Déjà vu in Bucharest

I wonder: if a city were a person, would the land be her skin and skeleton? Would the architecture be her identity markers? Would people inhabiting on her be her soul? I hope to discover a city as I get to know a friend. In the past two and a half months, I have been gradually getting to know Bucharest and uncovering her various identities. In this process, I also found out new aspects of myself, my concept of home, and my idea of belonging.
On my way from the Henri Coandă International Airport to our dorm, I was jet-lagged, hungry, and a little bit disappointed. It was late March and the spring clearly had not arrived. Passing by grey fields, old factories, and shabby houses, I sighed and slowly fell asleep. A while later, awakened by continuous horns, I realized that my taxi was trapped in the traffic. I looked out the window and for a moment thought I was on a random street back in my hometown in China. Grey concrete apartment buildings deceived me and gave me this brief feeling of Déjà vu. Everything looked similar — homogenous apartment blocks, trees by the road, and small grocery stores — except that everything is in Romanian.  
Before coming to Bucharest, I had googled pictures of this city and had mixed feelings about it. I had my specific stereotypes of a “European” city, as represented by London and Paris. Pictures of Bucharest online and my first impressions of the city after a ten-hour flight did not meet my expectations of a “European” city. Tired and frustrated, I groaned: “These buildings look too functional, too modernist, too…like home.” Back then, I was ignorantly looking for a stereotypical “European” city which I associated with Enlightenment and Renaissance. Moreover, I was trying to discover a “foreign” land, one that was drastically different from home. I was in a foreign city and eager to uncover the unknown, the different, the other, or even the dichotomous opposite of my own culture and life. Communist architecture just felt too familiar. The cognitive dissonance of picturing the novel “European” architecture but witnessing the known communist buildings put me in frustration.
A deeper frustration for me, however, was the feeling that my home was arbitrarily imposed on a clearly unknown land. The architecture of different cities is one crucial way for me to differentiate home from the foreign, or simply one place from another. Furthermore, the landscape of a city is closely intertwined with my memories. I associate houses and buildings in Northfield with my memories of academic life, bad American food, freezing winter, and my identity as an international student in the US. Every time I come back to China, on my way from the airport to my apartment, looking out from the car window, I know I am home. While architecture can preserve my various experiences, the change or demolition of architecture can also strip away my memories. Once I returned home after one year and discovered that my primary school was replaced by a new gas station. I suddenly felt lost, directionless, and foreign in this old place I “knew.” Standing next to an apartment building in Bucharest, I felt that my memory was misplaced, or that I was physically displaced.
Getting to know Bucharest does not feel like meeting a new friend. It feels like encountering an old friend of whom I have some hazy memories, but has long been lost in time. In the next few days, I started my first excursions in Bucharest. I did discover other architecture styles and familiarize myself with different landmarks of the city. Nonetheless, I was still particularly drawn to those concrete and grey apartment buildings scattered everywhere in Bucharest. Through the recommendation from our tour guide Anca, I got in contact with the historian Petre Buiumaci who works at the Bucharest Municipality Museum. Buiumaci has recently published a book titled Ieri și azi în București (Then and Now in Bucharest), in which he examines how the urban landscape of Bucharest changes over time. During my interview with Buiumaci, I learned that most of the “communist-style” apartment buildings I had seen in Bucharest were built in the 60s and 70s. They generally follow the socialist architecture style that was prevalent in the Soviet Union back then. Furthermore, there were several remarkable projects going on in Bucharest from the 50s to 70s, one of which was the construction of the new neighborhood Titan in the eastern Bucharest. As part of the communist government’s plan to urbanize and industrialize Bucharest, Titan neighborhood was built to host more than 400,000 inhabitants who would work in the factories nearby. Back then, Titan was on the outskirt of Bucharest or was even not considered as part of Bucharest.
The story of urbanization sounded familiar. My hometown, Jiande, is 45-minute drive south of the major city Hangzhou, which underwent the rapid urbanization process in the 60s. Even as the periphery of Hangzhou, my hometown had cottages replaced by apartment buildings and farming lands substituted for factories in the 60s. I decided to go to Titan neighborhood and try to discover the traces of its communist past. I was also trying to uncover an aspect of Bucharest which I had not explored before.
I arrived at a gorgeous and lively park — Alexandru Ioan Cuza Park — which is the center of the Titan blocks. Rows of widely spaced concrete apartment buildings overlook this huge park with five lakes. Wandering around aimlessly, I saw kids riding bikes, families picnicking, lovers whispering in the shades, and the elderlies dozing off on the bench. The moment I went inside the neighborhood, I suddenly felt that I was amid a vibrant community. Observing an old lady slowly going inside the building with groceries, hearing the laughter of children, and simply seeing lives flourishing, I suddenly felt intimately connected to this neighborhood.

In retrospect, when I first arrived in Bucharest, I found all the concrete apartment buildings quite depressing: grey and homogeneous structures with dark and rectangular windows. The modernist design of these buildings gave me a sense of alienation. Back then, I was viewing the architecture from the perspective of a distant and indifferent observer. Only perceiving the appearances of the architecture, I did not realize that the architecture is simply a vessel to host different forms of liveliness. Instead of being labeled and defined by the style and the political context, the architecture is enriched and reshaped by the people live in them. For me, the apartment buildings in the Titan neighborhood are not simply characterized by labels such as such “communism” and “urbanization.” I now perceive them from a new dimension, one that is about the vitality of the community.
Strolling around the Titan neighborhood, I was suddenly reminded of my own experiences. My family has moved several times during my childhood. Not only can all the apartment buildings I have lived in be categorized as socialist and modernist, but they are also part of “communist blocks.” Nonetheless, my images and memories of them are never about those labels. I remember planting orange seeds behind one building, having my own balcony with flowers in another one, and sharing the best time with my grandparents in the last apartment building. The familiarity I have towards apartment buildings in Bucharest is not simply due to their appearances, but is related to the experiences of home, belonging and human intimacy beneath these appearances.
I am now two days away from leaving Bucharest. I have seen her in the late winter covered in melting snows, in the early spring coming to life, and in the mid-summer bathing in warm sunshine. I have been with her in rainy, cloudy, windy, and sunny days. I hope to travel through four seasons with her and see her glow in each one of them. I am glad that Bucharest gives me the chance to understand her better, as my subtle, mysterious and dynamic friend.