1
In 1939, when Chen Zhibi fled to Chongqing with her grandmother, she was just a 10-year-old girl.
In her own words, Chen Zhibi’s life was “born without a mother. Grandma usually earned money by mending clothes for the slender men pulling boats on the river bank, while she went to the vegetable market in the evening to pick up some unwanted leftovers and bring them back to eat.
In mid-summer of 1941, the Japanese started bombing Chongqing.
There was a tunnel behind the place where they lived, and they had to pay three hard foreigners for a permit to enter the tunnel. Because they were poor, Chen Zhibi and her grandmother did not get in, so when everyone around them had a permit, the man in charge of the shelter locked the door and hid himself in another hole.
As a result, the Japanese planes did not come that night, and the air-raid siren was not lifted, of course, the cave door was not opened. The oxygen inside the cave was thin, the heat was unbearable, the number of people had exceeded the upper limit, some of the oil lamps were gradually extinguished, and the babies and children made heart-wrenching cries.
The next morning, Chen Zhibi and his grandmother came out of the unstable “brute cave” (a small cave that can accommodate two or three people) and saw that the doors of the surrounding houses and stores were no longer open. She said, “Since the morning, bodies have been carried out from inside that shelter and thrown inside the bucket of roots.”
Many people went inside with their whole families, carrying gold necklaces and bracelets, but “their whole families died in there.
After the liberation of Chongqing, the government organized to clean up the tunnel, maintain it and widen it. Later, this tunnel became part of the route of Chongqing Railway Line 1.
The place where Chen Zhibi followed her grandmother is the famous “Eighteen Steps” of Chongqing, a true symbol of the “Old Mountain City”. Here, she glimpsed the changes of a city.
2
When Chongqing was not yet developed, the Eighteen Steps had already gathered a lot of people.
There were people from the countryside who came here to make a living as batsmen, journeymen, pancake sellers, pedicurists and sex workers. …… In the late 1990s and early millennium, you could even see the needles left by drug addicts on the floor of the 18th Terrace.
The eighteenth ladder is located in the lower half of the Yuzhong peninsula, near the Yangtze River, the humidity is heavy, people who live here all year round have to cupping every now and then.
At that time, it was common to see the sight of a middle-aged man sitting naked on the side of the street with a wooden jar taped to his back, surrounded by people who gathered around to join in the fun.
At that time, the eighteenth ladder, the most important thing is the people and lively. It was a small microcosm of the “overcrowded” underclass. Until the 1960s, the household registration here was “out but not in”.
After Chongqing became a municipality directly under the central government in 1997, its economy took off rapidly and it gradually developed into the central city of the west. The price of a small hotel has increased from 5 yuan to 10 yuan, the sign of a barber store has become more dilapidated, there is a lot of garbage on the ground, and in summer, the gutter gives off an unbearable smell.
But Jiefangbei, which is just one street away from the 18th Terrace, has developed into the center of Chongqing, with high-rise buildings rising up there. It is unimaginable that the Eighteen Steps has existed for a hundred years in the middle of the Central Business District of a municipality.
And after a hundred years, the fate of the Eighteen Steps is destined to be rewritten.
On July 28, 2010, the Chongqing government officially launched the demolition project of the Eighteen Steps. By March 2015, more than 95% of the residents had signed the resettlement compensation agreement, and in June 2015, more than 7,700 families moved out one by one, leaving only a scattering of more than 100 families that had not reached an agreement.
Among them, there was the Chen Zhibi family.
Chen Zhibi grew up without parents and was unable to have children due to health reasons. She never married, and her old next-door neighbor, Liu Qiang, a Chinese herbalist, said she was, “an orphan who has no children.”
3
Chen Zhibi is indeed an “orphan”. She often felt so “lonely” that she felt that death was not so scary anymore.
In the last few months of living in the 18th Terrace, Chen Zhibi did not seem agitated because “the house is going to be demolished”. She was over eighty years old and had nothing to do every day but exercise and watch TV. She wakes up at seven every morning and goes for a walk in the park along the Yangtze River, chats with her elderly friends, runs and twists her back. When she met people she didn’t know, she would often greet them eagerly.
When she returned home at noon, she would prepare a meal and wait for her nephew Chen Yong.
Chen Yong moved in with Chen Zhibi in 1997. He is 41 years old, with a gentle face and a soft-spoken voice. During the day, he works as a salesman for an insurance company in Xiaoshizi, and at night, he works part-time as a night security guard at Chongqing Children’s Hospital.
Chen Zhibi and Chen Yong in front of their home at 184 18th Terrace. (Photo by the author) Chen Zhibi and Chen Yong in front of their home at No. 184, 18th Terrace. (Photo by the author)
Chen Yong’s wife and children are living in their hometown in Hechuan, ask him why he has to work two jobs a day, he replied, “The children go to daycare for a month is more than a thousand, want to reduce the burden on the family.”
Chen Zhibi and his nephew’s food is not abundant. A two-day-old cabbage, a plate of roast white with a few pieces of meat, a pot of vegetable soup. That’s all.
Every day after lunch, Chen Zhibi had to lie in bed and watch TV. The TV set and the old refrigerator in the kitchen next door are the only appliances they have.
The house Chen Zhibi lives in is an old wooden hanging building with two floors, adding up to less than 50 square meters. The entrance is a narrow staircase, and the living room, dining room and Chen Zhibi’s bedroom are integrated into one.
The roof is so short that an adult can reach the only incandescent lamp. The bed is lined with miscellaneous items, including outdated newspapers and bundles of old clothes. On the wooden table next to the TV, the only picture frame in the house hangs, with a large black-and-white photo and some scattered registration photos.
The door of Chen Zhibi’s house is always open during the day. At the entrance is a concrete dam of about ten square meters, on the dam there are two cats, one male and one female, which Chen Zhibi picked up. Last month, just gave birth to a litter of kittens.
“Those who moved away, the cats left down, so poor”, she described these cats as “strays”.
Outside the dam, there is a passage connecting the Liberation Monument and the 18th Terrace. There is a constant flow of people coming and going on this ladder, and when Chen Zhibi rests on her bed in front of her house, she can hear the hurried footsteps of the pedestrians outside.
On one occasion, Chen Zhibi was lying in bed taking a nap with the door open and the television set turned up. A hundred meters away, the construction of Phoenix Terrace had already begun, and the rumbling sound of excavators reached the house. She woke up from her dream, “I don’t want to move, I really don’t want to leave at all.
4
There are some people who don’t want to leave either. In the last days of the 18th Terrace, those who did not move out continued to live the same life as usual.
The old Chinese doctor Liu Qiang next door to Chen Zhibi wears round-rimmed glasses to read the newspaper every day, and the two beds used for acupuncture and massage in the house have long been “unoccupied”; further up the stairs, a middle-aged couple is still doing business as a stir-fry restaurant, with three tables set up in front of the house, and people often sit down and order a douhua, a dish of bai bai, and a bottle of Lao Bai Gan, and sit down to eat for a few hours.
However, Chen Zhibi, who had not moved, still encountered some minor problems.
One morning when she got up, she turned on the TV and found a snowy screen, “it was stolen again. Chen Yong could not go back to work, so he asked his former colleague Yu Mingyou to help the elderly to install the TV closed line.
The company’s main business is to provide a service to the public and to the public. “Le a house collapse is a matter of time,” said Yu Mingyou to himself while installing the wire. He is slightly fat and looks very naive. After the installation, Chen Zhibi left him down for dinner. Yu Mingyou in the kitchen while washing his face while telling the old man: “You are afraid of him to do that you are afraid, to you, do not even be afraid, you have to have the basic things to survive in this place.”
Chen Zhibi said she was not afraid, the last time the wire burned out, she went to the street office people “you do not give me good, I will go to the road Oh!” The response: “Go ahead and press it!”
In the middle and late stages of the demolition of the eighteenth staircase, fires, theft of electric wires and fiber optic cables, similar things happen from time to time. Residents are unspoken – “It’s those people from the demolition and relocation office who are responsible for this.”
The door frame of Chen Zhibi’s house, where the door plate should have been hung, has now accumulated a thick layer of ash – the new door plate issued by the street office a few months ago, and was stolen.
At night Chen Yong went to the children’s hospital for the night shift, Chen Zhibi sat alone on a chair in front of his house and would sing in the dim light.
At the end of June, Chongqing was already showing signs of sweltering heat. It rained for several days in a row, destroying the beams of the unoccupied neighboring house next to Chen Zhibi’s house. Chen Zhibi took a fire poker and picked up the fallen bricks and tiles one by one into a bucket and took them out to dump them. She wanted to renovate the house again, but thought “it’s not good to live for one day”.
There were many pedestrians coming and going during the day, but at night it was silent. At the same time, the Jiefangbei business district, which is just one street away from the eighteenth ladder, is a nightly music, staging a story of urban people’s intoxication.
At this time, the prosperity and bustle of the central business district is no longer the same as the bustle of the eighteen stairs in the past. It has the power to swallow the surrounding area and the speed to break through.
All the people around moved out one after another, and Chen Zhibi’s family still lived in a dilapidated house. One day at noon she came back from a walk and saw that the house of Liu Qiang, a Chinese medicine doctor next door, had been demolished and the bottles and jars inside had been smashed, “I thought it was on fire”.
Faced with such a situation, Chen Zhibi actually thought about moving out, but the conditions have not been negotiated. It is understood that the compensation for the demolition and relocation of the eighteenth ladder area is not the same. The price of compensation for demolition of houses near the more-field interchange is higher, but the price of houses on the edge of this sidewalk leading to the Yangtze River is relatively low, plus the resettlement houses in the nine kilometers, (nine kilometers belongs to the southern suburbs of Chongqing, Banan, from where Chen Yong works, it takes two to three hours to commute back and forth.) They would be even more reluctant to go.
Chen Zhibi said, “I’ve lived here all my life, I’m used to it, and I can’t even sit in the elevator if I move to one of those tall buildings”.
5
After the neighbors moved out one after another, Chen Zhibi planned to make a door sign for No. 184 of the 18th staircase, “so that it would be a memento when she left. A week later, she was walking home with a broken black umbrella and a door plate number in her hand, trembling.
On the way, someone asked her, “Burkha, what did you buy?” She said, “I bought a door plate, the previous one was stolen, and some thieves were stealing the door plate.” Back home, Chen Zhibi ran to the house and took out a box of rusty nails, and borrowed a hammer, stepped on a wooden stool and nailed up the door number. Because the door frame was too high, she only nailed the two holes against the bottom.
But the sign didn’t stay up for long, and was “lost” again.
That morning, she walked to the park with a black umbrella in her pestle. She seemed to have a premonition at the time and brought her cell phone, which she usually doesn’t carry. “The phone was heavy and inconvenient, but I took it with me that day.
But she didn’t know that the day she left her home in the 18th Terrace was goodbye forever.
Near noon, Chen Zhibi walked home from the Yangtze River Park as usual, “I walked to the TV station, came an ambulance, and put me on the shelf”. Chen Zhibi sensed that something had happened at home, so he told them, “Let me go down, I want to go home”, the people in the car said, “Do not go back, your house at the head of the house are gone”.
“You let me go back to see, I want to go back.” Chen Zhibi still insisted.
“You go back to do it, the house are rotten, the house can not enter, things are moved to you to nine kilometers, you go there, I have arranged for you”. Chen Zhibi could not remember exactly who said these words to her.
Chen Zhibi did not return to her home in the 18th Terrace, she was dragged into an ambulance and taken to a resettlement house in the 9th kilometer. She was taken to the resettlement house in 9 kilometers. Along with her, there were several large bags of household goods packed for her. Those people bought daily toiletries for Chen Zhibi, brought her a carton of milk, and made the bed in the room.
“Those people took good care of me still.”
That night, she stayed alone in a strange house, to Chen Yong after work, picked up the phone and he talked on the phone once “I told you, you can not go back, the house are no longer available”.
After Chen Zhibi’s home was demolished, she came to walk around the Mountain City Trail every day. (Photo by the author) After her home was demolished, Chen Zhibi came to walk around the Mountain City Trail every day. (Photo by the author)
Early the next morning, Chen Zhibi walked alone from the nine-kilometer resettlement community. Because she couldn’t read the road, she asked many times and walked across three major roads. “The station in that neighborhood is farther than walking to Jiefangbei.”
After the house at 184 Eighteenth Terrace was demolished, a concrete wall was built around it. Remembering that there were some things at home that she had not yet taken, Chen Zhibi found a “stick”.
She took out the pickle jar and saw that it had grown flowers. There are also many photos are lost. Those photos were taken by the travelers who came and went.
All of their household goods were moved to the nine kilometers, and Chen Yong planned to move them again to the house he rented on Heping Road. Because it was close to where he worked.
The August sun hung brightly in the sky, not at all stingy in sharing the sunlight to the people of the city. Chen Yong paid for a van to pull the things to the peace road. Because they lived on the tenth floor, there were too many things that were not easy to move, even if they went up the slope from the halfway stop, they had to climb six floors.
So Chen Zhibi and her nephew, one carrying a large package, climbed up the ramp and climbed six more floors, back and forth many times.
On that hot summer day, Chen Zhibi officially said goodbye to her 184 18th Terrace.
Postscript
Now, Chen Zhibi no longer has to worry about her house being demolished during her nap, and the ear-splitting noise from the excavators is no longer heard.
After the demolition and relocation of the 18th Terrace is completed, the rebuilt 18th Terrace area will be closely connected to the “Cross Golden Street” in Jiefangbei, and a new landmark will rise up. A museum will be built at the site of the former French Consulate next to Phoenix Terrace.
Chen Zhibi lives in a ten-story silo, the roof of which is the rooftop, where she often looks out. (Photo by the author) Chen Zhibi lives in a ten-story silo, the roof of which is the rooftop, where she often looks out. (Photo by the author)
This passage in front of 184 Eighteenth Terrace will be preserved, only the original houses and residents are gone.
Today, there are still many people coming and going on the observation deck of the 18th ladder. People sitting under the trees, playing poker in piles, drinking bowl of tea, as well as the “stick army” of the mountain city, selling dog skin plaster, selling selfie sticks, selling cell phone cases ……
The eighteenth ladder is still lively, but those people, changed a group of people.
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