Beijing Welcomes You

Spring was coming in, with the help of manpower. There were only four and a half months left to deliver what the organizing committee had designated as a “Green Olympics”—one of the Three Concepts of the Beijing Games, the other two being “High-Tech Olympics” and “People’s Olympics.” By the roadsides, crews assembled new hedges, sprig by sprig; rolls of sod waited on truck beds. A year before, horticulturalists had injected female poplar trees with growth-suppression drugs to try to prevent the annual clouds of flying catkin fluff, but the poplars, uninhibited, loosed their fluff on the breeze, turning the insides of taxicabs into snow globes. A flock of hoopoes arrived in the neighborhood, with big brown Woody Woodpecker crests—pecking in the courtyard, fluttering through the diplomatic compound, perching on the tower crane on the construction site. The Christmas tree vanished from the gatehouse, then reappeared a few weeks later, even more withered, by the garbage cans.

The biggest area of man-made parkland was the 1,600-acre Olympic Forest, above the Olympic Green, where a half-million newly planted trees surrounded engineered streams and ponds, flowing with recycled wastewater. In honor of the world’s press, a Media Forest was being installed down in one corner of the site, among traffic ramps. The organizing committee invited the press to see.

In the middle distance, up a rise, trees in the rest of the Forest were leafing out in pale green. To the south were heavily staked pines. Black netting covered bare ground to the west, and above it rose rounded brick cairns or columns—topped, on closer inspection, with manhole covers: here was some sort of sewer construction, waiting for the ground above it to arrive.

For the occasion, the organizers had brought back some of the citizens who had lived in the area, before it was cleared for the Forest. The relocated people helped the committee staffers shovel dirt around the bases of silver plum trees. The press was urged, awkwardly, to join in the spadework. Most hung back. When the last of the trees had been tipped upright and watered, the former residents got on the press buses for a trip to the neighborhood to which they’d been moved.

My seatmate, representing the Olympic relocatees, was Bao Jingnan, a thin, youngish man with prominent ears, wearing a sweater vest, dress shirt, and olive slacks. The bus arrived at a side street west of the Olympic Green. There was a Century 21 office on the block, and curious real estate agents in their pale blazers stood out on the sidewalk, watching the arrivals.

Bao’s new home was a unit on the ground floor of an apartment tower. There were clean tile floors and a large TV on the side of the living room—middle-class comforts. In the bedroom was a large color wedding photograph, in a gold frame, of Bao and his wife, Wang Xuechun. Wang had laid out strawberries, oranges, and roasted seeds and nuts on the coffee table, next to a tea tray. She liked to practice tea ceremonies, Bao said. Bao did the main share of the talking for the two of them. When he was asked to come to the tree planting, he said, no one had warned him that anyone would be coming over, but they kept snacks around the house for guests.

Most of this was translated by Sim Chi Yin, a reporter for Singapore’s Straits Times, who had also ended up in Bao’s apartment. The organizing committee had not arranged for any interpretation. Bao offered us Yuxi brand cigarettes. A team of the Fuwa, handmade from plastic beads, stood atop the TV. A friend had made them. Beijingers had taken to making their own Olympic paraphernalia; by now it was unsurprising to see beadwork Fuwa in a window, or home-welded Olympic rings on a taxi partition. On the enclosed balcony, three pet turtles sat in a glass tank.

Bao brought out pictures from his previous house, the cheap old kind of housing called pingfang: a red-brick exterior, a sagging couch, a clutterstrewn courtyard. It had been two kilometers away. One picture showed his old motor scooter. Since the resettlement, he said, he had gotten a car. It was parked outside, a silver Honda sedan.

China’s troubles in its west, and with the West, were not subsiding. There had been more riots among ethnic Tibetans, in Tibet and neighboring provinces, and those areas were closed to the foreign press. TV coverage of the kindling of the Olympic flame in Greece was surrounded by footage of Lhasa burning—evidence, for the majority Han Chinese, of Tibetan hatred and violence. The torch, setting off its Journey of Harmony, skulked into Beijing on March 31 like a fugitive, or like a U.S. official dropping in on Iraq: all secrecy, security, and evasive measures. When I tuned in to watch the torch celebration on TV, it was already over. The authorities had switched the ceremony from starting at noon to ending at noon. The flame had fled, heading for Kazakhstan. Protests and scuffles would chase it across Europe and to America.

Meanwhile, the press was being given a chance to meet actual Chinese Olympic athletes. Armed with a Chinese-only briefing sheet, I spent the bus ride north to the old Asian Games compound deciphering the names of the featured sports with my cell phone’s dictionary: field hockey, tennis . . . We were not quite entering the heart of the gold-medal machine. Nor would we be mingling with the athletes, exactly—on arrival, we were informed that team managers and coaches were available, but interviewing athletes “will interfere with and disturb the training of the athletes.”

The press-conference room was overflowing with reporters, mainly Chinese, penned in by a solid line of cameras. At a table were the athletes who would be permitted to address the media: men’s freestyle wrestler Wang Ying, women’s heavyweight judoka Tong Wen, women’s tennis player Zheng Jie, women’s team handball player Liu Ying, and men’s field-hockey captain Song Yi. “This is the first time for us to receive the media friends from home and abroad,” Cui Dalin, secretary-general of the national Olympic delegation, announced.

There were numbers to be had: 12 teams trained at this center, comprising 430 athletes and coaches; the overall national delegation would have 538 athletes in 226 competitions. Other numbers were for shoveling into sandbags: “A lot of athletes from other countries . . . have shown very good strength in all these events,” Cui cautioned. Analysts for NBC, he said, had predicted 42 gold medals for the United States, and 108 medals altogether (“a very conservative estimation,” Cui said). Russia’s largest sports newspaper anticipated 122 medals for Russia. In swimming and in track and field, the most medal-rich areas, China was lagging—particularly in track and field, where there were “still large gaps between Chinese athletes and those athletes from overseas.”

Pity the People’s Republic, facing such formidable opponents. But winning medals, Cui said, was only one goal of the Olympic program. It was, likewise, important to “promote the exchange and friendship between people all over the world.” Then the officials in charge of particular sports broke down their own prospects. “The competition will be very fierce,” the weightlifting, wrestling, and judo official said. The handball, field hockey, and softball official allowed that those teams were “not of a very high standard on the international level.”

There was no offer of medal quotas or targets. Sharing that sort of specific information would be indelicate. A reporter from Brazil asked how many medals was China estimating it would win. “I myself am curious to see,” Cui said. What about the bonus money for medal winners? In Athens in 2004, it had been 200,000 yuan (or about $25,000) for gold, 120,000 for silver, and 18,000 for bronze. The Chinese sports program was not interested in rewarding athletes who would finish third. With the development of the economy, the bonuses would be even higher this time around.

How were the athletes prepared for the pressure of competing in front of their countrymen? All of the teams provided mental training and stress-reduction courses. Had there been any preference given to minority athletes in choosing the teams? Ethnic diversity was a tricky question; the People’s Republic made a point of celebrating the distinctive culture of its dozens of minorities, but more than 90 percent of the population was Han Chinese. So room for minorities could be hard to come by. The Olympic-qualified athletes represented somewhere between ten and twenty ethnic groups. Xinjiang had multiple boxers and a rider—a woman—competing in dressage. A Tibetan woman had been picked by the rowing team as a coxswain. But there was no preference. “We are upholding the principles of justice and fairness to choose the best athletes for the Olympics.”

And what about the individual, human side of the athletic program? A Wall Street Journal reporter asked the competitors to tell a little bit about themselves. Liu, the handball player, said that she liked singing and she had a blog. Wang, the wrestler, said his hobbies were reading books, listening to music, and surfing the Internet. Tong—a genial massif of a woman, much larger than the 185-pound, wrestling-scarred Wang—said that when she did not need to train, “I would like to read books, listen to music.... Now we are working very hard.” Song, the field hockey captain, said he liked shopping, surfing the Internet, and singing karaoke with his teammates.

Had the unrest around the torch relay affected the athlete’s preparations? An official filibustered: “Sacred event . . . passion and glory across the globe . . . establishing a harmonious world . . .” The riots were “against the Olympic principles” and “not supported by most people in the world.” The news “has not had any impact.”

The press conference broke up; it was time to watch the athletes in training. Outside, it was overcast. Birches grew in bare dirt. The field hockey team scrimmaged against itself. On the tennis courts, Yan Zi, a women’s tennis player, was practicing against two men at once. A box of Wilson tennis balls stamped “US OPEN” sat on the sideline.

Wrestling practice was taking place in one spacious gym, with judo in a neighboring one, even more spacious, with walls of windows and gauzy white curtains. Young women dressed like flight attendants flanked the doorways connecting the two. In red characters on the walls of both gyms was the message “Tuanjie pinbo / Wei guo zhengguang”: Fight together with all your might / Struggle for the glory of the country. As we gazed over the judo athletes, an American reporter told me about the death threats he had been getting since covering the Lhasa violence. Other journalists had been receiving harassing phone calls and e-mails from outraged Chinese citizens, or people saying they were outraged Chinese citizens—there was some skepticism about how much opportunity average Chinese people had to consume foreign media, so that they could be privately outraged by it—but this was something more personal and menacing. He was rattled.

A chilly breeze was picking up, and the women at the doorways suddenly were wearing dark overcoats. In the other gym, wrestlers were working on their core strength: lying prone with their hips on a bolster, they tried to keep their upper bodies suspended straight out in space, while a dumbbell rested on the backs of their necks. Their hands were behind their backs, and a stopwatch lay on the mat for them to contemplate. Whenever one faltered and dropped a hand to the mat for support, a coach would take a can of topical cooling spray and swat the errant arm with it.

A week later, in mid-April, the final venue was open. It was time to see the Bird’s Nest: centerpiece of the Olympic construction, icon of the Chinese Century, and site of the 2008 Good Luck Beijing Racewalking Challenge. The early morning was comfortable, with some haze. Not too much, but I wouldn’t have wanted to racewalk in it. A thicker pall hung over the north Third Ring. In traffic, out the cab window, a double-decker bus had a UPS ad with the Bird’s Nest on it.

The approach to the stadium was full of rubble and loose dirt and paving blocks and sewer pipe. It took a long walk north, away from the stadium proper, to find the gate. A steady file of people trooped north, beside the battered aqua-metal construction walls, wire fencing, temporary buildings. Workers along the way were installing the sidewalk and tree boxes; there were patches of wet concrete.

Across from the security checkpoint was an actual bird nest, a magpie’s thick jumble of twigs in a skinny, newly planted tree. The inspection at the gate was more thorough than ever before. I had to demonstrate that my camera and my umbrella worked as a camera and an umbrella, rather than as disguised tools of Tibetan “splittism.”

Some of the sprigs in the freshly assembled hedges were ailing, leaving patches of brown. Everyone paused for snapshots on the way south toward the stadium. There were little Bird’s Nest–inspired lamps stuck in the ground, their tops round tangles of metal. I reversed direction once more, to reach the north entrance.

The event was full; people wanted to get inside the Bird’s Nest, even if it meant watching racewalking. Two minutes and seventeen seconds of the race had already happened by the time I got to my seat. It was getting hotter, and haze was visible inside, across the open eye of the stadium. The seats were plastic, red ones down low gradually giving way to gray ones at the top, in the same random-pixel manner as at the Water Cube. The logo of the Sinopec oil company, familiar from gas stations, had been molded into each seat back.

Most of the race would take place on a roadway outside. The crowd could go out and watch or follow the race on the stadium screen. Inflatable-suited Fuwa—Beibei, Huanhuan, and Nini—appeared on the track as the racewalkers hit the exit. Jingjing was outside, with the cross-sectional crowd. The universal attraction of the stadium had drawn a variety of Beijingers, and the uncertain temperature meant that none of them could quite settle on what to wear. The result was a sartorial free-for-all. Some young women wore party dresses. I saw a Playboy tracksuit, a woman’s green corduroy suit, more than one turtleneck with cap sleeves. People’s Armed Police were out in their uniforms. A man dressed prosperity casual: a zip-neck pullover under a blazer. Fake-leather jackets. A Mao suit jacket. Burberry pants.

The racewalkers looped back and forth, and the heat increased; I wandered back inside and strolled the concourse, taking in the futuristic details: the deep-red paint job on the seating bowl; the translucent, alien-botanic hanging light fixtures; the cartoonish signage and logos, like something drawn up by A Bathing Ape. The bathrooms had glossy black paint on textured walls, and gleaming black floors, from which a worker wiped tan footprints of Beijing dust over and over again.

And everywhere around, veering off and coming together at different angles, were the huge tangled silver columns of the nest, the avant-garde steelwork I had seen rising for so long. I walked up to one and touched it, then rapped its surface with my knuckles. It had made a dull, stifled tap.

Tap? I mulled over the sound, in confusion. I was not a metallurgist or a structural engineer, but it felt as if I had knocked my fist against a big chunk of concrete. Not steel. Or not what I would have expected steel to feel like. But what did I know?

Reporting in China had always meant groping along through an epistemological fog. Language was part of it (and a big part, in my case), but there was something more fundamentally elusive and opaque about fact-gathering. People and institutions were not used to the experience of being reported on. It’s not merely that they could be secretive or uncooperative or obstructionist, unprepared for the glaring light of a truly free and inquisitive press, and so on. It was that even people who wanted to cooperate—who may even have been affirmatively trying to put out a news story—didn’t quite know how to distill and transmit information.

The organizing committee struggled with this. One spring morning, the press gathered to meet the director of the committee’s project management department. A handout dutifully explained in English that the director’s duties were to “provide services for . . . decision-making,” “coordinate the compilation of overall operational plans,” “carry out research . . . on leading subjects,” and “frame preparation policies.” What followed, after a long opening silence, was the reporters asking, reasking, and finally badgering and pleading with the guest of honor to explain, with one or two specifics, what sorts of things he actually had decided or coordinated or prepared. (“First,” the director replied, after a particularly desperate entreaty, “I would like to say a few words about project management.”)

Maybe steel felt like concrete when you tapped on it. What did I really know, beyond what I’d been told? The racewalkers lurched their way into the stadium, one at a time, and onto the final standings board. Jared Tallent of Australia won with a time of an hour and twenty minutes, with Wang Hao of China fourteen seconds behind him. Wang was listed on the scoreboard as representing Inner Mongolia; for diversity’s sake, the Chinese entrants were listed by their provincial or other athletic affiliations: Heilongjian, the People’s Liberation Army, Shandong.

The crowd thinned out as the finishers straggled in. A young Chinese man in a Nike visor struck up a conversation with me in English. He’d gotten his tickets from a friend on the organizing committee, he said. His cabdriver had had trouble figuring out how to get to the stadium, because the signs weren’t clear. “I think surely there are a lot of things we need to improve in the future,” he said.

He said his name was Michael Wang, and he was originally from Sichuan—from the hometown of the pandas, he said. First he had wanted to move to Shanghai, because it was a new city, but Beijing was “the core of China.” He had majored in English—“not a good major, I think.” No? “English is just a tool.... It’s only a language.” He went into international trade, and struggled at first because he hadn’t learned business terminology in English.

A Sri Lankan racer entered the Nest, thirty-four minutes off the pace. The scoreboard read “Congratulations.” “Sometimes, I think the last one deserves more applause,” my companion said. “Because he has no hope of getting a gold medal, but he still has to finish the Games.”

On the way home, the cabbie lit up a cigarette. A citywide smoking ban was due to take effect on the first of May. At least, that was what had been officially announced. By the time the day came, the ban had been revised to allow smoking to continue in restaurants, clubs, Internet cafés—more or less anywhere (except the hospitals) where people might want to smoke.

The hundred-day countdown was at hand, but instead of being in China, I was in China’s waiting room. And with three months to go till Beijing would host the world, the mood in the waiting room was grim and angry. The visa hall at the Chinese consulate in New York was packed with people, every seat taken; the line for problem cases at Window 1 stretched all the way to the back.

The family had reached the limits of Beijing’s hospitality. Christina’s visa could be renewed open-endedly, but the baby’s and mine could not. For all the trappings of stability—the new sofa, the Pampers, the organic maple-arrowroot baby cookies—our papers still said we were short-term visitors, and every six months, short-term visitors had to get out. I could only imagine what the city was doing without us, the things Beijing was changing behind our backs, while we were stuck on the old, familiar American side of the world.

The reason for the backup emerged when I got to the window and presented the clerk with a new set of the routine visa paperwork. It was not enough, the clerk said, in disgusted tones. There needed to be an airplane ticket, an itinerary from a travel agency, a bank statement showing sufficient personal funds, and a documented hotel reservation. When had the rules changed? These were the rules, she said, shoving the papers back.

This was China’s greeting to would-be visitors as the Olympics drew near. Rather than expediting the process of getting into the New China, the consulate was taking the role of a guardpost on a hostile border. The first bureaucratic duty of the visa office was not to grant visas; it was to reject applications that didn’t satisfy the rules. And the rules had been changed without notice, so that every applicant would be rejected at first—so the hall was backed up not only with people arguing about their rejections, but with all the applicants making a second or third visit, till the people on both sides of the glass were infuriated with each other and the clerks were rejecting applications out of spite.

Not that the Chinese didn’t have reason to be crabby. When I came back to the far West Side to pick up the passports, one or two dozen demonstrators on the other side of the West Side Highway were waving Tibetan flags and a sign with skulls inside the Olympic rings. “Bloody Olympics!” someone yelled. On the near corner, just across Forty-second Street, Falun Gong supporters were demonstrating. There was an arc of splattered red paint on the building, and glass blocks in the façade were broken. What protesters couldn’t do in China, they were doing in the streets of New York.

In downtown Flushing, I came across a demonstration on the other side: a group of young Chinese people rallying outside the library, wearing T-shirts that said “One China.” The map on the back of the shirts included both Tibet and Taiwan. One of the young people, wearing a hoodie and a stocking cap, said repeatedly, with a heavy New York accent, that his group was not affiliated with anyone in particular. It was a Face-book group for supporters of China. Outside a grocery market, a white man was talking into a cell phone: “They resent that the Tibetans aren’t appreciative,” he said.

Terminal 3, Beijing’s vast, coppery-roofed new gateway, was open. We flew back into the newest airport in the world, 10 million square feet of internationalism, if you could get a visa for it. A train led from one sprawling lobe of the building to another, connecting the gates to the baggage claim, passing on the way through the dimness and bare concrete of a yet uncompleted middle section. The short hop to America had helped make the familiar in Beijing unfamiliar again: the thick air of evening, the trees pruned back to poles, the shapes of the guardrails and the streetlights, the tiny size of even a new Hyundai cab’s backseat. The gait and pace of the people, and the dimness they moved through. There was a flashing arrow in lights at the mouth of the alley—we had missed something happening, right there—and blue metal fencing had surrounded the public restroom.

We had been gone long enough to get jet lag. It was May, and the sky brightened to deep blue well before five, on its way to a yellow-gray morning. The building where the bicycle store had once been was being renovated, with drywall and new wiring. Roofers were on top with flaming torches. A man smashed the concrete-and-brick curb with a sledgehammer. People peeked through the fence gaps at the restroom. A brick-lined pit was going in beside it. The phone and DSL were off, because we’d missed the payment date while we were away; the bank on the corner where we’d paid the bills was gone. “Ban jia,” a gray-haired woman in a long denim jacket said—it moved. There was an afternoon press conference on building an environmentally friendly city. By then, not quite twenty-four hours after returning, I had a burning feeling in the back of my throat.

A few days later, on a cool morning, a crew arrived to refurbish our own building. They lowered themselves down the inner face of the building, over the courtyard, on seats on ropes, using paint rollers and buckets of water to wash the surface. Cracks were patched, and some of the worst sections of paint were stripped away. By afternoon, the northwest corner had a patch of new paint, a bright margarine color where the old paint had been cream. “Si tai zhong,” a man said, looking up at it. The color is too strong. Someone must have agreed, because the crew disappeared for the next few days, leaving the bright spot as it was.

And now, all around the city, the walling-off of everything was reversing itself. Construction fences were starting to come down, opening up the near and middle distance. Air and light filled my peripheral vision where there had been the constant, almost forgotten, press of walls.

New façades were going up on shops—blocks and blocks at a time—with uniform plastic characters replacing the old assortment of hand-painted or cheaply computer-rendered signboards. Run-down or irregular storefronts vanished behind a tidy, regular skin of silvery plastic-aluminum composite panels. Everything was squared off and gleaming, if only a half-inch deep.

There was a new feature on the aural landscape, too. To celebrate the hundred-day mark, an army of pop stars had recorded a song, nearly seven minutes long, called “Beijing Huanying Ni.” Singers traded off lines, in the manner of “We Are the World,” as a long, quiet verse promised a new atmosphere, morning light, the floating aroma of tea. The front door of our home is open . . . All are guests, from near or far . . . Make yourself comfortable . . .

Then Jackie Chan (atop the Great Wall, wearing white, in the video) belted out the opening of the refrain: “BEEEI-jinng HUAN-ying NIII . . .” Beijing Welcomes You! Heaven and earth open for you! Mainland and Hong Kong and Taiwanese singers made the promise; American and Korean ones, even. A Peking Opera performer broke into the pop tune with a classical, nasalized wail: “Beeeei-jinnnnng huannnnn-yinnnng nnnnii—YAAH!” On and on. That pentatonic hook was everywhere: cab radios, DVD shops, wafting over the streets. Beijing Welcomes You! The constancy of it all but guaranteed it would be the ironic backdrop to whatever might go sour in the course of a day. Coughing fit? Traffic jam? Argument with the authorities? “BEEI-jinng HUAN-ying NIIII . . .”

The Lantern Courtyard, however, would not be opening its front door to greet anyone. The fire marshal of Xicheng District would not grant a permit to Big Mack’s hotel project. The fire code said that a hotel couldn’t have exposed beams. There were no sprinklers. There was no second exit, and it was architecturally impossible to make one. By definition, a traditional courtyard house could not pass inspection.

Some forty other projects were held up in the district for similar reasons, Mack said. The fire marshal had added, cryptically, that he wouldn’t chase after the Lantern Courtyard group if they went around him, but there was no legal way to open the hotel without the fire certificate.

Most of the renovation work was done. A damp-looking spot lingered on the paving stones in the first courtyard, making the new blocks darker than the old ones. The inner courtyard had been repaved, too, over the newly constructed cesspit and sewer lines. In the hall at the front, the old low ceiling was gone and the fire marshal’s unacceptable beams were a rich brown overhead. New tiles on one end marked where the kitchen would have been.

The side rooms were largely finished. The bathrooms at the rear had been reconstructed and retiled, and a bathtub, running lengthwise, had been installed in the less-small one. Wires and plumbing hookups sat waiting for the lights and toilets that would never come. Mack was dissatisfied with the floor tiles in the smaller bathroom. The color didn’t harmonize with the walls, not that it mattered.

He and his partners had managed to make some friends in the district government, but that had gotten them only a better explanation, not relief. In Dongcheng and Chaoyang districts, in the more visitor-friendly eastern part of the city, there were official programs to develop business in the hutongs. They had special business-licensing rules there, including fire regulations for courtyard houses less stringent than the national code. Xicheng had no such exemption. If the fire marshal were to approve a courtyard hotel, it would mean that he had personally lowered the standards, with no bureaucratic or political coverage.

So when the marshal invited them to bypass his office, Mack said, “he’s just telling us that you have to use your connections.” And their group didn’t have good enough connections. It would take someone big—“like the commerce-bureau chief,” Mack said, “or the mom of this guy, the fire marshal.” It might become possible to do the hotel after the Olympics, when low-level bureaucrats were less afraid of drawing attention to themselves. Then, an irregular hotel pitched to foreigners might get by. “But I lost interest now,” he said.

The American guy who wrote the book One Billion Customers—a bestseller about doing business in China—was right, Mack said. It was all about guanxi, your connections. This was the sort of thing that the expats would say to each other all the time, in stentorian tones, as a running gag: Success in China is all about guanxi. . . . The Chinese place great importance on the concept of mianzi, or “face”—all the received truisms about the Way the New China Really Worked. Now here was Big Mack, the master problem-solver, glumly citing a business writer. “It’s all about guanxi,” he said.

We went back out to the alley. Around the corner, another courtyard house was being reconstructed. Old Beijing was getting yet another incarnation—the city had finally grasped that people valued the idea of a nondemolished hutong, and preservation had become a municipal goal, like slum clearance had been before it. So the neighbors were getting a renovation of their own, paid for by the government. Their house had two main buildings, north and south, and a little kitchen between. Wooden door and window frames were going into the rebuilt brick of the north building; the south one was done. The woman of the house was seventy-one, a retiree from the municipal building department, and she was paralyzed on her left side. She sat in a chair in the courtyard, by a pomegranate tree and a jujube tree, working her bad arm with her good one. Her husband was partly paralyzed, too, Mack said. They had four grown children, three daughters and a son, and the youngest lived with them. Another neighbor poured tea from a metal pot into paper cups. While the house was being rebuilt, the family had lived together in the kitchen, with an ayi to look after them. The whole neighborhood was being redone this way.