Jeffrey Meyer's Blog - Posts Tagged "housing"
China: Where's the beauty?
I first visited mainland China in the late 1980s. The spartan ideals of the Mao era had been discarded by that time and the nation was sailing under a new flag described by paramount leader Deng Xiaoping: to get rich is glorious. I remember how shocked I was to see Christmas trees appearing in the new hotels and stores. Mao and his communist ideals had been overthrown by Santa and his capitalist senarios.
I was doing research at the time on how the ancient moral tradition of China was being passed along in the elementary and middle schools. I'll touch on that subject later, but at the same time I was looking for some of the beautiful cultural objects of old China, if any could be found. It was not easy. Buddhist, Daoist and Confucian temples were mostly still in a sad state of disrepair, although the process of rebuilding had just begun. The old landscape paintings, sculpture, ceramics and fabric art had been banned as decadent. Beijing's old hutongs, the ancient and charming one-story domestic private dwellings of the city, were being torn down rapidly and replaced by multi-story apartment blocks of socialist planning. What hutong neighborhoods remained were a mess--what had been a one-family home was now crammed with many families, dismal shacks now filling what had been spacious courtyards.
I remember riding a train from Beijing to the old summer palaces at Cheng De (now destroyed), northeast of the capital, looking out at dismal villages we passed by, many of them nearly abandoned as able bodied workers had flocked to the big cities to get jobs. Where is the beauty to be found? And then the train passed some prosperous small farms, the fields neatly carved out of the yellow clay, filled with neat rows of cabbages, lettuce, turnips, celery, greens of every sort. Truly a work of art, the farm as a place of beauty, the many shapes of the plots and small fields, the different colors of green, the well tilled and weeded soil, tended by farmers for literally thousands of years and still beautiful, still bearing crops for the people. That is the beauty I saw portrayed in The Good Earth, as the earth responded to the toil and loving care given by farmers like Wang Chung and his cohorts, down through the centuries.
I was doing research at the time on how the ancient moral tradition of China was being passed along in the elementary and middle schools. I'll touch on that subject later, but at the same time I was looking for some of the beautiful cultural objects of old China, if any could be found. It was not easy. Buddhist, Daoist and Confucian temples were mostly still in a sad state of disrepair, although the process of rebuilding had just begun. The old landscape paintings, sculpture, ceramics and fabric art had been banned as decadent. Beijing's old hutongs, the ancient and charming one-story domestic private dwellings of the city, were being torn down rapidly and replaced by multi-story apartment blocks of socialist planning. What hutong neighborhoods remained were a mess--what had been a one-family home was now crammed with many families, dismal shacks now filling what had been spacious courtyards.
I remember riding a train from Beijing to the old summer palaces at Cheng De (now destroyed), northeast of the capital, looking out at dismal villages we passed by, many of them nearly abandoned as able bodied workers had flocked to the big cities to get jobs. Where is the beauty to be found? And then the train passed some prosperous small farms, the fields neatly carved out of the yellow clay, filled with neat rows of cabbages, lettuce, turnips, celery, greens of every sort. Truly a work of art, the farm as a place of beauty, the many shapes of the plots and small fields, the different colors of green, the well tilled and weeded soil, tended by farmers for literally thousands of years and still beautiful, still bearing crops for the people. That is the beauty I saw portrayed in The Good Earth, as the earth responded to the toil and loving care given by farmers like Wang Chung and his cohorts, down through the centuries.
