Beijing Sprawl

Muyu and his fellow young bachelors may have moved from the provinces to the massive Chinese capital, but from the rooftop of their single-story building of crowded apartments on Beijing's western outskirts, the city still looks unapproachably distant, like "a tropical rainforest of tall buildings and the glow of neon lights." At night they paste up ads for his uncle's fake ID business; by day they try to sleep and go up on the roof to play cards, drink beer, and share stories about the brutal, lonely, and yearning lives of their fellow migrants, which in the telling of Xu Zechen, through Muyu's eyes, reminded me of nothing so much as the terse violence and fettered humanity of Isaac Babel's Cossack tales.