But hold on, you might say. On our street, once called North Milton Avenue and renamed Longevity Way by our predecessors, who saw the nearly three-kilometer run of ruler-straight road and couldn’t help but think of wondrously extended, if not eternal, life, the main infractions are spitting or littering or publicly relieving oneself, most always perpetrated by the very old and very young and those who overindulge on nights before their free-day. There hasn’t been a property theft in recent memory, and a report of a serious crime, some mugging or assault, would likely halt all work and social activity immediately, for how exceedingly rare such a thing would be, like some solar eclipse.
So, yes, yes, you would be more than right. It’s been nearly a hundred years since our originals arrived and fifty plus since the final reconstruction and incorporation of what B-Mor is today, and for all that time we have kept up the community, curbstone by curbstone, brick by brick, we have not let our windows get dingy or our brass knobs spot, we are always after our children to pick up after themselves in the playgrounds, we have not allowed anyone to shirk his or her duties or to become lazy and dependent. B-Mor works because we work, our sense of purpose driving us that extra measure, that extra hour, and then, of course, the knowledge of what’s out in the counties and what it used to be like here before the originals landed refueling us whenever we flag.
We know very well how it was because it’s central to our schooling, a primary unit of our studies devoted to the history of B-Mor and the conditions that made it possible, and how B-Mor itself and other places patterned after it have in turn been stabilizing elements in this long-struggling land. There are times we need to remind everyone of those conditions, especially people like Fan’s boosters who even now would be so misguided as to believe they can follow her example and simply step outside the gates and embark on some journey that will write itself on our houses and walls, like the murals our originals found splashed all over the deserted neighborhoods. Those murals depicted scenes of children dancing in circles, of teams of smiling, joyously laboring adults, of never-setting suns whose rays illuminated only acts of kindness and sharing. For aren’t all such murals as bounteous in their hopes as in their scale? Aren’t they expressions of the grandest wishes, which by definition will never come true?
Now, from time to time, you’ll see freshly painted portraits of Fan and Reg on the side of a row house or fence, hastily done in the night and clearly by different hands, though the eyes of the pair are always rendered so as to look at you squarely, relentlessly, like Fan and Reg never would have in real life, for how shy they both were. Their eyes like beams. And even though it’s laughable, and the homeowner or some outraged neighbor immediately paints it over before anyone from the directorate can notice, they keep popping up regularly enough such that you are almost guessing where one will appear next. And if one doesn’t, maybe you begin to picture it yourself.
A legend can be made, it turns out, one crude stroke at a time.
But we should pause, for the moment, in the tale of Fan, and of her dear Reg, and of the several others who would figure into the consequences of these travails. We need to remind all boosters, agitators, wonderers, wishers, of what it was like here when the originals landed. What did they first see, before B-Mor was B-Mor?
Perhaps the most telling artifact is a picture that hangs prominently in our historical museum, right by the entrance. It’s an enlarged image of one of our characteristic row houses, dating to the very year of arrival. The image shows the front façade of the house, its two narrow first-floor windows and the stoop leading up to the front door. On first view it’s all trimmed up and neat, the brick face painted over in daffodil yellow, the sills in creamy white, the iron railing of the stoop a lean, rigorous black. The patch of sky in the upper corner reveals that it’s later in the day, a cloud tinged reddish on its wispy belly, the summing impression being that this is yet another fine day in the neighborhood, and you wonder why the curators would display such a picture when the museum is all about the pivotal role of B-Mor, so much so that you’re sure you’ve mistakenly read the date and that it’s an image of the present time. What you can easily miss — and many younger B-Mors do — is that there’s something odd about the second-story windows, which aren’t reflecting the warm hues of the cloud but instead shimmer with an icy white-blue, like the most exotic, fantastical marble; and then you gather that they are not windows at all but plywood sheets painted as such, quite wonderfully executed trompe l’oeil; and on further examination, you can see a slit where one of the plywood sheets has come loose at a corner, and you now realize that the reddish light glowing behind it is only possible to see because this house has no roof, because it is open to the sky.
Now, take this house, and the one next to it, and next to that, and you can see that even though they still have roofs, the continuous run of them on this block are similarly closed up with boards of wood and colorful paint. And as you move through the foyer of the museum into the cavernous main hall where there are banner-sized pictures that show other blocks like it in the same scale and then zoomed out, this block multiplied by scores, if not hundreds, you are struck by the fact that immense sections of this old harbor city are completely abandoned.
Everyone has left, though not for the same reasons our predecessors had to leave their small riverside town in New China. By the time they departed, Xixu City was made uninhabitable by the surrounding farms and factories and power plants and mining operations, the water fouled beyond all known methods of treatment. Although the population of the town was only 300,000, the cars and trucks and scooters and buses easily numbered a million, and so along with around-the-clock coal and rare-earth excavation, the air never had a chance to clear. Then one day the provincial government could not transport in any more fresh water — fresh water was shockingly scarce even in the major cities — and so the town was forced to cease. Those who can remember the tales of the old-timers report that in the heydays it was as if the entire valley and everything in it were slowly scorching, all the rubber and plastic and alloys, all of what little real wood remained, all the rotting food and garbage, the welling pools of human and animal wastes, such that in the end it was as though the people themselves were burning, as if from the inside, exuding this rank, throttled breath that foretold of a tortuous, lingering demise.
When our ancestors were first brought here — the archival vids and pix show them rolling in on fleets of shiny silver company buses — the air was to them fresh and clear, just like in the image of the roofless row house, and when they stepped out, they must have been entranced by the scant briny notes of the harbor waters, breathing them in deep. And think of how startled they might have been by the strange brand of tidiness in this place (once known as Baltimore) and other abandoned cities that settlers were sent to in other eastern and midwestern states, this preservation by dint of absence, such that after they gathered their luggage from the curb and were shuttled by carts to the houses assigned to them, our and your and Fan’s forebears among them, their gasps were not of trepidation or disappointment but of gratitude and relief.
Indeed, it’s difficult for us to understand how genuinely grateful they were; we glance around B-Mor now and it’s impossible to imagine how our people could have felt that way (how time and safety and a filled belly rapidly evolve us!), to be presented with so depleted a cityscape and still have a heart-surge of excitement. The legendary Wen Shurbao, who would be our first and only mayor, reportedly exhorted his brethren by invoking the classic proverb: “Our generation will plant the trees. The next will enjoy the shade.”