Michael Meyer went to China in 1995 as one of its first Peace Corps volunteers. As the author of the acclaimed The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. His second book, In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China, won a Lowell Thomas Award for Best Travel Book from the Society of American Travel Writers, as did the third book in his China trilogy, The Road to Sleeping Dragon: Learning China from the Ground Up. His fourth book, Benjamin Franklin’s Last Bet: The Favorite Founder’s Divisive Death, Enduring Afterlife, and Blueprint for American Prosperity, was published by Mariner/HarperCollins in 2022. Meyer’s stories have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Smithsonian, Sports Illustrated, Slate, the Financial Times, Foreign Policy, Architectural Record, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Iowa Review, the Paris Review, and on National Public Radio’s This American Life. He has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar award and residencies at MacDowell, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy, and the University of Oxford’s Centre for Life-Writing. He is a fellow of the National Committee on United States-China Relations’ Public Intellectuals Program and is a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches Nonfiction Writing. He was recently a U.S. Fulbright Scholar in Taiwan, and in residence at the American Academy in Berlin. Meyer’s latest work of nonfiction, A Dirty, Filthy Book, details a scandalous trial in Victorian London over the publication of an American birth control pamphlet, and the activist who defended herself before the Crown. It will be published worldwide by Penguin in 2024.
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The Last Days of Old BeijingLife in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed
Book Mansion was overwhelming. China’s largest bookstore occupied 172,000 square feet and carried 230,000 titles. Bestsellers included Chinese titles such as I Was an American Police Officer; I’m Only Raising You for 18 Years; Chinese-Style Divorce; and Harvard Girl, a memoir that revealed the parenting style that made her stand out from her Chinese classmates and gain acceptance to the school. That book was in its sixty-third printing.
Downstairs, Monica’s Story lay between Bill and Hillary Clinton’s autobiographies. A boxed set about Göring rubbed shoulders with What’s Behind Jewish Excellence? Translated American titles ranged from the predictable – The Da Vinci Code, The Atkins Diet—to the surprising—Henry Rollins’s Get in the Van, and a Woody Allen collection whose Chinese title promised MENSA Whores. An entire floor held English-learning materials. Love English taught pickup lines and pillow talk, including cultural hints such as “‘I’m bored’ really means ‘Do you want to have sex?’”
The Last Days of Old Beijing:Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed -
The Last Days of Old BeijingLife in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed
The students’ determination to show their best faces to the world in 2008 never waned. They were embarrassed to tell people they were unemployed or laid-off, or retired even, and so we practiced “I am a grandmother!” as a reply to inquiries about their profession.
One afternoon, a row of rickshaw bicycles pedaled through our hutong, bearing German tourists, who pointed their camera lenses at decrepit doorways.
“Why do foreigners want to take pictures of a poor neighborhood?” the class asked. “Don’t they want to go to the Forbidden City? Are they laughing at us?”
The Last Days of Old Beijing:Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed -
The Last Days of Old BeijingLife in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed
Each of the lanes framed an area the size of a football field. The rows were unlit, save for the bare sodium bulbs illuminating the scale before every shack. Recyclers bought refuse from individuals in the city, then trucked it out here after dark to sell it at a markup. Profit came from volume. Recycler Wang paid one fen ($.0013) per twelve-ounce plastic mineral-water bottle in town and received 1.5 fen ($.0020) for it here. If he bought a thousand bottles for $1.30, he could sell them for $2. The earned $.70 was the equivalent of a little over five yuan, the cost of a bowl of noodles.
The Last Days of Old Beijing:Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed
“Nimbly told . . . Through his skillful weaving of his professional experiences with his intimate encounters with neighbors, The Last Days of Old Beijing is as much a chronicle of the physical transformation of the city as it is a tribute to the inhabitants of his beloved hutong." —The San Francisco Chronicle
“A haunting portrait of the interaction between change and changelessness in China . . . Meyer beautifully dissects the tensions between tradition and modernity in the minds of the Chinese people and examines the identity crisis that still persists, for Beijing, and for China.” —Slate [on The Last Days of Old Beijing]
“All in all, his record of the dying ways of a city is an impressive feat. And while the phenomenon may be most extreme there, it's not just Beijing's problem. In a way, we're all living on New Ancient Culture Street.” —The New York Times Book Review [on The Last Days of Old Beijing]
Selected Works
- Print Books
- Find your local bookstore (via IndieBound)
