Dashanlanr

Old Lady Gao's life in Dashalanr began in 1937 when, aged 17, she married into the neighbourhood.Footnote ¹⁴ She lived there until the summer of 2011, when following the death of her youngest son, she and her daughter-in-law moved out when the local government's demolition programme reached her lane. The hutong where Old Lady Gao lived until 2011 is near the Guanyin Temple on Dashalanr's West Street. The temple was destroyed by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, and all that can now be seen of it is a dilapidated, moss-covered roof. Nevertheless, residents still refer to it as an important neighbourhood site, in which local memories converge in asserting a sense of belonging to, even ownership of, a neighbourhood with a long history.Footnote ¹⁵ It also gives the old name to Dashalanr's West Street, ‘Guanyin Temple Street’, prominently displayed in the wrought iron archway marking the street's entrance. Demolition of Dashalanr had already begun when I first visited it in 2005, but it was still a neighbourhood that throbbed with noise and movement: rickshaw cyclists shouting to pedestrians to get out of the way as they steered a path through the tiny lanes, angry street brawls amplified by the shouts of unsolicited advice from the crowds of onlookers, restauranteurs booming out ‘old Beijing’-style cries to attract passers-by. It was also a place of smells, from the warm fragrance of tripe soup steaming in enormous woks in front of restaurants, the incense burning on the stalls of vendors selling Buddhist trinkets, to the stench of the public lavatories.

The refurbishment of Guanyin Temple Street with clean walkways and grey painted shop frontages was completed to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the PRC. Inside the courtyards, however, little had changed since the 1950s. Xuanwu District had long been Beijng's poorest and most densely populated district, and Dashalanr's dilapidated infrastructure and overcrowding presented particular challenges.Footnote ¹⁶ Inadequate investment and population growth during the 1950s hampered the overstretched local government's plans for demolition and reconstruction. Some dazayuan housed 20 or so families, sharing an outside hob and with no sanitation or hot water,Footnote ¹⁷ and there were frequent conflicts between registered residents, tenants and private owners who wanted to reclaim their property.Footnote ¹⁸ Attempts to mobilize households to vacate rooms in order to accommodate new residents only added to the overcrowding without adding any new services. A local survey noted many instances of ‘six people of three generations in one bed, with only enough room to turn around in, and sleeping on wooden planks in summer’.Footnote ¹⁹ Demolition affected vast numbers by the late 1950s as the government launched its project to construct its ‘ten great buildings’, two of which – the Great Hall of the People and the Revolutionary History Museum – were in Tian'anmen Square.Footnote ²⁰ Large ‘repair rescue teams’ were organized by the housing authorities to assist those in need, particularly during the raining season.Footnote ²¹ However, repairs failed to keep up with the pace of dilapidation and demand and by 1965, the amount of ‘old and dangerous housing’ had doubled over 1949.Footnote ²² By the mid-1970s, following further absorption of private housing into public ownership and a ‘snowballing’ approach of ‘demolishing three and building one’ little had changed.Footnote ²³ The 1976 earthquake further exacerbated the situation, and subsidies to enable families to undertake their own repairs were woefully inadequate. In all, under a policy of ‘not letting the roof fall in, not letting the walls collapse, but repairing serious leaks’, the area suffered from extreme neglect.Footnote ²⁴

An urban plan to transform Beijing from an industrially based city to a ‘political and cultural centre’ to attract business and tourism designated Dashalanr a cultural protection area in the early 1980s. Following the commodification of urban housing in 1988, Dashalanr was marked for regeneration in a city plan to ‘transform old and dilapidated housing’ (weifang gaizao) by 2000 when the government initially hoped to stage the Olympics. By 2002, Dashalanr appeared in another protection plan as one of the ‘twenty-five historical areas of Old Beijing city’, two-thirds of the housing of which was graded as dilapidated.Footnote ²⁵ Demolition of the neighbourhood finally got underway in late 2004 with the widening of its main north–south road axis and the relocation of large numbers of local residents, powerfully recorded in Ou Ning's film.Footnote ²⁶ The big white character chai’ (demolition) and Zhang Dali's spectacular AK-47 graffiti peppered the neighbourhood's walls. Blue corrugated metal sheets and bamboo scaffolding surrounded semi-demolished buildings, and while pedestrians had to pick their way through piles of rubbish and litter, posters appeared on courtyard doors and walls explaining the government's concern for local residents. Evacuation orders were put up, and notices appeared urging inhabitants to ‘say farewell to dangerous housing’ (gaobie weifang) and to benefit from the bonuses offered for voluntary relocation. Enormous billboards displaying digitized images of the neighbourhood of the future celebrated the commercial splendours of Dashalanr's history, and in preparation for the Olympics, shop owners were ordered to re-furbish their shop fronts with new signage and grey paint, and street vendors and rickshaw drivers were cleared from the lanes. But the dazayuan off Dashalanr's West Street remained virtually untouched. Rumour had it that chaiqian (demolition and relocation) was on hold due to corruption among the responsible officials. Reconstruction of Guanyin Temple Street only began in the winter of 2008–09, with migrant workers labouring alongside bulldozers late into the night to lay new pipes and wiring, leaving a tangle of open wires and piles of rubble in the tiny pedestrian margins left at the sides of the street.

Dashalanr, then, is a neighbourhood in which everyday life for long-term residents has been shaped by an experience of long-term neglect, exacerbated in recent years by the relentless noise, dust and detritus, and resultant tensions of the neighbourhood's reconstruction. The overlapping boundaries between the ramshackle dwellings of the crammed dazayuan already made hutong life very complex; dazayuan residents generally all know each other's names and occupations, where their children attend school and what kind of people visit them. As Zhao Tielin once put it, ‘everyone knows everything, even when a blade of grass moves in the wind’. Far from the nostalgic tones of contemporary narratives about the ‘loss of the hutong’, the spatial arrangement of the dazayuan and the hutong breeds a hotbed of gossip about local relationships and family quarrels, and hutong social and personal relations (hutong shenghuo de renji guanxi) are fraught with potential conflicts that frequently spill over into street brawls and fights with the local police.Footnote ²⁷

The history of Dashalanr's ‘reconstruction’ over the past half century or so thus offers a particular perspective on the government's attempts to order the lives of its subjects that challenges dominant narratives of the capital's transformation. For local residents such as Old Lady Gao, the spatialized routines of her life were significantly shaped by the state, but as I show below, the terms and temporality of her memories of everyday life indicate a stubborn rebuttal of the state's attempts to cast her as its obedient subject. For Old Lady Gao, the state's neglect of local regeneration produced the paradoxical effect of affirming her ‘ownership’ of her home and neighbourhood. Her history highlights the history of a neighbourhood that has simultaneously served ‘as an area for the operation of large historical forces’ – the state, the bureaucracy, and most recently the market – and as a sphere of informal everyday strategies of survival, defiance, determination and intractability.Footnote ²⁸ The squatters who refuse to relocate, the unregistered rickshaw drivers who use their local spatial knowledge to evade the local police, the vivid graffiti and the everyday arguments between local people and the law enforcement officers (chengguan) are a constant reminder of the limits of the authorities’ reach.

Old Lady Gao and her son

When Old Lady Gao first moved into Dashalanr in 1937, her husband worked as a security guard for the Nationalist police. The couple lived in one room of a rented small three-room courtyard; Old Lady Gao's ‘in-laws and elder brother-in-law and his family lived in the other two. By 1959, Old Lady Gao had four children, and after persistent requests to the authorities, was given another room in a dazayuan on the same lane. Two rooms of the family's first home were then allocated to new occupants around the time of the Cultural Revolution, and by the early 1980s, the interior of the courtyard had been filled up with the small single room constructions typical of the dazayuan. When Old Lady Gao's eldest son took over the family's main room in their first home when he married in the early 1980s, Old Lady Gao moved out to their single room in the nearby dazayuan where she remained until her relocation in 2011 to a second-floor apartment in a popular area further south. Until 2011, she had rarely left the neighbourhood.

Old Lady Gao's home was one big room, divided into two by a partition. A small exterior extension to the left of the entrance served as the kitchen containing a hob and a tap with cold water. The main front space housed a double bed – the kang (the traditional raised brick bed, heated underneath) as she called it – a dresser and an old television, a fridge and a microwave, a small table at which the family used to eat, one small armchair and a few stools. The smaller bedroom at the back contained a big wardrobe and a double bed under which were numerous boxes storing the family's extra bed linen and clothes. The place was warm, and full of family bits and pieces – a few photographs and soft toys, a framed picture of the Buddha, sauce bottles and so on. But it was shabby and badly in need of repair, with dilapidated walls, peeling pale green paint and cracks in the bare concrete floors.

Old Lady Gao became bedridden in 2009. Painfully thin and very frail, she spent her days on the big bed, lying back against a pillow, knees raised in front of her, looking at the television on the dresser in front of her, dozing or just looking around. Her grey hair was always neatly arranged, pulled straight back from her face and caught in a clasp at the back. She kept a small wooden box at her side with her immediate necessities – cigarettes, lighter and tissues. The family's small dog often accompanied her. Young Gao, her unemployed youngest son, spent most of his time with her, sitting at the small table by her bed. His wife was often out at work, so it was left to him to care for his mother, helping her with the bedpan, and rearranging her position to make her comfortable. But his wife took over these tasks as soon as she returned; she also did the daily food shopping, the cooking, tidying and cleaning, despite her husband's comments that she neglected her duties.

Old Lady Gao was the youngest of four, with an elder brother and two elder sisters. She had a ‘bad fate’ (ming bu hao), as she put it. Her father had been away working and returned home through a rainstorm one late April to find that his wife had given birth to a third daughter. He developed a fever and died 20 days later, ‘broken hearted’ at not having another son. Her father's elder relatives suggested giving her away. Her aunt's husband said that had it been his wife's child he would have left her at the barracks. Another older relative simply said ‘she's a girl, let the dogs drag her off’.

Old Lady Gao's widowed mother had no independent resources, and tried to make ends meet picking up whatever work she could, cleaning, gathering fuel left on the streets and making shoes. Compelled by poverty to take drastic measures, she sold her five-year-old as a child bride (tongyangxi) into a household where she was treated as a skivvy. She repeatedly ran back to her mother, and her mother repeatedly returned her to her in-laws. She managed to leave, finally, at the age of 10, and went to live with one of her married elder sisters, earning a bit of money doing odd jobs for neighbours. Then, aged 13, she found a job with a local shopkeeper, collecting coal and cleaning, but her elder sister insisted that she return to her mother. Her elder brother found a position as an apprentice to a shoemaker who lived near Dashalanr's Guanyin Temple, and it was through his connections there that Old Lady Gao was introduced to the man who became her second husband.

Old Lady Gao's life centred on her home after her marriage. Her first child, a daughter, was born in 1942, followed by a son and another daughter, and finally by her youngest son in 1959. Her husband was a good-looking and mild-mannered man, but who as time passed, seemed to her to be weak and inept. He was sacked from his job when he bribed someone to give him cakes for his daughter's birthday. He eventually found another job selling vegetables, but he always undersold his produce, and brought little money back home. Life was tough, and Old Lady Gao had to struggle to keep the family going. During the early 1950s, she worked briefly in an ‘army uniform factory’ behind her home, where alongside other women she washed the blood and filth out of soldiers’ uniforms, then unpicked and remade them as trousers and jackets for new recruits. There was little food; corn dumplings were the staple, with noodles at New Year and when relatives came to visit. Meat was a rarity. Old Lady Gao's memories of the famine years, when her youngest child was born, were particularly bitter. She had to scavenge on the lanes, and send her older children out to the suburbs at night to forage for wild plants. Between 1958 and the mid-1960s, she worked in a ‘production group’ (shengchan zu) organized by the neighbourhood committee, where local women made shoes and clothes, stuck match boxes together and folded paper for the pages of books for the New China Bookstore, at the rate of two cents for 100 pages.Footnote ²⁹ As a member of this collective, Old Lady Gao worked not in the organized space of a work unit, but in the informal space of her home where she would chat and smoke cigarettes with her ‘sisters’. Illiterate and without any publicly recognized skills, Old Lady Gao commented that ‘this was all someone like me could do’. Tellingly, her eldest daughter once commented that her mother might have done better had she stayed with the man to whom she was ‘married’ as a child bride.

Old Lady Gao's infirmity did not diminish her role as the emotional mainstay of her household. People used to come and go; they would sit at the table to eat and watch television, and would chat, drink, and smoke cigarettes, accompanying her as she dozed. Her daughters sometimes jokingly told her that she was talking nonsense, or that they did not want to hear any more about her tales of woe. But they were extremely respectful of her and attentive to her needs. Even though she no longer spoke very clearly, her children would often consult her when they needed reminding about past events on their lane. Her long life, her determination to keep her family going and her reputation for generosity to neighbours down on their luck made her the linchpin of her family's unity and survival.

When I first met Young Gao, his right arm was in a cast, having been broken in a collision with a rickshaw cyclist. His mother had just come out of hospital. Before I met him, he had a job at a local vegetable depot, but was laid off when he was admitted to hospital for an operation. By June 2007, he had been sacked from another job as a night watchman after being discovered drinking while at work. With a chronic lung condition that made him unfit for regular employment, he received 300 yuan a month from the government as basic ‘welfare’ payment (dibao), but this only lasted one year when his wife was unemployed. She took up work as a pedicab driver until pedicabs and itinerant street vendors were officially ordered off the streets as part of the neighbourhood's ‘prettification’ before the 2008 Olympics. She then found a job in a factory where she used to do six night shifts every week. It later became apparent that this, too, was a source of distress to Young Gao. During a visit in late 2010, Young Gao's wife asked me whether women or men enjoyed a ‘higher’ position in Britain. When I responded by saying that generally men did, and that women had to take care of their families as well as work, she agreed, but then added ‘but sometimes women make more money than men, and if they didn't work. . .’. She broke off when she realized that this might go down the wrong way with her husband, and quickly added, ‘I'm not talking about you, I'm just making a general comment. This is not about you.’

One morning in June 2009, Young Gao seemed unusually depressed, and had lost a lot of weight. He had had another spell in hospital, this time for liquid on the lungs. His mood was not helped by the sweltering heat and by the constant noise of bulldozers excavating a nearby lane. Though it was only 10 in the morning, he had already started drinking strong sorghum spirits. His mother's condition had further deteriorated, and financial difficulties were on his mind. But as he talked, it became apparent that there was another reason for his distress. He had been quarrelling with his eldest sister, and had not slept well, and woke up thinking about his father's death a few years before. Young Gao had developed pneumonia, but since his father was already in hospital, he – Young Gao – tried to ignore his own condition to be able look after him. Eventually, Young Gao had to be hospitalized, and was only released after his father died. ‘So I couldn't make it in time before my father passed away. What regret. I cried, I really cried. Aiya!’

Old Lady Gao used to make repeated references to the care her younger son gave her. Yet for Young Gao, his claim that the ‘Communist Party doesn't let me work’ could not hide his sense of inadequacy as a husband and son unable to sustain his familial and filial duties. He once remarked that it would have been better if his mother had not given birth to him. His distress was also compounded by the precarious future his family faced. Local people were long accustomed to living with the everyday uncertainties of their neighbourhood's reconstruction. Some, like Young Gao's wife, were quite pragmatic in their response to the prospect of moving: ‘if we have to move out, then that's what we'll have to do, but we won't be able to come back’. Young Gao could not, or chose not to, confront the idea; for him it was unimaginable. ‘We can't think about the future’, he said, ‘since we all we can do is get through today. All we can do is wait.’

Old Lady Gao's and her son's narratives were undoubtedly inflected by my interests in their family and neighbourhood. Had I approached them with different interests, or had I got to know them earlier, they might have talked about their lives in different terms. Like many elderly people, Old Lady Gao liked to dwell on her childhood and youth: ‘I'm happiest when talking about the past, however bitter.’ Her recollections of her mother's destitution and her own childhood suffering were particularly acute, sometimes bringing tears to her eyes. Reaffirming the bitterness of her childhood highlighted her determination to care for her uterine family during the 1950s and 1960s, even though it also explained her lowly status as a ‘dependent housewife’ (jiashu) outside the formal state system of employment.Footnote ³⁰ The bitterness of her past life, therefore, became the reference for a self-legitimation articulated through her role as mother and wife. Her son's narrative, in contrast, fluctuated between resentment against a state that, in his terms, subjected him to its power without bringing any benefits, and his sense of inadequacy as a husband and son. In the context of their physical positioning in their home and neighbourhood, surrounded by family members and neighbours whose preoccupations centred on getting by in their everyday routines, Old Lady Gao's and her son's choices of events and concerns to articulate are telling, however selective or partial these might have been. I therefore now turn to reflect on the main themes their narratives highlight before addressing the questions I raised at the beginning of this article.

A gendered lens on place, space and temporality

Stephan Feuchtwang has argued that the ‘emptying out’ and destruction of place – ‘territorialized space’ – that occurs as part of the ‘deterritorializing’ process of globalization at the same time ‘remakes’ place in physical and emotional terms, and crucially through memories of association with the sites and buildings which ‘sustain a sense of the interiority of place’. Places are made and remade through memories and temporalities of belonging, even though these may sustain an identification of place with ‘a single physical point of reference’.Footnote ³¹ As a centre of belonging, place emerges as an interwoven site of shifting individual and collective memories, formed not out of fixed cultural traditions and material forms that ‘freez[e] moments of the past of a place’, but out of interrelations which change over time and engage with other places but converge in their reference to the materiality of a particular building or monument.Footnote ³²

Old Lady Gao's family story centres on a powerful sense of family belonging to place in the spatialized and social form of her dazayuan and neighbourhood. Despite its remaking – daughters leaving to marry, rural migrants moving in, its recent reconstruction and her relocation – Old Lady Gao's home retains a sense of interiority as a centre of being and identification through her long-term and spatial occupation of it. Old Lady Gao was instrumental in keeping her household going, with little support – at least that she acknowledged – from either her husband or the state; she performed the role of patrolling the boundaries between family unity and separation.Footnote ³³ The embodied and social dimensions of her life centred on the material space of her dazayuan, where she cooked, looked after her children and worked for the neighbourhood committee. Her memories and temporalities of belonging to Dashalanr thus give a gendered quality to the place and space of her everyday life as an impoverished and illiterate woman, as I try to explain below.

As in urban districts throughout China, everyday life in Dashalanr has been unremittingly mediated by the visible, physical and disciplinary presence of the state, in the changing rules and regulations, prohibitions and orders issued by local governments, the eviction notices and the big chai (demolition) character painted on courtyard doors and walls, the posses of administrative officers (chengguan) patrolling local lanes and the bulldozers and migrant workers working day and night to excavate foundations for new roads and buildings. Ever since 1949, household censuses, political campaigns and mobilization of neighbourhood residents to support the state's projects of social and spatial reconstruction have attempted to incorporate urban subjects, including Old Lady Gao, into the state's changing visions of its future. Yet, neither the dates, political events or slogans of the political campaigns that affected Dashalanr feature much in Old Lady Gao's story. The key moments and events of her memories suggest little association with the officially authorized themes of the capital's transformation; they do not correspond with what Gail Hershatter calls ‘campaign time’ – the temporal sequence of political events that structure the official chronology and themes of China's recent history.Footnote ³⁴ One might have reasonably expected that Old Lady Gao's silence about such dates and themes would not apply to the ‘speak bitterness’ campaigns and ‘struggle meetings’ against local entrepreneurs and capitalists; Dashalanr's commercial and entertainment history made it a key site of such campaigns during the early 1950s. One might also have reasonably expected that she would have acquired some familiarity with the language of gender equality (nannü pingdeng) through which women became conscious of the injustices of the ‘feudal’ marriage system and of the legitimacy of their claims to employment; the local archives contain numerous documents about the campaign to publicize the 1950 Marriage Law. The official terminology of gongsi heying (amalgamation of public and private property) occasionally featured in her narrative, but she remembered it as a vaguely dated episode in the 1950s when the private property of many of her neighbours was confiscated and when her husband ‘entered the group’ (ru zu) as a vegetable vendor. Old Lady Gao was officially designated as a worker, and her status as a former child bride and victim of ‘feudal oppression’ meant that, despite her husband's work for the Nationalist police before 1949, her family was protected against criticism during the Cultural Revolution. Indeed, for a short time during the Cultural Revolution, Old Lady Gao was an enthusiastic member of the neighbourhood committee network of local surveillance, in order to get her own back on its leader who had spent years bullying her into washing her clothes and cleaning her house. However, it was her eldest daughter who revealed this information. And while Old Lady Gao made occasional references to the Red Guards’ activities in Dashalanr, ransacking former capitalists’ homes and demanding food and accommodation in dazayuan, her main references to the period were to her neighbourhood sisters sitting in her home folding the pages of books and making clothes and shoes, to neighbours who had moved out, to her children's lives, and the births and deaths, wedding and funerals of people on her lane. Moreover, despite her repeated references to her childhood suffering, her narrative contains few of the contrasts between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ society that structure the official history of China's revolution, regardless of reminders from her daughter-in-law that there was no welfare or old-age pension in the past. Her narrative refuses containment by the timelines and terms of the party-state's language of power shaping the new ‘ruling class’.Footnote ³⁵

Old Lady Gao's attenuated relationship with the state work unit system offers one explanation. In Hershatter's oral history of rural women during the 1950s, those who were most likely to narrate their memories through the temporalities of ‘campaign time’ were those who were drawn into its processes as activists and village cadres. In contrast, Old Lady Gao's memories trace a temporality associated with a space of everyday family routines and relationships. The preoccupations which structure her story of her life – the circumstances of her marriage, the scarcity of food, the comings and goings of neighbours, the inadequacy of her husband, her son's filial care of her – converge in the emotional, social, material and spatial circumstances of her everyday experience as mother and wife. The places, spaces and temporalities through which she articulates her memories are therefore profoundly shaped by the conditions of her status as a woman of a particular time, generation and class. Her self-legitimation and self-recognition as a social being rest on her – and her family's – acknowledgement of her determination to live up to her gendered responsibilities as mother and carer.

If Old Lady Gao's account contributes a gendered perspective to place and temporality, so does Young Gao's. But in contrast to his mother's, his suggests a bitterness directed against the authorities that is inversely matched by a sense of powerlessness to be able to influence the conditions of his existence. His frequent references to ‘them’ – the government and state – suggested an awareness of the powers that shaped his life that was absent in his mother's account. Indeed, on the few occasions when I ate in a neighbourhood restaurant with him, mostly together with other local men, his cynical banter about the authorities was markedly different from the tone and content of the mostly women-dominated conversations that took place in his home. By this, I do not suggest that as a man he was automatically drawn into conversations about ‘big matters’ of state, as the stereotype of Beijing men would have it, but rather that his social connections with men, some of whom attended to the political issues of the day, gave him access to referring to ‘them’ in terms that his mother did not use. Sickness, unemployment, financial dependence on his wife and prospect of dislocation from his home imprisoned him in conditions that he felt had been imposed on him. His sedentary presence in his home alongside his bedridden mother confirmed his sense of inadequacy as an uneducated, unemployable man, whose everyday care of his mother should, in the proper gendered order of things, have been the responsibility of his wife. For him, therefore, the spaces of his home and neighbourhood acquired significance not as a source of self-validation, but of shame at his incapacity to assume the social and family responsibilities expected of him as husband and son.

The repertoire of the memories Old Lady Gao shared with me made no reference to personal hopes or aspirations, either for herself or her children, in the past or in the present. Her long-term preoccupations with the everyday tasks of family survival in the contained spaces of her home and neighbourhood produced a temporality that denied her access to the future represented by the ‘new China's’ vision of urban modernization. Old Lady Gao is now extremely old, and long before her displacement from her home, she was aware of the physical destruction of her neighbourhood. It is not surprising that she cannot or does not want to talk about her future, any more than it is surprising, as I have noted above, that she is drawn to memories of her younger days. But if her preoccupations with her everyday present have precluded ideas about a future, this has also been because of her long-term marginalization from both the socialist promise of the Mao era and the market promise of prosperity since. In the face of demolition and relocation, all she and her son could do was to ‘get by’ in the everyday present, resigned to an unimaginable future that they were powerless to mediate.

Differences between Old Lady Gao and her son emerge here, as well. Gail Hershatter has wonderfully described how aged rural women repeatedly ‘assert the stability of their virtuous remembered selves across time’, creating ‘continuity in the face of state inconstancy and familial neglect. They narrate a world full of hardship, indexing stubborn inequities that have yet to be recognized or addressed.’Footnote ³⁶ Along the same lines, the activities and values Old Lady Gao represented and sought recognition for centred on memories and accounts of having kept her family going in the face of extreme bitterness. Harking back to experiences of childhood suffering during the war-torn years of the 1920s and 1930s, Old Lady Gao's story of constancy, bounded since her marriage by the spaces of Dashalanr – to her mother, husband, in-laws and children – inversely mirrored her hardship and contained an implicit call for recognition and for redress against the injustices of the world she found herself in. In contrast, Young Gao's focus on ‘getting by’ signified not his ‘virtue’ in maintaining his family, but his failure to be able to do so.

Place, space and temporality are therefore co-implicated in Old Lady Gao's and her son's stories in different ways. They highlight important aspects of the gendered effects of the convergence between the state's neglect of their neighbourhood, their long-term identification with the virtually unchanged space of their home and embedded attachments to ‘traditional’ expectations and obligations of family members.

Personal narratives as history

Old Lady Gao's and her son's narratives add important records to Beijing's recent history, but in themselves they are no more than personal accounts. There is a distinction between the notion of personal account and memory as a ‘form of knowledge that is appropriated as a truth for that person and transmitted as such’ and ‘public or social memory transmission of which assumes a congruence between the personal and the larger group’.Footnote ³⁷ The narratives I have drawn on in this article are shaped by the singular circumstances of individual and family and obtain a singular truth for their narrators, but they reappear in the accounts of near family members and neighbours, both in their explicit acknowledgement of Old Lady Gao's achievements as the mainstay of her family, and in their sombre reflections on Young Gao's depression. The personal memories of Old Lady Gao and her son converge with, contribute to and are in part constituted by others’ experiences which ‘are learned in the process of remembering’.Footnote ³⁸ Few of the people I know in Dashalanr are employed on more than a very piece-meal basis. Some receive a meagre welfare allowance (dibao) from the government, and a few receive a minimal state pension. Financially able family members periodically help out with hospital expenses, celebrations, funerals and so on, and women's incomes are essential to their families’ welfare. Individuals might find employment for a few months at a time washing up in a local Kentucky Fried Chicken, waitressing in a local cafe, or working as ‘hygiene officials’ (weisheng guanyuan) – rubbish collectors, road sweepers and cleaners of the public toilets. They refer to themselves as members of the ‘underclass’ (shehui diceng) – the unemployed and down and out, individuals who live from hand to mouth picking up odd jobs wherever they can find them, occasionally selling drugs or sex, and trying to steer clear of the watchful eyes and greedy fingers of the local police. Everyday energies go to creatively developing strategies of survival in informal and often extra-legal activities – driving a pedicab without a licence, making trinkets for unauthorized vendors to sell from the street – that signify a constant interruption of official plans for local transformation.

Old Lady Gao's story also becomes part of the historical record through its intersection with the archive. Integrating the researcher's spatial and social knowledge of her home and neighbourhood into a reading of archival material yields interpretations that both contextualize and add to the written word. For example, a list of Dashalanr production groups (shengchan zu) in 1958, including glass engraving, paper folding and sewing groups, notes three near the Guanyin Temple which could have included the one in which Old Lady Gao worked.Footnote ³⁹ Without Old Lady Gao's descriptions of where and how she undertook such work, the reader of this document might well imagine that such ‘production groups’ were organized in specially allocated spaces. Another report by the Dashalanr Party Committee's industrial department of 5 May 1961 focused on the difficulties of dealing with local women factory workers who were described as ‘old, infirm or sick, disabled or with heavy domestic responsibilities’.Footnote ⁴⁰ While the notion of the ‘factory’ might easily conjure up images of the spatial and political features of the urban work unit, the dilapidated buildings that housed such ‘factories’ in Dashalanr give another meaning to the term. The same report also criticized workers with a ‘stubborn attitude’ who failed to observe work discipline and went around saying ‘bad things’. It focused particularly on a former prostitute whose husband was a drug addict, and who complained about the cotton and grain rations saying ‘what the hell can you make with two inches of cloth? I might as well come to work naked . . . or with cloth over my front and a bare arse.’ The comments could well have been made by a number of local woman I know. Such detail is fascinating in itself, but when read alongside familiarity with Dashalanr's residents, it facilitates a reading of the archive against the grain, as it were, of its official organizers. Conversely, oral narratives such as those I have discussed here acquire larger historical meaning when interpreted alongside the written archive.

The stories I have discussed here are not ones of explicit contestation of state power, any more than they are stories of victimization and marginalization. Old Lady Gao's home does not emerge as a bastion of active resistance to state power, even if it is a space in which antipathy, recalcitrance and complaint are articulated. It is a stone's throw from Tian'anmen, the physical and symbolic heart of state power, giving her and her son's distance from the state – its sites, campaigns, rules and regulations – a potent eloquence. Many former residents of Dashalanr moved out years ago to live in the low-quality apartment blocks that surround the city's outer ring roads. Amongst those who remain, many would gladly move elsewhere if the government provided them with adequate subsidies, but their dazayuan accommodation is so small that government compensation would fall far short of what they would need to rent property elsewhere. In such circumstances, many local people are resentful about a system which, in their terms, has held them locked in conditions of extreme precariousness. They are also cynical about the capacity of lawyers to help them resist relocation. Their potential challenge to the authorities is, however, always circumscribed by their experience of the political system; without the protection afforded by money and connections, they have learnt to refrain from articulating open antagonism against the authorities. Lessons of arrest and imprisonment for ‘crimes’ ranging from refusal to pay fines for petty traffic infractions and quarrels with neighbours have taught them to keep their resentments to themselves.

Told through temporalities that are embedded in the gendered spaces of their home and neighbourhood, Old Lady Gao's and her son's stories therefore give an intractable quality to their subjects precisely because they sideline the concerns of official power. It is in this sense that they do not correspond with the binary teleology of Beijing's transformation that I referred to at the beginning of this article. Rather, they appear as urban subalterns, characterized by particular associations with gender, class and generation, who refuse appropriation by the state at the same time as they are produced by it.