From my Tingzijian

The short answer is “it’s my study.” But it’s a room worth knowing a little more about.

Back in the 1920s and ’30s, in Shanghai’s first heyday, a unique architectural style of house developed here. The city was getting crowded quickly with an influx of foreigners and people from the countryside escaping civil unrest and poverty. So, instead of building traditional courtyard houses, such as you find in Beijing, they built vertical townhouses. (My own bedroom is up two long flights of narrow stairs.) Following the rules of feng shui, all the houses face south, and you enter through a gate and a garden. The family’s rooms — nice, large, sunny — are all on this side of the house. But on the back side, you find the kitchen on the ground floor and, up shorter flights of narrow stairs, small rooms called tingzijian. These were used as servant’s quarters and, in many cases, rented to students. Lu Xun, China’s famous writer, wrote from a tingzijian, and, I am told, many of the founders of the Communist party lived in them.

These houses were lined up in rows down narrow lanes inside large city blocks, and that is where much of life took place. It’s still that way today. Kids play in the lane, old people sit outside and play mahjong, vendors stroll buy with their wares or collecting cardboard for re-cycling and, these days, there are traffic jams.

From my own tingzijian (I’ve occupied two, in two different houses), I watch laundry go out the windows on poles, listen to a tuba player practice, hear the Wednesday morning ladies’ chorus practice and the national anthem sung at the start of a school day, hear the call of the scissors-sharpener or the fruit vendor, and watch progress on a skyscraper. It’s an amazing place to sit and write and hope that I am somehow soaking up a bit of Shanghai’s past.

Here’s what it looks like inside my tingzijijan. (Sorry about the mess.)