At Home In Old Beijing.(The Arts)(The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed)(Book review)

Amid the wrecking balls, hutong residents cling to a traditional way of life.

China is so big, diverse and protean that no single photograph can sum it up. And yet iconic images often come to represent the country at a particular point in time, the way the-man-who-stopped-the-Tiananmen-tanks did in the late 1980s. Michael Meyer's impressive new book, "The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed" (Walker & Co. 368 pages), goes a long way toward illuminating some of the scenes that have come to symbolize early-21st-century China, at least before the unrest in Tibet and the Sichuan earthquake. They include wrecking balls knocking down beloved small businesses; schoolchildren dragging their migrant-worker parents, who have never been in a restaurant, into a KFC; human-powered vehicles in a land of high-rises, evoked by the canopied pedicab set against construction cranes, as depicted on the book's cover.

These images eloquently capture the sense of eras colliding, which is a core part of many China stories--including Meyer's own. A former Peace Corps volunteer, Meyer spent several years in a Beijing hutong, or alleyway, living in a tiny rented room that lacks indoor plumbing, like all the houses in the neighborhood, yet has a broadband Internet connection. Indeed, one of the book's main attractions is its intense local focus, conveying the daily rhythms of life in his neighborhood. His route from his room to the public latrine takes him past "the vegetable seller arranging a pyramid of cabbages, the hairstylist massaging the temples of a customer, and the open doorways from which spills the clack of the gamblers' mah jong tiles." He describes his relationships with students and the faculty at the dilapidated Coal Lane elementary school where he teaches, as well as with local characters like the elderly widow next door who is addicted to Flying Horse cigarettes and televised opera performances. Some of his best writing details her daily visits, which typically involve her walking through his doorway without knocking and cajoling him to eat some of her homemade dumplings ("It's too hard to cook for one person").

Perhaps China today is best crystallized by Meyer's description of the Chongqing Nail House, a home that gained ...