▾ Prologue · Shanghai Before Shanghai
The Old Neighbour
"Is that the Thai boy who lived here? The one who spent a year with us?"
One hundred metres of lane. Eleven doorways. Every door is a story, every story a doorway.
Tranquil Light · 宁静里 · 1928–1932 · 163 houses · 8 branch lanes · 36 perimeter shops
From the gate in Shanghai to the staircase in Bangkok. From a teahouse in 1921 to a flooded provincial city in 2019. A map, in the spirit of Joyce's Ulysses, of every place the book names — with the passage that names it.
Excerpts from the nonharvard blog, written in a pavilion room where the light was the only one still burning at 1 AM. The blog and the dissertation began together; the dissertation finished, the blog did not.
nonharvard.wordpress.com · 2015–2016, and after
One hundred and seventeen years of the same street. Drag the slider. The same Shanghai, made of different Shanghais.
The words the book invents, recovers, or refuses. Hover for the working definition.
Eight chapters. Eight doorways. Each one opens into a different room of the city.
Fieldwork. Family. Friends. Buildings. The years of work, and the years of going back.
The compound has a gate that still opens. The neighbours still have opinions. If a claim in this book cannot survive a walk down the eighth lane, it does not belong in the book.
Nearly everything learned in Tranquil Light turned out to apply, almost without translation, to a flooded provincial city in southern Thailand. The lesson is the same: the people who live in a city are usually better at reading the city than the institutions that try to manage it.
The lilong was a less-is-more building before the smart-city pamphlet existed.