Jim's belated comments on Beijing

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What's stuck in my mind after a week away from Beijing....

Wudaokou station on the subway line lies astride Chengfu Road, a broad and busy boulevard that stretches through the sprawl of northwest suburban Beijing. Much of the area is taken up with universities - 8 or 9 of them, one after the other, with what must be hundreds of thousands of students. Departing the Wudaokou station, you can walk in one direction toward the Foreign Language and Culture university (where Doug teaches English); in the other toward Qinghua University and Peking University - these are the cream of the crop, typically described as the MIT and Harvard of China. I worked with a few Qinghua-educated engineers and they lend credence to the boast.

But whichever direction you walk, at almost any time of day or night, you will have to pick your way past throngs of people - as in most of urban China. When unperturbed by the police, the vendors spread blankets out on what sidewalks there are to display their wares: T-shirts, toys, shoes, cell-phones…and leave just a single pedestrian lane that pushes and shoves and starts and stops in the tension between those in a hurry to get to somewhere and those who stop in this single lane to window-shop. Ballet-like skills are necessary if you want to get home in time for dinner. Then of course are the series of negotiations with bicycles, cabs, buses, and other pedestrian as you cross an intersection. Traffic signals are best understood as general suggestions; actually crossing the street requires you to step far enough in the paths of the oncoming vehicles so that they HAVE to slow down / swerve / stop so as not to run you down. And they do, without any apparent irritation.

Beyond the blankets are myriad small businesses - restaurants, banks, clothing stores, small groceries, hotels, mobile phone stores (there are 570 million mobile phones in China). A few blocks from the station is an entrance to Qinghua University, and past the entrance is a separate world. This could be a (large) university anywhere, with buildings spread out, wide walkways, tree-lined roads, students and faculty walking and riding bikes with purpose but also with a degree of relaxation and repose un-imaginable just a few blocks away. A recent addition to the landscape - at the edge of campus and shielding the university from the noise of Chengfu Road - is a complex of steel-and-glass commercial buildings housing banks, Starbucks - and offices of both Google and Microsoft.

Hidden away in all this are a few shopping malls, each occupying 3 or 4 stories of a fairly compact building. Inside you might find a Nike store with $100 running shoes; outside along the street, a shoe store with no-name but perfectly functional versions for $10. Outside on the blankets, shoppers haggle at even $1 shoes.

Across Chengfu Road from Microsoft, Google, and Starbucks are some rather grimy buildings with parking lots torn up and what seems to be impromptu and primitive construction underway - to what purpose is hard to tell. Make your way past the debris, dodge the welders’ sparks, and around the corner of one such building, on the side, you may find a small hole-in-the-wall restaurant serving northwest Chinese Muslim food. Wonderful food, and the dubious sanitary conditions had no ill effect for me. $15.00 just absolutely stuffed 3 of us.

Another half-mile along Chengfu Road, among more small restaurants, is an expat bar called D22, where we watched Doug and his friends entertain. Guitars, djembe, and very creative kinda-folk music...There certainly is an expat community in Beijing, enough to support businesses of this sort. But in general the sight of non-asians is remarkable. Given the opportunity, expats anywhere will bitch about the uncomfortable differences from home life, and Beijing expats are no different. Pollution, noise, crowds, the arbitrary and inconsistent rules and procedures of most institutions…

On my way back to the hotel, I notice (from the comfort of a taxi) that intersections are still an adventure at 11PM. An old man pedals across with a heaping mound of ... garbage? …rising far above his head and tenuously secured to the back of his 3-wheeled bicycle. He is nearly invisible and apparently oblivious to the cars and trucks passing him, and to traffic signals. I think that he is fatalistic, which he probably is, but then it occurs to me that he simply cannot afford the effort and time to stop and then start up again at every intersection, with such a load. The taxi drivers warn him with short toots of the horn, and he corrects course minutely if at all; the drivers pick their way around him. Doug considers Wudaokou a particularly busy area of Beijing, and echos other expats' jovial complaints about the crowds and noise.Yet many other areas of the city seem even more crowded and more difficult to navigate.

All of Beijing seems to be torn up, only partly due to the Olympics. As many know, the hutong neighborhoods - old low rowhouses arranged around courtyards, with common areas including, sometimes, common toilets - have largely been bulldozed and replaced by modern buildings - concert halls, business buildings, modern apartment buildings, and this continues. A large project of this sort is underway just south of Tiananmen Square. According to the posters on the plywood walls hiding the project, this time the new will look something like the old: low rowhouses around common courtyards. I don't know if this is following the taste of affluent Chinese homebuyers, or a response to complaints about the loss of the culture and history, or both. After walking through several of the remaining hutongs, I sympathize with future tourists who will miss a fascinating street scene. Yet it looks to me like a pretty lousy day-to-day life - loose bricks and other debris everywhere, transit in and out are difficult at best, sanitation seems dubious.If - if - the displaced residents find more functional places to live, I don't see the tragedy.

Migrant workers live - well, wherever they can. Groups squeezed into erstwhile storefronts, with doors open to the world. Or in what look like tent-hutongs, large dingy canvas structures clustered behind old stone walls, sometimes backed up to railroad tracks. I notice darker skin, rough clothing, and a workday ending at 8 or 9 PM, the workers carrying their own tools - shovels, picks, ladders - back to their quarters while we are out strolling, looking for a nice spot for late dinner. It's well known that many bring their families, and because they are fully legal residents, their kids do not go to school, or must go to private, informal schools - such as they can afford. This life is apparently better than the one they left - but it is hard not to speculate about social tensions building up over a generation while the educated continue to become more affluent, and the migrants and their descendants cannot provide that opportunity for their kids.

On the Great Wall at Simatai, a few hours northeast of Beijing, we joined Canadians, Europeans, and some Chinese tourists on a strenous hike of 6 miles, up and down the hills, and complicated by the crumbling surface on top of the wall. Hawkers were sprinkled along the wall - some walking along with us and providing a halting, informal guide service for a few minutes before offering up some merchandise for sale. I'm afraid I grew impatient and shushed them away without much tact. All said they were local farmers - a credible claim, since those we saw in the fields from the bus were typically tilling or furrowing with their own shoulders to the yoke, not even a mule or ox to provide the power. Hawking water and guide books several miles along the wall would seem a better life.

This day was misty, occasionally rainy. The setting must be spectacular in fair weather; it was beguiling in the mist. What looked like cherry trees, in bloom, were everywhere on the hills, and sometimes we could make out the bits of terraced, cultivate land pushed up the hill higher than seemed possible. The hills went on, one after the other, into the mist; the wall meanders and along the way watch-towers rose up, perhaps 2 or 3 visible ahead at any time. At the end, a cafteria meal of decent food, tasting wonderful for the effort of completing the hike, with a well earned $0.45 liter of beer and chat with the other foreign tourists - from Canada, England, Germany. A tourist trap, surely, but fully justified.

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Comments

[Evy]

Super Interesting
Jim, Well you and Pat both are 'writer's extraordinaire" and I so appreciate the time and effort you have both taken to give us here at home a "taste" of what you are experiencing. While "recliner-bound" it is wonderful to "feel" a lil' of what you and Pat have so eloquently described. I must say, while so very interesting, even snow and all, I appreciate Seattle-WA, HOME. We Americans have something sooooo worth "fighting" for and to defend. I thank God for 'her.' Love and safe journey's to you both, Evy

[Hugh]

Impressive
The scenes you desscribe are impressive; same for the pictures. China must be an amazing place. It looks less modern than Japan. In five years that may not be true. Also let me say your writing is really great, both of you. Think about writing a book. Snowing again this morning here. We still have snow in our yard from two days ago, but it's melted down lower. I don't envy you the 90 degree weather in LiJiang.