A Back Alley in Nanning: A Palimpsest of Quiet Survival

Here in this back alley of Nanning, the grid does not bend or twist in Camillo Sitte’s old sense of surprise — no medieval corners springing a secret square into view — yet the surprise is here all the same, hidden in how the mundane drifts through a straight line of brick, tarpaulin, and steam.

Scooters stand nose-to-tail like patient animals. Beside them, transportation bikes lean into the old plaster walls, waiting to ferry boxes of eggs or cheap plastic stools. Near the food stall, an elderly woman stirs a pot of braised pork and glutinous rice, under a humble sign: 梁阿婆 — Grandma Liang. Her stall is a living promise that a warm, honest meal can hold the day steady.

On the wall: painted murals of children, stylized scenes recalling the good old days — women at the hairdresser’s, faces lifted into steam, soft towels draped — the ancient art of 梳妆 (Shū Zhuāng): the careful ritual of arranging hair and tending the face, an everyday poetry of dignity handed down across generations.

A folding table and scattered stools become a makeshift food street, then vanish at dusk. Beside it, piles of second-hand furniture or potted plants crouch against the wall — someone’s warehouse without a door, someone’s first stake in the city’s small economy. Christopher Alexander would smile here: this is the backstreet at work — living tissue in the city’s grid where the humble can make do, start small, and survive together.

On the wall, moral slogans hang like gentle nails against the drift of modern temptation:
“邻里守望” — “Neighbours Watch Over Each Other.”
“树清廉家风，创最美家庭” — “Cultivate an Honest Family Tradition, Build the Most Beautiful Home.”
A thousand-year ideal pinned to old bricks, reminding those who pass: Don’t trade virtue for neon. Don’t sell your soul to the flicker of a screen.

One can imagine this lane through the eyes of Pablo Picasso, drifting back to his Blue Period — but here the blue is not Parisian melancholy alone; it is the soft dusk of steam rising from 梁阿婆’s pot. No Edouard Manet’s bold provocation of “Luncheon on the Grass” declaring modern liberation in broad daylight — but rather a quiet, dignified meal at dusk, in a back alley where a stool and a bowl mean survival, not spectacle.

One might catch the ghost of Paul Cézanne too — not his still-lifes alone but the earthy swirl of figures, like his “The Large Bathers,” bodies gathered in a humble clearing. Here, the dancers are invisible but present: neighbors, patrons, stall owners circling each other in daily choreography — the small ballet of give and take, sit and eat, gossip and sweep.

Somewhere in this steam flickers the spirit of Epictetus, the Stoic slave who taught emperors the freedom of the inner citadel. He would stand here and nod: Freedom is not the absence of hardship but mastery of the self. The woman clutching her plastic bag of rice, the man wiping dust from his scooter’s seat, the boy stacking stools at dusk — they own little yet lose nothing of themselves.

Against this humble philosophy rises the grim caution of John B. Calhoun — his behavioral sink, his rat utopia experiment where endless abundance and no structure bred ruin. Here, the alley whispers the opposite: Live simply. Sit on a plastic stool. Share a pot of rice. Sweep your stoop. Watch your neighbor’s back. Civilization’s decay is not inevitable — not if it keeps its backstreets alive.

A Back Alley of Possibility

So this straight, uncurving lane is no dead end but a gentle threshold:

A place for scooters to rest under tarpaulin shadows.

A salon of old beautification painted on a flaking wall.

A humble canteen where 梁阿婆’s braised pork keeps virtue warm in the stomach.

A reminder that civilization is not neon alone but a slow braid of borrowed bricks, repainted signs, and whispered ideals that refuse to vanish.

A quiet stage for the Blue Period of the everyday.
A backstreet Cézanne might dream — bodies drifting in soft daily dance.
A humble nod to Epictetus — a reminder that the Stoic good life is not far away but here, on a cheap plastic stool at dusk, steam rising in the hush of a lane that has seen dynasties come and go.

So long as there is 梁阿婆. So long as rice steams in a borrowed pot. So long as the neighbor watches the neighbor, as virtue sticks to the wall alongside painted memories — this lane breathes.

In this grid there is surprise. In this backstreet there is life. In this hush, there is truth.
And perhaps that is civilization enough.

Traces of the Lane: Brahma’s Peel, Derrida’s Pearl

 

I stand here on 清平路 — Qingping, “clear and peaceful” — though the name feels more like a wish than a fact. The alley is soft with the hush of old walls, the drone of wires overhead, the smell of dried roots and sweet sugar pearls drifting out from 陈基二号, Chen Ji No. 2, all these tiny stalls stitched into the city’s circulatory system.

The two old men hold this street in place. One walking out, half turned from me — the other pivoting back, caught at the threshold of his stall, his glance a backward echo. Between them drifts a time so dense it almost stands still: 靓绵茵珠 shimmering faintly in its plastic bag, 观音蔗珠 sweetening the air, 夏枯草 withered but potent — all these dried words promising life extended, softened, bought back in ounces and grams.

And yet, they walk through it like ghosts of themselves — or ghosts of the street — or ghosts of my seeing. This is Nietzsche’s soft snarl at the back of my mind: the Eternal Recurrence. A man walks this lane. He sells herbs, counts coins, locks the shutter. Tomorrow he walks it again. And again. No final exit. The cycle curls back on itself. The shop’s sign rots and is replaced. The fungus grows on a caterpillar in a high valley, dries, powders, is spooned into boiling water. The old man drinks it, coughs less, lives longer — but only long enough to circle back to the same lane, the same door.

Here too, a Hindu murmur: Brahma births, Vishnu sustains, Shiva devours. Creation, maintenance, dissolution. A dried peel of tangerine sold for small change is the shape of that cosmic loop in miniature. The peel that once was sweet flesh is now cure. Sweetness gone — bitterness preserved — a memory turned medicine.

And if time is the clearing, as Heidegger said — or the deferred trace, as Derrida would correct him — then these two men are not just here now but always here: young once, maybe slipping through this same lane with coins in their pockets, eyes clear, backs straight, seeing their own fathers standing at these same thresholds. They walk through a street that remembers more than they do. They walk through a memory dissolving at the edges like old rice paper — presence that is already absence, now that is already once.

Presence is never fully here — Derrida’s ghostly grin reminds me. It is always deferred, always a trace, always haunted by what is not said, not seen. 靓绵茵珠, 观音蔗珠, 夏枯草 — all these names are signifiers dangling from hooks, signs promising sweetness, softness, cure. But the cure is not the cure. The sign is not the thing. The street is not the street.

What remains is a drift — two old men, circling each other like Brahma and Shiva, birth and decay mirrored in every slow step. 清平路 promises clear and peaceful — but clarity is confusion folded into stillness, and peace is only the hush that covers up the constant hum of becoming and unbecoming.

Perhaps they do not remember being young here. Perhaps memory has faded to a blur — a faint taste of bread they can no longer chew, a sweetness on the tongue that might be 蔗珠 or just the ghost of it. Perhaps the past and future slip over each other like layers of cellophane — translucent, sticky, impossible to pull apart.

I stand in the middle of this thought — half presence, half absence — Derrida’s différance whispering through the wires overhead. Meaning slides sideways; the sign drifts from the stall; the men slip from frame to frame.

Maybe this is all we have: this narrow lane, this slow drift, this old pair of feet scuffing stone that was once new, now cracked, someday dust. A loop that refuses exit.

Somewhere a butterfly lifts off from Zhuangzi’s dreaming head — its wings brushing past Nietzsche’s circle, Heidegger’s clearing, Derrida’s trace — and the two old men walk on, soft echoes of each other, circling a street that remembers them more perfectly than they remember themselves.

And I stand here, quiet witness, sign and signifier dissolving in my mouth, tasting the faint sweetness of a sugar pearl that was never really there.

Daily Bread and fading time

 I stand here oberving — the bakery sign hanging quiet over an old Guangzhou street, wires looping overhead like the tangled veins of thought. An elderly woman steps forward alone, folding herself into the narrow corridor of buildings and years.

Daily Bread. 美日面包店.

Once, these words promised warmth — fresh loaves, soft crumb, the hush of dawn broken by the smell of flour rising into life. Now, at sixty-one, bread has become an echo in my mouth. Gluten-free — a small, unassuming boundary between what once nourished me and what my body now refuses. A subtle gate I carry within.

She walks away from me — or perhaps I am walking with her — empty hands, slow steps. She carries no bag, no bread, only the certainty that she is still moving. That is enough.

Heidegger reminds me: Being is never separate from Time. We do not stand outside it — we dwell within its clearing, die Lichtung, where everything comes into presence, if only for a breath. Time does not flow like a river outside of me — it wells up through my days, seeps through my bones, drifts in these wires overhead. It hums in the cracked facades, the bakery shutters, the tired bricks that remember more than they tell.

To be — to truly be — is not to hold onto time but to let it pass through me, to dwell in it, to lean into its openness. Time is not what ages me; it is the hidden depth that makes each step real.

Giedion murmurs that architecture is never still — that these streets are not only stone and wood, but folds of space-time, human intention hardened and softened by years. This lane is a map of people and days — yesterday’s loaves, today’s emptiness, tomorrow’s silence when the ovens go cold and the sign fades into memory.

But then Zhuangzi drifts in — light as a butterfly’s wing. He dissolves my seriousness with a question: Am I the dreamer, or the dreamed? Is this old woman crossing the street my thought, or am I hers? Is bread real, or just hunger dreaming of shape? Is time mine, or am I the fleeting shape time wears for a while?

Mystery upon mystery — the gateway to all that cannot be named.
I stand here, sixty-one years worn and lighter for it. Bread gone, but hunger still intact — not for crust, but for breath, for drift, for what waits down this narrow street.

The bakery’s promise is behind me now. Ahead, the wires hum, binding old buildings and the pulse of this street to the clearing that is my life. I walk on, empty-handed, carried forward by the open secret Heidegger left behind: that time is not a cage but the quiet clearing where Being steps forward to greet me, then drifts away like a street in Guangzhou at dawn.

The bread is gone. The street remains. I keep walking.

Where Nothingness waits in metal bars

 

When I look at this image — this kitten behind thin, cold metal bars, perched in its little plastic box against the muted, almost desolate backdrop of old buildings and empty street — something tightens in my chest.

I remember standing there that early morning in Guangzhou, the air still clinging to the hush of dawn. There was no bustle yet, just the faint echo of footsteps and distant voices. And there, in the middle of this sleeping street market, was this small life caged — soft fur, wide eyes — a fragile heartbeat in a steel enclosure.

I thought of Nietzsche then — the will to power, the weight of freedom, the burden of choice. Is this creature’s spirit shackled by these bars, or is it my own mind that sees the cage more than the kitten does? Does it know it’s captive? Or does it dream beyond these grids, beyond the cold wire?

Then Laozi came to me — the Dao De Jing whispering its lessons of emptiness and non-striving. The street was empty; the kitten’s stare was full. The emptiness was not absence but potential. The bars defined the space but could not enclose the vastness of what is not said — the ten thousand things returning to the uncarved block. Maybe freedom is not the open street beyond, but a stillness inside this tiny being, so untouched, so perfectly wu wei.

But it was Zhuangzi who stayed with me longest. His words of drifting with the wind, of refusing golden cages. I remembered the parable of the sacred bird, so exquisite that kings offered palaces for it, but Zhuangzi turned them away: better to let the bird live among the clouds and trees than gild it in luxury and watch its soul wither.

This kitten — this gentle prisoner — made me wonder: where do I stand in this moment? Am I the bird in the cage, gilded by comforts yet bound? Am I the iron bars, defining the limits of others? Or am I the empty street — a space where anything can happen, where freedom and nothingness merge?

In that early morning, I felt the ache of existence: a soft creature confined, the whole city sprawling behind it, blurred, indifferent. It is not only the kitten’s cage I see — it is the invisible cages I carry within me.

Perhaps all that remains is this: to look, to feel, to know that behind every bar is an entire sky waiting to be remembered. To stand before a caged kitten and find my own longing for wild flight, for uncarved spaces, for drifting freely like Zhuangzi’s butterfly — dreaming of life that cannot be pinned down.