.
JAKARTA, Indonesia / The Jakarta Post / Life & Times / May 28, 2009
By Maureen Fan in Beijing
I am standing at a desk in the Xuhui District Housing Bureau with a photograph of an old document, in search of my past. Two middle-aged bureaucrats sit behind desks, one scowling and the other eating a takeout lunch with chopsticks.
The house at 1292 Huaihai Road was the last
building that Robert Fan owned before he left
China in 1949, just as the Communists took
power. (Photo: Maureen Fan, Washington Post)
“We’d like to know what the procedure is for getting back the house that belonged to her grandfather,” my interpreter tells them. I look just like them, and for a moment they can’t understand why someone else is speaking for me. But the Chinese my mother taught me was Cantonese, which turns out to be the wrong Chinese.
After some prodding, the scowling man pulls out a weathered ledger that says a real estate agent named Zhang controlled the property after 1958, authorizing the government to rent it out.
When I insist that my father and uncle know no such person, and that the family couldn’t have rented out the house in the 1950s, the bureaucrat grows irritated.
“What do you know?” he says coolly. “You’re only the third generation.”
The history of a country changes, but often the buildings do not. They continue to stand, mute witnesses to the narrative around them. Those who control them, manage them or live in them fill them with meaning, and that’s what they stand for, until history changes again and they represent something else.
I come from a family of architects, and so the buildings matter to us. My grandfather was one of Shanghai’s most prominent architects and designed the Nanking Theater, now the Shanghai Concert Hall; the Rialto, Astor and Majestic movie theaters; the YMCA building on Xizhang Road South; university buildings and private residences; and the Railway and Health ministries in Nanjing.
But the buildings that drew me most were the ones my family once lived in — in particular, the house at 1292 Huaihai Road, the last house my grandfather Robert Fan (or Fan Wenzhao) owned before he left China in 1949, just as the Communists took power. He and my grandmother lived here with their four children, including my father, and a handful of servants.
I first visited this house in 1986, just after college, and again in 2002. I stand before it now, trying to read the history of my family in its sprawl.
My father and mother are also architects, retired from their San Francisco practice. I was raised in suburbia with only an academic understanding of China until I came back in 2005 to study Mandarin and work as a correspondent for The Washington Post.
I go in. The house is three stories, pale yellow, with flaking green trim and rusty scaffolding that juts haphazardly from the facade. The front porch is a tailor shop; along one side, a tiny storefront sells cheap shoes and socks.
I walk tentatively up the steps, into a labyrinth of dark rooms. The air smells like old wood and dust, mingled with the cooking of 10 families that occupy every inch of the place, from basement to attic. Mice dart between the loose electrical cables and portable stoves lining the dingy hallways. There’s a toilet next to the kitchen sink, a curtain drawn around it to provide a modicum of privacy.
On the second floor, I find an elderly man in an unheated room crammed with detritus: plastic bags, coat hangers, stacks of dried food. He wears a stained aqua windbreaker and a brown knitted cap against the cold.
“Come in. Sit down,” he smiles.
I explain that my grandfather once owned this house. From a drawer the man fishes out a limp photocopy of a 2002 ruling issued by the People’s Court, Xuhui District, listing my grandmother Fan Xiao Baolian as the “property owner of house No. 1292 in mid-Huaihai Road.”
“It is not clear where the property owner went,” the People’s Court declared.
But I know the property owners went from a life of luxury in this spacious house to renting a small two-bedroom apartment in Hong Kong, still a British colony in 1949. Their children, in search of degrees and passports to help end their statelessness, scattered to the United States.
I was drawn to my grandfather’s buildings because I hoped I could pull some kind of meaning from them. He died in Hong Kong when I was a teenager, too young or ignorant to extract stories about why he left China. From my father, I got only the barest details in between his understandable rants against the Communist Party.
“Mao Zedong was not just against capitalists. He took away freedom of speech. He launched the Cultural Revolution. He killed two and a half million of his own people,” my father said in one of his many tirades.
“Not being for Western dancing, that’s fine. But he burned Confucius’s books and destroyed Chinese culture. He called America a paper tiger when America was way ahead. He was an uneducated hypocrite, and he took away the best years of my life.”
In Shanghai, my grandfather spoke English at home, counted foreigners among his friends and kept Mies van der Rohe chairs in his living room. He took his children to see the Marx Brothers or Tarzan in theaters he designed. They were the privileged minority, preparing their children for jobs as doctors, lawyers, architects and engineers while Shanghai’s poorer citizens died of starvation in the streets. If my father was bitter about Mao, I cannot fathom what my grandfather must have felt.
He always believed in being open to trends outside of China. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1921, thanks to scholarship funds made available by the Americans, and returned heavily influenced by Paul Philippe Cret, dean of the Beaux-Arts tradition.
He began by incorporating both Chinese and Western elements, such as the YMCA building with its upturned eaves and large windows. But after a 1935 tour of Europe, he began to criticize the “Chinese style” and fully embrace modern Western-style architecture, as in his 1941 design of Shanghai’s Majestic Theater.
This wasn’t so surprising when Shanghai was known as a cosmopolitan, international center of trade. But when Mao promised to nationalize private property and redistribute wealth less than a decade later, the future of anyone with Western attitudes was doomed.
Yet many Western buildings outlasted those whims of policy, surviving the wrenching change that China has undergone over the past 50 years. In 2003, the neoclassical Shanghai Concert Hall built by my grandfather and architect Zhao Chen was lifted off the ground and moved 66.1 meters, to allow space for an elevated roadway nearby, at a cost of $20 million.
One man responsible for saving it is Wu Jiang, 49, vice president of Tongji University, who disagrees with the argument that such buildings should be torn down because they are a reminder of China’s shameful colonial subjugation.
“History cannot be changed or blotted out,” Wu told me. “We should respect ourselves. No matter whether they are beautiful or not, those buildings represent your past.”
In 1989, Shanghai had a list of 62 protected historic buildings. Today, thanks to him, it has more than 2,130.
Wu’s grandfather, also a Western-trained architect, had worked for my grandfather. Wu’s father, a civil engineer, was ruined by the Cultural Revolution, which reduced him to an impoverished existence in the countryside and made him a stranger to his son, Wu said. As he spoke, I thought, “I could have been Wu.”
“Every family like us has similar stories,” Wu said. “A lot of families were totally destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. But if you survived, you had a much better life. People like me were sent to university.”
If you survived.
Just when I was feeling lucky for having been born in the United States, Wu explained why he turned down chances to emigrate. “Chinese people have a different cultural background. Here, you are with your own culture,” he said. “My grandfather told me an architect needs to stay in his own culture. I argued that some Chinese architects like I.M. Pei are famous in the United States. But my grandfather said no, no, no, he’s not a Chinese at all.”
My father had just entered St. John’s University in Shanghai when the Communists defeated Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. Under the Communists, the university was dismantled. The Harvard-trained founder and dean of the school of architecture, Henry Wang, was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution, reportedly turned in by his own students for being too Western.
By 1952, a xenophobic mentality had taken hold. Citizens were forced to shout slogans against “imperialistic capitalists.” My father had to confess at “study sessions” that his mind was poisoned because he came from a capitalist family. He and his friends were questioned for frequenting cafes and eating Western food. Other Chinese deemed too friendly with foreigners were persecuted so much that they chose suicide.
When my father finally received an exit permit to visit my grandfather, he told none of his friends. He packed a knapsack with a sweater, a book and a few essentials and climbed onto a train with my grandmother, leaving behind his younger brother, then 19, and all their belongings. His two sisters had already gotten out.
What did that feel like, I often asked my father. “That was a long time ago,” was his stock answer. In China, I came to see, there is no dwelling on misfortune. No whining. No hand-wringing. There’s even a term for it: “to eat bitterness.”
But I wanted to know. Pressed, my father finally said, “Of course, I didn’t feel good, but I knew Grandpa would get him out.” My uncle got his exit visa about six months later, but the family couldn’t have known that that was certain.
China was well into its third decade of a reform policy, begun by Deng Xiaoping in 1979, when my father finally returned to Shanghai in 2002. After 50 years, he had finally been worn down by the arguments of friends. One, from a prominent Shanghai banking family that had lost everything when they fled, told him she had made peace with her own bitter memories by focusing on the improvements the Communists delivered.
The Communists had installed a state-run economy and cradle-to-grave job security in exchange for political loyalty. They promised to end the appalling corruption of the Nationalists but they soon substituted their own abuses of power, collectivizing farmland, sparking famines and subjecting citizens to brutal political campaigns that led to the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. That campaign of terror against the educated and merchant classes is still felt today in the “lost” generation it produced. But at least people were no longer dying in the streets, the friend said.
Had he stayed, my father would have belonged to that generation. Instead, he attended graduate school, raised a family in California and never looked back. Our family visited my grandfather in Hong Kong, but we never talked about China.
The 2002 trip did not change my father’s views. But it seemed to jar his stoic pattern of not thinking or talking about the past.
One day last year, I was visiting my father in San Francisco. He began talking about Wang, the revered former St. John’s dean who had studied under Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school, and returned to China in hopes of starting a school in the same modern tradition.
Instead, Wang found himself trying not to use English and having to criticize students for reading too many Western magazines. Wang and his wife were both placed under house arrest. They died shortly afterward, my father said, beginning to cough violently.
I looked up to see that my father was actually crying. “Thank God Grandpa sent me to Harvard,” he said. In his view, my grandfather’s foresight had saved both their lives and my father’s career.
When I tell him Xuhui District Housing officials say it’s impossible to get the house on Huaihai Road back because there is no policy or procedure for dealing with pre-1949 houses, my father says he doesn’t care. Another home designed by my grandfather means more to him: a larger building on Yongfu Road that my father remembers as the “Bauhaus house,” for its angular lines and turreted, rectangular windows and where he lived from 1932 until 1941.
It is in the lines of this house that I can see my grandfather’s hopes and ambitions. This house is boxy and square from the outside, absent decorative detail and almost industrial in style. The windows are galvanized steel, once painted black but now red with rust. Inside, the stairway landings are geometric half circles.
This is my grandfather, trained in the Beaux-Arts but following the modern International movement that came into fashion after he returned from the United States. At a time when most Shanghai voices urged a focus on traditional Chinese design, I see him rejecting decoration that serves no purpose, applying that foreign mantra “form follows function.”
I imagine him poring through American architectural magazines, not unlike students in China today, studying the latest Western trends. I picture him lecturing colleagues and apprentices on paying attention to the competition and not looking inward, as China did for so many years.
I can see the cost of doing so in the jumbled lives of the many tenants in the house on Huaihai Road. But that house seems to no longer have any real meaning for my family. Instead, it is the house on Yongfu Road that tells me the most. It reminds me that China once looked forward and outward, and is doing so again today, faster than it has ever done before.
Maureen Fan is Beijing Bureau Chief for
The Washington Post
Copyright 2009 The Jakarta Globe
By Maureen Fan in Beijing
I am standing at a desk in the Xuhui District Housing Bureau with a photograph of an old document, in search of my past. Two middle-aged bureaucrats sit behind desks, one scowling and the other eating a takeout lunch with chopsticks.
The house at 1292 Huaihai Road was the last
building that Robert Fan owned before he left
China in 1949, just as the Communists took
power. (Photo: Maureen Fan, Washington Post)
“We’d like to know what the procedure is for getting back the house that belonged to her grandfather,” my interpreter tells them. I look just like them, and for a moment they can’t understand why someone else is speaking for me. But the Chinese my mother taught me was Cantonese, which turns out to be the wrong Chinese.
After some prodding, the scowling man pulls out a weathered ledger that says a real estate agent named Zhang controlled the property after 1958, authorizing the government to rent it out.
When I insist that my father and uncle know no such person, and that the family couldn’t have rented out the house in the 1950s, the bureaucrat grows irritated.
“What do you know?” he says coolly. “You’re only the third generation.”
The history of a country changes, but often the buildings do not. They continue to stand, mute witnesses to the narrative around them. Those who control them, manage them or live in them fill them with meaning, and that’s what they stand for, until history changes again and they represent something else.
I come from a family of architects, and so the buildings matter to us. My grandfather was one of Shanghai’s most prominent architects and designed the Nanking Theater, now the Shanghai Concert Hall; the Rialto, Astor and Majestic movie theaters; the YMCA building on Xizhang Road South; university buildings and private residences; and the Railway and Health ministries in Nanjing.
But the buildings that drew me most were the ones my family once lived in — in particular, the house at 1292 Huaihai Road, the last house my grandfather Robert Fan (or Fan Wenzhao) owned before he left China in 1949, just as the Communists took power. He and my grandmother lived here with their four children, including my father, and a handful of servants.
I first visited this house in 1986, just after college, and again in 2002. I stand before it now, trying to read the history of my family in its sprawl.
My father and mother are also architects, retired from their San Francisco practice. I was raised in suburbia with only an academic understanding of China until I came back in 2005 to study Mandarin and work as a correspondent for The Washington Post.
I go in. The house is three stories, pale yellow, with flaking green trim and rusty scaffolding that juts haphazardly from the facade. The front porch is a tailor shop; along one side, a tiny storefront sells cheap shoes and socks.
I walk tentatively up the steps, into a labyrinth of dark rooms. The air smells like old wood and dust, mingled with the cooking of 10 families that occupy every inch of the place, from basement to attic. Mice dart between the loose electrical cables and portable stoves lining the dingy hallways. There’s a toilet next to the kitchen sink, a curtain drawn around it to provide a modicum of privacy.
On the second floor, I find an elderly man in an unheated room crammed with detritus: plastic bags, coat hangers, stacks of dried food. He wears a stained aqua windbreaker and a brown knitted cap against the cold.
“Come in. Sit down,” he smiles.
I explain that my grandfather once owned this house. From a drawer the man fishes out a limp photocopy of a 2002 ruling issued by the People’s Court, Xuhui District, listing my grandmother Fan Xiao Baolian as the “property owner of house No. 1292 in mid-Huaihai Road.”
“It is not clear where the property owner went,” the People’s Court declared.
But I know the property owners went from a life of luxury in this spacious house to renting a small two-bedroom apartment in Hong Kong, still a British colony in 1949. Their children, in search of degrees and passports to help end their statelessness, scattered to the United States.
I was drawn to my grandfather’s buildings because I hoped I could pull some kind of meaning from them. He died in Hong Kong when I was a teenager, too young or ignorant to extract stories about why he left China. From my father, I got only the barest details in between his understandable rants against the Communist Party.
“Mao Zedong was not just against capitalists. He took away freedom of speech. He launched the Cultural Revolution. He killed two and a half million of his own people,” my father said in one of his many tirades.
“Not being for Western dancing, that’s fine. But he burned Confucius’s books and destroyed Chinese culture. He called America a paper tiger when America was way ahead. He was an uneducated hypocrite, and he took away the best years of my life.”
In Shanghai, my grandfather spoke English at home, counted foreigners among his friends and kept Mies van der Rohe chairs in his living room. He took his children to see the Marx Brothers or Tarzan in theaters he designed. They were the privileged minority, preparing their children for jobs as doctors, lawyers, architects and engineers while Shanghai’s poorer citizens died of starvation in the streets. If my father was bitter about Mao, I cannot fathom what my grandfather must have felt.
He always believed in being open to trends outside of China. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1921, thanks to scholarship funds made available by the Americans, and returned heavily influenced by Paul Philippe Cret, dean of the Beaux-Arts tradition.
He began by incorporating both Chinese and Western elements, such as the YMCA building with its upturned eaves and large windows. But after a 1935 tour of Europe, he began to criticize the “Chinese style” and fully embrace modern Western-style architecture, as in his 1941 design of Shanghai’s Majestic Theater.
This wasn’t so surprising when Shanghai was known as a cosmopolitan, international center of trade. But when Mao promised to nationalize private property and redistribute wealth less than a decade later, the future of anyone with Western attitudes was doomed.
Yet many Western buildings outlasted those whims of policy, surviving the wrenching change that China has undergone over the past 50 years. In 2003, the neoclassical Shanghai Concert Hall built by my grandfather and architect Zhao Chen was lifted off the ground and moved 66.1 meters, to allow space for an elevated roadway nearby, at a cost of $20 million.
One man responsible for saving it is Wu Jiang, 49, vice president of Tongji University, who disagrees with the argument that such buildings should be torn down because they are a reminder of China’s shameful colonial subjugation.
“History cannot be changed or blotted out,” Wu told me. “We should respect ourselves. No matter whether they are beautiful or not, those buildings represent your past.”
In 1989, Shanghai had a list of 62 protected historic buildings. Today, thanks to him, it has more than 2,130.
Wu’s grandfather, also a Western-trained architect, had worked for my grandfather. Wu’s father, a civil engineer, was ruined by the Cultural Revolution, which reduced him to an impoverished existence in the countryside and made him a stranger to his son, Wu said. As he spoke, I thought, “I could have been Wu.”
“Every family like us has similar stories,” Wu said. “A lot of families were totally destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. But if you survived, you had a much better life. People like me were sent to university.”
If you survived.
Just when I was feeling lucky for having been born in the United States, Wu explained why he turned down chances to emigrate. “Chinese people have a different cultural background. Here, you are with your own culture,” he said. “My grandfather told me an architect needs to stay in his own culture. I argued that some Chinese architects like I.M. Pei are famous in the United States. But my grandfather said no, no, no, he’s not a Chinese at all.”
My father had just entered St. John’s University in Shanghai when the Communists defeated Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. Under the Communists, the university was dismantled. The Harvard-trained founder and dean of the school of architecture, Henry Wang, was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution, reportedly turned in by his own students for being too Western.
By 1952, a xenophobic mentality had taken hold. Citizens were forced to shout slogans against “imperialistic capitalists.” My father had to confess at “study sessions” that his mind was poisoned because he came from a capitalist family. He and his friends were questioned for frequenting cafes and eating Western food. Other Chinese deemed too friendly with foreigners were persecuted so much that they chose suicide.
When my father finally received an exit permit to visit my grandfather, he told none of his friends. He packed a knapsack with a sweater, a book and a few essentials and climbed onto a train with my grandmother, leaving behind his younger brother, then 19, and all their belongings. His two sisters had already gotten out.
What did that feel like, I often asked my father. “That was a long time ago,” was his stock answer. In China, I came to see, there is no dwelling on misfortune. No whining. No hand-wringing. There’s even a term for it: “to eat bitterness.”
But I wanted to know. Pressed, my father finally said, “Of course, I didn’t feel good, but I knew Grandpa would get him out.” My uncle got his exit visa about six months later, but the family couldn’t have known that that was certain.
China was well into its third decade of a reform policy, begun by Deng Xiaoping in 1979, when my father finally returned to Shanghai in 2002. After 50 years, he had finally been worn down by the arguments of friends. One, from a prominent Shanghai banking family that had lost everything when they fled, told him she had made peace with her own bitter memories by focusing on the improvements the Communists delivered.
The Communists had installed a state-run economy and cradle-to-grave job security in exchange for political loyalty. They promised to end the appalling corruption of the Nationalists but they soon substituted their own abuses of power, collectivizing farmland, sparking famines and subjecting citizens to brutal political campaigns that led to the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. That campaign of terror against the educated and merchant classes is still felt today in the “lost” generation it produced. But at least people were no longer dying in the streets, the friend said.
Had he stayed, my father would have belonged to that generation. Instead, he attended graduate school, raised a family in California and never looked back. Our family visited my grandfather in Hong Kong, but we never talked about China.
The 2002 trip did not change my father’s views. But it seemed to jar his stoic pattern of not thinking or talking about the past.
One day last year, I was visiting my father in San Francisco. He began talking about Wang, the revered former St. John’s dean who had studied under Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school, and returned to China in hopes of starting a school in the same modern tradition.
Instead, Wang found himself trying not to use English and having to criticize students for reading too many Western magazines. Wang and his wife were both placed under house arrest. They died shortly afterward, my father said, beginning to cough violently.
I looked up to see that my father was actually crying. “Thank God Grandpa sent me to Harvard,” he said. In his view, my grandfather’s foresight had saved both their lives and my father’s career.
When I tell him Xuhui District Housing officials say it’s impossible to get the house on Huaihai Road back because there is no policy or procedure for dealing with pre-1949 houses, my father says he doesn’t care. Another home designed by my grandfather means more to him: a larger building on Yongfu Road that my father remembers as the “Bauhaus house,” for its angular lines and turreted, rectangular windows and where he lived from 1932 until 1941.
It is in the lines of this house that I can see my grandfather’s hopes and ambitions. This house is boxy and square from the outside, absent decorative detail and almost industrial in style. The windows are galvanized steel, once painted black but now red with rust. Inside, the stairway landings are geometric half circles.
This is my grandfather, trained in the Beaux-Arts but following the modern International movement that came into fashion after he returned from the United States. At a time when most Shanghai voices urged a focus on traditional Chinese design, I see him rejecting decoration that serves no purpose, applying that foreign mantra “form follows function.”
I imagine him poring through American architectural magazines, not unlike students in China today, studying the latest Western trends. I picture him lecturing colleagues and apprentices on paying attention to the competition and not looking inward, as China did for so many years.
I can see the cost of doing so in the jumbled lives of the many tenants in the house on Huaihai Road. But that house seems to no longer have any real meaning for my family. Instead, it is the house on Yongfu Road that tells me the most. It reminds me that China once looked forward and outward, and is doing so again today, faster than it has ever done before.
Maureen Fan is Beijing Bureau Chief for
The Washington Post
Copyright 2009 The Jakarta Globe
