Stories under a Golden Rain Tree: The Beating Heart of a Courtyard Community

During the 1960s, children huddled together under a gigantic golden rain tree in a courtyard in Tianjin, a northern city in China for days and years on end, listening to an “aunt” or “uncle” telling stories of the bygone years. Such is the memory, individually and collectively, of a generation of children growing up in a courtyard culture. The flawed and selective nature of memories aside, this “picture” nonetheless portrays a life that is seemingly remote yet meaningfully present in Chinese history. This paper is intended to provide an analytical narrative of the courtyard culture during a pivotal period in Chinese history when “ghost” stories were told to mitigate the trauma of the Cultural Revolution and when women took care of one another’s children so that they would devote to their work in the factories, elementary schools, hospitals, and neighborhood committees, when outside dinner tables during the summer months attracted young children who became stuffed by the time they circled back to their own family’s table, and when neighbors fought over “invaded territories” due to the unimaginably limited public space. More than anything else, this paper depicts the lives of commoners with their inherent mundaneness and drama amid a momentous and nationwide political and social movement.