The Last Days of Old Beijing

When I was in China, one day after a field trip (was it to the marriage bureau or the prison?) a classmate invited me to her host parents' nearby home in a hutong. I begged off, saying I had to study for a test. That was partly true. The other part was that I felt deep anxiety about the trip back to my dorm, which would require multiple buses and subways and probably a lot of asking for directions that I wouldn't be able to understand. I regretted it almost immediately and feel that even more acutely now that I've read this book by Michael Meyer about the Beijing government's systematic destruction of these neighborhoods. Meyer first came to China as a Peace Corps volunteer, as did the New Yorker's Beijing bureau chief Peter Hessler; and his account of his salt-of-the-earth neighbors and the whirlwind changes taking place around them reminded me a lot of Hessler's excellent books River Town and Oracle Bones. The salt-of-the-earth neighbors are interesting, but I thought the most fascinating part was the changing status of Beijing as a city with each wave of Chinese history culminating in the national fervor caused by the Olympics. This snippy article about Americans' lack of interest in reading books about other countries unless they were written by Americans made me feel a little sheepish about reading this book instead of one on the same topic by a Chinese author, but Meyer's book indicates that gathering research on this topic was not the simplest task logistically or politically so I'm glad I didn't wait until such a book appears in translation and available through the DC public library system.