Yesterday one of my professors from Purdue, Jay Wang took Jen and I out for drinks in Sanlitun, a famous bar district in Beijing. Perhaps what I found most interesting about this experience was that one of the bars was contained within an old Chinese hutong giving it the feel of a Chinese house/cocktail party at times.
The hutong are the old, one story traditional Chinese buildings that have received international attention as they have slowly be destroyed to make way for more modern archetecture in Beijing. However, some are being preserved by the Chinese government and apparently the demand to live in them can be quite high.
Jay explained that only if you had some status or prestige as an artist or some connection to the government would you ever find a single family living in a hutong. Currently they are multi-family dwellings unless a conglomerate or business partnership chooses to buy out the other owners and renovate the building. There are actually many hutong in the southern part of the Tsinghua campus that have fallen into disrepair over the years. This is in part because they are multi-family dwellings and it requires a considerable amount of coordination and agreement to actually find the time and resources to renovate them.
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Once again to those of you emailing me, I'm in the same position as last summer where I'm very busy trying to juggle teaching, traveling, researching, and just having a bit of fun. I also have very limited access to the internet so most of the communication you're going to get from me will be through this blog. This is not personal; it merely reflects time and resource constraints.
The hutong are the old, one story traditional Chinese buildings that have received international attention as they have slowly be destroyed to make way for more modern archetecture in Beijing. However, some are being preserved by the Chinese government and apparently the demand to live in them can be quite high.
Jay explained that only if you had some status or prestige as an artist or some connection to the government would you ever find a single family living in a hutong. Currently they are multi-family dwellings unless a conglomerate or business partnership chooses to buy out the other owners and renovate the building. There are actually many hutong in the southern part of the Tsinghua campus that have fallen into disrepair over the years. This is in part because they are multi-family dwellings and it requires a considerable amount of coordination and agreement to actually find the time and resources to renovate them.
__________________
Once again to those of you emailing me, I'm in the same position as last summer where I'm very busy trying to juggle teaching, traveling, researching, and just having a bit of fun. I also have very limited access to the internet so most of the communication you're going to get from me will be through this blog. This is not personal; it merely reflects time and resource constraints.
