Beijing, the Backpacker, and the Olympic Bid

For five days without reprieve the filth and soot hung in the clouded sky like some great fecal smear on a porcelain toilet bowl. For five days, without reprieve, there was not even the remotest suspicion of the chance of the possibility of blue.

I had arrived in Beijing. Where pollution has usurped the heavens.

And in this sense, is not industry China's new God? Even the universally-coveted tourist buck is here but an afterthought, an appendix to the real behomoth of the East: the dragon of production. It is no secret, of course, that the Chinese are choking on the exhaust of their labors. But I expected nothing on the scale that I witnessed.

The infamous hazes of Mexico City, Jersey, Bangkok, and Kathmandu; the oil-slicked streets of Dakar; the bag-addled scrub of Africa's deserts and her sludge-slurried ports --- none of these compare to the filth which smothers Beijing's sky. On the contrary, stepping into the fetid atmosphere over Beijing after leaving the notoriously smoggy Bangkok was as newly shocking as the streets of Bombay are to a virgin arrival from American suburbia.

And though this be a symptom particularly pronounced in the city itself, the infection was by no means confined there. On my second and their third day, Walker, Carah-Beth and I took a mini-tour to the Great Wall at Janshanling. Nearly three hours we drove, watching construction workers be replaced by peasants, skyscrapers by tree-covered hillocks. But the sky did not change. Here the color blue was as mythical a notion as it must have seemed to the urban inhabitants.

I tried to imagine what this mass of pollution looked like to the global organism. A fount of soot and dust and vaporous metal boiling out of the smokestacks of the capital and billowing up some pale and bilious umbrella over the whole metropolis. At whose edge it fell, spreading and suffocating the surrounds, nimbus plagiarist, blotting the map of China with this sienna rorschach. On the concrete-scarred surface scurry the hairless apes of original sin, rushing to and fro with the apparent aim of keeping the rotten fires of their own destruction stoked, hapless as each breath they take comes bound by fate and entropy to swirling pulmonary poisons. Which pass through their bloodstreams, the dancing seeds of cancers, the death born of life run amok.

Dystopian imagery aside, the wall itself was (in a word) great. No misnomer there. Yet despite its crumbling visage, its faded and ancient ramparts, I could not help but think of it more as a monument to continuity, rather than a relic of a cleaven past. The scale of the thing was too enormous. Seven meters high, seven meters wide. Cast endlessly, serpentine and medieval, over a sharply undulating range by a civilization vast and besieged. Punctuated by soaring watchtowerss, the battlements dissolved into the fog perhaps three kilometers distant on either side. Just this object of perception impossibly large. Yet to think -- 5000 kilometers it ran! Each stone laid by the hands of peasants, its mortar thickened with their blood.

And so many centuries later, we have a society massive in extent and number, grandiose in apperception, ambitious and militant.

There is no surprise in this. All was foretold.

The next day we visited the Olympic village and stadiums, where the story of the wall was echoed to us. For just as in the case of the wall in ages past, we saw a vision grander in conception than successful in execution.

When I landed at Beijing International Airport, there remained 44 days until the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics. I expected them to be putting the final touches on the whole affair. Polishing their Mao busts, washing the roads, educating employees in the tourism sector on English and how to handle the massive influx of tourists arriving in just over a month.

Laughable. Nothing was ready. Not the airport, not the metro, not the stadiums, not the "egg" you see plastered all over the Olympic propaganda, not the village (it didn't appear to have been started), and certainly not the filthy roads.

And if everything had been in standing order for the Olympians --- if in 44 days by some act of God or Buddha everything is in its right place? So what. The sky is so blighted it's sickening. You can stand a kilometer away from the egg and be unable to discern its perimeter.

Sometimes, in the evening, a kilometer is enough to erase a skyscraper completely.

And as for this whole 'educated tourism sector' theory, forget it. As cheerful and open and inquisitive as the Beijing people are, you could go for days without finding someone who knows how to say "rice" in English. The desk-girl at my hostel (cute though she was) couldn't figure out how to charge me for the key I lost, though I had left a deposit expressly for that purpose.

Allow me just a summary.

For the cheerfulness and earnestness of its people, for the progress of its nation, and the industry of its state, Beijing deserved to be short-listed for the 2008 Olympics.

For its pollution, it shouldn't for one moment have been considered at all.

---

---