Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
pages 167-168

The house was at no. 6 Fenzi Hutong. Face Powder Alley: During the Ming Dynasty, this had been one of Beijing's red-light districts, named after the heavily made-up prostitutes who lived here. The house was now the Flourishing Garden Home for the Aged, a nursing home run by the local Communist Party branch. It was a one-story red building with yellow ceramic roof tiles, on an alley of crumbling courtyard homes. I opened the front door, walked through a dim hallway, and came into what was once the central courtyard of a traditional Chinese house.

Sixty years ago, my father had lived here. This had been his family's last home before they left China in the autumn of 1948. And this was where, on a cold and clear afternoon in January 2004, I started my investigation into my family history in China. My guide was Zhao Hongzhi, the eighty-year-old man who had once dated my aunt Nellie. The courtyard was roofed over now, and the trees that once graced it were gone. A lattice of fake ivy and plastic flowers spread across the ceiling. Two old men sat under it reading newspapers; one was bent over with a humpback that gave him the shape of a question mark.

Zhao walked into the courtyard behind me. He pointed to a row of rooms on the left. "That's where the kitchen was." He pointed to the right. "Those were the bedrooms."

"Please speak quietly," a nurse urged us. "It's their rest time."

Zhao pointed again, as if tracing the ghostly imprints of people only he could see. "That's where your grandmother slept. Sometimes I slept in the living room right outside her bedroom. I was her godson, you know."