House with a Suicide

I'm in the process of moving out of my hutong apartment of five years. I have many memories associated with this place that are hard to pack into boxes, so I'll put some of them here.

House with a Suicide

A house where a murder occurred is called a xiongzhai.
A house with a suicide, shazhai.
No Taoist priest was called to expel — dazhai — the unhappy dead
from my shazhai, what any good relative would have done, really.
That’s why it can’t be sold, says a neighborhood woman
wandering by, who’s been around the block long enough
to know what a courtyard is worth. That three-room
apartment yonder was swapped for three pastries
in fifty-nine.
                        Way before then, by a half-decade or more,
my house was the library of a Republican-Era intellectual.
Baidu Maps still identifies it as that, but what it doesn’t know
is when half of it was lost by a landlord in a bad wager. 1983,
says the neighbor — before it found its way to an Australian
who didn’t care for ghosts, then a German who leased it to me.

It was just sold, I tell the woman. Nine million yuan.
Absurd, she snorts. She hanged herself while her grandkids lived there.
These courtyards weren’t carved up like today. One family, one yard,
that’s how it used to be. That there, she points,
belonged to this here. It’s where they kept their horses.
I shake my head. So much change I only hear about,
which she keeps in her bones like a direction for home.
I turn to go in, and say, as a throwaway, “Beijing 
has too many people.”
                        ​The woman laughs.
She leads her dog up our alley — Beigouyan, 
Along the North Ditch — that’s seen generations 
of fortunes get lost and made. Back turned, she laughs again
as if remembering a joke that, for the life of me, 
I’ll never understand.