Ann Arbor resident builds adobe brick house in Nebraska to revisit her homeland and her past.
ANN ARBOR -- Over the years, when Beili Liu would doodle, she would draw small pictures of what she calls "the little house."
They were sketches of the simple, single-room, adobe brick structure
where she was born in northern China and where she spent the first four
years of her life.
The little house was filled with few furnishings but many memories:
the sheets of a Communist Party newspaper that served as wallpaper, the
cook stove that was the sole heat source.
"The little house was special to me. It's always in the back of my
mind," said Liu, an Ann Arbor resident who teaches art at Washtenaw
Community College, Eastern Michigan University and the University of
Michigan.
Last summer Liu, 30, built an adobe brick house on the plains of
Nebraska as a way to connect to her homeland and her past. While it's a
home, Liu said, it's also a work of art.
It is, obviously, a house, said Ed Dadey, director of Art Farm, the
art residency program in Marquette, Neb., that hosted Liu. But its
thick walls offer a quiet sanctuary, even as the wind howls outside.
It also connects different cultures. Like the pioneers who
constructed dugout and sod houses on the vast American prairie, Chinese
adobe brick houses used only building materials that were close at
hand.
Liu looked to an expert for guidance on how to build her little house: her father, who still lives in China.
For six weeks last summer, Liu gathered building materials and made bricks at the rural site 75 miles west of Lincoln.
She used clay excavated nearby, grass from the Nebraska prairie and sand from the nearby Platte River.
On good days, she made 32 bricks. On bad days, eight. Students from
the University of Nebraska came to help. The bricks -- nearly 700 in
all -- had to be regularly turned to dry properly.
"By the end of six weeks, I was exhausted," Liu said.
But it was time to begin construction, with only two weeks left before she had to leave.
She built the wood frame and began to lay the bricks. She built a
beam and rafters and laid thatching as the roof. She worked from sunup
to sundown, under the daily sun and a deadline to return to Ann Arbor
to teach.
Liu papered the walls with newsprint, but this time it was American newspapers that carried stories about China.
She finished the house and was able to spend a single night in it before she had to return home to her teaching jobs.
She had accomplished her goal on the land of the Great Plains, a great distance, in many ways, from northern China.
Liu's parents were about to finish high school when they were swept up in Chairman Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution.
Even though they were from educated families, they were sent to a
village in Jilin, a province in northern China, to be "re-educated."
There they became part of China's "lost generation," young people whose
educations and promising futures were cut short.
They learned the hard life of villagers -- how to use local
materials to make their small houses, how to tend farm animals and how
to raise their own food.
While life was difficult for her parents, the little house was good for Liu.
When Liu was 4 years old, her parents left the village and moved to
southern China to attend separate universities. While it meant a better
life for her parents, it was difficult for Liu, who was moved from one
family member to another for four years. It was a hard time, Liu said,
but she clung to good memories from her village.
It had been a simple house, Liu said. There was a single platform
bed that filled half of the one-room house, which measured
16-feet-by-20-feet. A tunnel connected the stove to the bed, warming
it. It had one room, one door and one window.
Liu was eventually reunited with her parents. Her mother became a school principal and her father is an engineer.
Liu came to the United States 10 years ago to attend college. She
earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Tennessee and
her Master of Fine Arts at Michigan.
She now teaches 3-D design at Washtenaw Community College and
Eastern Michigan and a mixed media course at the Lloyd Hall Scholars
program at Michigan.
While the little house in Jilin Province has crumbled, its meaning has not.
"The process was more meaningful than the result," Liu said.
It connects cultures from different times and places that have looked to the Earth to build their homes, she said.
And it has connected her to her family, she said."This brought me a
lot closer to my father, although my parents still don't understand why
I made it."
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