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HONG KONG / The Standard / Property / June 4, 2009
By Maureen Fan
I am standing at a desk in Shanghai's Xuhui District Housing Bureau in search of my past. Two middle-aged bureaucrats sit behind desks, one scowling and the other eating a takeout lunch. "We'd like to know what the procedure is for getting back the house that belonged to her grandfather," my interpreter tells them.
The scowling man pulls out a weathered ledger that says an 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, he grows irritated. "What do you know?" he says coolly. "You're only the third generation."
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.
The buildings that drew me most were the ones my family once lived in: the house at 1292 Huaihai Road, the last house my grandfather Robert Fan Wenzhao owned before he left China in 1949. He and my grandmother lived in the Shanghai house with my father, his three siblings and 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 with only an academic understanding of China until I came back in 2005 to study Putonghua and work as a correspondent.
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.
Upstairs is a labyrinth of dark rooms. The air smells like old wood and dust, mingled with the cooking of 10 families that occupy the place. Mice dart between portable stoves lining the hallways. There's a toilet next to the kitchen sink.
On the second floor, I find an elderly man in an unheated room crammed with plastic bags, coat hangers and stacks of dried food. "Come in. Sit down," he smiles.
I explain that my grandfather once owned this house. From a drawer he 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 owner. "It is not clear where the property owner went," the court declared. But I know the owners went from a life of luxury in this spacious house to renting a small two-bedroom apartment in Hong Kong. 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. From my father, I got only the barest details in between his 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 2 million of his own people," my father said. "He burned Confucius's books and destroyed Chinese culture. He was an uneducated hypocrite, and he took away the best years of my life."
If my father was bitter about Mao, I cannot fathom what my grandfather must have felt. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1921, thanks to scholarship funds from the Americans.
He began by incorporating both Chinese and Western elements. 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.
My father had just entered St John's University in Shanghai when the communists defeated Chiang Kai- shek's Kuomintang. Under the communists, the university was dismantled.
By 1952, a xenophobic mentality had taken hold. My father had to confess at "study sessions" that his mind was poisoned because he came from a capitalist family.
When my father finally received an exit permit to visit my grandfather, he told none of his friends. He packed a knapsack and climbed onto a train with my grandmother, leaving behind his younger brother, then 19, and all their belongings.
China was well into its third decade of a reform policy when my father finally returned to Shanghai in 2002. The trip did not change his 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. 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.
He 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, 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.
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 no longer has any real meaning for my family. Instead, it is the one 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.
THE WASHINGTON POST
© 2009 The Standard, The Standard Newspapers Publishing Ltd..
I am standing at a desk in Shanghai's Xuhui District Housing Bureau in search of my past. Two middle-aged bureaucrats sit behind desks, one scowling and the other eating a takeout lunch. "We'd like to know what the procedure is for getting back the house that belonged to her grandfather," my interpreter tells them.
The scowling man pulls out a weathered ledger that says an 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, he grows irritated. "What do you know?" he says coolly. "You're only the third generation."
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.
The buildings that drew me most were the ones my family once lived in: the house at 1292 Huaihai Road, the last house my grandfather Robert Fan Wenzhao owned before he left China in 1949. He and my grandmother lived in the Shanghai house with my father, his three siblings and 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 with only an academic understanding of China until I came back in 2005 to study Putonghua and work as a correspondent.
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.
Upstairs is a labyrinth of dark rooms. The air smells like old wood and dust, mingled with the cooking of 10 families that occupy the place. Mice dart between portable stoves lining the hallways. There's a toilet next to the kitchen sink.
On the second floor, I find an elderly man in an unheated room crammed with plastic bags, coat hangers and stacks of dried food. "Come in. Sit down," he smiles.
I explain that my grandfather once owned this house. From a drawer he 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 owner. "It is not clear where the property owner went," the court declared. But I know the owners went from a life of luxury in this spacious house to renting a small two-bedroom apartment in Hong Kong. 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. From my father, I got only the barest details in between his 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 2 million of his own people," my father said. "He burned Confucius's books and destroyed Chinese culture. He was an uneducated hypocrite, and he took away the best years of my life."
If my father was bitter about Mao, I cannot fathom what my grandfather must have felt. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1921, thanks to scholarship funds from the Americans.
He began by incorporating both Chinese and Western elements. 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.
My father had just entered St John's University in Shanghai when the communists defeated Chiang Kai- shek's Kuomintang. Under the communists, the university was dismantled.
By 1952, a xenophobic mentality had taken hold. My father had to confess at "study sessions" that his mind was poisoned because he came from a capitalist family.
When my father finally received an exit permit to visit my grandfather, he told none of his friends. He packed a knapsack and climbed onto a train with my grandmother, leaving behind his younger brother, then 19, and all their belongings.
China was well into its third decade of a reform policy when my father finally returned to Shanghai in 2002. The trip did not change his 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. 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.
He 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, 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.
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 no longer has any real meaning for my family. Instead, it is the one 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.
THE WASHINGTON POST
© 2009 The Standard, The Standard Newspapers Publishing Ltd..
