Belonging to 'Old Beijing': Old Lady Gao's Story

The Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College presents a talk by Harriet Evans of the University of Westminster that examines a subaltern woman's experience of Beijing's transformation in an analysis that links place, space, temporality and gender.

Old Lady Gao lived in a poor neighbourhood of Beijing's 'south city' for seven decades until in 2011, aged 88, she had to move out when local demolition reached her home. Poor, illiterate and widowed, and never having been incorporated into the formal work unit system of employment, she had never left her neighbourhood since she married into it at the age of seventeen. Her long life in the crowded two rooms of her home and its immediate environs establishes the spatial, social and cultural parameters of her entire understanding of the world and her self-identification as a social being, mother and wife. It also gives a temporality to her memories of life in the neighbourhood that is shaped by her gendered positioning in home and locality rather than by the dominant themes of the state's project of revolutionary change. Based on many years of fieldwork recording local Beijingers' memories of everyday life through decades of revolution and reform, this paper examines a subaltern woman's experience of Beijing's transformation in an analysis that links place, space, temporality and gender. It suggests that Old Lady Gao's identification as an 'old Beijinger' asserts not a nostalgic desire to cling to the places and spaces of a disappearing past, but a claim for recognition as a woman whose  achievements in sustaining her family through long decades of hardship is inseparable from her sense of belonging to her neighbourhood.

Harriet Evans is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies, and Director of the Contemporary China Centre, School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Languages, University of Westminster. Her publications includeWomen and Sexuality in China: Dominant Discourses of Female Sexuality and Gender since 1949 (Polity Press, 1997) and The Subject of Gender: Daughters and Mothers in Urban China (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). She coordinates an international network on cultural memory and local cultural heritage initiatives in China and is currently working on an oral history of everyday life an 'old Beijing' neighbourhood.