Imagethief

Tag: Beijing

  • Not enough radiation in your skull and other problems with retail

    Modern Beijing, as distinct from the leafy, 1960s loufang neighborhoods and the hutongs, is an unlovely town at the best of times. No acreage of hanging glass curtain walls can make up for the viscerally alienating nature of the razor-edged, neo-Stalinist SOE office buildings lining the boulevards on the west side of town. The malls and commercial developments of the east side are little better. Wanda Plaza looks like what Albert Speer would have built in Berlin if the Third Reich had lasted into the age of shopping malls. And there are plenty worse than that.

    My own neighborhood is no great prize. It abuts one of those monster intersections on greater Chang’an Avenue that are like urban planning fever dreams – a vast and lethal plane of asphalt ruled by a squawking tribe of crossing-guards that lives in the permanent shadow of a monster overpass, like Brothers Grimm trolls with orange vests. At rush hour the whole thing seizes into gridlock, offering a pretty good preview of what the traffic in Hell will be like. The Guohua power plant’s 500 foot visible-from-space smokestack looms over everything. One of my favorite mental games is looking up at it from different spots in the neighborhood and trying to work out whether it would land on me if it tipped over in my direction. The answer usually is yes.  And people think high school trigonometry is useless.

    Two factors redeem the neighborhood. First, it is within walking distance of the congenial Tuanjiehu, Hujialou and Yanjingli neighborhoods, and the Tonghui canal, which isn’t exactly scenic but is useful for running. Second, it’s convenient, with a subway station, easy access to the Third and Fourth Rings (important for my commute), and a dynamite selection of amenities.

    There is naturally some ebb and flow in those amenities. In early 2008, when Mrs. Imagethief and I returned from a year in Shanghai, we moved into China Central Place Apartments. Soon thereafter workers started converting the previously vacant commercial building in front of  the apartments into an Italian delicatessen and restaurant complex. Having then recently spent a week immersed in the culinary delights of Tuscany, this seemed like a fantastic thing. Exotic sausages and cheeses on our doorstep! Score!

    The reality was rather less inspiring. The Piazza Italia turned out to be three floors of mediocrity: A middlebrow Italian supermarket attached to a cafeteria and an unremarkable restaurant. The curse of the Piazza Italia was demonstrated by its deli. With all the treasures of Italy to choose from, it stuck resolutely to Italian food cliches. I like Parma ham and Parmesan cheese as much as the next guy, but trust me when I say there is much more to Italian deli. For me, the Piazza’s high point came the day Mrs. Imagethief, Zachary and I ate lunch at the cafeteria and found ourselves dining at the table next to Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Say what you will about the Italians, they’re not hung up about who’s in the restaurant with their leader.

    It was thus moderately disappointing but not in the least surprising when the Piazza rolled over and died. I expressed my grief by rummaging through the wine area and buying several bottles of nice Brunello at knockdown prices. Merchants at Sanyuanli market did a roaring trade in surplus Parmesan for several months thereafter. And Mrs. Imagethief and I started wondering what business might occupy the three newly vacated floors of retail space with an eye watering rent bill.

    I was hoping for a three-floor Jenny Lou, which will tell you how realistic I am. Our neighborhood lost its Jenny Lou three or four years ago, which is a shame because none of the other local shopping options is much good for imports. The BHG Marketplace in the basement of the Shin Kong Place ultramall has pretensions, but mostly it just charges otherworldly prices for produce available for one quarter the price 300 meters away. But, hey, you can get Japanese Cokes for 12rmb.

    In that way, BHG Marketplace is representative of Shin Kong as a whole: glossy, but mostly useless. Take out the Din Tai Feng, the food court and the coffee places, and rest is a waste of space. But maybe that’s just me. I am a man of plain tastes and there are only so many Bvlgari trinkets that I need. And, as I discovered when I tried to buy a jacket a couple of years ago, nothing in the department store fits me. I’m much better off at the Jimmy and Tommy Foreign Trade Club in Sunshine 100. So I guess I have no business assaulting the Piazza Italia for being “middlebrow.”

    After it lay fallow for a few months, work finally began on the abandoned Piazza. We asked the security guards what was being put in, but nobody seemed to know. “A car showroom,” said one. The first sign of trouble came when workers erected an enormous, welded hoarding around the building, concealing it from sight. Concealed buildings in China seldom lead to anything good. A second sign came when the hoarding on one part of the building indicated that it was being subdivided into a cluster of luxury watch boutiques. Finally, the took down the hoardings from the other part and revealed…a three story Burberry boutique.

    If you had asked me to make a list of things that they could have put in the abandoned Piazza that would have been of the least use to me, it would have read like this:

    1. A minefield.
    2. A malarial swamp.
    3. A smelting works.
    4. A Burberry boutique.

    The black, plasticky facade of the Burberry boutique would have been bad enough on its own, but it gained that extra measure of vulgarity thanks to that defining architectural cliche of modern Beijing (after the hanging glass curtain wall), the colossal video screen. In fact, it being a corner lot, one video screen wasn’t enough. There are two house-sized video screens from which endless loops of prancing Eurotrash in plaid trenchcoats can be beamed to the entire neighborhood.

    Our neighborhood was already blessed with an abundance of kinetic distractions, including the semi-animated front of the over-lit Shin Kong mall itself and the usual assortment of kaleidoscopic neon signage and red LED crawls in office windows. But if there is one thing I’ve learned over my years in Beijing, it is that there is no neighborhood so tacky that it can’t be debased just that little bit more.

    It’s hard to transmit the effect of these screens unless you stand in front of them. They’re so bright they can etch your shadow into the sidewalk like atomic explosions. When people stand in front of these things you can see their skeletons and surgical implants. They literally cast a glow over the entire area. The first time Burberry started them up I thought it was large-scale welding works reflecting off of the neighboring buildings. At least my apartment gets only what reflects off of the side of Shin Kong. God help the poor souls living on the east side of Blue Castle who will now be bathed in a nonstop glow of high-energy Burberon particles. They’ll have to install lead-lined curtains or eventually the poor souls will all go thoroughly insane and have to be exiled to some remote corner of Hainan where they can wile away their miserable last days fruitlessly banging damp coconuts together in a wretched attempt to rediscover the technology of fire and cook their meager strands of monkey meat.

    Admittedly, a worst-case scenario, but when you see these screens you’ll know what I’m talking about. If this was Ginza, fine, but this is a partially residential neighborhood. A MyGym looks out over that intersection. Think of the little children!

    I presume they’ll take a cue from the Shin Kong mothership and shut down the illumination at 10:30, but Beijing’s winter sunset comes at about 4:30 PM, which is a lot of time to be exposed to a nonstop loop of fluorescent luxury propaganda. And during the testing phase, all bets are off. A few nights ago I woke up at 2AM and the damned things were on, casting a ghostly flicker across my living room walls.

    I should not be surprised. Our descent into neighborhood tackiness began earlier this year when the property office made the catastrophic decision to line the clubhouse in the middle of our courtyard with animated, green strip lights. This not only made it completely impossible to sit at the outside tables at the coffee shops in the courtyard, but it cast the entire courtyard in a color drawn straight from Pantone’s “Radioactive Monster Puke” palette. Giant video screens were a logical next step. Face the courtyard. Face the street. Face the vast power station. You’re pretty much damned in any direction.

    I guess I should count my blessings. Burberry may have colossal video screens, but at least they didn’t stoop to that other well-worn tactic of Beijing retail marketing: a pair of blown speakers outside the front door blasting distorted Mandarin-pop at a volume that can kill small dogs and knock the magpies out of trees two neighborhoods away.

    But they haven’t opened the watch boutiques yet, so that could still be coming.

    Only much, much bigger.
    Only much, much bigger.

  • Journey to the planet of the electro-squids

    It’s time to move.

    We’ve been in the same place for nearly three years. It’s been good, but Mrs. Imagethief’s business is growing, I’m spending some of my time working at home, and let’s not even get into the whole child-number-two discussion. The upshot is that we need a bigger place.

    I hate almost everything about moving. It’s disruptive. It’s a pain in the ass. It’s expensive (although less so in China than elsewhere). There is the great mystery as to whether you’re trading your current decent landlord (I’ve been lucky) for Empress Wu. There’s the great computational axis of price vs. commute vs. school vs. amenities vs. could our ayi get here? The only good things about moving are being able to slough off a layer of useless house-cruft — all that stuff at the backs of closets– and the feeling you get when you finally have the new place set up the way you want, before the cats have salted everything in summer cat hair and little, scattered pills of cat litter. I have many miles to go before I have my feet up on that particular ottoman of satisfaction.

    Until then, I must endure the great drudgery of plodding through empty apartments. The other day I had to reel in an agent who was about to take us to look at some places renting for RMB40,000 a month. Hold on there, tiger. I know you’re paid based on the rent, but if I could afford that kind of ticket my personal flunky would be taking the first look. Not me. Our budget is decent, but we’re still squarely in the making-some-compromises bracket. It says something about China that our current leading-candidate apartment had an unflushed toilet full of shit and yet our conclusion was still, say, not bad. In the US realtors tell you set out fresh cookies when people are coming to look at the apartment. In China you get a bog full of crap. But you also get new floor boards, so take the bad with the good, I guess.

    I don’t want to complain at length about all the miseries of hunting for an apartment in China. Well, strictly speaking, that’s not true. I do in fact want to complain about them and I have done so at length. But I also want to focus on just one thing that gets up my nose every time I tour apartments in China. It is not, despite what you might think, piles of human waste. It is the light fixtures.

    To gather all my complex feelings about this into just three words, what the f***?

    It’s true, many Chinese apartments have appalling furniture. My solution to that has been to buy my own furniture and look for unfurnished or partly-furnished places. I’m completely willing to have redundant crap dragged out of the apartment as a condition of rental. That couch that I wouldn’t sit on without wrapping my ass in saran-wrap and sunscreen? Adios, muchacho. But lights are built in. There is wiring, and screws and god knows what. And if I unplug this wire, this being China and all, there is a chance, however small, that all the stop-lights in the neighborhood will turn green at once or the neon sign on the restaurant across the road will spell out a dirty word and my visa will be canceled for gross disturbance of public order.

    None of which would matter if the light fixtures weren’t so consistently awful. I’m not talking some rarefied, well that’s a bit unsightly thing. I’m talking full-on psychotic awful, like having Damien Hirsch Hirst* as your interior decorator and coming home to find pickled sharks lined with halogen bulbs hanging from your ceiling at face level. I’m talking 1970s Disco Inferno throwback nasty that makes me think of lime green shag carpets and Ford Econoline vans with bubble windows and airbrushed paintings of topless space-vixens deflecting lightning bolts with Gibson “Flying V” electric guitars. If you’ve ever wanted to see what it would look like if the space-ship from the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind landed in your living room, I’ve got the apartment for you. If you want to know what it would look like if Louis XVI had escaped the guillotine, sneaked out of France disguised as un ouvrier Chinois (quelle humiliation!) and wound up in a downtown three-bedroom in Beijing on a middle-class Chinese salary, I’ve got the apartment for you.

    What is this fascination with chandeliers? Listen: If you’ve got a stately pile in the countryside with forty acres (or, this being China, 240 mu) of grape vines and a grand hall with a thirty-foot ceiling that requires banquet illumination, then fine. Get a chandelier. I’m not saying it’s a good decision, but it’s at least technically defensible on some kind of inbred, blue-blood clause. But if you’ve just bought an urban pre-fab concrete box with eight-foot ceilings, a three-foot chandelier is simply not going to work unless you’re renting your apartment to Wee Man from the “Jackass” movies. Sooner or later, someone is winding up in the hospital having bits of Swarovski shrapnel irrigated out of their eyes. Plus, if you are renting your apartment to Wee Man, a stack of turds in the hall bathroom is likely to be the least of your problems when he moves out. Make sure you get the deposit in cash.

    Lights, dude. How hard can it be? It’s the illumination that counts, not the number of fronds on the fixture or getting it exactly the same shade of pink as Aphrodite’s hemorrhoids. A big factor in choosing our current apartment was that it had naked bulbs in the ceiling. All we had to do was hang shades on them. Less is more. Think minimal and simple. Especially –and I cannot stress this enough– if you want to rent to foreigners. We’re weak. Our eyes bleed if we see too much brass filigree at any one time. Easy test: if your light fixtures make my son either giggle or cry, I’m not renting your apartment, even if the fridge is colossal and the toilets just came out of an autoclave and the bathrooms smell like a strawberry muffin factory. It’s that simple. When I stagger home from work late and flick on the living room light, I don’t want my first reaction to be cardiac arrest. I don’t want to feel compelled to place a panicky phone call to SHADO.  I don’t want to crack my head into the goddamn thing when I stumble into the kitchen in the middle of the night for a biscuit. I don’t want to find freaking bats hanging from it.

    I don’t, in a word, want this:

    electro squid

    Now, really, is that too much to ask?

  • Poorly thought out adventures in commuting

    In the grip of my darkest and most bourgeois moments I actually considered buying a car and hiring a driver. So, it’s come to this… I thought, as I hovered over a digital map of Beijing. I have to get one of those Buick vans. No matter how I traced the route or arranged the useless layers of meta-data in Google Maps I had to face up to reality. My new office was in the sticks.

    More specifically, it was in Wangjing. North Wangjing, hard against the Fifth Ring Road. The Fifth is commonly accepted as the dividing line between the frothy, urban Beijing of Apple Stores and upscale dining and the great void of the Chinese hinterland where all is windswept grist for broody New York Times articles about how miserable the rest of the world has it. Well, and also Tongzhou. Never mind that when I moved to Beijing the Fourth Ring Road was that line.

    You can tell the office is in a neighborhood that didn’t exist three years ago. The building is as gorgeous and new as a space station and just as isolated from amenities and comforts. The nearest Starbucks is at least two kilometers away. In Beijing in 2010 more than two kilometers from Starbucks is the qualification for a rural hukou. I brought a French press to office.

    I am strong enough to confront my flaws (although weak enough wrap that confrontation in a layer of prickly humor). By the standards of my Chinese colleagues this is, I admit, jello-kneed schoolgirl bitching. Many of them live outside the Fifth and have commutes that sound lifted from the darker pages of Jack London novels, where people die freezing for want of a twist of jerky somewhere on the track from Fort Yukon to Unalakleet. Just substitute a bendy-bus for the dog sled. Against this, even the commute from Dawang Rd. to Wangjing is lower middle-distance at best, like one of those mid-range Olympic track races that is too long to be exciting but too short to be impressive and that nobody remembers who won.

    I, however, have been spoiled. For six years my distance from the office has ranged from a five minute walk to a five-stop straight shot on subway line 1. Even the latter is the Beijing commute equivalent of schlepping from the couch to the fridge during a commercial break for a half-full can of Duncan-Hines frosting and a Pabst Blue Ribbon.

    Although I toyed seriously with the idea of either buying a car or hiring a car and driver, in the end my socialist* pedigree won out. For my first day at the new job I decided to take public transport.

    Man, was that stupid.

    It looked good on the map, though. From my house I can take the line 1 subway one stop to Guomao. Then it’s a straight shot north on line 10 to the Shaoyaoju interchange and one more stop on line 13 to Wangjing West. From there a short bus ride. Simple!

    If you read the New York Times you probably scan the occasional Tom Friedman column where he hyperventilates about how fast the Chinese are building infrastructure for which Americans have lost the blueprints. Subways, for instance. The statistics for Beijing are magnificent: Thirty lines planned, totaling over 1000 kilometers of track. Everyone living within the Fourth Ring to be able to walk to a station in fifteen minutes. Sounds like The Future!

    Sure. It’s Logan’s Run. But with the subway system from The Warriors.

    There are two reasons for this. First, adding more lines and interchanges has certainly made the entire system more useful. But the number of people riding has gone up as something like a cubic function of the number of track kilometers. In the course of two years my old line 1 commute went from crowded but tolerable to needing to lubricate yourself with Astroglide and use a prybar to get on or off the train. Combined with the casual Chinese disdain for off first, on second it’s a miracle the platforms aren’t entirely covered with bits of scalp and shards of broken teeth.

    Second, the planners of the Beijing subway system haven’t really figured out the whole idea of the subway interchange. In Singapore, subway interchanges are designed such that trains that make the most natural connections pull up on opposite sides of the same platform. Walk thirty air-conditioned feet, get on the next train. Now that’s the future!

    But why build an actual subway interchange when you can just build a long, sweaty tunnel between stations in adjacent neighborhoods? Changing trains in Beijing is a little bit like changing airport terminals, right down to the surprising number of people dragging luggage. Add the rush hour crowds and idiotic security screening chokepoints and it’s almost (though not quite) as bad as checking in at JFK.

    It took me an hour to get from my house to Wangjing West station. When I finally staggered off the third train I was ready to bail on the bus and head for a taxi. Except that Wangjing West apparently serves as the informal transportation hub for the entire Wangjing new town, which means that at any given moment there are zero authorized taxis and about fifty black cabs. I don’t generally like taking black cabs, although I do it from time to time, so I reverted to the bus.

    Big mistake. Should have taken the black cab. Beijing subway platform minders are good at cramming an apparently limitless number of people onto a train, but they have nothing on the bus drivers. Beijing’s bus drivers have taken that skill and extended it into a rarefied art form of otherworldly magnificence. The driver of the bus I took used a combination of eye-watering verbal abuse, physical bullying and backyard-steel-furnace socialist will power to get people stacked three deep in the bus. Mine was the Very. Last. Stop.

    Except that I accidentally got off a stop early and had to walk the last kilometer. There isn’t much in Wangjing and they space out the bus stops like railroad towns. An hour and twenty minutes after leaving the house I got to the office, late and looking like I had been caught in a kitchen fire at a Bob’s Big Boy. I felt virtuous, but exhausted and dumber than a chicken on roofies. Some of my colleagues do this daily. In both directions. This, not the threat of cyberwar, is why America should be scared of China.

    So I’ve been taking the taxi. I did the math. Sure, it adds up, but it’s still way cheaper than a regular car and driver, let alone buying my own car. About 25% of the taxi cost is offset by my having to brew my own coffee (which says something about the magnitude of my coffee habit). And it gave me the gossamer thin rationalization I needed to justify my iPad (thus instantly cancelling out something like two year’s worth of coffee savings). A quiet half-hour each way alone with my electronic newspapers. Well, quiet except for the ubiquitous radio story teller who makes wet lightning-and-thunder noises with his mouth.

    I’ve come to terms with the cost. I’ve come to terms with my increased contribution to global warming. The only thing that really worries me is the feeling that a taxi-based commute in Beijing is actuarial equivalent of moving to Detroit and developing a habit for convenience store robbery. After all, few Beijing taxis have seatbelts and most are driven by people with the patience and deliberation of a fox terrier that has been whipped with car antennas. If you hear of a pileup on the fourth ring and a white man being whisked to hospital to have an iPad removed from his abdominal cavity that’ll be me. If you hear of a taxi driver being whisked to hospital with an iPad embedded in his skull and an angry white man being questioned by police, that will also be me.

    *by American standards.

    You can't get there from here.
    You can’t get there from here.

  • The zombie-slugging toy police car

    Imagethief’s son, Zachary, turned two this week. I’m amazed we made it. By this I mean I’m amazed that Mrs. Imagethief and I made it. If the boy’s engine room telegraph is stuck on “full-speed-ahead”, Mrs. Imagethief and I are on something more like “dead slow” or “all back one quarter”. It’s been a busy couple of years.

    My Chinese tutor, a wonderful woman who employs the spectacular pedagogical technique of making me translate articles from The Economist into Chinese and then debating me about the contents, was kind enough to give Zach a toy Chinese police car as his present. It was really kind of a fantasy police car, being as it was a BMW in police colors, but it was a big hit with the boy. It hit three of his sweet spots: “nee-nee nee-nee cars” (anything with lights, with the sound representing the siren); “zoom cars” (anything with a spoiler); and “gongan che“, which is not at at the top of his hierarchy –taxis occupy that spot– but which rate pretty high nevertheless.

    The car was electric, so my wife hunted up some batteries for it and we switched it on.

    That was a mistake. The “nee-nee nee-nee” was approximately as loud as a real police car. I almost smashed the thing on the spot, with my tutor watching (smashing a gift in front of the person who gives it to you is not well thought of in polite Chinese society). The cats are still traumatized. Zachary seriously re-thought his infatuation.

    In the end, I took the thing apart and removed the little drive wheels and motor, which kept the car from freewheeling, and cut the wires to the speaker so that the only electric component that still worked was the lights. This made the police car a much improved toy in almost all respects. While I was about my improvements I noticed something a little odd. Here is a photo of the car:

    police car

    All well and good, except for the BMW thing, but take a closer look at the police seal on the hood:

    Raccoon City

    I almost didn’t spot it. It says, “Raccoon Police Department”.

    At first I thought this was just your random Chinglish gibberish, which often finds a way onto toys. Zach has one front-end-loader that is spangled with the declaration, “Vigorously Super Power” (which I’m thinking of having tattooed on my ass for no good reason), and some small trucks that say, “Forbid Fireworks” on the gas tank and “Head Back” on the rear bumper.

    But the miracle of Google Images reveals that this is actually the badge of the Raccoon City police department, which is the police department of the zombie-infested city from the Resident Evil video-game and movie franchise. Pop culture bottom-feeders may remember the original movie (there have been about 80 of them now) as the one in which model-turned-actress Milla Jovovich loses her memory, gets naked and kicks the ass of everything that gets in her way. I’m not sure that’s the correct order, but I’m pretty sure all those things happened. Actually, I think all those things happen in almost every movie Milla Jovovich makes, which may be why the Academy continues to snub her. At any rate, here’s the Racoon City Police Department Logo:

    Patch

    This is from a site called, “Patchbug.” Yes, somewhere out there is a patch collector serious enough that he needs a replica of the Raccoon City Police Department uniform patch. It takes all kinds, I guess.

    What I find interesting is that the maker of this toy didn’t steal the Raccoon City patch wholesale, but kind of mashed it up with Chinese to come up with something uniquely ridiculous. For those who need reminding, the actual seal on Beijing police cars is an image of the Great Wall (as if it would be anything else):

    Beijing Police Seal

    So this is apparently a replica of the car of the Beijing Police Zombie Squad, which is apparently the best equipped squad in the Beijing police department. This makes sense: Only the best if you’re going to take on zombies.

    The car also has a line of Chinese over the rear windshield, “有困难找警察”, which would properly be translated as something like, “If you have difficulties, look for a cop,” but which was rendered in English on the car as the delightfully sinister, “Any trouble with you, call the police to help.” Presumably “trouble” in this context means turning into a zombie.

    Note: Actual police car emblem from Upton’s photostream.

  • How to ensure your reincarnation as a frog

    Having grown up in “Mediterranean” San Francisco and then lived in Singapore nearly a decade, winter is something of a novelty to me. This is still true even after six years in Beijing. I don’t much like the desiccating cold or walking around in a cloud of my own skin flakes like the human sno-globe, but I enjoy the occasional snowfalls and the frozen lakes. One of my favorite Beijing experiences was a morning champagne brunch followed by a slightly drunken careen across frozen Qianhai on one of those ice bicycles that have the twin advantages of high speed and a dangerous illusion of steerability. I was double riding with my then colleague, Dennis. I can’t remember which one of us was steering. I do remember that we were thought of as ruffians and idiots. The latter was certainly true, and it’s only through the intervention of some higher power that we didn’t end up drowning under the ice or impaled on one of those little ski-poles that the kids use to prod their slow-poke sled chairs along.

    Anyway, the point is, winter: Make the most of it. Now that my son is two and learning to appreciate idiotic behavior I look forward to further snowbound adventures. Although if he does anything like Dennis and I did, he will of course be grounded until global warming ensures that any further such hijinks become impractical.

    There is a dark side to these wondrous winter scenes, however. As comes the freezing, so, inevitably, must come the thaw. The thaw has the effect of releasing the animal corpses that have been entombed in the ice all winter. Usually this means fish, and there is nothing like a stroll past a thawing Beijing lake to dazzle you with a lesson in the variety and size of the fish living (or, more accurately, that had lived) in these unpromising sludge ponds. Furthermore, there is always the one currentless doldrum where all the disgorged corpses accumulate.

    I was reminded of this during a stroll around Tuanjiehu Park yesterday, my first visit to any of the frozen lakes this winter. Last year Zachary was really still a baby, and his public emergence in anything less than a crocheted NASA spacesuit was an invitation to admonishment from the aunties of Beijing. They are well-meaning, but deep inside they truly believe that foreigners are incompetent at raising children. After all, if we were better at it, there would be more of us. With Zachary much more in the “small boy” category this year, his emergence in inclement weather leads to less scolding and clucking.

    As always, the park was festive. There was a Chinese oom-pah band (exactly as euphonious as it sounds) leading a massive sing-along inside the front gate, and the usual collection of small singing groups, lone-wolf erhu-ists, and children gnawing on that culinary hallmark of the Chinese fairground, unnaturally-colored mystery meat on-a-stick. God bless Beijing. Summer or winter, people here know how to use a public park.

    The lake that is the dominant feature of Tuanjiehu park was still mostly frozen over. Most of it was slick and gorgeous and only mildly spoiled by a dusting of rubbish half frozen into the ice. But there was one spot, near the pleasure boat docks where in summer you can rent a leaky electric boat and spray cadmium-laced water at friends and family members, that had collected an entire fish market’s worth of moldering corpses. It is an image that will haunt me if ever we take Zach to the water-park on the island in the center of the lake.

    At least it was only fish, which you kind of expect even in an urban Beijing lake. Four or five years ago, at exactly this time of year, Imagethief went on a walk past Houhai and Qianhai with the former Asiapundit, Myrick. He was in town from Shanghai to cover the National People’s Congress for the wire service he was working for at the time, and had never really had a look around the city. One of my dominant memories of that walk is the surprising number of turtle corpses we spotted on the ice, recognizable even at a distance as lonely, black humps surrounded by crows.

    These turtles are not naturally occuring. Well, these are artificial lakes, so nothing in them is “naturally occurring”. But as far as I know, there is no year-round population of turtles in these lakes. Rather, many of them had been released into the lakes by Beijingers. The dead giveaway is that a number of them were still attached to little “turtle leashes” of string and sticks.

    There is a ritual in Chinese Buddhism –放生 or fangsheng– by which one can earn merit by releasing a captive animal. Merit earns you a more advantageous seat on the wheel of karma, and helps ensure your eventual reincarnation a further rung up the ladder toward nirvana rather than a further step down toward cockroach or lemur or whatever your idea of bad is. Forgive the loose explanation, I’m shaky on my Buddhism. But you get the idea.

    I see a lot of this ritual at Spring Festival (the Chinese New Year). This isn’t surprising. Spring Festival is heavy on themes of renewal and remembrance, and the temples do good business both in carnal temple fairs (see mystery meat on-a-stick, above) and in spiritual matters. The Chinese, as in so many spheres, have applied their commercial nous to the fangsheng ritual, and you can often buy birds for release at the fairs. The birds are trained to return to their keepers, which has the double advantage of enabling punters to feel meritorious while ensuring that the bird guy protects his capital stock. Everybody wins. Arguably even the bird, which is a good score in Beijing.

    The idea of fangsheng, however, is to save an animal that is facing imminent death. Under this definition, the captive bird on the temple fair fangsheng circuit may not completely qualify, and, depending upon how strictly you interpret the scriptures, your merit may vary. Sufficient for the relaxed devotee, but perhaps not for the more orthodox. Also, the temple fairs only run a week or so, and there’s never a bird-release guy around when you need one, and so on. Sometimes, a creative solution is called for. This turns out to be the pet-store (or, more often, animal market) or supermarket turtle. Turtles are cheap. Turtles are substantial enough to matter, karmicly speaking. Turtles don’t test your resolve, like freeing that cockroach you found behind the dumpling-skin flour might.

    So people buy and release turtles. Except, with Spring Festival actually falling in a Beijing mid-winter, they release turtles into icy lakes where they promptly freeze to death. The sun then warms their dark shells and the corpses slowly sink into the ice, visible only as dark humps that will be revealed again during the spring thaw. Imagethief is no religious expert, and will defer to someone who is, but to me this seems dubiously meritorious at best. Maybe the turtle moves up the karmic ladder (it starts at a low bar). You won’t.

    Turtles aren’t the only animal that catch a hard one during this season. Frogs draw a crappy lot in China at the best of times. In 2007 Imagethief lived in Shanghai in an apartment that backed onto the local wet market. The frog seller set up shop in front of our rear gate. The frog seller’s total shopfront consisted of a bucket of live frogs, hand-held scales, a pair of kitchen shears and some plastic bags. When someone wanted to buy some frogs, the frog seller would use the kitchen shears to decapitate the frogs, and then weigh and package the rest for the customers. Over the course of an afternoon, a tragic pile of frog heads would accumulate. In summer, this would rapidly become a tragic and smelly pile of frog heads. Imagethief used to keep frogs as pets, so this was always a little traumatic for me, like a pile of kitten heads might be to a more normal person.

    Market frogs don’t do any better in Beijing than in Shanghai, so saving a frog from the kitchen shears seems as though it could be both cheap and meritorious, a combination designed to excite the thrifty Buddhist. But this goes wrong in winter as well. Mrs. Imagethief was once going for a winter jog by the Tonghuihe canal, near our house, when she saw a family releasing frogs. The frogs got about one kick and then froze more or less instantaneously. You’d think people would catch on after the first couple of frogs, but as anyone who works in business or government knows, processes tend to take on a life of their own. These people released lots of frogs. They all froze.

    When the family left, some canal workmen who had been watching from nearby immediately scooped out the frozen frogs and took them home to cook. So, genius, how does the merit allocate on that one?

    My karma ran over my frogma.
    My karma ran over my frogma.

  • A few other people that China could helpfully quarantine

    Imagethief has been watching with some interest the resolution of the drama concerning the quarantining of Mexican passport holders, some of whom hadn’t even been to Mexico in recent months. Given that my own country, the United States, was only recently contemplating the building of a border wall specifically designed to keep Mexicans out even before the flu, it seems small of me to criticize China for this policy. Especially now that news has surfaced that four Americans and a bunch of Canadian students have joined the Mexicans already enjoying government-sponsored stays in luxurious, one-star accommodations.

    Fortunately, I am a small man. Charitably, the jury is still out on the epidemiological efficacy of quarantining the Mexicans. Uncharitably, it was a scattershot, poorly-thought-out bit of knee-jerk policy that did for Chinese-Mexican relations what the notorious P3 incident off of Hainan did for Chinese-US relations in 2002.

    There is something rather 19th century about the whole idea of “quarantine”, conjuring as it does visions of smallpox and death ships. Not that there aren’t situations in which quarantine is a perfectly reasonably option. Infectious diseases are simply the most obvious application. But if the Chinese authorities are going to get all quaranteeny, Imagethief is happy to suggest a few other groups of people that the government should consider holding in isolation, for the benefit of society at large:

    • Taxi drivers who piss and moan under their breath about the traffic. It’s Beijing. You’re a taxi driver. What were you expecting?
    • Sanlitun bar touts.
    • Those girls with blue-frosted eyelids at Oriental plaza who try to waylay me for the tea-house scam when all I want is a coffee from Starbucks.
    • People who walk slower than me and follow an unpredictable path that makes it hard for me to get around them, or who stand two abreast on escalators.
    • People who cram huge trolley bags onto the subway at rush hour.
    • Drivers at the back of a line of thirty cars who honk the instant the light turns green. In fact, all drivers.
    • People who tell me my son needs to wear more clothes. Or less clothes. Or offer any kind of unsolicited parental advice based on folk wisdom.
    • People who put smiley-face emoticons in otherwise unpleasant e-mails: “You’re being audited. :) ”
    • Anyone who sends me an SMS that begins, “本公司…”
    • The Bank of China.
    • Snarky foreign bloggers.

    All of them would benefit from a spell in isolation, if only as a precautionary measure.

    Addenda:

    • People who smoke in elevators or office-tower bathrooms
    • People who instant-message you from ten feet away.

  • Adventures in pyromania

    So CCTV burned down their own hotel. That has got to look bad in the yearly evaluation. However, here is what I am pretty sure didn’t happen: I am pretty sure that they didn’t torch their own building for the insurance money using the year’s second-biggest night of fireworks as convenient cover. This conclusion rests on no special powers of insight or criminological ability, only on my conviction poor planning and an abundance of colossal fireworks in a dense, urban area is explanation enough. I might concede sloppy construction-site management, bad safeguards and poor materials choice as a contributing factors, but that’s about it.

    I am, however,  sad. I have no particular attachment to the Mandarin Oriental tower (or much of the other graceless architectural wank that has sprung up in this town in the past five years), but I expect the fire will lead to new controls on fireworks in Beijing. As wise as that might be from a civil defense point of view, it would dilute one of the Beijing’s great spectacles: the Chinese New Year fireworks inferno.

    Fireworks reach a special part of me.That part is the twelve-year-old boy that still lives inside of me somewhere. He’s not gone, he’s just been gradually wrapped under three more decades of of maturity added over the years one thin coating at a time, like a pearl. But he’s still in there. And he still thinks fireworks are a hoot.

    Like many small boys, Imagethief went through an extended phase where fire was just about the coolest thing ever, with slot racers and jet airplanes close behind. A scientifically-inclined lad, I pursued a rigorous program of experimentation in which I tested the combustibility and incendiary characteristics of various household objects and substances. Those were good times.

    But not for my father. In those days I was living with him in a four-story Victorian in San Francisco’s Castro district that he’d bought in ’74 (for what would now seem like a preposterously small amount of money). 1890s redwood Victorians are notorious tinderboxes. Living in one is about the closest you can get to living in a house built from oil-soaked rags. When the 1906 earthquake struck, most of the damage was caused by the resulting fire ripping through hundreds of wood-frame Victorian houses. And that was when they were relatively new.

    So what I thought was good clean, educational fun, my father thought was borderline psychopathy. He may have had a point. Over the years I set my hands on fire with alcohol, singed my eyebrows with gasoline, melted one kitchen trash can, accumulated a ghoulish collection of blisters and retained my eyesight only through, pardon the expression, blind luck.

    In fairness, I had a local role model. Not neighborhood toughs lighting trash-can fires, but Walter, a friendly engineer who lived on our block and worked at Sutro Tower, the enormous, three-legged broadcasting antenna that dominates San Francisco from atop Twin Peaks. For many years in my family Sutro Tower was known as “Walt’s Tower”. In fact, I may have thought for some years that that was the official name.

    One year for the Fourth of July, which is when one lights fireworks in the United States, Walt put on a show for the neighborhood. He built a large aircraft carrier model out of cardboard, filled it full of small explosives and smoke charges wired to an electrical switch panel, and proceeded to recreate the Battle of Midway. The climactic explosion disintegrated the model and deafened the entire neighborhood. I can picture it with near perfect clarity to this day.

    I was also a budding film-maker with a super-8 camera. Suitably inspired, I soon launched an ambitious project to recreate every pyrotechnic effects shot from Star Wars, but at a level of spectacle that I felt George Lucas had lacked the balls and vision to achieve. My Millenium Falcon adventure playset? Blown up. My X-Wing fighter? Incinerated. My painstakingly built The Empire Strikes Back snowspeeder model? Scorched with flaming WD-40. And so on. What would be valuable collectables today became molten puddles and detonated fragments. I have no regrets.

    Fireworks (presumably including homebrew exploding aircraft carriers) were illegal to purchase in San Francisco, but could be bought legally a ten minute drive up Interstate 280 in Daly City. The stalls were almost always on the lots of car dealerships, as I recall. Perhaps because these were convenient spaces, or perhaps because you might feel the need to celebrate the purchase of a Dodge Dart with a little something extra. The stalls were plywood shacks that sold a changeless assortment of cheap-and-cheerful pyrotechnics including sparklers, ground flowers and fountain cones.

    You could buy the fireworks a la carte, but typically you picked up the biggest boxed assortment you could wheedle your parents into and prayed it didn’t burst into flames in the car. The only drawback was that the boxed sets also included some b-list stuff like Piccolo Petes (all sound, no flame) and those risible charcoal “snakes” that expanded magically from black pellets into, um, a pile of ash. We conducted some experiments trying to launch Piccolo Petes like rockets, but after one blew up on the pad we suspended the program.

    There were limits to what you could buy, however. For one thing, no bottle rockets. In fact, anything with a projectile component appeared verboten. I recall Roman Candles as being very hard to get. This seems pointless in retrospect since I have clear memories of engaging in totally legal model rocketry at about the same time, using much larger and potentially more destructive projectiles. This lesson that was etched in my mind for all time when (Star Wars again — this was the late ’70s after all) my classmate Andy Filler’s Estes X-Wing encountered guidance problems off the pad and nearly gave the entire Marin Country Day School class of 1981 a haircut. That was just one of several grand failures on our school model rocketry day.

    In practice, the projectile ban simply tempted inventive lads to test the strength of their throwing arms with pyrotechnics never meant to go airborne. It may be called a “ground flower”, but it makes a hell of an impressive sight when it ignites in mid-air. It also, like Andy Filler’s X-Wing, has erratic and unpredictable ballistic characteristics. One fourth of July I accidentally lofted one right into the middle of a bunch of beer-drinking adults. It was like dropping a rattlesnake into the hot tub. Liberty Street’s own Nolan Ryan and his flaming fastball were promptly benched.

    Firecrackers were also illegal to purchase, along with their larger cousins, cherry bombs and the dreaded M-80, a hand-vaporising bastard with military antecedents and sixty times the punch of a garden-variety firecracker. Thus, in an early brush with Chinese globalization, my experiments were heavily dependent upon the availability of black-market Chinese fireworks in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Even for a small boy it was easy to go down to China Town and buy bricks of 1280 firecrackers and packs of bottle rockets sold out of the backs of Datsun 280-Zs by skinny, dangerous looking Hongkie kids for not too much money.

    Those black market firecrackers were grist for many of my experiments. They also went off many times in my hand (which leaves you with a characterestic numbed burning sensation in your fingertips and a sheepish expression) and once right in my face (stunned amazement), so it’s probably a good thing we didn’t have access to anything bigger.

    If only I had known what real Chinese firepower was. Imagine the fiendish child that I was with access to real Chinese fireworks…

    To understand the gravity of that bit of conjecture, you need to understand the nature of fireworks that can be had at retail in China during the Spring Festival. As in Daly City the booths spring up seasonally, gaudy and colorful, their wares piled high alongside. And what wares! In China any drunk fool with a few hundred RMB can buy a colorful box the size of a beer keg that includes twelve or eighteen thudding mortar tubes that launch starbursts that would look good at the Pro Bowl. Imagine legalized, recreational white phosphorus. The first time some friends of mine set one of these off in China I thought the cops would come for us.

    And there is a kaleidoscope of options on down from there. When you read about a Chinese fireworks factory exploding (as they do), it’s not the fwisssh….phut! stuff that gets sent to America that does the damage. It’s the high-grade domestic product that levels the village and kills the livestock. I admit one must have different expectations for China. Nevertheless, having grown up in San Francisco, where fireworks are controlled, and then lived a decade in Singapore, where private fireworks are banned, it staggers me to this day what you can buy legally in China. I don’t even want to imagine what’s available on the local black market. Stand back and don your radiation goggles.

    So we get treated to quite a show during the fifteen days of lunar new year. Everybody and their maid buys piles of fireworks. On key days–new year’s eve, the lantern festival–there are queues at the stands. This being China, it’s imperative that your Golden Lotus Atomic Flower Detonator be bigger and more impressive than your neighbor’s Mighty Dragon Lucky Supernova. Or, if you can’t beat him on size, counter with volume and pepper him with a vast battery of the smaller stuff.

    All of this would be chaos enough if the Chinese set off their fireworks with any sort of rational planning as to safe areas, minimum distances from nearby structures and crowd control. And in fairness some of the bigger apartments maintain pretty sound operations, with barricades, fire extinguishers at the ready and people stationed on the roofs to watch for embers (an essential precaution apparently not adopted at the Mandarin Oriental).

    But in much of Beijing, and presumably in most other Chinese cities, that isn’t how it works. Many of the fireworks, possibly most of them, are detonated in the narrow warrens of old neighborhoods where sound is trapped, star-burst fragments ricochet off of windows and the general sense of bedlam is amplified far beyond the limits of common sense. Now that is good fun, and if you ever have the opportunity to wander through such a neighborhood at the height of fireworks season I heartily recommend you take it. The noise will feel like someone has painlessly run a large metal pole through your chest and is shaking it vigorously. (However it may also feel like someone has very painfully run knitting needles through your eardrums and is shaking them, too.) Heavy metal bands can only fantasize about this kind of sound and fury.

    Even in the large courtyard of our apartment, where fireworks are not permitted, the sound is powerful. A rolling tide of detonations that sloshes back and forth between the slab sides of the surrounding towers, the echo creating a distinct basso triplet.WHUMPWhumpwhump! One, two, three. Often I’ll just stand in the center of the courtyard and listen to that glorious sound. I’ve often wished I could record it in a way that would do it justice.

    One thing I’ve never witnessed in China is malicious use of fireworks. I’m sure it happens. People –teenagers especially– throw firecrackers at each other. They aim mortars through the superintendent’s window. They blow up small animals. That kind of behavior must be universal. Indeed, sombody scandalously blew up a popular cat at a university in Hebei recently. But I’ve never seen this kind of thing myself during the festivities in Beijing. It’s always been very family-oriented and congenial.

    I have, however, seen plenty of garden-variety recklessness and stupidity, reminding me of my own past as a garden-variety reckless youth with a fire fascination. Every year fires break out and the emergency rooms stand ready for the fingerless masses. A friend of mine once videotaped a guy accidentally blowing his hand apart. Not something you’ll put on YouTube for mom to see. Alcohol, carelessness and really large fireworks mix badly. The police plaster the town with safety advisories and guidelines in the weeks leading up to new year, and the period when fireworks are allowed in the city is rigidly controlled. But it’s crazy nevertheless.

    The rules for fireworks in Beijing have ebbed and flowed over the years. But I wonder if this week’s huge CCTV disaster, itself an apparent product of garden-variety recklessness at an institutional level, will mean another great ebbing. Will the city government finally decide that unfettered pyromania is inconsistent with the development of a dense metropolis of 15 million people? It wouldn’t surprise me.

    And that would probably be the sensible thing to do. The twelve-year-old boy inside me, the one who still runs to the window for the fireworks and wanders the besieged streets in glee, would be sad to see that happen. But, then, he’s never had to apologize for burning down a new hotel.

  • E-Z steps to make your own Beijing air at home

    Imagethief realizes that he and much of the journalistic and blogging community have been doing a grave disservice to our readers who don’t live in Beijing. We beg your forgiveness. Living in Beijing is such an all-consuming experience that we sometimes forget there is a world beyond the fifth ring road. Although we are, of course, tangentially reminded of this world every time we go to our beloved import supermarkets, which thrive on the business of bringing us Doritos, Haagen Dazs and other nibblicious, western treats from beyond the Great Barrier.

    The disservice we have perpetrated is to groan on at length about Beijing’s shabby, noxious air while never giving you, the reader abroad, the chance to understand for yourself what we really mean. Beijing in August is not best experienced as some kind of abstract mental construct based on the fulminations of bloggers, or the moralizing of the mainstream media. It is a physical experience, and has to be experienced viscerally and immediately. After all, reading about a rock band simply isn’t the same as standing in the mosh pit in front of the stacks, with the thump of the bass separating the cartilage from your bones and slow-cooking the fluid in your eyes.

    Part of the reason why Imagethief thinks that first-hand experience is valuable is that it provides perspective when one reads the dissembling of official apologists who are doing their best to insist that the air is not really as bad as it looks, tastes or feels in our eyes. In fairness, it has been much better the last couple of days than it was the past week, thanks to a welcome breeze and a touch of rain. But the mandarins have passed much of the last few days demonstrating that they are either disconnected from reality as the rest of us understand it, or that they have a less than satisfactory understanding of the meaning of the word “good” as it is commonly employed in English.

    It is hard to know which of these two situations is correct. Imagethief suspects that faulty dictionaries may be the problem, since the word “moderate” is used in SEPA reports to describe air quality that Imagethief would label “hopelessly toxic”, “depressing” or “squalid”. Adjectival nuance can be tricky, especially in a language as eccentric and irregular as English.

    It may also be that the authorities are simply trying to be “hip with the times”, and have noted the tendency of English-speaking youth to use negative adjectives as endorsements, e.g. “sick*” (what we who went to high school in the ’80s used to call “cool”, “awesome” or, in the most rarefied of circumstances, “radical”). If this is the case, then the fault is ours and when the authorities say “good” they actually mean “screwed”. Athletes are overwhelmingly young, so this is perhaps a forgivable error in these Olympic times. If SEPA, or its ministerial successor, refers to one of our rare blue-sky days as “sick”, then this theory may gain credence.

    The shame of this situation is that Beijing is in many ways a great city. It’s interesting and fun enough that many of us live here despite the often crummy air, which is really saying something. And when, every now and then, the air is truly clear, Beijing verges on beautiful. Colors pop out. The hills are visible to the north and west. The gorgeous parks and temples beckon. These clear days cluster in the brief spring and autumn, when temperatures and winds are favorable (although spring also gets dust storms). By any standard, however, they are rare. An enveloping, noxious fug is far more typical.

    Which brings me back to the point. I want to help you, the reader abroad, understand exactly what we’re talking about when we refer to Beijing’s poor air quality. After long experimentation at Imagethief Laboratories SA, I am pleased to report that we have developed a method of simulating Beijing’s typical August atmosphere with nothing more than a few easily obtainable ingredients and a common household appliance.

    Here is what you will need:

    • A serving plate.
    • Large bowl that can be used to cover the serving plate.
    • A bucket of water.
    • A Yorkshire terrier, Pekingese or similar small dog (at a pinch, a dog pelt can be used, but a whole dog is more reliable). Important: If the dog is wearing a metallic collar or tags, remove them.
    • A packet of bad cigarettes. Ideally, Chinese Red Pagodas. But at a pinch, Gitanes or Parliaments will do.
    • A non-metallic ashtray.
    • A turd.
    • A microwave oven.

    Steps:

    • Soak the dog in the bucket until wet to the skin.
    • Place the wet dog on the serving plate with the turd and the ashtray.
    • Place three lit cigarettes in the ashtray.
    • Cover the serving plate and all ingredients with the bowl.
    • Microwave on “high” for sixty seconds.

    Congratulations. What’s under the bowl is a close recreation of typical August Beijing air. Use a fork or butter knife to carefully lift the edge of the bowl (it’s hot!) and have a sniff. Now you’ll have something to visualize (or “olfactorize”) when you read the inevitable thousands of stories still to come on Beijing’s Olympic air quality. If you’re daring, you may want to get a garden hose, have a few of the frat brothers over and challenge each other to do “hits” of Beijing. You may need more than one dog**.

    *Probably already hopelessly out of date.
    **Imagethief does not actually condone microwaving yappy dogs, although he does sometimes fantasize about it.

  • Hairy crabs, the hill of pain and the boulevard of a thousand massage touts

    Imagethief went for a hike with some good friends on Sunday. Hiking is one of the things that I was sorry to give up when I moved to Shanghai, and that I’ve been most eager to rediscover upon my return. In Shanghai you can drive for days through the industrial sprawl of the Yangzi delta before you find anything that looks remotely appealing for a stroll. Unless you like walking through cement plants, paint factories and valve workshops.

    This isn’t a joke. I recently went with my Shanghai colleagues to Jiangsu’s fabled Yangcheng Lake, home of the world’s most legendary hairy crabs. I was picturing someplace out of a Chinese fantasy. Limpid waters. Verdant banks shaded by drooping willow trees. Graceful pavilions on which maidens in silk gowns would pluck pipas for my pleasure (it’s not as dirty as it sounds) while I feasted on plump crab hoisted fresh from pure spring-fed pools.

    Wrong. Yangcheng lake is a suspiciously turbid expanse of water with concrete and rapple banks and ringed by cement plants, paint factories and valve workshops. It’s connected to a labyrinth of local canals that look like they supply the drinking water to Mogadishu. I’d be wary of eating of anything pulled from Yangcheng’s dubious depths, let alone a creature that lives in the heavy-metal sludge and eats the carrion of whatever couldn’t survive in the lake, died and sank to the bottom.

    So much for the hairy crabs. They’re overrated anyway. It turns out the Chinese idea of what constitutes damn good crab is something you can easily suck the innards out of. I grew up in San Francisco, eating fat Dungeness crabs. We discarded the innards so we could get to the meat. Better yet, we had the fishmonger discard the innards so we didn’t need to be reminded they ever existed. Nothing but meat and a hollow space in the middle that, as far as you know, was always full of fresh lemon slices. That’s good crab.

    A hairy crab has no meat. It’s all innards. And hair. Hence the bliss of my Chinese colleagues, who gleefully explained to me every organ they were eating. Except when the girl sitting next to me got to the testes of a male crab. “You don’t want to know what this is,” she gracefully suggested. Doing my best to ignore the gusto with which crab ‘nads were being consumed at my elbow, I was reduced to trying to squeeze miniscule fragments of meat out of legs the size of toothpick envelopes. You could starve to death doing this.

    But this has nothing to do with hiking. Or massage touts.

    Shanghai is all industrial wasteland and toxic lakes infested with carrion-eating vermin that somehow got rebranded as a delicacy, probably during one of the many famines. But in Beijing you only need an hour on clear roads and you’re back in the dongbei in all its rural, dustbowl splendor. This is fine for me because, as it happens, I like rural dustbowl splendor. There is something about Northeast China that evokes loneliness, resilience and endurance honed in an endless arid wasteland. The ghost of hard times still lingers over these lands.

    Plus there are mountains. We climbed into the remote hills somewhere north of Beijing where there are desolate stretches of unrestored Wall traversing peaks with panoramic views stretching from Beijing’s smoky basin to the Kangxi grasslands. I am told this is where the Mongols fed and watered their horses before riding through the pass at Badaling (where the famous touristy section of wall is) to assault the capital.

    I nearly didn’t manage the climb. I run three times a week when I’m being good and can go on flat ground more or less indefinitely. But hill-climbing fitness is different, and I was contemplating the pros and cons of a good vomit within about twenty minutes of setting off. It didn’t help that my hiking companion leaped up the mountain like a goat on speed. To add insult to injury, he smoked his way up and down. The road to true fitness apparently leads through Marlboro country.

    Outside of the embrace of Beijing’s heat island it was also cold enough to freeze the water in our bottles. A ripping wind peeled the skin from our lips and reminded us all why living in a porous, brick hut in the dongbei is not, perhaps, an ideal lifestyle. And why this is the land that gave birth to the kang, a traditional bed warmed by the exhaust of a fire.

    But the worst penance of the trip came the next day. Sometime during the night someone secretly replaced the fine thigh muscles I normally use with bags of broken glass soaked in vinegar and cat urine. Or that’s what it felt like when I tried to walk. This is what happens when you let moving blow up your workout schedule for a month and them climb a mountain with smoking gazelle-man. I spent the next forty-eight hours doing an extremely good impression of an eighty year old man with crippling arthritis. I also experimented with every variation of the standing up and sitting down groans.

    On Monday evening I worked a bit late. Knowing that by the time I got home it would be so late that I would blow off the gym yet again, I decided to walk from my office in Oriental Plaza back to my apartment at China Central Place. I figured this would give me some exercise while also enabling me work some of the devastating soreness out of my legs.

    I have no idea why we always think the solution to exercise pain is more exercise. This is total BS and should be resisted. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the walk. This was unexpected, because it was an hour and fifteen minute slog down Chang’an Jie and Jianguomen, past the world’s champion assortment of dour, institutional looking buildings and vaguely seedy hotels. I put it down to the odd euphoria that returning to Beijing has generated in me. This could be because I am deeply affectionate for this sprawling, funky city. Or it could be some kind of toxicological effect from all the pollutants in the air. Either way, it’s a good feeling and I’m nursing it.

    In addition to enabling me to survey at leisure what an architectural wasteland Beijing’s central artery has turned into (Wanda Plaza, anyone?), it gave me a chance to sample some of the city’s finest massage pitches. By which I mean prostitution pitches. You can always tell when you cross from an office’s or institutional building’s frontage to one of the hotels because you immediately get hit with, “Hello? Massage? Girl?” And, to up the ante, “Pretty girl?”

    In the course of my walk I got it from singles, tag-team pairs, men and women. But the all time winner was a girl who glided past me on one of those preposterous, little folding bicycles with wheels the size of salad plates. She had long, black hair and was painted unnaturally pail, so her face leaped out in the darkness. She had false eyelashes so big it looked like she could have propelled herself along by flapping them.

    “Helloooo,” she cooed in a singsong as she carved out graceful turns in front of me. “Massage?” And then, “Hellooooo! I love you!” And then, with a final flap of those absurd, batwing eyelashes, “Hellooooo! Sex?”

    On the bicycle? I wondered. But it was too late to ask. She had given up on me and was pedaling off down the sidewalk. While I was still writing down her pitch in my notebook a rough looking man in a leather jacket came up to me and said, “Hey, massage?”

    It really is great to be back in Beijing.

  • Just walking my pony, officer

    Imagethief has been watching with come concern the Beijing city government’s drive tocrack down on “stray dogs”. In the expansive interpretation of the authorities this means any unlicensed dog, any dog that contravenes the city’s 35cm height limit, or any dog that has the misfortune to be dog  >n+1 in the household, where n is any other dog that the owners like better.

    Mind you, this has zero personal implications for me. Being as I live in a two-bedroom apartment on the 17th floor and not, for instance, a ranch house on two wooded acres, I keep cats. It’s not that I don’t like dogs, it’s just that I’m not Parisian or Chinese and thus not compelled to keep an enormous dog in a tiny apartment that barely has room for me, Mrs. Imagethief, two ungrateful cats and some houseplants. Not only is space at a premium, but we also like to travel. The good thing about cats is they are similar to houseplants in many ways. They have about the same intelligence –although they barf more– and if well fed and watered they can be left on their own for a few days. If the cleaner drops by every now and then to make sure they are still fed and watered and no dried cat barf is bonding permanently with the carpet fibers, then all is good. If I could freeze-dry a dog temporarily while traveling, say in one of those 2001: A Space Odyssey-style tinsel-lined refrigerators, I might reconsider dog ownership in Beijing. But, you know, there’s always a chance the computer could turn evil and the dog might never wake up, in which case you’d have to dispose of an enormous, freeze-dried dog carcass. Although in a city where dog meat commands a premium, this might not be as hard as it sounds.

    The challenges or apartment dog ownership don’t seem to be stopping my neighbors, however, despite a lack of dog freeze-drying apparatus. Although they appear to be normal, law-abiding citizens, it turns out that a vast number of them are apparently trafficking in contraband dogs. How else to explain the profusion of manifestly illegal golden retrievers and the one rottweiler (yes, rottweiler) that are often being exercised in the courtyard. If there was a reward, I’d turn the lot of them in and pocket the cash.

    What has changed noticeably in the couple of weeks since the “strike hard at stray dogs” campaign began is that my neighbors have  become much more furtive about walking the larger dogs. Whereas before you could pretty much count on a gamboling retriever or two (retrievers love to gambol) on any weekend afternoon, people are now hustling their dogs out under cover of darkness and walking them in discreet loops near the walls where they are less visible. This is a particular challenge for my rottweiler-owning neighbors. It turns out that a rottweiler is a hard animal to smuggle, especially if it is hyperactively sociable and prone to mob anyone who gives it a glance. Might as well throw a saddle blanket over it and claim to be walking your pony. Your hell-pony with especially large, sharp teeth, that is.

    Truthfully, I think the dog campaign is misdirected. I can understand the licensing requirement, and even a drive to limit households to one dog. True, it cuts against the libertarian grain but, um, this is China. But I think the size thing is not on. After all, if a citizen wants to keep an inappropriately large wolf-beast in his miniscule shoebox of an apartment, that’s his problem. Well, and the dog’s, I guess. I don’t hear of many dog attacks in Beijing, and people don’t seem to be dropping dead of rabies in the city limits. I am far more likely to put a shoe in human feces deposited by one of the zillions ofkaidangku-wearing babies than I am in dog-shit. (Saw one child busy leaving a load on Tian’anmen Square during the National Day flag lowering ceremony. Surely crapping in the sight-line of the Great Helmsman has to break some kind of taboo. But the cops were too busy hustling away black-market ice-cream sellers to care.)

    Anyway, I think the whole dog campaign is misdirected. From a quality-of-life perspective Beijing would be a much more pleasant city if the authorities made 35cm the minimumheight requirement for dogs. Think of the many benefits: People would think twice before keeping more than one dog. Sure you can put a dozen chow-chows in a siheyuan, but try putting a dozen Rhodesian ridge-backs in and see how long the furniture stays in one piece. Also, large dogs often have a more pleasant temperament I find. At the end of a long day, as I stagger home after 12 hours in the PR salt mines, the last thing I need is Fufu the Pekingese following me through the courtyard going yapyapyapyapyapyapyap! Listen: I am an avowed animal lover. I dote on my idiotic cats and to this day I am awash with guilt for every mean-spirited thing I did to any animal, no matter how lowly, as a misguided youth. (Well, except for the Flintstones-sized Roachasauruses we used to get in my house in Singapore. I’d kill them all if I could.) But more than once I have been sorely tempted to draw back my right foot and go for distance and hang time, like Hall of Fame punter Ray Guy. Plus, the nice thing about large dogs is that if the apocalypse comes they can be trained to guard or hunt, or provide meat for days. Imagine the whole family fighting over a Chihuahua haunch. Embarrassing.

    But my influence over municipal policy is, alas, limited. Therefore it looks like all my neighbors will be walking their dogs under cover of night for some time to come. If I were them I might try draping the animals in camouflage nets to break up their outlines. Not only will that make them harder to spot, but any city management flunky who sees an enormous, shapeless, drooling green blob charging toward him will probably hightail it out of dodge and never come back.

    Barely a nibble.
    Barely a nibble.