My Memories of Old Beijing 1983

Set in the late 1920s, the story follows Lin Yingzi, Shen Jie, a six-year-old girl living in a Beijing hutong with her father, her mother, and a devoted nurse. The small, close-knit world around her is filled with simple routines and secret hopes, where every face in the alley seems to tell a story.

Her first friend is the madwoman Xiuzhen, Zhang Min, who waits at the hutong entrance for her missing daughter Little Guizi. Xiuzhen once loved a college-age man, but he was arrested before she could have their child, who was later abandoned by her family. Yingzi shows deep sympathy for Xiuzhen, and soon discovers that Yingzi’s friend Niu is actually Xiuzhen’s daughter. Overcome with emotion, Xiuzhen longs to bring her daughter to her father, a former student whose fate remains unknown. The two race through the pouring rain to find him, but tragedy strikes when they are struck by a train and die in the wreck.

With the memories of that loss shaping her childhood, Yingzi and her family move to another hutong. She befriends a young man with thick lips who becomes a thief, Zhang Fengyi, driven to steal in order to support his younger brother’s schooling. Yingzi sees something kind in him, even as she questions whether he is truly good. His eventual arrest by the police leaves her sad and unsettled, a harsh reminder of the fragility of trust.

When Yingzi is nine, the husband of her nurse Xia Yingzi, Shen Jie, comes for his wife. He explains that his son has died and his daughter was sold away two years earlier, a revelation that deepens Yingzi’s sorrow. She struggles to understand why someone who cares for children must go out to earn money rather than stay at home with them, a question that weighs on her as she watches the world outside her doorway continue to change.

The tale culminates as Yingzi endures the shock of her father’s death from tuberculosis. Grieving yet growing, she eventually leaves Beijing with her mother and baby brother, carrying the memories of her bustling hutong childhood and the quiet courage it demanded.