SWATHES of old Beijing neighborhoods no longer exist and some of the few remaining are renovated into touristy New Ancient Streets.

Since early last century and more recently to prepare for the 2008 Summer Olympics, Beijing has bulldozed many traditional neighborhoods of hutong (narrow lanes) and siheyuan (courtyard dwellings) to make way for modern transport, high-rises, skyscrapers, shopping malls and business streets.

American journalist and writer Michael Meyer, who describes himself as a "camera," spent three years living in a Beijing courtyard in Dazhalan area, observing its people, their daily lives and hearing their stories.

Today that neighborhood is gone.

Lying south of Tian'anmen Square, the hutong community compound is in one of the oldest (600 years) areas that were demolished for the 2008 Olympics. Today it has been "renovated" into a pedestrian street - called the New Ancient Culture Street - lined with renovated architecture, restaurants, cafes and shops selling century-old brands.

Meyer, who speaks Chinese, was a volunteer English teacher for the neighborhood primary school. The Minnesota native also befriended neighbors and landlords and talked with preservation activists, real estate developers and high-rise architects.

In 2008, he described his experience in "The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Backstreets of a City Transformed," describing the impact of urban development on the community and its way of life.

Published just in time for the Olympics, the book was well received and was reprinted in 2009. Meyer won the Whiting Writers Award that year.

Today the book is used in Western university courses on Chinese studies and history, urban planning anthropology and sociology.

"... his (Meyer's) record of the dying ways of a city is an impressive feat. And while the phenomenon may be extreme there, it's not just Beijing's problem. In a way, we're all living on New Ancient Culture Street," said The New York Times book review.

The book led to a job teaching documentary writing at Hong Kong University and Pittsburg University in the United States. Chinese-language editions came out in April on the mainland, in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Meyer was in Shanghai to promote the book in April.

Readers' response varies.

"Western readers are more interested in the characters. They want to know average Chinese people's life, what they like and don't like about their city changing," 41-year-old Meyer told Shanghai Daily in an interview. "Chinese readers care about what has been deleted in the Chinese version, while I'm more interested in the history."

He wouldn't be drawn into the controversy about the destruction of hutong and whether old neighborhoods should be torn down.

"Beijing people should get to decide what their city will look like. For me, my job is just being a camera. I want to record everything I could see," he said.

"I like to read Lao She ('Ricksha Boy,' 'Four Generation under On Roof'), and I like his way of looking at Beijing in the 1930s," he said. "I like to read Dickens and how he looks at London. In 100 years I want my reader of the future (to read my book) to find out, 'Oh, that's what Beijing looked like around the Olympics'."

Meyer is now back in the States finishing his second book, "In Manchuria: Life on a Rice Farm in China's Northeast." It will be published worldwide in English in early 2014, and in Chinese later that year.

The book is set in the Jilin Province village, known as Wasteland, where his Chinese-American wife nicknamed Gua Zi (literally meaning melon seeds in English) grew up. It combines living history and daily lives with important historical events that are never written about but which shaped "dongbei," or Northeast China, such as Emperor Kangxi's visit to the communes, Japanese and Russian invaders and aliens that landed (or so locals say).

"Different from my first book, this one will be more personal. Readers will see me in it," Meyer said.

Love at first sight

After working as a Peace Corps volunteer in a Sichuan mountain village for two years, Meyer, then 25 years old, went to Beijing in 1997 and immediately fell in love with the city. He liked to cycle to the old town inside today's Second Ring Road, exploring the maze of narrow hutong and discovering places that don't appear in guide books.

He remembers his favorite jiaozi (dumpling) restaurant and bookstore and the place where he and his wife-to-be often dated. During the city's reconstruction they disappeared.

"I asked the neighbors where they moved to, nobody knows," Meyer recalled.

In 2002, the Beijing Urban Planning Authority established 25 historical and cultural protection areas, covering more than 10 square kilometers, around 17 percent of the old town area. Together with the imperial palace and the royal gardens, 38 percent of the old Beijing city was to be preserved. The rest was torn down and residents relocated.

"There's not a single book explaining the destruction, so I decided to write my own book," Meyer said.

He quoted French architect Le Corbusier criticizing activists in Paris who lamented demolition of "rotten old houses full of tuberculosis and demoralizing."

"These lovers of the past ... live in a new building with lifts or in some wonderful little house hidden deep in a garden," Meyer quoted Le Corbusier as saying.

Meyer said that the most strident hutong defenders he had met were historians and tourists. "Neither lived in the lanes themselves, and both were drawn to the tangible architecture and its details, including beautiful old wrought-iron-work," he wrote in the book.

"Le Corbusier's complaint sounded like a challenge."

Social network

In 2005 Meyer moved into a courtyard in Yangmeizhu (Red Bayberry and Bamboo) Crooked Street in Dazhalan, nestled outside the Zhengyang Gate, or Qianmen, the front gate of the old Beijing city. It was a maze of 114 hutong, some narrow, some crooked, some with dead ends due to grassroots planning. It covered 1 square kilometer and housed 57,000 inhabitants.

"I imagined it would be a nice courtyard where I could enjoy the cool and have a cup of tea in the shade of a giant persimmon tree," Meyer said. "But it turned out to be a dazayuan (tenement yard)."

The house had no air-conditioning, bathroom or privacy. He had to burn charcoal to keep warm in the winter; the public men's toilet was a five-minute walk from the house. His neighbors called him "the great landlord" because he rented two rooms in the courtyard, costing 500 yuan (US$81 today) a month.

"At first I was afraid of demolition and the next year I was hoping it would be demolished," Meyer said. Residents refused to spend money on improvements because they didn't own the property. Some didn't want to have a child because their room had no heat. Seniors were afraid of getting sick because the lanes were too narrow for an ambulance to enter.

"But it's definitely not a slum. It's a working-class community that ensures the residents the basic living standards," he observed, adding that he first wanted to write about cultural heritage protection but became more interested in daily life.

"The best part of living in a hutong is the dense social network, the humanness. People know each other and look out for each other. The density of trees makes the hutong a sea of green. My students can name every tree."

Another value of hutong, Meyer argues, is tolerance. "It's a melting pot that provides non-locals affordable housing, letting them settle down and become Beijingers."

Still, he said the demolition issue isn't simply black or white. Most young people look forward to seeing the character "2e" (demolish) written by an invisible "hand" in white chalk on their outside walls when they wake up. Their elders are unwilling to be relocated to high-rise apartments, however, calling the old courtyard jiediqi - down to earth. The Widow, from whom Meyer sublet, had always wanted to come back to the hutong, he said. The granddaughter has cut off her connection with Meyer lest she become too homesick.

Veteran Liu, a Shaanxi native, ran a noodle shop in the hutong after his discharge from the army, but he was forced out and returned to his hometown after the hutong was demolished. He couldn't even get compensation since he wasn't the householder, but he returned to Beijing and reopened his restaurant in a new location a year later.

In addition to chronicling the life in the hutong, Meyer got to know real estate developers and old house defenders and activists. They include writer Feng Jicai who canvassed to save the old street in Tianjin, and Taiwan professor Hsia Chu-joe who argued for protection of the Taipei villages where people from the mainland fled in 1949.

"In order to protect and renovate the hutong, while maintaining the dense social network and sense of community, Beijing will need to create an entirely new model of reconciliation over usage and ownership rights," Meyer said.

"It may seem daunting, but China has built a train to Lhasa when the world said it could not, and the Three Gorges Dam when the world said it could not. China can show the world novel solutions to problems that global capitals are facing, including affordable housing and the preservation of tangible and intangible cultural heritage," he said.

After graduating from the University of Wisconsin at Madison with a major in English and education, Meyer joined the Peace Corps and hoped to use his Spanish-language skills in Latin America.

He was offered Russia, Afghanistan and Mongolia, and China was the seventh country he was offered. In 1995, he signed up to teach English in a vocational school in Neijiang, a river town in Sichuan Province.

He called the two years in Neijiang "a happy experience."

"It prepared me to do this book in Beijing because I had to live by myself. I had to be the only foreigner in the neighborhood and I had to know how to make friends rather quickly. And I had to know to have a sense of humor and be patient," he said.

Meyer had a lot of time by himself when he read widely in the school's library, including all of Shakespeare's plays and lots of Dickens. That taught him about writing structure, characters and setting.

Over the past decade, Meyer has contributed articles to newspapers and magazines. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship and residencies at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center.

He calls himself the "world's worst journalist," adding that he didn't like bothering strangers, making phone calls and talking on the phone. "In most interviews, reporters are like vampires, taking a bite and going. They don't manufacture knowledge," he said.

"I prefer to be a vampire without teeth, so I can eat slowly and look at the things in a long-term view."

He plans to write about three very different places in China, as did author Peter Hessler, his friend and former Peace Corps who also taught English in Sichuan. With Meyer's first two stops in Beijing and Jilin, the last will be Shenzhen in Guangdong Province and the Hong Kong border area, or maybe Taiwan.