In the early sixties, a number of “worker apartments” were built there, which were undoubtedly an improvement over the pre-1949 slums, but each apartment unit had then been partitioned and partitioned again, resulting in an entire family inhabiting one room of the original three-bedroom design, and all of the families sharing the kitchen and toilet.It wasn’t a surprise that the lane showed all the wear and tear of the past decades, even more so now that the apartment buildings were in sharp contrast to the skyscrapers that surrounded them. As he stepped into the lane, Chen felt a weird sense of disorientation. He was walking under a network of bamboo poles stretched across the lane, filled with damp laundry, like an impressionist expanse obliterating the sky overhead. The lane was rendered even narrower by the bewildering jumble of stuff stacked along both sides-a locked bike with a large bamboo basket, another covered with a large plastic sheet, a broken coal stove, a ramshackle tool-and-junk shed, and all sorts of residential add-ons, legal or illegal, seeming almost to have sprouted magically from the original houses.It was like another city in another time, and the people seemed baffled at his intrusion: an old man squatting sideways with his bare back stuck against the wall, looking up at him; another straddling a wooden stool with one foot outstretched, inadvertently blocking the lane; and several more farther down the lane, one holding a large bowl of rice, another stretched out on a tumbledown bamboo recliner, and still another vigorously scaling a beltfish in a moss-covered common sink.
