Beijing: I hear it’s a nice place
BEIJING — I’m not going to write much about Beijing. Because, frankly, I didn’t do much in Beijing. I treated my six days in China’s capital as a vacation from traveling through China. And, the mere fact that I could do a thing like that — the concept initially sounds rather absurd — should tell you that Beijing bears little resemblance to the rest of the country that it governs. It is a foreign city to almost anyone, Chinese or non-Chinese, who visits it. And, as China remodels — no, revamps — its centerpiece city in preparation for the 2008 Olympics, Beijing may soon feel foreign to Beijingers themselves, if that hasn’t happened already.
So yes, I walked the Great Wall, and it was indeed “great.” I entered the Forbidden City, and it was crowded. I wandered some traditional hutong neighborhoods, and they were still standing. According to a recent report, Beijing was home to more than 7,000 hutongs in 1949. In the late 1980s, only 3,900 remained. Recently, with the radical pre-Olympic restructuring, they have been disappearing at an alarming rate — more than 600 a year. Soon Beijing may be the Great Wall and the Forbidden City … and a modernish city that no one recognizes.
But a modernish city isn’t a bad place to escape for a while when you’ve been traveling through a third-worldish country. And I made the most of it, eating non-Chinese food whenever possible. It’s strange that the foods that would upset my stomach in America — actually, foods that I would never touch in America, like McDonald’s, KFC, Pizza Hut, and their ilk — are the ones I have relied upon to settle my often unstable insides during this trip.
So I had a Blizzard at a Dairy Queen in a ritzy mall, future home of the Beijing Lamborghini store, which is a few doors down from the Rolls-Royce showroom and a short walk from Tiananmen Square. I had a beer in a bar named Nashville and decent pizza in a place owned by Belgians. I tested two of Baskin-Robbins’ flavors and salivated at the sight of an Outback Steakhouse. (I know it’s only Outback, but if you have ever tried to order a decent steak in China, you would understand.)
Of course, I also ate Peking Duck three times. I think it was three. Maybe it was more. Anyway, I stopped counting at three.
I dined with old friends and new friends, journalists and the grandmas of former students. She was an interesting one, a Beijing native, a Muslim, who came from a wealthy family that had ties to the Kuomintang. After 1949, though, the money, the maids and the big homes were seized. Many of her relatives fled the country (she recently re-established contact with some cousins she hadn’t heard from for 50 years). Her husband’s family was wealthy as well, prominent Beijing jewelers. And they, too, were looted by the government. He actually ended up working for the Communists, and in the 1950s the couple was “encouraged” to leave their hometown and move to far-away Xinjiang, part of the government’s attempt to assimilate the restive region. But the recently-widowed 75-year-old still will not speak ill of the government that twice so drastically altered her life. Instead she credits the Communists for helping her pick up the pieces, helping her go to college, helping her start her career as a teacher. “I love the government with all my heart,” she said.
Upon hearing that, my student whispered across the table to me in English, “Brainwashed.”
We ate at a Muslim restaurant that shared the name of an Old Beijing restaurant she frequented in her youth. The current location is in a new shopping mall — most buildings she grew up with are long gone — on Wang Fu Jing, a sparkling shopping street east of Tiananmen. That was also the location of one of my several roast duck dinners, this time with Zhang Aixue, English Column Editor at the Beijing Youth Daily. Zhang and I had corresponded by email earlier this year regarding a blog post of mine that the BYD ran. I claimed they used it without my permission. I later learned that Chinese law says they didn’t need my permission.
For some reason — perhaps the fact that she works for the Beijing Youth Daily — I expected Ms. Zhang to be my minor, maybe just out of college, maybe still in college. I felt this way even after having talked to her on the phone. Well, turns out she is close to 50, and she has some interesting stories to tell.
Zhang was 19 and ready for college when Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution closed down universities nationwide. So instead of school, she was sent to a farm in remote Heilongjiang Province. Day after day, she harvested wheat with a sickle. She did this for three years.
“At the time I was rather excited about it,” Zhang said. “I thought it would be a good experience. I thought I was helping my country. Chairman Mao sold us on heading to the country and learning from the peasants. At the time, I was rather naive.”
In three years, Zhang was allowed to return home just once. She earned RMB 32 ($4) a month, which, at the time seemed like a decent amount of money to her. Each month, she was able to send home RMB 15 to help her retired parents back in Beijing.
Zhang’s first job on the farm was slicing pumpkins, but she was sent into the fields after suggesting to her “leader” that an easy-to-construct mechanical device could help the workers do their job much more efficiently. He didn’t care.
Zhang kept a journal of her experiences, and her writing caught the attention of one of the managers at the farm. He thought perhaps Zhang would make a good secretary, and tried to get her out of the fields — an idea Zhang was enthusiastically in favor of after experiencing the back-breaking work of harvest time. But it became known that Zhang’s father, formerly an accountant, had been labeled a “right-winger” by the government. Allegedly he had disagreed with his boss about one thing or another while he was still working.
So Zhang stuck it out in the fields, and eventually got sent home because a knee injury prevented her from being a productive worker. So she did what any high-school-educated 22-year-old would do — she became a middle school physics teacher. Then, when colleges opened back up in 1977, Zhang enrolled in Capital Normal University to study mathematics. Prior to her graduation, the Beijing Youth Daily came to her school recruiting science writers, and she was offered a job. That was 1982. She’s been with the paper, now with a 600,000 circulation, ever since.
All newspapers in China are state run, but Zhang said governmental restrictions have become more lax in the last 10 years. She said they can now safely criticize middle-level government officials, but they can’t go much higher than that. Zhang said it is “hard to predict” whether China’s media will ever be as free as America’s, but added that the American press didn’t seem too free during the Iraq war. (A war, by the way, that is still very much in progress.)
When Zhang and I finished our meal, we were presented with a “commemoration card” telling us the exact number of ducks the restaurant had served since 1864. Ours was No. 11,506,540. On the front of the certificate it said: “To the Great Wall — a trip for real heroes, Peking Duck at Quanjude — food for real gourmets.”
It should be noted that I did more than stuff my face in Beijing. In fact, most of my time was spent sitting on an apartment floor, writing on a laptop computer. Both apartment and laptop were owned by Steven Jiang, a producer at CNN Beijing. He interviewed me last year for a SARS-related story regarding some t-shirts on sale in this site’s store. And when he learned of my plans for this trip, he graciously offered up his couch for my stop in Beijing. I basically took over his apartment for a week, and he never complained. Not once. (Well, at least not to me.)
Steven’s apartment is in a gentrified part of Beijing known as SOHO New Town, a complex of color-coded high-rises, each labeled in big English letters “RED,” “GREEN,” “ORANGE,” “PURPLE” and so on. Steven lives on floor No. 5, which is really floor No. 4, because, in an attempt to appeal to all cultures, the SOHO designers have done their best to erase both Eastern and Western numerical taboos from their buildings. Hence, there is no floor No. 4 — the number four is associated with death in Chinese culture. There are no floor Nos. 13, 14 or 24, either. Good thing they’re not trying cater to numerologists.
A simple — by most Western standards — one-bedroom apartment at SOHO will run you around RMB 6,500 (more than $800) a month. That is more — about five times more — than the average monthly salary in any city in China. (Full disclosure: My apartment in Shanghai also falls into this category.) Steven’s previous Beijing apartment was “next to a brothel,” which, as they often are in China, was disguised as a hair salon. When he first moved in, Steven made the mistake of assuming they actually cut hair in the place. When he went in and asked for a haircut, the staff panicked. They shuffled around frantically, whispering to each other, and eventually scrounged up someone who could cut Steven’s hair. Right before the blow dry, Steven saw a barely-dressed “hairdresser” emerge from the upstairs loft with an old man in a business suit. That’s when the light bulb went off in Steven’s head: “I guess that explains the sounds I heard coming from next door.”
Steven, in his late 20s, is Shanghainese, but he attended high school and college in the United States and is now an American citizen. He worked for CNN in Atlanta before transferring to the news station’s six-person bureau in Beijing. At first he was skeptical of moving to Beijing — “that big village up north,” according to many Shanghainese — but he has since warmed to the place, and now may even prefer it to that shiny metropolis down south. To Steven, Beijing feels less pretentious, less business-oriented than Shanghai. He likes that in Beijing he can hang out with artists, diplomats and journalists and discuss topics other than how much money each person earned that month. He likes that Beijing — for most things other than real estate — is cheaper than Shanghai.
Steven has been working at CNN’s Beijing office for three years, and during that time he has “only” been detained by police three or four times for doing his job. To Steven, this is a sign that the climate for foreign media outlets in China is “getting better.”
“But every time you think that, they do something to make you think otherwise,” Steven said. “We just assume all of our phones are tapped, land and mobile.” During “sensitive times” (like the recent anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, for example) or when the government “gets wind of something” (like a CNN meeting with prominent dissidents), Steven and his coworkers are followed by not-so-undercover state security personnel. In fact, CNN has a list of license plate numbers from the cars the government usually uses for surveillance. In anticipation of being detained, CNN crews often go out on stories armed with “decoy tapes” that they hand over to authorities.
Almost all viewers of CNN International in China are foreigners, who access the channel at upscale hotels or through illegal satellite hook-ups in their homes. Still, the station is censored and subject to blackouts in China. CNN must re-route its satellite feed through a Chinese-government-owned satellite, thus creating a 15-second delay for the government censors to work with. This proved to be most frustrating during the Iraq war. Through an agreement with CNN, China Central Television (CCTV) has the right to use CNN footage for major international news stories — but they are able to use CNN’s original feed, not the delayed one. So, at times during the war, Steven saw CNN on CCTV before he saw it on CNN.
That did not make him happy.
Click here for photos.
A note to my readers: Wireless internet service on my Pocket PC has not worked since I arrived in Beijing more than two weeks ago. Thus I have not been able to post from the road as much as I would like, and I have been forced to do all of my writing in dirty, smoky internet bars … when I can get to one. This has affected my productivity — I tend not to concentrate well when someone is spitting phlegm on the floor next to me. I apologize. The Pocket PC will be headed back to Shanghai this weekend, and hopefully I will have it working again and in my hands by the beginning of October.
But I can now give you regular updates from the road via this site’s new feature, the TripTik. Using the TripTik, I can provide you with short tidbits about the trip on an almost daily basis, so you can join me on my journey through China. I can usually write the TripTiks quickly — before the cigarette smoke at the internet bar makes me feel too dizzy.
Recent TripTik entries can be found on any of the site’s pages. Or you can access the entire TripTik archive.
2 Comments
I can’t even get a Blizzard in New York City! Wow, globalization….
I can understand the need to chill in a place like Beijing after traveling in China for so long. It can be rough.
A friend just sent me the link to your web site. It looks awesome. I’ll keep checking back!