“Beijing’s soul was always its street life: its hawkers and vendors, its ethnic minorities from every corner of China, its street food, its flashing giant neon signs and and semi-legal businesses, its recycling men in bicycles carts, its migrant workers and foreign backpackers, its late-night music clubs and cheap sidewalk vendors.”
This g&m blog post by Geoffrey York (g&m Beijing Bureau Chief) touches on a topic that my friends and I were hashing out over some beers at the bar last night after our pub quiz gathering was canceled for O-related reasions, and we discovered our second planned location, a local rock venue, had shuttered its doors (possibly due to O-related complications).
Things have changed a lot in the past little while as the city primps and fixes its hair for its date with the Olympics.
Our flight back to Beijing from Qingdao on Sunday night put us on the tour path of seeing Beijing through the eyes of someone fresh off the plane. We were getting the full Olympic treatment. We tottered off the airport gangplank (probably not the industry term?) and into the nicest public bathroom I’ve ever been in since the start of my public bathroom-going career. It was so bleached-white and shiny I felt like we’d been hurtled far into the future. The Jetson’s would pee here.
T3 of the Capital airport has more than glittering bathrooms; the building itself looks like a Christmas tree/disco ball from the highway. Right from the get-go visitors are injected with a very modern sense of the city. The highway into town was smooth sailing and flanked by immense trees; intersecting overpasses were gently lit by underneath bulbs; and every so often we’d roll over sections of the road freshly painted with giant Olympic rings.
When we got back to our neighborhood, we discovered that the giant pit that used to be the road next to our apartment and leading to school had finally been fully paved. At some point in the night, tree elfs had hustled into town and deposited hundreds of huge potted fern-like plants onto the sidewalk, which added a huge dose of green to the city and brought upon us poor pedestrians an extra walking conundrum/hazard (how to overtake someone on a crowded sidewalk without getting a face full of palm fronds).
A few weeks ago we went on a bike ride around Tiananmen square and marveled at the advancements. I’d been there just a year ago and already noticed the streets bordering the square looked markedly different. They’ve added some garishly painted traditional Chinese architectural touches. There wasn’t a kebob seller to be seen. Everything was still in a state of half-construction; we walked through tiny puffs of sawdust and smelled freshly cut wood by modest shops. It resembled the exaggerated Western storefronts on the frontier ranges, a sort of painted modernity.
In no way do I know the real Beijing. I’ve only been here a month. But even in that month so much has changed. To accurately lament what Beijing has become, one would have to have very good idea of what it was, and what it meant. I can really only skim the surface, but it’s apparent that a lot of what I like about China, the hurried frenzy on the sidewalks, people rattling by on a bicycle cart stacked high with styrofoam, the too-smelly-to-be-quaint but too-vibrant-to-be-a-ghetto hutong communities, are getting airbrushed out of the picture. Many of the people who helped spackle up the city with its glam are getting booted out of town. Visitors will have to look a little bit harder to scratch the gilded edge of the town and peer into its throbbing under-life.
And what’s with the nightlife taking a hit? During the Olympics they’ll be closing many clubs for safety reasons (this may be a good thing), but the mere approach of this auspicious event seems to be sending venues into a sort of hiding for fear of getting too much attention from authorities. Nothing to see here! (literally. darn.)
The effects of these changes certainly deflate a lot of the awkwardly endearing idiosyncracies of the city, but they come with some minor advantages. On the one hand, some visitors will miss out on getting meat on a stick on the side of the road, and on the other, they might avoid having someone spit on their leg (this has happened to me). Cleaner public bathrooms, spitting bans, pollution policies, anti-congestion measures, these will have some minor positive effects on my life and possibly reduce the amount of grit I get in my eye while walking to class. I am happy about that.
I’ll be gone by the time the Olympics crash-lands into town. I’ve got to get back to Canada soon, but thought I’d position myself here to catch some of the excitement leading up to the big O. Mostly it seems I’m present for the Molly Maid cleaning frenzy. And in some ways my time here is inconvenienced and I’m missing out on some real Beijing excitement; I have to lift up my feet in my chair so they can vacuum underneath.
Then again, perhaps post-Olympics things will return to normal. Its Pleasantville facade will get wrinkled and ease itself back into a sort of everydayness. People will once again spill out onto the street and start screaming below my window. The scent of spiced meat on a stick will waft through the air. The flourescent glow of the barbershops/brothels will flicker back on again. I will throw deathstares to motorcycles/cars that cut through traffic and attempt to run me off the road.
And we will continue to view the Olympics as both a type of saviour (the streets are so clean! Thanks, Olympics!) and scapegoat (goddamit look at these inauthentically clean streets. Screw you, Olympics!). At least these exhausting contradictions, this ability to argue endlessly in two directions, are so so very familiar, so authentic China.
