A Warped Hometown

This chapter explores how Lao She performs an affective mapping of his warped native city’s streets, courtyard houses, ditch, and teahouse: everyday tyranny and despair in the phantasmal and entrapping avenues and streets; wartime atlas of emotions including nostalgia, mourning, shame, anger, and hatred; socialist sentiment and citizenship born in the ideological/ecological representation of Dragon Beard Ditch as a metamorphic space; and self-mourning in a warped and wounded teahouse as a distorted space-time continuum, a shrinking and pessimistic miniature of old Beijing misery and a sign of unfathomable urban darkness. Confronting the advent, expansion, and menace of modernity as well as the whirlwind and whirlpool of political and historical change, Manchu writer Lao She envisions modern Beijing as the locus of pain and pleasure, dystopia and dreamland, moral decline and physical performance, material deformations and emotional vicissitudes.