2020 Ba Qiu -
“I was married to the house.”
A granny told me when I stepped in one of the classic wooden one-and-a-half-story masonry buildings. She and her entire family have lived in the house since the year of 1800s, while the history of the village is more than 1600 years old since the period of the Three Kingdoms (220-280s).
In August 2017, the local government planned to relocate the village in response to the problems of floods and humid weather which put the dilapidated wooden houses in great danger of collapse. Based on the residence registration report in 2019, 920 households and 32,000 residents needed to be relocated, of which over 56% were aged over 35 years old.
“I’ve been living here for more than 50 years. It was acquired by my grandpa’s grandpa and thus it (the house) stored the memory of my family,” said another granny who recently moved to a new apartment. “I’m not used to this new house. It’s simply too furnished for me to feel alive.”
“When the idea of relocation was firstly proposed, it received mostly complaints and oppositions from the residents. Even though they had suffered chronicle floods and that the houses were leaking which triggered arthritis of the elder residents, they refused to move simply because of their shared memory with the house.”
—— Anonymous Local Resident
Unlike western homes, according to Professor Francesca Bray, the Chinese home was “a smaller community in itself. A place that sheltered a clan’s or family’s patrilineal kinship. ”
Strongly influenced by the collateral Confucianist value of loyalty to the family, the husband would grow up, marry, and die in the house in which his father and grandfather had been born and died; while the wife of the family would die in the house of her husband’s patrilineal clan. Witnessing the chaos and the subsequent transition from the revolutions and wars to peace, these local residents and their houses served as important documents of both their family and Chinese history.
