Ｔｈｅ　Ｒｏａｄ　ｆｒｏｍ　Ｃｏｍｍｕｎａｌ　ｔｏ　Ｏｗｎｅｄ　Ｈｏｕｓｉｎｇ.docVIP

Ｔｈｅ　Ｒｏａｄ　ｆｒｏｍ　Ｃｏｍｍｕｎａｌ　ｔｏ　Ｏｗｎｅｄ　Ｈｏｕｓｉｎｇ 　　 　　Homes in China have transitioned during the past sixty years from government-allocated to commercial housing. The change has brought immense improvements to people’s living conditions. 　　 　　Waiting for Welfare Housing 　　 　　The novel The Happy Life of Talkative Guy Zhang Damin by Liu Heng, an account of the real lives of everyday Beijing residents, won the Lao She Prize for Literature. The main character is Zhang Damin. He, his widowed mother and four siblings share a crowded quadrangle with several other families. Their living room is also their bedroom. In it are one double and one single bed, a desk, a folding table, a washstand and a few stools ?C the extent of the family furniture. The inner room is the width of a train sleeping compartment. 　　Residential conditions in the 1980s were often even worse than those depicted of the character Zhang Damin and his family. As China’s population skyrocketed after the 1950s, formerly one-household quadrangle houses were often occupied by dozens of families. Each lived in one room and all shared a toilet, courtyard and whatever other facilities existed. The common people of Shanghai lived in similarly poor conditions in shikumen or tenement housing. 　　Zhang Damin’s story describes how, after Zhang and his brother marry, everyday life in the 16 sq meter room deteriorates from being cramped to downright embarrassing. Zhang Damin has no choice but to build a room around the pomegranate tree in the small yard. He names his son shu which means tree in Chinese. 　　 　　The old saying, “a good neighbor is better than a brother in the next village,” defines the close bond among residents of neighborhoods composed of crowded quadrangles. But bonding does not always compensate for the absence of personal privacy under these conditions. 　　People sharing a quadrangle envied those living in the storied dwellings of the time. These basic tubular apartments were originally student and w