Dear Home, Who is this? And why am I writing to you?
I think about this question a lot, not just when I was writing the letters home, but since day one I took on this project at SOL, hoping that my spot in this cohort could be a chance to finally bring me back home to Beijing since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. I had always thought home consists of all things we grew up feeling used to: childhood friends, the family home, grandma’s cooking, a gourmet cafe where I did my homework every day after school, etc. So I took on a project working with a grass-root NGO based in Beijing. CHP works to advocate on behalf of cultural heritage issues within the communities who still reside in Hutongs – the traditional grid-like living quarters of common people in the historical parts of the city.
Comprised of narrow grey-bricked alleyways, one-story houses with curved tile roofs, and traditional courtyards called Siheyuan(四合院), Hutongs(胡同) have been recognized as one of the most treasured types of vernacular housing in China, documenting the cultural and historical transformation in Beijing ever since the Yuan Dynasty (1271 – 1368).
Believing that protecting the past is to better move forwards and that urban modernization should not clash with the preservation of traditions, CHP’s mission centers on raising cultural competence and heritage protection awareness among Hutong communities and the general public. Through this, they hope to revitalize this traditional ethnic culture and preserve more historical sites that represent the heritage of a city, before losing them to a series of rather rule-based, function-based, and rapid urban reconstruction.
I, too, thought everyone wanted to preserve the history of their own home. But, given that 90% of the original 8000 Hutong neighborhoods had either been leveled to make room for homogenous apartment complexes or had their local businesses bricked up and turned into identical malls, I started to think about whether our ideas of home always equal feeling at home?
