Xiayuan Village, Beijing, China: 40° 13' 48" N, 116° 27' 11" E
You never know what you’ll find walking north of Beijing past those great glass sarcophagi of megamalls with their giant fiberglass sculptures of French bulldogs sporting bling chains and pinky rings and then out through the panoramic green of a quintillion tree leaves and eventually into the liquid-hydrogen cold maw of Manchuria.
Take the old farmers (they are always old in China) shading their puce faces too late with big straw hats while out picking the wild buckthorn berries called jujubes at roadsides. Men and women both they sell these jujubes to men in passing trucks who announce on loudspeakers We buy jujubes! and not once do the peri-urban hunter-gatherers of the Anthropocene treat the spectacle of backpack-humped humans fleeing on foot a megalopolis of 22 million as anything worthy of comment but to the contrary hew to their nickel-core farmerness which is A) to always complain (“Our kids? Ha! You think they’re going to do this work?”) and B) be kind. The farmers give away everything in their reach—their hard green little peaches, their jade green gourds the size of human heads, and their plastic cups of yoghurt sent up fortnightly by the guilty son in the city for the āyí with osteoporosis. How can wizened hands be so soft?
Or all that old but perfectly good office furniture—shelves and desks and swivel chairs—dumped at random intervals next to lush weedy country lanes, urban artifacts that you can commandeer if only in passing to sit on and indulge your whim of outdoor workaholism and then farther on rises the famous restored Great Wall at Simatai with its high stone rampart stairs so nubbly and exposed and neck-breakingly steep that in all ghoulish honesty I lingered there one sunset transfixed—can there be safety rules more risk-averse anywhere other than in Confucian China? Maybe in Mennonite colonies? Or in male psyches trapped in couples counseling?—to see if a tourist tottering through their smartphone peepholes might actually plunge off.
And in between there is Xiayuan.
A farmer harvesting wild buckthorn berries on the periphery of Beijing, a city of 22 million. Scratch any Chinese and you’ll likely find a farmer beneath. But also, on occasion, a hunter-gatherer.
Ana Jegnaradze
The once not rich aboriginals of Xiayuan village cultivated cucumbers and corn for the city of 22 million but now they cultivate artists. Housing rentals are outpacing raisins sales by many li as hundreds (maybe thousands) of painters, sculptors, dramatists, musicians, and heavenly artisanal vegan bakers who concoct wild-yeast sourdough with dried plums have congregated among the duck canals for inspiration. There is a textile gallery open by appointment only and a student away on scholarship at the Rose Academy of Ballet in New York and informal Buddhist workshops relabeled yoga classes because of any slight possibility of official disapproval. There is a self-serve doorless tea house called “the crappy tea house” and the workshop of a German prosthetic leg maker and the intensive waste recycling system and the Waldorf School and a “ten-year clothes” pledge to trade not buy garments. The solar dreams are stalled it’s true because there is no accommodation for freelance sell-backs in a highly centralized power grid. But the pest controls at least are biological. Predator wasp cocoons pale as raw silk are thumb-tacked into the elm trunks to eat the alien worms preying on the trees and they look like tiny druid milagros.
“A lot is organized by the moms,” environmental activist He Ran says on a tour of the alternative community and my walking partner Frank smiles and says yes all the dads are working in Beijing but he’s a cynic.
A farmer harvesting wild buckthorn berries on the periphery of Beijing, a city of 22 million. Scratch any Chinese and you’ll likely find a farmer beneath. But also, on occasion, a hunter-gatherer.
Ana Jegnaradze
The once not rich aboriginals of Xiayuan village cultivated cucumbers and corn for the city of 22 million but now they cultivate artists. Housing rentals are outpacing raisins sales by many li as hundreds (maybe thousands) of painters, sculptors, dramatists, musicians, and heavenly artisanal vegan bakers who concoct wild-yeast sourdough with dried plums have congregated among the duck canals for inspiration. There is a textile gallery open by appointment only and a student away on scholarship at the Rose Academy of Ballet in New York and informal Buddhist workshops relabeled yoga classes because of any slight possibility of official disapproval. There is a self-serve doorless tea house called “the crappy tea house” and the workshop of a German prosthetic leg maker and the intensive waste recycling system and the Waldorf School and a “ten-year clothes” pledge to trade not buy garments. The solar dreams are stalled it’s true because there is no accommodation for freelance sell-backs in a highly centralized power grid. But the pest controls at least are biological. Predator wasp cocoons pale as raw silk are thumb-tacked into the elm trunks to eat the alien worms preying on the trees and they look like tiny druid milagros.
“A lot is organized by the moms,” environmental activist He Ran says on a tour of the alternative community and my walking partner Frank smiles and says yes all the dads are working in Beijing but he’s a cynic.
Placid nights in Xiayuan. The food stalls are organic. The art often spiritual.
Paul Salopek
Meanwhile at painter and illustrator Li Hua Meng’s studio there are walls with 10,000 books of philosophy and poetry and Li says, “A majority of the art today follows the interest of the majority so it’s not really art.” And then he says, “You have to be able to withstand your own loneliness here.”
And the collected children’s essays on display at the global village café agree with him:
“Therefore, sometimes one has to fall down a ‘rabbit hole,’ an unexplored territory, to get to the place or the position s/he needs to be. It is of utmost importance to be courageous to experience a unique life to be a better self.”
Tell me about it, brother, out here together among the jujubes.
Found art. Walking partners Frank Geng and Marita Tevzadze join a roadside exhibition—an old sofa abandoned under some trees.
Paul Salopek
