Student Street — A Chinese University Phenomenon
All university cities have their studenty areas. In England that might be a dozen streets between the campus and the cheap nightclubs, with uneven floors, grubby windowsills, and carpets strewn with the detritus of all the days since the last parental visit. Once, when our neighbour kindly drove us home after a weekend away, he took one look at the place and thought we had been robbed.
The first time I saw a Chinese student’s dormitory in 2006 left a lasting impression on me. These student slept on shelves, with one half of the room economically divided into six bunk beds by one horizontal and two vertical wooden boards. The students had blankets but no mattresses, and the desks they worked on resembled little folding stools a foot high, and they sat cross-legged on their hard beds to work. It was an incredibly thrifty use of space, the tightest possible way to squeeze six people into an area which technically provided everything they needed to live and study. I remembered at once reading a newspaper article when I arrived at my own university, which actually featured an old schoolmate of mine, entitled Overcrowding Forces Students to Share Rooms. Coming from a background of boarding schools, our dormitories got smaller and smaller (from 8–14 children in a room at age 8) until the age of 16, by which time we all had private rooms. The fact that she had to share a room in university-provided accommodation was apparently worth an article in itself.
Decorating each of these living-shelves were a handful of pretty things that one might expect to be added by a student attempting to stamp their individuality on the inside of a wooden box. While subject to restrictions that would be unacceptable to self-righteous westerners such as myself, the little bed spaces contained splashes of colour that were the students’ small protests of individuality, and it is perhaps for that reason that Student Street sells everything in miniature. Tiny pot plants are sold from tiny shops, and little stuffed animals and minuscule desk ornaments can be picked up from next to nothing, and multitudes of young students pack it from edge to edge by the early evenings. The crowd thickens as you approach the road, and along its length there are cheap snacks like squid kebabs, fried tofu or oily pancakes.
If your arteries are able to suppress their instinctive panic, and your feet to find their way between the viciously sharp kebab sticks and sticky takeaway boxes that litter the floor, then you can follow the road as it winds gently uphill away from the main road — mind the scooter — and battle your way past the thumping techno music that changes every five paces as you pass hole-in-the-wall shops clamouring for attention.
It’s true that you can pick up a bargain in student street. Shoes, handbags, sports kit… all there for a couple of dollars. But that doesn’t change the fact that I won’t be setting foot there again any time soon. The sad fact is that I can hardly think of a single item that I have bought there that lasted a month. Clothes split along their stitches, my little egg cooker overheated and later electrocuted me, and the headphones had such a horrible tinny sound quality it almost didn’t matter that the left one wasn’t working. Saddest of all, my girlfriend bought three little rabbits just before Christmas after being moved to tears by the tiny cages that they were being kept in. Tragically, the rabbits too turned out to be ‘low quality’, and all died within a few weeks.
There are things to like about Student Street — it is a lively bustling atmosphere if you don’t mind the mess, the food is tasty enough if you don’t care about your health, and you can pick up a few half-decent items if you look around. I suppose that its a street that caters well for its clientèle; the students, like the products, are not likely to be around for long.
