Community of the Streets

CAUTION: Please do not read the following post if romantic drivel about "community" makes you want to spew. (Rob Chisholm, I'll ask you to refrain from reading on.) Anyone who pines for simpler times (the Pleistocene, for example), please read on and enjoy.

The street beside our apartment comes alive in evening (as do all the streets in Hohhot). People come home from work to eat, drink, stroll, and shop along the crowded byways.

This "thought-piece" reflects a decidedly romantic view of community from a modern middle-class American who sometimes yearns for community (in the abstract), but who mostly enjoys the individual freedom that comes from being liberated from actual community. Real communities require mutual obligations and reciprocities; they entail, for better or worse, the curtailment of personal freedoms and privacies. And yet, as I stroll down the evening streets of Hohhot, all around me I see the web of real human communities at their most picturesque--families gathered on the street corners and steps of apartments; kids riding bikes; men playing mahjong, cards, and pool (on pool tables mounted on carts that have been pulled upon the sidewalks); women talking and strolling; girls arm in arm. There is noise and laughter. People sit on stools eating noodles, vendors with carts sell plums and melons, a petty restaurateur cooks kabobs on a barrel, a man sits on the curb with a bottle of "Snowdeer" beer and reads a book. Everyone seems happy and relaxed. It is a warm early autumn evening in Inner Mongolia. The evening sky is blue and streaked with clouds. The city seems alive in a way that is missing in suburban American--or even our greatest cities, which, depending on what part of town you're in, are either depressed or gussied up to cater to the urban upper class.

Perhaps this sense of "community" that I think I'm observing is merely an expression of poverty: where there are donkey-carts and street vendors, tourists may confuse primitive capitalism for community. Perhaps this "vibrancy" will disappear as increasing wealth transforms peasants into middle-class people, with greater desires for individual freedoms and private pleasures. In Hohhot, people are already retreating from the streets to gated luxury apartments. But this street that I'm walking down is not just a community of poverty, where people inhabit the streets because they have nowhere else to go. These are college students and ordinary middle-class people from the adjacent apartment complexes enjoying an evening on the streets. Yes, there are poor Mongolian peasants selling their wares, but there is also something here that is missing in modern America: people gathering in common places, enjoying each other and participating in the collective joy of eating, drinking, playing, and simply being alive on a warm evening. I wonder how "the Chinese" ever acquired the stereotype of being placid, cold, and inscrutable. There is nothing like that here.

By the way, I’m teaching undergraduates as of this week (instead of junior faculty). More on that later.

Thanks for reading.

Dave