildings do not exist. They are replaced by the idea of architecture, just as Town C has vanished, substituted by the imagination of countryside. Something has made us extremely used to looking at the world with a perspective of abstractness, as though we modern people merely live on the grounds of social status, law, and intangible transactions. Granted that these concepts help clarify what’s beneath the material realm, our reliance on abstractness has also built countless walls of rhetorics and misunderstandings.
It is like walking in a thick fog: all you can depend on is intuition or reasoning. For architecture behind the wall of rumors, because you cannot see it, you can only think you know it. And if you think you know its architecture, you think you know the life and people living there too. Personally, I used to think that Town C was the countryside before even getting there to really see it, and as a kid from the company’s community of 119 concrete blocks in vast tree canopies, I despised brick country houses and was frightened by sloped narrow roads. Consequently, I did not like farmers or people who might be considered farmers. Town C existed for me not as a place, not as a building, not even as an image, but as a connotation – an abstractness, a lack of tangible perceptions, and ultimately a prejudice. Only until I went there, being the experience scary or enjoyable, did I begin to see. And only until I made friend with the boy from Town C, being the contact lost or not, did I begin to know.
It is indeed not easy to know the life of others we cannot see. Sometimes it is even more difficult for us to see the life of ourselves with a genuine lens. Words and meanings have become the wall, which does not need to be very tall, but effective enough to eclipse the sight of physical living for us. The more those legal and political terms are stressed, the more buildings and life stories vanish, behind those intangible walls.