"It Used To Be A Vacant Lot..."

This afternoon I received a note from a friend:

I’m at the computer in my home office. My home office has a view of what has been, for longer than the eight years we’ve lived here, a vacant lot. But just a few weeks ago the builders started. It is quite a show watching the Mexican crew build a house unlike Mexican houses (much use of wood in the framework of the house, in this country, but Mexican homes use cement blocks and rebar. American homes seem quite fragile in comparison.) Today, in addition to the men finishing off the top floor’s wood frame, I can see a carpenter building the stairs inside what will be the front door. This takes some getting used to after eight years...

This note instantly intrigued me because it contains two moments I experienced myself.  The first is the ridicule of the scene where the Mexican crew build a house unlike Mexican houses.  During my 2009 visit to Beijing, I watched the Chinese crew build mansions, shopping malls, grand hotels, office towers, etc., unlike Chinese architecture, which ruined the harmony and uniqueness of the city and would ultimately, I dare say, turn it into Die Stadt ohne Eigenschaften.   

The second is the change of view from an (at least) eight-year-old vacant lot to a wood house within just a few weeks.  I left China in 2002 and revisited it every one to three years thereafter; each homeward journey, as far as the environment is concerned, reinforced the impression that I no longer belong there: my kindergarten and elementary school both permanently vanished from the planet; my high school’s new look is grandiosely artificial and hardly recognizable; the rebuilt campus of my university has become a labyrinth to me despite the 8 years I spent there—day and night.  When I wandered through the city of Beijing I got the feeling that it’s a relative of mine after numerous plastic operations.

“An infinite ocean turns into a mulberry field in the twinkling of an eye.”

—This is one of my favorite Chinese idioms (Canghai Sangtian, literally “infinite ocean, orchid field”).   I love it because it illustrates in a poetic way the awful truth my friend and I have learnt; both the ocean and the mulberry field are serene and immensely potential.  Changes in real life, however, are far less poetic and soothing.

I always encourage my students who want to study abroad in China to do so as soon as possible; I am afraid otherwise they would miss even the last few traces of what it used to be like. 

In thirty years my friend’s children will have their own children.  If they happen to ask about the wood house viewed from his home office, what would my friend say, after telling them that “it used to be a vacant lot...?”