The House in Shilong

During my last chat with my Dad for the book, he sketched out the layout for the house he lived in as a child in Shilong, which I’ve never seen and which has long since been demolished. I’ve reproduced the sketch here.

Basically the first floor served as my grandfather’s practice, while the entire family — my grandparents and their seven children (Aunt Peici, the oldest of the eight children, was away in school at the time) — lived on the second floor. Uncle Zhaohua, being the oldest of the kids in the house, got his own room, while the other six shared about a room that was about 12’ x 14’.

As with many businesses at the time, the front door is actually a series of narrow wood planks that must be taken down in the morning and put back up when the practice closed in the evening. It looks something like this place, which we saw in the water town of Wuzhen during our trip to China last year.

The giant window in my grandparents’ bedroom opened up to Taiping (Peace) Road, the street running in front of the house. My Dad remembers that Shilong used to get flooded frequently, and during floods, the streets would become canals, with water rising up to waist level. Grandfather would still see patients during floods, sitting on chairs on top of the exam table to stay dry. The six younger kids would gather in front of the second-floor window and float paper airplanes down to the “canal” below. Meanwhile, merchants would row boats through the streets, peddling meat and vegetables. To buy something, one would lower a basket on a rope with money in it from the second-floor window, and then pull up the food in the basket.