SHANGHAI - I moved to an apartment complex in 2010 named The Summit. It’s made up of 8 high rises surrounding a green courtyard where my children play. It was built a decade ago, along the Street of Eternal Happiness. Once I asked a neighbor what used to be on this land - “just a bunch of old, run-down hovels,” he said with a swipe of his hand.
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Later, when a historian showed me an old browned map of the neighborhood from the 1940s, I noticed a maze of alleyways snaking south from the Street of Eternal Happiness down through dense rows of tiny residential plots where my high-rise apartment building now stood. I peered closer and counted well over a hundred structures inside one square block. I thought about the hundreds of families who had lived where my family now slept. Where did they go?
Seniors in the old alleyway homes across the street all pointed me to a woman named “Xi”. The day I met Xi Guozhen, she had just stepped off a train from Beijing, where she was released from detention center that very morning. For twenty years, the 61-year-old has petitioned China’s government to investigate the death of her husband. He died when developers came to demolish his home to make way for the high rise where I live. Ever since, his widow’s routine is predictable: she pleads for justice outside Zhongnanhai, the central headquarters of China’s Communist Party along Tian’anmen Square in Beijing, she’s tackled by police, and she’s detained. “One time I spent fourteen days there, one time, 38 days, and this time, six days. Whenever they let me out, I go straight back to Zhongnanhai.”
Her life is on repeat.
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