Guo Yifan- The Passionate Voice of a Young Father in Old Nanjing

Guo Yifan is my extremely enthusiastic, outgoing, hilarious, and welcoming 35-year-old next-door neighbor. He and his wife have essentially adopted me as their surrogate daughter (or perhaps I should say little sister), and for this I am forever grateful for their warm hospitality. I can honestly say that I might not have survived the winter without them looking after me (I probably would have moved out by now if it weren’t for them). The examples of their patronage are countless: they arranged my current housing arrangements, negotiated the rent and electric bill with my landlord, took care of me when I got food poisoning, spent Chinese New Year with me, and bought me a birthday cake. Not to mention the fact that they provide my Internet connection (I connected a wireless router to their Ethernet cord so I can go online in my house) and invite me to eat dinner with them at least 3 times a week.

Guo Yifan, not only being a supportive big brother, is also my most enthusiastic research participant. He always has good ideas for interview questions and research topics. For example, he thought a good project would be to interview the meat and vegetable sellers at the market and do a little report on food market culture and how rising food prices are affecting Chinese society. He also clips newspaper articles for me and help introduce me to people who would be good to interview (including the local government officials). He currently lives in his grandfather’s house, and is passionate about the value of Old Nanjing culture and the importance of cultural preservation—not by advocating to literally preserve the houses, but rather by supporting the preservation of culture through participation in my research, which seeks to capture the life of the Old Nanjingese. I teach his daughter English, he teaches me the Nanjing dialect.

Guo Yifan talks loudly in the local dialect, smokes frequently, and drinks often. He is a social butterfly, always talking to the grandmas and aunties on our street and hosting dinner parties with his relatives and friends at the house. He scolds me frequently for being too polite, saying that I’m his little sister and I can come in and out of his house and eat his cooking whenever I want. The angriest I’ve ever seen him was when I got sick and I didn’t tell him. He found out two days in, and scolded me for not telling me while he proceeded to give me homemade remedies, like garlic, porridge, and washing my feet, and lectured me on Chinese medicinal practices for an hour.

He loves to joke around and is quite hilarious. He always makes me laugh. He likes to tease me about being fat and not speaking good enough Chinese. He teases my roommate even more, always telling her, “Why can’t you be more like Sarah? You need to study more. Your skin is so dark, the only way you’re ever going to get a boyfriend is if you go to America and find a foreigner.” I’m not kidding. He actually said that to her last night.

He and his wife have also adopted my roommate, by the way. We are these two lost girls without parents right now, and Guo Yifan and his wife have stepped in to fill that role. It works out quite nicely for all of us. He is a good cook, and likes to make Chinese food for me that I’ve never eaten before. His wife wears the pants in the relationship, and it’s quite obvious. She is older than him (something that almost never happens in China) and is a successful accountant. He never went to college and is a self-employed construction contractor. He frequently tells me that he is afraid of her.

I've written blog posts about him before. Here is a story about his daughter going to first grade. Here and here are some pictures of us celebrating the Chinese New Year together.  

Big Brother and me

Big Brother Guo's wife and him

The Guo Family: Big Brother, his 5-year-old Hannah, and his wife

Here is a map of his house. His house is TINY, it's only two rooms, and they don't have a shower. He and his wife share a room with his daughter. His wife and his daughter sleep in the same bed.

Without further ado, here is his story, told in his own words:

My name is Guo Yifan, but you can call me Big Brother Guo. I was born in 1976 in Old Nanjing. My parents were married in this house and I was born here. I’m an only child because they started the One Child Policy the year I was born. When I started first grade, we moved away, but my grandparents still lived in this house. The happiest time during my childhood was coming to visit my grandparents in this house every Saturday. All of my aunts and uncles would come to chat and catch up with one another, and bring my cousins along so we could all play together. That was the best, happiest time of my childhood. 

The most beautiful memory I have from that time was going to Rain Flower Platform, which is a memorial to political martyrs that’s not far from here. I would play with my childhood companions and my cousins together. Sometimes we would have a barbecue, and roast some fish and sweet potatoes. There’s a bamboo forest there too and we loved to play tag there. We would go fishing, fly kites, and play games that boys like to play. I don’t know what games the girls played because I’m not a girl. A lot of my childhood companions still live around here, I’m sure you’ve met them, you know all the guys that are my age. I grew up with your roommate’s mother too, we were good friends, that’s why I feel like I have an obligation to take care of Xie Rui [my roommate].

I had so many hobbies when I was younger. I liked to fish, throw horseshoes, and shoot slingshots. I played every game that little kids play. When I was little, my favorite person to hang out with was my older male cousin on my mother’s side of the family (biaoge). We had a close relationship because we are relatives and are close in age. Actually I don’t even know his real name because I just called him “cousin.” He used to live down the street from this house, but his house was demolished and he now lives very far away from here.

When I was 15 years old, my paternal grandfather died and my mom died shortly thereafter. So my dad moved into this house to take care of his mother, my paternal grandmother. At that time, my dad gave his house, the one that I had grown up in after starting first grade, to me and I still have that house. We rent it out for 1,000 yuan a month to another family. Anyway, I still visited them often. I graduated from high school and started working for an advertising agency. My grandmother later died, and a few years after that my dad got stomach cancer, so I moved in with him to take care of him. After he died, I inherited this house and decided to move in, because I really like this house and this neighborhood. This house has feeling and emotion attached to it (ganqing) because it belonged to a previous generation of my family (fubei). These houses belonged to our forefathers, so they’re really special to us.

My hobby right now is going fishing, even though my wife doesn’t usually let me go. I have a lot of free time because I’m self-employed. I build performance stages. I like to consider myself an art-designer, if you will. I do this on my own, I don’t have any work partners or anything like that. People will help introduce me to people that need to build a stage, but other than that I’m all on my own. I make about 50,000 yuan ($8,000) a year, which is about the same amount that my wife makes. Since I’m self-employed, this is just an estimate that I’m giving you, sometimes it’s more, and sometimes it’s less. I didn’t choose this job. After I graduated, I worked in advertising, there was nothing I could do about that (meibanfa) because I didn’t have a college degree, and I just took what I could get. Then eventually I got into this job because some people I met through the advertising industry introduced me to some people who needed to build stages.

People my age don’t have dreams. We’re too old for that. It’s not like when you’re twenty some years old and you just started working. Now I have a family, and I everything I do, I do for the family. The only thing we think about at this age is working bitterly hard to make a little bit of money (ku yidian qian) and make sure that you have a stable income. If someone calls you to make money, you do that thing to make money whether you like it or not. You young people have dreams. For us people approaching 40 years old, dreams are distant and impractical. You just have to do whatever you can to make money. The one thing I’d like to do in the future is to buy a bigger house.

My put all of my hopes for the future into my 5-year-old daughter, Hannah. I just need to work bitterly hard to make some money so that I can give her the education she deserves. Then maybe later she can go abroad for university. My hope for her future is that she studies hard and is healthy. I’m doing everything in my power to make sure that she has access to good education. I really want her to go to the United States to study.

Ok, I’m joking a little bit, because she’s so young and her going abroad is far away in the future. It actually depends on her own development and if the family has good enough conditions (tiaojian) for her to go abroad. Right now in China, sending your kid abroad for university is an aspect of society (shimian), but not a necessary aspect yet. I think that after China’s economy develops a bit more and family income increases, going abroad won’t be such a huge deal. By the time Hannah gets to be that age, in 10 years or so, I believe it will be easier for Chinese people to go abroad, and it might even be required for her to go abroad. And by that time, hopefully our family will have saved enough money and have the right conditions to let her go. That is, if she is willing, of course. If there are better opportunities for her to develop herself in China, then she should stay in China and stay by her parents’ side. Because you know Chinese parents are kind of conservative when it comes to these types of things, especially with daughters. Sometimes parents aren’t willing to let their daughters go abroad, because they are so worried about them being out in the world all by themselves. But if it really will help her future development, then I’d let her go abroad so she can see what the outside world is like. It really depends on whether our family has the proper conditions to let her go.

Her mother definitely does not want Hannah to go abroad, she wants Hannah to stay by her side at all times. Because according to our tradition in China, daughters don’t really have to know how to do anything or have a good job, as long as they can take care of the family, that is enough. Usually it’s more important for the son to have good, marketable skills. But as long as the daughter can take care of her husband and have a baby, we don’t really ask much more of her. All we ask is that she be a girl, be a wife, and be a mother. If she has the abilities, like you Sarah, and she has the goal to go abroad, then I will support her. But if she’s not interested in going abroad, then that’s fine too. 

Beautiful Hannah

Once Hannah gets a little bit older, this house is going to be way too small and I hope we’ll be able to buy a bigger house in the future. But right now considering our family’s conditions, it’s a very suitable place for our family to live. There are a lot of reasons why we still are living in Old Nanjing.

First of all, it’s because of our close relationship with our neighbors. We have been neighbors since the previous generation of our families were neighbors, meaning that our grandparents and parents were neighbors, and so we consider our relationships with our neighbors to be very close, just like with blood relatives. We all know each other very well and there are no conflicts among us. There isn’t anyone I don’t like. We’re all very polite with each other, take care of each other, and ask after one another. I’m perhaps the closest with Aunt Fatty [that is her actual nickname, it’s actually pretty common to nickname even slightly overweight people “fatty”], because she raised my daughter from the time she was born until she was two years old. She didn’t even ask for money. Even though we technically aren’t blood related, we are just like blood relatives. I bet you don’t have relationships like that in America. Maybe I don’t like that fact that my house is so small, but I like the location and the neighbors.

Second of all, because we only have the usage rights to this home, not the property rights, if we abandon this house, then the house is returned to the state. We give up any compensation we could receive in the event of demolition. So that’s why we haven’t moved out yet.

Third of all, this house and this place hold a lot of good memories from my childhood. It’s a great place to raise a family and Hannah loves it here, she can play safely with the neighborhood kids on the street.

I have to say, though, if this family’s conditions were good enough, I would rather live in a big house in an apartment building than in Old Nanjing. Though I really do like it here. 

The house I’m living in right now was given to the previous generation of my family, my grandparents, during the socialized housing redistribution policies of the Mao era. That’s when large properties were broken up and given to several families. Later, with the marketization of the property market in the 1980s, household income began to determine residence, rather than the traditional work unit, which governed living space during the Mao-era. But now the government will still give you a little bit of money for compensation in the event of demolition so you can buy a new house on the market. But this little bit of money actually isn’t enough to buy a house in the city, only in a place in the suburbs, sometimes far outside the city jurisdiction. Even with fair compensation, some people are not willing to give up their house.

Remember that Old Nanjing is not a slum. Slums are where poor people live because they have no other choice. The local people that live in this neighborhood live here because their previous generation lived here. They’re not willing to give up their land to the government. They’re not willing to say goodbye to their neighbors, and give up a house full of history, emotions, and memories to the government.

Some of the residents that live here could choose not to live here if they really wanted because some people that live here have at least one other house, but if they leave this place, then they give up the benefits in this place. These houses are owned by the state (gongfang) and the government will take over the house if you abandon it. No one wants to give up their house to the government, at least not without some sort of compensation. If they have a house that is better, then of course people are not going to be “willing” to live here, because you know how it’s so inconvenient to go to the bathroom, and the rats, but in the end these are small things (xiao shiqing). However, they still live here so that they can get compensation when it gets torn down.

I really care about this neighborhood and the people in it. If I move away I will come back frequently to take a look around and see who is still here. I really care about how the development of this neighborhood will be carried about because I’ve lived here for so long. I’m not afraid of demolition. Either the government will compensate us fairly or they won’t, there’s not much anyone can do about it. If they tell us to move, we have to move. Of course it will be hard to part with this house and this place (shebude), but I’m just very helpless (hen wunai). If they want to demolish, I have no other choice but to leave. Anyway, I just want to work bitterly hard to make some money so I can give my daughter a better life and buy my wife the iPad 3 [joking].  

Chinese word of the day: 

无奈- wu2 nai4- literally "without help," aka helpless; without choice; for lack of better option. This is how Big Brother Guo feels about demolition.