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Several years
ago, I flatted in Sydney with an old school friend named Thorin, affectionately
nicknamed 'Toz'. We led a spartan lifestyle in a grubby district called
Petersham, where in a bare apartment we attempted to make do without the
basic essentials, as if it were possible to erect a tent in central downtown,
wash clothes in a river. Rent was expensive, cutlery a luxury: it was in
Australia where I learned to use chopsticks. Expensive coffee, however,
was at that time considered staple; we were an odd species of rugged dandies.
The apartment
where I was living in Beijing reminded me strongly of my life in Petersham.
It was a bare set of small rooms; the tenant had arranged to move out immediately
after Spring Festival, and so had extended the lease by several days in
order that I might stay there alone. Plaster fell frequently from the walls
and ceilings, leaving mounds of fine white powder and whitewash on the
bathroom floor. An unreliable gas water heater regulated shower times by
periodically ceasing to function. The walls were plainly dabbed with white
paint, an arty previous resident had pasted 14th century European linecuts
over the doors like newspaper cuttings of architectural diagrams. It was
warm and dry and dusty, bare wooden floors, a musty old armchair picked
in holes, a bandaged TV on a small coffee table. In the bedroom remained
a simple bed with a thick mattress; I was as comfortable as I could be.
Western Hua
Jia Di, which referred to the whole complex of apartments in which I was
living, is part of a series of housing developments in North East Beijing,
close to the International Airport. This is the home of Beijing's middle
class residents, many of which have migrated towards the capital from outer
provinces in hope of finding opportunity and comfort, the American Dream
alive in the capital of China. It was extraordinary luck in my mind to
discover myself to be amongst them in kind; most foreigners who visit the
city wind up in sterilised 'friendly' hotels and private rooms, whereas
I was making wet footprints in plaster dust between the shoddy old shower
and my warm, thick bedroom. I ate generous, inexpensive servings of basic
hot food in local diners, wandered through packed supermarket caryards
in which stalls loudly offered cheaper wares than inside, where rows of
warm meat hung in red lantern-lit aisles. A selection of bus routes served
the local stop; I took to visiting the nearest luxury hotel for my sole
foreigner's vice - real coffee at 24 yuan a cup, something around eight
New Zealand dollars.
The hotel, Beijing's
Li
Do Holiday Inn, was another world entirely. Packed with foreigners,
I was assumed to be a guest and greeted with obsequious smiles from the
waiting staff, attendants and prostitutes circulating the foyers. The café
hands refused to speak in Chinese with me, which quickly seemed to be a
failure on my part to make myself understood - however, I soon realised
that this was their instruction to 'make foreigners feel at home'. I noticed
other students proudly insisting to answer the cashier's questions in English
by using Chinese, both participants desperately failing to impress each
other.
Native Tourists The fact that Beijing has no shortage of foreigners who look like myself was of no comfort to me. In Shenyang I had been a curiousity and an alien; here the word commonly used for foreigners is lao wai, which means 'old foreigner', thus bestowing a sense of familiarity on the non-Chinese. Since Marco Polo was here, there have been thousands of us, most with less than benign intentions. It was the British and their counterparts who came here to burn down anything interesting a hundred or so years ago, now American businessmen wander the streets of the commercial sectors with an air of ownership. The word 'hello' is the standard merchant's catch-cry, on sight I was greeted immediately and various valueless trinkets with heavy price tags were held aloft for my perusal; thus 'hello' in Beijing translates to 'come buy this'. My trips to the central city in my early days in Beijing were something between tourism and orientation; I needed to understand the layout of the city and make something of a home of it in the short time I had. I also found myself with an unusual problem to resolve: the whole place just didn't feel like 'China' in a rare sense. If this was the centre of the country, then why was the strongest and oldest culture on Earth hiding behind a tourist's curtain? It was understandable that for a visitor to Beijing, which has in the last decade become a city of international standing, the plazas and shopping centres and the Roger Moore's Audio Tour of the Forbidden City might prevent one from getting under Beijing's skin; what I found difficult to understand at first was the way in which locals seemed to think like tourists, those that I met with any degree of success were so imbedded in International culture that it was difficult to perceive their own within themselves. When I finally conceived of why this was, it was simpler to understand what Beijing has become, and perhaps what China is becoming. Qianmen
Qianmen was a good place to start my own mixed relationship with Beijing. Beijing traditionally has a North-South orientation, with a main central road leading from the Forbidden City palace, where the Emperors lived, down towards the Temple of Heaven, called Tian Tan. The socialist reconstruction of the central city symbolically inverted the map, which previously represented the divisions between the oppressors and the people. A central public square was opened in front of the Forbidden City's main gate, Tian An Men, and is now one of the most famous sites in the country - Tiananmen Square. Furthermore, a new road was built to extend from the extreme west to the far east of the city, centring on Tiananmen and representing the new equality of the classes. Changing its name four times along its length, it is one of the world's longest straight roads. Qianmen (meaning 'Front Gate') is directly south of Tiananmen square, and now marks the top of the street that formerly linked the palace with Tian Tan. The old gate is still there, or rather the two of them, which sit incongruously in a grassy roundabout and at the bottom of Tiananmen Square respectively. Traffic and a complicated series of underground crossings fan out from the lower gate park, where the metro exit feeds passengers out onto the sidewalks. Days before, religious fanatics of the Falun Gong sect committed suicide here by covering themselves in petrol and lighting it in protest of the Government's banning of this dangerous religion; police were in full force checking bags for liquid, and were generally edgy around the whole of central Beijing. I was coming out of a French café when I was approached by a student of art - at the time I didn't realise that she was a member of a school which habitually approached foreigners to attempt to sell art; a fair attempt to finance their education. She was polite in that she didn't invite me to view the gallery without my first asking to see it, and she did introduce me to a colourful back street coming off the western side of Great Qianmen Road where we stopped to watch a display of traditional lion dancing. Dang Kai, and her classmate (who similarly came from Xian) whom I met inside called Yang Chun, proudly showed me their artwork, a combination of traditional Chinese and modern Western styles. Modernist colours contrasted with each other on rice paper, sweet and blushing Chinese ladies in full costume made traditional poses in drab modern apartments. We had green tea in old Chinese pottery vessels which they instructed me how to use, and I attempted to fix the gallery's Internet connection. I invited them to accompany me to the Museum of Natural History, further down Great Qianmen Road, where, I had read, a notorious display of pickled people provides a gruesome antidote to the stuffed animals that populate the rest of the halls. A long walk down bustling and dirty Great Qianmen Road later, the reports were true: the displays were old and dull and smelt of sweet oranges and paste; the preserved bodies were built up too much in reputation to disarm me. The most unusual was a dissection of a young woman dressed in black gloves and socks, and with a black woollen bag covering her head. I left my friends to visit the most well-known attraction of Qianmen, the Temple of Heaven. It's considered a wonder in that it is a spectacular construction of wood without a single nail, a temple for Ming and Qing emperors alike to perform rituals for the sake of good harvests. Again, it is not the original temple, although it was rebuilt exactly according to the original plan - the first destroyed not by invasion or fanatics this time, but by a lightening strike a few hundred years ago. The price of using wood. The official excuse was that a caterpillar with an intent to desecrate had made it all the way to the top. The park in which Tian Tan is situated is large and leafy. I was a little overcome by all the wandering and camera-toting, I walked pointlessly through it, circled the temple watching the cityscape more than the site itself, moved south through the traditional processional walkway where on one elevated platform is a small circle of stone once thought to be the actual centre of the entire universe. Other people were standing on it; I left the park and started on the long walk back to Tiananmen Square. Along the southern boundary of the park is a stretch of blue apartment blocks that defies belief in their regularity and repetitiveness. They oppose a river crossed in thick causeways; the sun going down over Beijing gave them a ruddy and dusty sheen. Deeper south, shacks smoked coal like Zhang Jia Kou, bicycles stacked against shop windows gathered heavy smuts and chubby busses stuffed like roasted ducks emptied their contents into old, unchanged alleyways. I was wandering back towards the central sectors where the hoteliers were genuflecting to today's visiting corporate reps, in danger of missing it all. |
