A Beijinger Story: Neighbors in the Hutong

Editor's note: After reading a Facebook post from Carl Setzer describing a critically-ill friend and neighbor, we asked Carl to share one or two stories about him with the Beijinger. Here's what he wrote.

I met Li Baoshan (李寶山) the first time at around midnight on a Saturday in the spring of 2011. Long term Beijingers might remember that being around the same time that you may or may not get a bottle, rock or roofing tile thrown at you if you ventured into Doujiao Hutong for some brews. I didn’t know what to do. Liu Fang didn’t know what to do. We were just trying to brew beer. We didn’t know that Beijing on a whole was going to react to our concept with such positivity. We had no idea that Hutong neighbors could be such a pain in the ass.

The best thing I could come up with was to stand outside and make sure customers didn’t make too much noise and maybe catch a glimpse of who was tossing the objects; naiveté at its best. Li walked up to me smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. He stood next to me and said nothing. I tried to ignore him and just focus on removing empty glasses from car hoods and asking customers to leave quietly and not disturb anyone on their way out. Finally he leaned over to me and said, “Business isn’t easy, especially when business is good.” I laughed and said, “Of course, but messy business shouldn’t be confused with good business.”

He offered me a cigarette and I politely refused. I offered him a beer and he said he quit drinking when he quit driving a taxi. I laughed. He smiled and yelled at his dog and watched me run around and try to make order out of chaos. We were a young business that had no idea what we were doing and Li found that to be amusing. The rocks stopped getting thrown and Lao Li became a fixture in our lives. He and his wife babysat our son, entertained our friends in their home, and made us part of the community. He didn’t have to do that. It seems that no one ever does that here.

I have 1,000 stories about Lao Li that hopefully I’ll get to tell someday. But right now my friend is dying. He decided to leave the world on his own terms. When diagnosed with terminal lung cancer he told no one and continued to smoke his cigarettes and crack his jokes. He didn’t want to spend his last months on this planet being pitied. He wanted to remember his friends the way they always treated him and he wanted to be remembered the way he had always lived; on his own terms.

Li Baoshan passed away Wednesday night in his sleep.