Book description
Journalist Michael Meyer has spent his adult life in China, first in a
small village as a Peace Corps volunteer, the last decade in
Beijing--where he has witnessed the extraordinary transformation the
country has experienced in that time. For the past two years he has been
completely immersed in the ancient city, living on one of its famed
hutong
in a century-old courtyard home he shares with several families,
teaching English at a local elementary school--while all around him
"progress" closes in as the neighborhood is methodically
destroyed to make way for high-rise buildings, shopping malls, and other
symbols of modern, urban life. The city, he shows, has been demolished
many times before; however, he writes, "the epitaph for Beijing
will read: born 1280, died 2008…what emperors, warlords, Japanese
invaders, and Communist planners couldn't eradicate, the market economy
can." The Last Days of Old Beijing
tells the story of this historic city from the inside out-through the
eyes of those whose lives are in the balance: the Widow who takes care
of Meyer; his students and fellow teachers, the first-ever description
of what goes on in a Chinese public school; the local historian who
rallies against the government. The tension of preservation vs.
modernization--the question of what, in an ancient civilization, counts
as heritage, and what happens when a billion people want to live the way
Americans do--suffuse Meyer's story. Michael Meyer first went to China
in 1995 with the Peace Corps, where he lived for two years before moving
to Beijing. A Minnesota native, he graduated from the University of
Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California-Berkeley with degrees
in education. He was also Blakemore Fellow at Tsinghua University,
concentrating on Beijing's urban planning and architecture. A Lowell
Thomas Award winner for travel writing, Meyer has published stories in Time
, Smithsonian
, the New York Times Book Review
, the Financial Times
, Reader's Digest
, the Asian Wall Street Journal
, the Los Angeles Times
, the Chicago Tribune
, among others. In China, he has represented the National Geographic
Society's Center for Sustainable Destinations, training China's UNESCO
World Heritage Site managers in preservation practices. The Last Days
of Old Beijing
is his first book. He lives in New York.
