BEIJING — The rickshaws jerk up and down like a pail in a child’s awkward clutch.

Members of the chamber of commerce tour snap photos on Friday as they are toted through the Hutong, Beijing’s oldest living area where homes and restaurants are tucked away in gritty alleyways.

The alley walls, containing courtyard homes, are gray and dingy, wide enough to fit the traffic of rickshaws, cars and pedestrians.

Many passed down for generations, the Hutong homes belong to the common Chinese classes, like vendors and the rickshaw drivers themselves. Laundry and quilts are hung to dry. Stray dogs and rusty bicycles abound outside the meager residences. Laundry and quilts are hung to dry.

“That was an appreciation of Americana,” Nancy Vogel murmurs when the rickshaws park.

More appreciation is to come.

The group is invited inside a couple’s home for a home-cooked meal.

They stream through the dusty wooden doors, passing the small entryway and closet-sized kitchen. They pull up stools at the two tables set up in the windowless living room, lit by a naked hanging bulb.

“That’s nice,” Jerome says with a chuckle of the flat screen TV and karaoke machine in the corner.

The couple is obliging. As the tour groups fill up their lunch bowls, the middle-aged husband poses for photos, the wife bringing in plate after plate of garlic shoots, bean sprouts, pork and peanuts they have prepared all morning.

The folks from the potato state dig in, murmuring their compliments.

Eventually the man of the house, Liu Jin Ming, enters to answer questions about his life while his wife cleans.

Roughly middle aged, he is tall and gaunt, with a long face creased with wrinkles.

Translated by the tour guide, he speaks in a raspy voice of his 24-year-old son working in Houston as a martial arts teacher. Ming passes around a photo album containing an ad of the film his son acted in, “The Last Airbender.”

“We watched that on the plane,” someone exclaims, to which Ming nods, smiling wide.

Himself a martial arts teacher and his wife a homemaker, Ming says he would never want to leave the Hutong.

His one-story home has been passed down among his family for 150 years, he says, and he was born and raised there. His siblings and father live in houses literally bordering his own. To invite his father over, he merely has to shout through his living room wall.

“We see each other all the time, to sing karaoke,” he says through translation, pointing to the machine.

Nancy Vogel asks the key question: “Are you worried the government will tear down your home?”

Much of the Hutong is disappearing as the government tears it down to make room for more high rises. In fact, he says he has been interviewed by various newspapers about being part of the sparse population that still calls the Hutong home.

“If the government asks me to leave, they will have to pay me a lot,” he says through translation, speaking of the government relocation subsidy.

He admits he wouldn’t mind joining his son in the U.S.

“Maybe someday,” he says.

Dinner is finished, and it’s time to leave.

Encouraging everyone to learn martial arts form his son, Ming sees the group to the door, offering a farewell handshake.

Talking about it later, Tom Quinn of Coeur d’Alene shakes his head.

“It just reminded me of how good we have it,” he said.

“And how much we make,” added his wife, Kathy Quinn.

She added that the Hutong does have something to offer, like having family a wall shout away.

“Even though they have less than we have, they have a very rich life,” she said.

Vogel was more impressed by Ming’s pride in his son than even the martial arts moves he demonstrated.

“I had so many preconceptions about China that have just gone away,” the Hayden retiree said. “One of them was how they feel about family. It’s so nice to see that everywhere in the world, that’s valued.”

Veronica Garnsey will stow away memories of how polished his small home was, she was, and the family photos taped up throughout.

She doesn’t see such satisfaction in simple things back home, she added.

“I think we’re spoiled at times, Americans. We have so much,” the Post Falls woman said. “Considering how little he gets, he seems happy.”