The tingzijian room
In the Shikumen Museum in Shanghai’s Xintiandi district there was a room that, when I walked into it, stirred a sense of familiarity. Shikumen, meaning ‘stone gate’, was the name given to the typical houses of Shanghai in which most of the population lived in the 1930s. The stone entrances had high thresholds to keep floodwater – and evil – at bay. Long alleyways linked the houses, each of which shared a courtyard with several others. The arrangement was not dissimilar to, and indeed was said to be based on, the Victorian and Edwardian terraces of Britain’s cities, with their rows of doorways and back alleys.
Most shikumen have gone now, supplanted by tower blocks. One of the few remaining of these old-style houses has been turned into a museum that presents an idealised view of domestic life in 1930s Shanghai, just as the row of pit cottages at Beamish, ‘The Living Museum of the North’, purports to show how mining families lived in County Durham in the north of England in the early 1900s.
If a common feature of the pit cottage was the ‘netty’ – the outdoor WC – the shikumen was characterised by a small room known as the tingzijian, located at the turn of the staircase between the first and second floors. These usually faced north, making them cold in winter and hot in summer, and for this reason families would let them out to bring in extra pennies. The tenants were often poor writers, and the work they produced in these little rooms on the stairs became known as Tingzijian Literature. Exponents included famous writers such as Lu Xun, author of the seminal short story A Madman’s Diary, and Ba Jin, a critic of the Cultural Revolution who had been rehabilitated as a literary hero by the time he died at the age of 100 in 2005.
When I stepped inside the tingzijian in the Shikumen Museum I felt an immediate affinity with it. The bare floor and tiny desk were immediately suggestive of writing. But it was the location that struck me as significant. The garret, the tiny room at the very top of the house, is the notional place where writers write but it is not necessarily the best metaphor for the standpoint of a writer. I had never felt myself above things by dint of who I was or what I did. If a house was the world, I would be in the middle. Half way up the stairs, or half way down if you will, seemed about right.
In such a position you could hear something of what was going on both downstairs and upstairs, and any traffic that passed between the two would be bound to attract your attention – a good place to be for a writer. At the same time, it wasn’t an entirely comfortable place to be, this tingzijian. Despite being in the middle of the house, it was rather cut off from it. On bad days it could make you feel excluded and lonely.