#ugo capuzzo

[boricuacherry-blog]

Edward Theodore Chalmers Werner, or ETC Werner, and his daughter Pamela lived in a traditional Chinese courtyard house on a hutong in Peking's Tartar City, just outside the Legation Quarter. Their daily routine appeared comfortable and privileged, based more around English than Chinese traditions even though Werner, a widower, had chosen to avoid the overtly European world of the Legation Quarter.

In a city with plenty of old China hands, Werner was perhaps the most notable, having lived and worked in China since the 1880s. As a scholar and a former British consul, his life story was well known. His books were widely read and translated, his complex but highly regarded lectures to the Royal Asiatic Society and the Things Chinese Society were well attended. He wrote articles on Chinese culture, tradition and history for the local newspapers, and his experience and learning might have made him a much sought after dinner guest. However he rarely, if ever, accepted, preferring a solitary and scholarly life.

These days Werner had a post at Peking University, where he lectured occasionally, and he also sat as the only foreigner on the Chinese government's Historiographical Bureau. But mainly he worked from home, at his house at 1 Armour Factory Alley, in the shadow of the Fox Tower. His home was separated by the Fox Tower by only an old canal and its population of noisy ducks. Once part of China's Grand Canal, it was now too silted up to allow the grain barges to transit, and had become a fetid rubbish dump.

Armour Factory Alley, known as Kuei Chia Chang by the Chinese, was close to the old imperial examination halls and a number of papermaking factories, small family businesses that had given the warren of lanes squeezed under the Tartar Wall the name of the Papermakers' District. During the day it witnessed a constant procession, beginning with bird fanciers strolling with their covered cages, street hawkers calling out their services, people coming and going by rickshaw and late-night snack sellers.

There were an influx of foreigners who couldn't afford to live in the Legation Quarter, such as the White Russians who'd fled the Soviet Union and European Jews escaping persecution in Nazi Germany.

Though the bulk of these exiles headed for Shanghai, Peking was also seeing their numbers rise, and many were semi-destitute, forced to live in run-down lodging houses in the sprawling, often malodorous Tartar City, or around the fringes of the Badlands. They found work as doormen, barmen, croupiers, prostitutes and pimps, or survived by begging.

Armour Factory Alley, although in the Tartar City, was no place for poor foreigners. Grey courtyard residences, or siheyuan, sat behind ornate gates along both sides of the alley. Werner's house was built on a traditional north-south axis with a raised step at the entrance to ward off ghosts. In the courtyard a century-old wisteria climbed the walls, and an ancient poplar tree stood amidst a small rockery. Werner rented the house from its Chinese owner, and although old it had been fitted out with electric lights, a palatial bathroom, steam heating and glass in the windows instead of paper.

The household had a cook, a housemaid who'd been Pamela's amah when she was younger, and Werner's number-one boy - a term used in the world of foreigners in China - who was actually a man in his forties. He'd been Werner's valet for many years and was the chief male servant in the household. There was also a gatekeeper who ensured the security and upkeep of the property, and he too had been with the family a long time. Except for the cook, all the staff lived on the premises.

Werner loved the sprawling Tartar City and would regularly take long, invigorating walks through its hive of narrow hutong. This was an area of one-story shacks, street markets with ramshackle restaurants, open-air butchers and hawkers. Winter in the Tartar City was the time for roasted chestnuts, cooked in brazier that were pungently fueled by charcoal or animal dung, as well as noodles and spiced bean curd, cut into squares and fried for dumplings. There were bathhouses, fortune-tellers, professional letter writers scribbling for the illiterate, pavement barbers who cut hair before an audience, impromptu Peking opera singers, child acrobats and bearded magicians. A few cars fought their way between clusters of rickshaws, and when it rained, the rutted roads were ankle-deep in mud.

As a scholar, Werner wanted to observe as much of Peking's street life and traditions as possible, and being a skilled linguist, he was keen to engage people in conversation. In winter he would wrap up in a long gabardine coat he had used on research expeditions to Mongolia. He attracted attention - an elderly but straight-backed white man, invariably wearing specially made wraparound dark glasses of his own design to protect his eyes from Peking's dust storms.

Aside from his scholarly work, his main concern was his daughter Pamela. She had been an orphan, abandoned at birth by an unknown mother and adopted by Werner and his English wife, Gladys Nina.

They adopted Pamela from the Catholic-run orphanage at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin. Here the nuns took in the unwanted babies of Peking's indigant foreigners, mostly White Russians. In those years of turmoil, as the White Russians fled the Bolshevik revolution, traveling across the steppes of Siberia and down into Harbin, Tientsin, Peking and Shanghai, the orphanages became crowded with discarded white babies. For the mothers, their money gone, their husbands and brothers still in Russia fighting in the White Army, babies were an encumbrance or a mortifying embarrassment.

What was it about that one baby girl, among so many, that led the Werners to choose her? Perhaps Gladys Nina stared into her grey eyes and the decision was instant. Grey eyes, more so than any other color perhaps, seems to look deep into you. Whatever the reason, the Werners took her home and named her Pamela - Greek for honey and all things sweet. They did not know her birth mother, her birthday or her exact age, since the nuns had not known either. The date of birth listed on the passport issues to her by the British Legation was February 7, 1917.

But before Pamela could really get to know her adoptive mother, Gladys would die, leaving Werner to raise his daughter alone. Pamela's very distinctive eyes would continue to catch attention. There was an unusual grayness of her iris, and she had light straw colored hair. As she grew up, Pamela never kept her adoption a secret. When people commented on her eyes, or questioned her about her heritage, she would say she supposed her birth mother was Russian, as grey eyes were most commonly found in Russians. People who knew Pamela always commented on her independence; how she was able to take care of herself when her father left on long research trips, her excellent Chinese language skills, the fact that she seemingly had no really close friends. In a tight-knit, often socially incestuous small foreign community, Pamela's independent, self-contained character marked her as somewhat different from the run-of-the-mill foreign girl in Peking.

While she'd grown up outside the Legation Quarter, first in a house on San Tiao Hutong in the Ch'ienmen district and then on Armour Factory Alley, she enjoyed the Quarter's skating rinks and hotel tea dances. The young men who knew her described her as gay and fun, always laughing and dancing. She also spoke fluent Mandarin, and moved more comfortably and more frequently in Chinese society than did most of her white contemporaries. She regularly visited the teeming food market of Soochow Hutong and ate at the cheap Chinese restaurants patronized by Chinese university students near her home.

Pamela had become that rare thing among the city's foreign community - a white girl who enjoyed both the European lifestyle of the Quarter and the life of Chinese Peking. Her ease in conversing and interest in China's culture, no doubt fuelled by her father's work, meant that she tended to roam widely across Peking on her bicycle, exploring parts of the city other foreign girls never ventured into.

Much as she was independent, and appeared to be largely content with her own company like her father, she had been a problem at school. At the first school, the Convent of the White Franciscans, she was rebellious, answering back and infuriating her teachers. Then she'd gone to the French School, where she was asked to leave, after which she was refused admittance to the American School. Pamela was intelligent though. She took exams for a scholarship to the Peking Methodist School and won a place, but there too because of her rebellious spirit, her father was asked to remove her.

Finally, in 1934, unable to control his daughter, who was then fifteen, and at his wits' end, Werner sent her off to board at a grammar school in Tientsin. She would be a boarder. Tientsin Grammar was a little slice of England in warlord-wracked, Japanese-threatened northern China. It was run on strict English public school lines and was known for its discipline. Those who knew Pamela, though, gave her some latitude. After all, she was an only child with no mother and an elderly father who left her alone in Peking for long periods while he went off on expeditions, looking for the lost burial tomb of Genghis Khan in Mongolia or pursuing rare artifacts in the wilds of Muslim western China. It was hardly surprising that she was a little wild.

Pamela's new friends in Tientsin were unaware she had been thrown out of schools in Peking. They knew her only as a plain, quiet girl and a keen sportswoman who was in the school hockey and netball team. She would also have a boyfriend at the school. And it was true that Pamela had been turning over a new leaf, trying to behave and stay out of trouble. When the term was finished, Pamela would go to stay at her father's house, and celebrate the Christmas holidays.

That day, on a cold January morning, Pamela was sitting at a desk by the window, writing letters. She told her father she was going out shortly to meet an old school friend; they were taking tea together and then going ice-skating at the rink, barely a mile away and in the safety of the Legation Quarter. She would be back by 7:30, in time to have dinner with her father, who was a worrier. So after her father had gone on his daily walk and she had finished writing her letters, Pamela donned her heavy overcoat and woolen mittens and pushed her straw-fair hair up into a beret. She took her iceskates and her bicycle.

She went and had tea at Ethel Gurevitch's house. Ethel was from a White Russian family who'd been living in Peking for five years. At fifteen, she was younger than Pamela, but the two had gone to the same school, until Werner enrolled his daughter at Tientsin Grammar. The girls had run into each other the day before at the skating rink, where they caught up on news about school, their lives and mutual friends, agreeing to meet again the following afternoon. Around six o'clock, the girls headed over to the rink. A mutual friend, another White Russian girl who'd been at school with Pamela, named Lilian Marinovski, was there too. At seven o'clock, Pamela said she had to go home. She told Ethel and Lilian she'd promised her father she would be back by half past seven. It had been long dark by seven, and it was freezing, with a bone-chilling wind through the blacked-out streets at the edge of the Quarter. The girls stood around the coal brazier that had been set up by the rink. 'But aren't you afraid to ride home alone?' Ethel asked, while Lilian wanted to know if she was scared of the dark. They both lived nearby, within the Quarter, and were staying out later than normal on account of it being Russian Christmas, but Pamela would have to ride a mile or so outside the Quarter to Armour Factory Alley, skirting the notorious Badlands by riding along the Tartar Wall. Then she'd be pedaling through the Tartar City in the dark, down unlit hutong, with not even moonlight to help. From the Tartar City, looking back into the Legation Quarter, the only landmarks at night were the spindly spires of St. Michael's Church, the lights in the upper windows of the Wagons Lits and the Hotel du Nord, and the black frame of the radio tower at the American Legation. 'I've been alone all my life,' she replied, 'I'm afraid of nothing! And besides, Peking is the safest city in the world.' And with that, her friends waved goodbye as she disappeared into that bitter January night.

Peking was a city that retired early. In the winter of January, the streets of Tartar City were virtually deserted by nine, the shops shut, the street hawkers gone, and most sensible people home in bed. Outside the Legation Quarter, streetlights were infrequent, motorized taxis and rickshaws rare. Only the hardiest and most financially needy of the pullers were willing to ferry the night owls home from the bars and nightclubs, and the dens of the Badlands. Peking was populous, but it was not a nighttime city to rival Shanghai. It was more conservative, reserved. Apart from the Badlands.

The Badlands was a network of twisting hutong devoted to sin and vice. This part of Peking was sleepy and calm during daylight hours, but at night it grew raucous with those seeking illicit pleasures. Anything was available in the Badlands, at a price. It used to be a buffer zone before the fall of the Qing dynasty, where attackers would be forced to expose themselves. Back then it was a no-man's-land between Chinese and foreign Peking. Since then, it had become developed, yet it still retained its no-man's-land feel, neither completely Chinese nor completely foreign, although technically it was under the jurisdiction of the Peking police. Into this vacuum moved the dive bars, brothels and nightclubs, the gambling and drug dens, most of them run by stateless White Russians or, increasingly, Koreans acting as fronts for the Japanese. Effectively beyond the law, it had become the playground of the foreign underworld of Peking. The stiff-backed authorities of the Legation Quarter ignored the sin on their doorstep, and the Peking police turned up only to receive their 'gifts' from the various criminal elements. Along with low-life Chinese and foreigners, it drew curious visitors, and played host to the U.S. Marines, British, French and Italian soldiers who guarded the nearby legations. Its rookeries of vice catered to all tastes, no matter how exotic or depraved.

The Badlands felt impermanent, hastily thrown together, with buildings that had been knocked up from rough wood or cheap brick, then slathered inside with plaster to make them appear more robust than they were. Inferior lodging houses clustered on the fringes, with rooms to rent for incognito assignations. There was rotgut and hooch in the flophouses for the destitute, which were home to Peking's foreign driftwood - men and women who'd come about as far as possible to escape something they mostly kept to themselves. On the streets were Chinese beggars with suppurating sores, missing limbs, milky eyes, and goiters protruding from their necks. White Russian down-and-outs with straggly beards and frayed tsarist uniforms wandered aimlessly. The Badlands' flourishing trade in flesh, narcotics , and sleaze, wrapped up in desperate poverty, was the end of the road for many. The heart of the Badlands was Chuanpan Hutong, a winding street of jerry-built structures, fetid and dank lodging houses for the transient, and all-night restaurants where pimps met their girls. Those too old, ugly or strung out to work in the brothels walked the street, touting for business. The presence of red lanterns and bouncers outside a joint indicated a late-night bar with a tacky cabaret show, or a protected brothel overseen by a fearsome madam who'd accommodate any request - white girls, Chinese girls, Chinese boys. About halfway along its length, Chuanpan Hutong formed a junction with Hougou Hutong, which ran down to the Tartar Wall. The wall formed a natural southern border of the Badlands, extending all the way to the Tartar City and the Fox Tower. On Hougou Hutong, street sellers sold opium, heroin, along with the works to inject it, and cheaply printed pornography of pubescent Chinese and White Russian Carole Lombard lookalikes. The only piece of goodness in the area was the church of the China Inland Mission. Converts were few and far between, but unwanted babies were daily arrivals. The Protestant missionaries dubbed their church the Island of Hope. The higher class foreigners thought the Badlands typified Chinese depravity; the Chinese thought it symbolic of barbarian foreign ways. Both mostly pretended it didn't exist.

Fox Tower was the tower in Peking said to be haunted by fox spirits, a superstition that meant the place was deserted at night. By day, the fox spirits lie hidden and still. But at night, they roam restlessly through the cemeteries and burial grounds of the long dead, exhuming bodies and balancing the skulls upon their heads. They must then bow reverentially to Tou Mu, the Goddess of the North Star, who controls the books of life and death that contain the ancient celestial mysteries of longevity and immortality. If the skulls do not topple and fall, then the fox spirits - or huli jing - will live for ten centuries and must seek victims to nourish themselves, replenishing their energy through trickery and connivance, preying upon innocent mortals. Having lured their chosen victims, they simply love them to death. They then strike their tails to the ground to produce fire and disappear, leaving only a corpse behind them. After dark, the area became the preserve of thousands of bats, which lived in the eaves of the Fox Tower and flitted across the moonlight like giant shadows. The only other living presence was the wild dogs - or huang gou - whose howling kept the locals awake.

When daylight broke on another freezing day, the tower was deserted once more. The colony of bats circled one last time before the creeping sun sent them back to their eaves. It was the morning of Friday January 8, and an old man named Chang Pao-chen was taking his prized songbird for a walk along the Tartar Wall towards Fox Tower.

Caged songbirds were an ancient Peking tradition, and every morning old men like Chang could be seen carrying lacquered wooden cages draped with blue linen covers. All Pekingers recognized the distinctive sound of these swallows, which were let out of their cages with flutes attached to their tails to go whistling through the morning air, soaring across the sky before returning to their masters. Chang came to the Tartar Wall everyday to smoke, drink tea and talk songbirds. That morning, shortly after eight o'clock, he was following the Tartar Wall eastwards to the Fox Tower when he noticed, in the icy wasteland between the road and the tower, the wild dogs prowling curiously and sniffing at something alongside a ditch. It was a badly mutilated body, clothing disheveled, with an expensive wristwatch on one arm that had stopped just after midnight. Partially clothed in a tartan skirt and a bloodied woolen cardigan, he assumed it was a girl. Her shoes, into one of which a handkerchief had been stuffed, were lying some distance away. But only a short distance from her body was a blood-spattered membership card for the French Club iceskating rink. It was hard to tell from the features of her brutally stabbed and beaten face whether she was foreign or Chinese. Her entire sternum had been cut open, her ribs broken, and the open cavity gave off a strong smell. The body was strangely bloodless though. The blood had to have been drained elsewhere. When police were summoned, they too were horrified. The cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head, which had split the skull and caused massive haemorrhaging in the brain. Most of the injuries had been inflicted postmortem. The throat was cut postmortem, and horrifying, her heart had been ripped out. She had been stripped before being repeatedly stabbed in a frenzy and mutilated. Her right arm was nearly severed. The cuts to the shoulder, though, could not have been made with an ordinary knife; some sort of specialist cutting tool must have been used, like a surgeon's scalpel or a professional amputation knife. It was not the hack job of an amateur. Her organs had been removed. Under the intensely bright lights of the pathology room, her small hands clenched rigidly tight, her thumbs locked inside her fists, trapped there by rigor mortis, with her distinctly grey pupils fixed to the sky, they could see she had freckles. But they couldn't figure why or who would have committed such a brutal act.

Werner would watch as Pamela's coffin was lowered into the ground next to her adopted mother's. His daughter had been barely five years old at that time, her blonde hair in a pudding-bowl cut, a few of her milk teeth missing. She'd worn a new black overcoat with black woolen stockings as the mother she'd hardly known was buried. Now mother and daughter lay beside each other, under the hard and frozen earth.

Even though Peking had been living under the threat of invasion from the Japanese for months now, the city's dread now coalesced at the discovery of the body at Fox Tower. It seemed to graphically symbolize the spiral into barbarism. The hunt for a the nineteen-year-old girl's killer was about to consume, and in some ways define, the cold and final days of old Peking.

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Presentata ad Ancona la lista Rinasci Marche

Presenti all’evento nel capoluogo il segretario di + Europa Della Vedova e tutti i candidati delle 5 province

ANCONA – Presentata ad Ancona presso l’Hotel SeePort la lista con tutti i candidati delle province della lista Rinasci Marche Mangialardi Presidente formata da Verdi, + Europa e Civici. “Una lista con una fortissima presenza femminile – ha sottolineato il segretario di +Europa Benedetto Della Vedova –  e smaccatamente ambientalista. Una presenza rosa non dettata da quote, ma altamente qualificata con donne che rappresentano il femminile in tutte le sfaccettature. Mamme, professioniste, imprenditrici, impegnate in politica e nell’amministrazione a livello locale. Una grande alleanza dei valori: l’equità generazionale, lo sviluppo sostenibile e l’ambiente. Rinasci Marche darà un segnale forte a tutti i marchigiani che hanno affrontato due terremoti e stanno vivendo l’emergenza Covid-19”.

“È il momento di rinascer – ha dichiarato Gianluca Carrabs dei Verdi –  di ripartire dai luoghi e dalle persone delle Marche, che insieme possono fare la differenza. Le Marche sono state la culla del Rinascimento che ha simboleggiato un’età di cambiamento in cui maturò un nuovo modo di concepire il mondo. Oggi ci dobbiamo riprovare e dobbiamo farlo insieme. La nostra generazione è la prima a sperimentare il rapido aumento delle temperature in tutto il mondo e probabilmente l’ultima che effettivamente possa combattere l’imminente crisi climatica globale, questa è una grande alleanza per il clima che deve agire subito e l’azione deve essere rapida e decisa. I comuni svolgono un ruolo decisivo nella mitigazione degli effetti conseguenti al cambiamento climatico, soprattutto se si considera che l’80% dei consumi energetici e delle emissioni di CO2 è associato alle attività urbane. Il cambiamento climatico è la sfida del nostro tempo.  Maurizio Mangialardi alla guida dell’Anci, ha dimostrato anzi tempo grande attivismo su questi temi, facendosi promotore e sottoscrittore del Patto dei Sindaci per l’Energia e il Clima. Rinasci Marche insieme a lui alla guida della Regione Marche porterà il 100% dei comuni a sviluppare politiche attive sulla transizione energetica e sviluppo sostenibile. Una particolare attenzione sarà data alle aree interne della regione, oggi siamo chiamati più che mai ad operare quel riequilibrio territoriale tra costa ed entroterra. Il divario non è più tra sud e nord dell’Italia, ma tra le aree interne e quelle costiere. Ci vogliono misure forti che individuino le aree interne delle Marche come Zona Economica Speciale dove gli imprenditori che investono ritrovino benefici fiscali e di finanza agevolata appetibili. Un’impresa “nuova” che ragioni su paradigmi nuovi, ovvero che segua le vocazioni del territorio che valorizzi gli immensi giacimenti naturali dello stesso. Fare impresa in questi territori ha una rilevanza soprattutto sociale. Non si può lavorare su vecchi paradigmi oramai superati. Non ci possono essere cittadini di serie A e cittadini di serie B”. Insieme disegneremo il nuovo modello di sviluppo delle marche più equo, sostenibile e legalitario”.

“La nostra lista – ha dichiarato Mattia Morbidoni –  si propone di appianare parecchi squilibri sociali che ancora persistono nella nostra regione. Ad esempio, è inaccettabile che nella nostra provincia non ci sia ancora una corretta applicazione della Legge 194, dove non viene garantita alle donne che decidono di ricorrere all’interruzione volontaria di gravidanza la mobilità interna dei medici non obiettori. Penso soprattutto agli ospedali di Jesi e Fabriano, con l’80% di medici obiettori”.

Candidati Rinasci Marche

Candidati Pesaro Urbino

Gianluca Carrabs project manager

Maria Rosa Conti avvocata

Fattori Cora ingegnera

Pierpaolo Loffreda docente universitario di cinema

Adiro Marini neo già cancelliere Tribunale di Pesaro

Santelli Sabrina imprenditrice

Valentini Anna avvocata

Candidati Ancona

Morbidoni Mattia manager beni culturali

Petrini Francesca imprenditrice agricola

Santarelli Luca infermiere

Sagramola Giancarlo sindaco di Fabriano

Rubegni Roberto commercialista fiduciario slow Food

Gianna Capuzzo produttrice tessile

Diletta Doffo studentessa

Corrado Manzotti imprenditore

Rosita Remini terzo settore

Candidati Macerata

Alessandra Zampetti manager Unicam

Venanzo Ronchetti pensionato

Francesco Acquaroli avvocato

Sandro Bisonni ingegnere

Giulia Messere dirigente associativa

Sabrina Ercolanoni imprenditrice ambito alimentare

Candidati Fermo

Ugo Pazzi agronomo, presidente Slow Food Marche

Francesca Annalisa Antolini Libera Professionista

Marco Feroci Imprenditore

Giada Pasquini impiegata

Candidati Ascoli Piceno

Edward Rino Alfonsi

Insegnante, operatore economico

Evelyn Bargiacchi

Conduttrice e produttrice televisiva

Barbara Riga

Direttrice strutture sportive

Luciano Spinozzi

Architetto, Insegnante

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  Presentata ad Ancona la lista Rinasci Marche Presentata ad Ancona la lista Rinasci Marche Presenti all’evento nel capoluogo il segretario di + Europa Della Vedova e tutti i candidati delle 5 province…