Lots of amusement can be had by simply reading the “English” signs around Beijing. Here are a few of my favorites:
Original Motive (a store?)
Outside a monument: Vigorously Prosecuted All Sorts of Crime
A bakery: Bread Talk
Yes House
Urban Street With Peaceful Name Defining Life
And, over the entrance to the Hard Rock Cafe:
No Drugs And Nuclear Weapons Allowed
In the end, I think what really bothered me the most in Beijing and its surrounding area was the crushing weight of 3000 years of tradition. Coming from such a young country as the U.S., it’s a stifling feeling being around a culture where everything important about life has been decided long ago.
Chinese people are born with the weight of over 100 generations of ancestors bearing down on them, telling them how to think about authority, marriage, work, play, love and war. America, on the other hand, was born out of the restless spirit of a people refusing to obey their colonial “parents.” It’s hard to overemphasize what a difference this makes between our two cultures.
The result in China is a culture of sameness. When I toured the various Ming Dynasty tombs, the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven and other historical sites in and around Beijing, at first it was fascinating to hear the lore of what everything represented.
Oh, I see, cool: Red is a color everyone can use, and its stands for happiness. Green stands for prosperity. Yellow is a color only the Imperial family can use.
See these two lions guarding the gate? Which is the male and which is the female? Oh, there it is: the male lion has a large ball (representing power) under his paw; the female has a lion cub under hers. See these three bridges to the temple sanctuary? Middle bridge is for emperor, left bridge is for common folks.
All perfectly interesting. Until you realize EVERY temple and traditional building has the EXACT same color scheme, the EXACT same lions, the EXACT same bridges. You even begin seeing exact motifs represented in art. See the pretty jade horses representing good luck? Now see the same exact set of horses in a hundred different sizes, carved out of a hundred different colors of jade, in a hundred different flea markets. Mind you, I’m not referring to similar designs, but IDENTICAL designs.
It’s as if the entire country is based on a set of immutable templates.
Compare this to old churches in Europe. Even though you’ll see the flow of certain architectural traditions, like Romanesque, Rococo, Gothic, etc., within those traditions you’ll see a wild proliferations of variations on the traditional themes.
Not in Beijing. Red, green, yellow. Three bridges. Two lions.
In stark contrast, the skyline of modern Beijing is a forest of fascinating and innovative new high-rises and skyscrapers. Daring shapes, colors and designs abound. The architects? German. Dutch. Italian. Not a single major construction project in the city has a Chinese architect. What a shock. I guess it’s a sign of progress that the Chinese can at least recognize their limitations and are willing to take the step of hiring foreigners to be innovative, since innovation has been bred out of their own national chromosomes.
Harsh? Maybe. But when you watch the Olympics on TV next year and marvel at the wild-looking Birds Nest Stadium and other cool buildings in the Olympic Village, just remember – ALL of them were designed by non-Chinese people who are capable of thinking out of the box.
This extends to all personal matters as well. When I spoke to Chinese people and they learned I wasn’t married, they were honestly shocked. Shocked, and seemingly almost unable to imagine such a state for a 47-year old man.
It reminded me of how rich and valuable my heritage as an American is. As an ornery citizen of the U.S., I actually get to decide for MYSELF what colors I’d like to put on my house. Or how to build a family, or IF to build a family. There are a thousand choices I can make a day that I can easily take for granted. Well, shame on me – I’ll try not to take them for granted any more.
Will it stay this way forever in China? Maybe not. It’s very possible that, with the aggressiveness of their outreach to the West to build their economy that an influx of new ideas could flood into the country and be embraced by the younger generations. I certainly hope so.
Remember, just because something is old, doesn’t make it good. Just because we’ve done something a certain way forever doesn’t mean we’re doing it the right way. You want me to list some of the institutions with a long and respectable history which are an abomination to modern man? Don’t get me started. That rant is for another piece.
Note to self: When you get home, find some HBO executive willing to discuss the bizarre state of HBO/Cinemax in Asia.
They edit and censor movies!! Uh, fellas, that’s the whole reason we have HBO, so we can have uncensored movies. I guess not in China!
On HBO Asia, you will never hear the word “fuck.” Ever. I was watching Casino the other night, or what was left of it after the HBO Asia censors had finished with it, and it was pretty hilarious to see Sharon Stone bitterly screaming “Oh, freak you. FREAK YOU!! FREAK YOU!!!”
But that’s not the most mysterious aspect of HBO Asia. The real head-scratcher is the programming. You think HBO and Cinemax can be lame in the US? In China you get to see things like Corey Haim thrillers. Did you even know there WERE Corey Haim thrillers? And you get to see big stars in movies you have never, ever heard of. Like Steve Martin and Liev Schreiber (the latter in drag, no less) in a deeply bewildering “comedy” called Mixed Nuts. Or atrocities like Wilder Napalm, starring Debra Winger and Dennis Quaid. What? You mean you’d never heard of it either?
I can understand perhaps that the Chinese government, being the biggest dog in the Asian kennel, gets to censor movies shown here, even on cable. But what’s with the movie selection? Do the Chinese have a weird affection for bad films? Do the American HBO executives think the Asian audience won’t know any better?
Verily, we need to get to the bottom of this.
How you react to Beijing has a lot to do with how adventurous you are.
There are many Beijings.
I am staying in the most expensive quarter, the neighborhood for rich foreigners and exceptionally well-heeled nationals. That means we shop at Van Cleef and Arpels and eat at Pizza Hut. Very little weird food.
On the other hand, my boss on the job went to an actual neighborhood and ate a restaurant that had grubs on the menu. I don’t want to even BE in a restaurant that serves grubs.
Here in our little enclave, shopping is very western. Leave it, and the local merchants are so aggressive it gets frightening. I’ve had several physically accost me and try to body check me from walking away from their stall of pirated goods. I don’t like that and it gets me very angry. Getting to any tourist destination means bulling your way through endless gauntlets of these pushy little prairie dogs.
The air is not good. But not as bad as I hear Shanghai is. Douglas Coupland describes the air of Shanghai as a mélange of heavy metals.
Taxis are cheap, and eating out is cheap as long as you leave your luxury hotel.
Would I like to stay here for a year? It certainly wouldn’t be my first pick. But maybe if you gave me a really cute houseboy and a huge salary and a great flat. In this neighborhood. It would be a huge plus if I had a serious interested in developing emphysema.
Perhaps I’ll sound more charmed with the place after I get to see a few more sights. I’ll see the Forbidden City this weekend.
The thing to remember about China is that it’s simultaneously 3000 years old and 20 years old. The soda cans have 70s style pull-caps that actually come off (remember those?). The industrial revolution here started five minutes ago. It really affects everything, and there’s a WHOLE lot of ugly almost wherever you go.
I’m sure it’s pretty in some parts of the country side. The trip to the Wall isn’t pretty, because the Gobi Desert has decided to move south. It’s killing the vegetation on the mountains pretty rapidly. The city regularly has sand storms that put the residents into gas masks.
Of course, if you went to enjoy the beauty of the bucolic countryside, you also will be dealing with lots of health issues you won’t have in Beijing. Malaria, diphtheria and an alphabet full of hepetitises await your tourbus.
Instead of China you might consider going somewhere quiet and serene. Like Calcutta.
China is a country of 1.3 billion people, and at least a billion of them sell bootleg cds and dvds on streetcorners.
As a champion for IP rights, this drives me crazy as I wend my way through the streets of Beijing. “DVD! DVD!” calls the huckster every four or five steps that I take. I now just turn to them and say in imperious (and I’m sure, incomprehensible) English, “You’re a pirate. A thief. You’re a nation of thieves. You’re a laughingstock to the world. No one will take China seriously until its people decide to take intellectual property seriously!”
I’m sure I’m making an enormous difference.
Here’s the weird thing: I’m not at all sure that, aside from the thousands of World of Warcraft gold farmers, that the Chinese play games at all. I have not seen a single person carrying a gameboy and in all of Beijing I have found exactly NO game stores!!!
I’ve talked to some of the partners in the firm about this. “Where are the damn gamestores?!” I demand, as I am about to finish Final Fantasy IV on my GBA and will need a new game before I go home.
Here’s what I think it is: Perhaps game cartridges and even game dvds are harder to bootleg, not to mention the fact that you have to have the actual consoles to use them. And in China, few people can afford the actual market prices for such things. At any rate, it’s been frustrating.
But as it now turns out that I’m headed to Tokyo, I’m pretty confident that I’ll be able to find a game store there. I mean, it’s Japan, the gaming nexus of the solar system!!
Vonnegut’s been my hero ever since I read Cat’s Cradle in seventh grade. His relentless humanism in spite of deep pessimism created some of the most bittersweet and memorable pieces of writing in the second half of the 20th Century.
It’s a huge crime that this towering talent never got what he deserved, namely the Nobel Prize.
For the first time in 25 years, I don’t have the prospect of a new Vonnegut book to look foward to. Quelle drag.
Thanks, Kurt. Thanks for Eliot Rosewater and Ice-Nine and Bokonen and Tralfamadore, granfaloons and Kilgore Trout. Thanks for Cat’s Cradle, Mother Night, Slaughter-House Five, The Sirens of Titan, Galapagos, A Man Without a Country and Breakfast of Champions.
I am the largest human being in China.
The China World Hotel, by the way, is dazzling. And since my stay is three weeks, I qualified for a “club floor” room, which included all sorts of groovy perks. Starting with complimentary car service from the airport.
I was met by a handler no more than three feet off of the plane, and she whisked me through customs, baggage, and immigration lines with martial efficiency. At the hotel they greeted me like I was a rock star. I was shuttled out of the enormous, gilded, perfumed lobby up to the exclusive Horizon Club where I relaxed and sipped a beverage while they checked me in.
The service in this place is like nothing I’ve ever experienced. There’s a pillow menu in the room, for heaven’s sake.
When I got to the room it was about 4:30 p.m. It was 2:30 a.m. for me and I’d been awake for 23 hours. Still, I felt reasonably okay, so I stumbled down to the lobby and began exploring the huge shopping mall underneath the complex.
I was hoping to find a charger for my GameBoy. This is China, I thought, which is right next to Japan. There’s got to be LOTS of game stores! Sadly the mall was nothing but wildly upscale American and European boutiques, restaurants, and “Le Cool” Ice Skating Rink. I ate at Pizza Hut (sue me), then went back to my room and managed to stay awake until almost ten o’clock.
The next morning, Sunday, I dealt with my jet lag by heading up to the Badaling section of the Great Wall (it’s about an hour out of the city). It’s pretty amazing and I got some good pictures, including several of me atop a very bored Bactrian camel.
There are two major places where you visit the wall near Beijing, and I went to the “less touristy” one. It was still a mass of tacky souvenir stands with shockingly aggressive vendors. How aggressive? Well, if you walked away from them they’d body block you in an attempt to keep your attention while they whittled down their price some more on the crappy t-shirt they wanted to sell you. Or they’d grab you. I’m not very fond of strangers grabbing me for any reason, and let’s just say it’s lucky there was no international incident.
After hours in the bus and lots of steep climbing on and near the Wall, I was ready for bed early.
THE FLIGHT
I don’t really fit into coach. I just don’t. My financial status is completely at a disconnect with my actual body.
However, even though my flight had been full for weeks, the airline gods decided to smile on me at the last minute, as some “Economy Plus” seats became available. On United Airlines, they have a class of seat that’s not Business class, but it’s a whopping five inches larger than Sit There and Shut Your Hole Economy class. So for a mere $119, I was able to be much more comfortable for the twelve hour flight.
Who knew five inches could make such a difference. But it did!
As I got comfortable in my seat, and noticed to my relief that, of the four movies they’d be showing us, Scarlet Johansson was only in one of them, I began to review the way I actually felt about the trip.
When you do the sort of work I do, the only thing that can keep your blood pressure at an acceptable level is information. Information about the client, about the classes you’re to teach, about what’s expected of you, dress code, weather, hotel, all that stuff.
For whatever reason, this job had been maddeningly thin on information until the very last minute. And by last minute I mean we had a conference call at 6:00 p.m. That’s twelve hours before my flight was scheduled to leave.
Before this meeting, I hadn’t even seen the outline of the class I’d be teaching in three days.
After the call, I’d found myself unexpectedly grumpy all of a sudden. I realized that, as excited as I was to go, I was also a bit nervous and anxious, too. China. Such an alien place!
After the queasiness that set in after being played by the United Skycap at LAX, I got extremely sleepy on the short flight to San Francisco. By the time I lumbered off the plane at SFO, I was basically the walking dead.
One medium mocha frappe later, the wonders of caffeine had transformed me into a perfectly happy camper. I found myself in a charming conversation with Ron, a teacher helping to escort seventy over privileged private school kiddies to an extended stay in China. Ron was a good conversationalist, the blessed caffeine was percolating merrily through my veins, and I even found a power outlet right by where I was sitting so I could top off the juice in my GameBoy. Clutching my shiny new Economy Plus Fuck You boarding pass, I was as contented as a Halliburton contractor in a warzone.
We board the plane, which of course is a 747. I’ve hardly ever flown on big planes, since my international travel has been fairly limited. There’s just something cinematic about a Boeing 747 that surpasses the more mundane one-aisle airplanes I was more accustomed to flying. I suppose it’s because so many movies with airplane dramas use the larger planes.
Now, sitting in my +5 inch comfy seat awaiting takeoff, I find that I’m as excited about the trip as a little kid on the way to Disneyland.
I keep thinking, embarrassingly corny as it sounds, that all I want to do is to do a great job on this gig. I want everyone to be pleased: the students, the client, Heidi, and me.
A SELF-ESTEEM-CHALLENGING BEGINNING
I begin my Asian Odyssey by being scammed by the United Airlines Skycap guy.
In my defense, it was 4:30 in the morning and I barely had a pulse, much less upper brain function.
Here’s what happened. After weighing my single bag for check-in, the Skycap came over and informed me my bag was 5 pounds overweight. I wasn’t surprised. (YOU try to pack for a three-week business trip without going over fifty pounds.)
Mr. Helpful Skycap took my passport, credit card and boarding pass and bounded away to get my $50 overweight fee paid. Ten minutes later he returned.“I talked him out of the fee!” His eyes shone with conspiratorial glee. “All I had to do was tip him $20.”
Okay, okay, I know, all of my alarm signals should have gone off at that point. Like I said, it was 4:30 in the morning, I wanted off the sidewalk and into the terminal, and I just didn’t have the strength to start off the staggeringly long travel day with a showdown with this guy. Remember, he’s the person in charge of getting my bag to Beijing. I was afraid that getting into it with him would be the equivalent of harassing a waiter, only to have your soup spit in. I didn’t want my overweight bag to end up in Yemen.
I pulled out my walled and sourly gave him $15.Of course, as I stood in the (football field length, even at 4:40 in the a.m.) security line, I had more and more time to think about it and get humiliated and angry. I told my story to several UA personnel, and mostly what I got was a very annoying, “Well, you know those guys don’t work for the airline.”
Well, fuck you, United Airlines. The Skycaps wear United Airlines jackets and they check you in for United Airlines flights. They’re representing United Airlines, goddamnit. Eat me.
After several employees managed to convince me that, being ripped off aside, my bag would most assuredly end up in Beijing, I was able to relax a bit and go from feeling anxious to merely stupid.Then I got my first laugh of the day as I had an early breakfast at “Ruby’s Cafe.” Ruby’s is an ersatz classic 50s All-American coffee shop, with the exception that, like most airport eateries, you stood in a line and gave your order at the front register.
I sat down to await my $15 egg sandwich and noticed that my table, like all the others, had on its side, in a classic chrome metal clip, a bright red-and-white menu. Just like diners of days gone by! Hang on, I thought. Why did I order up front.Curiously, I pulled out the large laminated rectangular menu, only to discover it wasn’t a menu at all! It just LOOKED like a menu! The cafe was actually using props. Maybe it was the hour, but this struck me as uniquely hilarious.