怀旧空吟闻笛赋，到乡翻似烂柯人
I lost my memory about my hometown, because I get so many bias on that. I’m not going to introduce you the place where I have been lived for past 30 years, but 30 years me who lived there.
During Childhood, before 2000, I lived with my grandma. It is an company or state owned community located in the suburban area nearing the factory where she once worked in. Typical Khrushchyovka style condo made by poor concrete, tiny bathroom, and corridor and public space filled with everyone’s stuffs. Wet, noisy, hot… those are the only things I could smelled from my memory.
Then, I move to the city with my parent since 2000s. Like what others did, they bought a unit of “jails” in the multi-stories apartment. It is the time, government find a way to make a huge amount of profits from selling lands to construction company, pushing people moved from suburban to urban area buying house to make GDP growing wildly. Now, still, 60% Chinese GDP is contributed by real estate industry, or I should say making new money from land by demolishing everything called “old” as they can.
However, just like what this nation always going from very radical progress to conservative, back force in last 50 years. A policy change from the willingness of highest could make everything changed in sudden without any resistance from tradition, which also wiped meaning and value that accumulated in the form of architecture from past thousands years. They, nowadays, trying to find a new symbol of culture to replace what they abandoned, but rebuilt many ancient buildings destroyed in the culture revolution by the reason of “toxic legacy of feudalism”. It reminds me, which I really like the critic from Koolhass about two ideologies exisiting in the logic of Chinese modern architecture - One is the high skyscraper, giant building, broad highway that your imagination relating to the words like “Development”,”Modern”,etc. which could show their power and ability; Another one is very traditional that they are trying to find meaning, identity, culture from there own history typology, demonstrating socialist, communist, “Chinese style”. They, finally combined together to a form like Frankenstein - Big Roof exterior “skin” but very modern concrete&glass interior bone. That is, for me, still not escaping the gaze from “the other”, because they use a symbol defined not by ourself but pleasing westerns.
Anyway, I haven’t tell you the reason I forget everything about my hometown. I’ve been left there since I went to another city taking my undergrad education. Everytime I came back to my hometown, there are construction sites everywhere. It’s like a paradox of ship of Theseus - is it still a same ship after thousands time of replaced? Especially, I can’t find my connection with my friends, because 70% local GDP contributed by state owned or related companies but only providing 30%-40% jobs. Young people have to choose leave, making living in a big city like Shanghai and Beijing, where they hard to find sense of belong because of so many restriction for those “outsider”, even we are under the same roof of nationality. That’s, somehow, I always use the metaphor of Cargo Ship to describe international students like me, which not belonging to this shore nor another one providing nothing but function job. There is no permanent the anchor for us for us to bound, like what I’ve been seen thousands times in my previous life in my home town, a port city. Ocean weave always tides you somewhere else, it’s meaningless to find the evidence of your exisistence on the beach, nothing but circle of journey.
At the final chapter of my biography, I’m going to show you this picture I took years ago on a construction site. The worker is clueless like me at that time, when I was in my last graduate school and my mom gave me a phone call 4 years ago, said” we moved into a new apartment” - “I become homeless!”, that was the first thought came to my mind. The government still want to use the inclination of political force to spur the economy, demolishing my old house making us move to new one to keep everything running on well, even my old home only bulit like 20 years ago. But everything I could called hometown, forgot in the ocean of history.
To wrap up, a story just flood to my mind could be a perfect end. A story I read in my high school, about Beijing: There are many subway stations named by those ancient buildings but destoried during the development of Beijing. A young child get off at the station called “XI Zhi” Gate, coming from under to top, looking around, asking me innocently “where is the gate?”. I told him: ”They lost their tickets to transimiss towards new eras”.
