Page 169 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

156 SALLY SARGESON
floor area of their new mansions has triggered the expansion, supervision and training of
bureaucracies in counties and towns (Xie et al. 1999).
The commercialisation of rural housing has not (yet) resulted in a re-valorisation of
local heritage by villagers. Not one respondent said they preferred the local over imports,
or the old to the new. On the contrary, they repeatedly drew unfavourable comparisons
between the ‘messy’, ‘dirty’, ‘dark’ and ‘unhygienic’ conditions in older houses and the
cleanliness, light and spaciousness of contemporary dwellings. No one mourned the loss
of the roofed verandahs and ‘sky well’ courtyards that protected old houses from rain and
sunlight and provided their inhabitants with semi-public spaces for work, social
interaction, play and storage. Old settlement patterns similarly are disparaged. The
poorest of the case-study villages comprises dense clusters of houses interwoven by
winding cobbled and dirt paths. At corners and where houses are recessed, these paths
widen to form open spaces where, on summer evenings, people gather to chat with
passers-by while they shell beans, mend tools or watch over children. But residents
bitterly complain that the town government has not yet demolished both housing and
paths in order to build straight, broad all-weather roads—roads that simultaneously will
provide vehicular access to new mansions and discourage the casual gatherings that sustain
interaction and flows of information among villagers.
Why this outspoken rejection of local architectural traditions? In reproducing the built
form of commercially branded suburban utopias—‘Prosperity Mansions’, ‘Swiss Village’—
women in particular seem intent on overturning old urban prejudices that identify the
rural with agricultural production and parochialism. Several women mentioned that
mutual respect and pride in their community had been fostered by the ‘urbanisation’,
‘beautification’ and greater ‘sophistication’ that came with the construction of new
dwellings. The nearer their proximity to cities and the higher their exposure to
commercial media, the more likely were women to describe even relatively new houses
as ‘dilapidated’ or ‘backward’. The three-storey rectangular concrete structures thrown
up in the 1980s and early nineties were disparaged, even by their owners, as ugly, poorly
designed and anachronistic: ‘I’d like a prettier house. This is really oldfashioned. The
houses got bigger in the nineties but now people are less concerned with the size and
height of a house and more concerned with external appearance and modern interior
designs.’
It is something of a commonplace that the stylistic referent and spatial form of houses
‘acts as both behaviour setting and mnemonic for idealized concepts of the domestic unit
that resides within’ (Lawrence-Zuniga 1999:158). The truism aptly sums up the life-style
changes that are being wrought in village mansions. Once, Chinese domestic interiors
were hierarchically encoded (Blanton 1994; Knapp 1999:181–2). Now, domestic space is
demarcated less by ritual, generational and gender hierarchies than by perceptions of
public and private space, and by the prioritisation of consumption over productive
activity.
Few mansions contain a formal reception room. The only vestige of the central hall
that once functioned as the stage for public reception, ethical instruction and kinship
ceremonial is to be found in the occasional placement in the centre of a living room of a
sideboard above which hang ancestral photos. The significance of such photos is, however,