Time: 11:22AM September 16th, 2012
Place: Front Garden Alley
Person: Uncle Tian
A massive German Shepard barks down at us as we rest in front of Big Sister Bian’s vegetable shop. An oddly-matched pair of armchairs have been placed next to bins of chicken and duck eggs for sale. With David in the deepseated wooden chair and Candy in the floral cushioned one, we ask for help taking our photo. The vege market bubbles with interest as we hand the camera over to a resident who has difficulty aiming the lens and finding the correct button.
Uncle Tian pokes his head out from the courtyard to check the commotion, and one of the onlookers calls him over with a laughing smile to assist with the photograph. He handles the DSLR camera with confidence and asks us to smile.
The buildings on either side of the small alleyway belong to him including the storefront from which Big Sister Bian sells her produce. He cracks some jokes with some of neighbors and Big Sister Bian and then invites us into one his courtyard where he has been tending to his songbirds.
“This is a Thai bird. Have you seen this before?” Uncle Tian points to one of the many wooden bird cages hanging from a fruit tree in his courtyard. “I hang them outside each morning and put them back at night.”
After looking at the songbirds, we are taken up to Uncle Tian’s building across the street where we meet the dog who incessantly barks at any passerby he sees from his second story lookout above Front Garden Alley. Uncle Tian used to work in the military but is now retired and seems to have a great deal of spare time to take care of his pets.
“These I make for the dog to eat,” he explains showing us his homemade, hamburger-sized patties of vegetables and raw meat. Across from the barking dog is a room-sized wire coop where Uncle Tian keeps 60 pigeons. Unlatching the door, he walks into the coop and shoos a flutter of pigeons out.
“In 2006, my pigeon was the second to reach Beijing [from Henan Province]” Uncle Tian boasts. He raises pigeons to compete in competitions where he and others from the hutong will drops their pigeons off in a far-off location and track them on his computer to see whose pigeon returns to Beijing to first. In 2006, his pigeon was the second out of 2,000 pigeons.
Each day Uncle Tian’s pigeons circle above the hutong and his two armchairs outside of the vegetable market. With the same regularity, the hutong’s residents come to sit in the deep wooden chair and floral-cushioned chair and chat with the neighbors before heading home with bags of produce for that night’s dinner.
