Yuyintang
Jan 22, 2025
The Shanghai livehouse Yuyintang, which had been around since the early 2000s, was "repossessed" towards the end of summer last year. It’s located right next to the West Yanan Road subway station. Whenever I get off of my train on the way home, I stop at a little gap between two signs where I can gaze down at its wooden carcass.
My girlfriend refers to everything within a 2km radius of our house as "downstairs". One time around when I'd first moved in with her, before I'd fully habituated myself to this tendency of hers, she casually mentioned “That livehouse downstairs is always having free events. We should go sometime."
I imagined a mysterious door I’d never noticed at the base of our building, blending in with the atmosphere of this xiaoqu where we lived: old people standing beside the rusting exercise equipment that might evoke memories of a playground in the mind of an American.
"We have a livehouse downstairs?"
What kind of music they could possibly be playing at a livehouse in a xiaoqu like ours. Was the audience entirely old ladies?
She picked up her phone and looked up pictures and videos of Yuyintang. It looked like a real “rock and roll” kind of place. Over the next few weeks, whenever I went outside I was on the lookout for it. I didn’t look too hard — whenever I’m obviously looking for something one of the old people materialize to ask me what I’m doing. I just casually looked over my shoulders left and right at a slightly greater frequency than normal. I never found anything that looked like a livehouse — just the kindergarten that I already knew was there.
It was only weeks later when I was getting off the subway and noticed this shack-like building with the same name as the livehouse “downstairs”. When I got home I mentioned to my girlfriend that they had another location by the park. She found nothing strange about this, as it turns out Yuyintang did in fact have a second location next to another park near where we live: Zhongshan park. That’s what she assumed I was talking about. So we went on not understanding each other for days, weeks, months.
The Yuyintang next to Zhongshan park still exists, connected to a mall, in a luxurious little underground shopping plaza between two roads. Everyday I see updates on its Wechat account about upcoming shows. As for the Yuyintang “downstairs” however, it remains boarded up and covered with brown leaves, awaiting the day when the government begins whatever redevelopment plan it has.