Imagethief

Tag: Beijing

  • The kid

    The kid had staked out a patch of sidewalk and was working the steady stream of locals and foreigners passing through. The limits of his territory were the entrance to a restaurant popular with foreigners and that of a convenience store ten meters further up. He wore a stained blue t-shirt and ragged sweatpants with a scuffed seat that sagged from his rear end. His feet were bare. He was perhaps ten years old. Hard living had thinned his face, and it was hard to tell. He could have been two years older and desperately malnourished, or two years younger and a bit precocious.

    It was a good patch to work. The two businesses and the luxury hotel across the street ensured steady, well-monied traffic. But it was a hard job nonetheless. Most people were completely indifferent to the kid, and those who weren’t tended to be hostile, either scolding him or batting him away. A chinese man smacked him in the head. One large westerner mocked him, cupping his hands in the same alms-receiving gesture as the kid and pretending to beg back.

    Through it all the kid stayed remarkably cheery. He was a natural showman, sassing the people who ran him off the steps and bursting into histrionics in front of marks. When he wasn’t actually working a mark he had a perpetually bright smile on his face. He had perfected a positive mental attitude; a mighty feat for a ten year-old Beijing beggar with poor prospects. He was not going to be one of the new China’s winners. He was going to be a loser. It was inevitable. He probably couldn’t see his future, but I could take a guess at it. Juvenile crime, perhaps, as he eased into more aggressive teenage years. Maybe addiction, another victim of the river of heroin coming over the Burmese border at Ruili or in from Central Asia. If he was lucky he might end up a migrant laborer, drifting from city to city in search of work. If he was unlucky he would end up in jail, or in a quarry with a bullet in the back of his head. Or perhaps he would just go on to a career as a begger, another one of the shabby, hopeless men who stalk intersections and tourist hangouts. But he kept smiling. He could have been subject of a motivational poster on perseverance, adorning a conference room somewhere.

    The kid was energetic and fidgety and had a hard time sitting still. That wasn’t entirely his own fault. Every time he settled on the steps of the restaurant or the store an attendant would be out within moments to shoo him away. A woman from the store tried to engage him. Earlier she had scolded the kid, but now she wanted to talk. Perhaps telling him that he should find something more productive to do with his time. He chatted with her for four or five minutes before she went inside. When she came out again, it was with a switch to run him off the steps again. He had given the wrong answer.

    The kid wasn’t alone. His minder was a fat woman in clean clothes who sat across the street on a low stone wall in front of the hotel. She had a second young boy with her as well, about the same age, but he was the favored child. His clothes were clean and he didn’t have to beg. Instead, he sat with the woman, holding two empty plastic bottles. Occasionally, he would come over and give the kid some trouble. For a while the woman sent the kid across the street to work the front of an expensive ice cream parlor, but perhaps traffic was bad because he was soon back working the stretch of sidewalk between the restaurant and the convenience store.

    And the kid had some luck. Three people, all women, gave him cash. A few yuan, which the kid counted carefully before stuffing into the pocket of his sweats. Part of the kid’s repertoire was pointing at his mouth and asking for food, and one woman gave him a wrapped piece of something that looked like a slice of cake. But the kid didn’t get to eat it. The better dressed boy was across the street in moments, demanding the cake. The kid handed it over, possibly along with a smart-ass remark because he ended up taking a swift kick. The better-dressed boy took the cake across the street to the fat woman. She clearly got all the cake. It seemed likely that she was going to get the money too.

    There was another beggar working the same strip of sidewalk as the kid. A middle-aged woman in the standard beggar’s outfit: blue cotton coat, white towel wrapped around her head, shoulder bag, stick and white enamel cup. She had perfected the beggar’s misery-ridden shuffle but once, as she crossed the street, an approaching taxi forced her to break character and she hustled energetically out of the way. The begging woman didn’t compete with the kid. She was a practitioner of the “persistence” approach, shadowing a mark for fifty or a hundred meters tugging at the sleeve and shaking the few coins in the enamel cup. She would return to the space of sidewalk between the restaurant and store for a minute, but often follow marks to the end of the block or cross the street to work people in front of the hotel. The kid would stay put and focus on his small patch.

    The begging woman and the fat woman seemed to be friends. Once, the fat woman and the well-dressed boy crossed the street and the three of them gathered under a poplar tree for a congenial chat. How’s business? Who’s giving it up tonight? Is the kid pulling his weight? A couple of promising looking groups walked by during the conversation and the begging woman gave a couple of desultory shakes of her enamel cup, but it was clearly coffee break and her heart wasn’t in it. Meanwhile the kid hovered at the edge of the conversation, restless, nervous, and pointedly not invited into the little circle.

    After a few minutes the conversation broke up. The fat woman and well dressed boy returned to their perch in front of the hotel. The begging woman shadowed another group of foreigners. And the kid went back to miming hunger and clasping his hands in front of the groups leaving the restaurant and going into and out of the convenience store. Somehow, he was still smiling.

  • Infernalture

    Apartment prices are down and my lease is up, so Imagethief has been looking for a new, larger apartment to accommodate himself, Mrs. Imagethief, two whiny cats and the various junk that has accumulated in the past two years.

    I hate looking at apartments. The whole process is annoying and seedy, like buying a used car, if you were going to live in it. Of course, if you were buying a car at least the whole process would be over when you drove it off the lot (unless, of course, it was a lemon). With apartment rental, once you sign the lease you then have to deal with the brutal moving. I don’t know about you, but I find it impossible to move without losing at least one thing. Once it was the rice cooker (no big deal — it had bicycle shorts crammed into it, so whoever lifted it deserved what they got). Once it was my wife’s dive computer. This time, if I’m lucky, we’ll lose one of the cats.

    Rental agents in China are motley crew, and not all of them strike me as entirely together. One young man greeted me and my wife in a white T-shirt with the sleeves torn off (and wore the same shirt on two separate occasions), and then wondered why the security guard at Huamao gave him trouble at the door. Another explained to me at a certain complex that 160 square meter and 180 square meter apartments “cost the same because the 180 meter ones don’t rent, so the price has come down”. I didn’t have the heart to explain to him that this was both economically impossible, and not supported by the evidence of a real-estate ad listing different prices for 160 and 180 square meter apartments.

    But by far the worst aspect of renting an apartment in China is the furniture. In fact, I will extend this beyond China, since I have seennumerous apartments in Singapore and seen places belonging to Korean landlords, and make a sweeping statement: Asian landlords have, on average, the world’s most appalling taste in furnishings and fixtures. If there is a hell, it will have been furnished by an Asian landlord. And, just playing the odds, probably a Chinese one.

    What is it about buying an apartment in Asia that makes a person instantaneously lose all contact with good taste and common sense? The furniture I see in these apartments is beyond ugly, ranging from Logan’s Run-style 1970s retro-future abominations that would make orange shag carpet cringe in shame (in the future, all furniture will be inflatable leatherette!) to coccyx-shattering rosewood chinoiserie with all the inviting warmth of an ice chastity belt to faux Louis XIV rococo obscenities that could be lifted from Versailles, if Versailles was in Branson, Missouri and lined with neon.

    The other thing that really gets me is chandeliers. If wanted to live in a luxury hotel I’d live in a luxury hotel. I don’t want my apartment to feel like a luxury hotel. I certainly don’t want things that look like inverted, crystal pine trees hanging from the ceiling. These things are like the Chandeliers of Damocles. I’d be waiting for the whole jangly works to tear loose and land on my head as I’m working my way through my morning Grape Nuts. I don’t want to die with my face in a bowl of Grape Nuts and an enormous, crystal pine tree embedded in my skull. The morticians will make fun of my corpse and my family will refuse to take delivery of the remains. The hearse will make jingly crystal noises every time it goes over a speed bump. New-agers will come to worship at my grave. (“He didn’t die! He transcended space-time with the help of crystals in his skull!”) How humiliating. I’ll end up was one of the “odd news” bites in the China Daily: “Foreigner dies in blaze of glory!” It’ll be right above, “Two-headed goat in Shaanxi sings Donny & Marie classics!”

    I suppose chandeliers are better than the alternative, which is relentlessly cold fluorescent lighting that makes the inside of the apartment look like a meat locker. Notice how fluorescent light can make anyone look like a serial killer? Under incandescent or warm fluorescent light Mrs. Imagethief is a gorgeous woman with intoxicating, brown skin, lustrous hair and sparkling eyes. Under fluorescent light she looks like Norman Bates’ mother in Psycho. And, if you don’t recall, Norman Bates’ mother was dead. God knows what it must make me look like. Lurch from the Addams Family, perhaps. Or Dick Cheney.

    But who will notice the cheap lighting when there is a TV the size of a billboard? Yes, every apartment I look at has furniture that looks lifted from Peewee’s Playhouse, either hallucinatory chandeliers that would make Steve Wynn blanch or soul-destroying dimestore fluorescents and, for some reason, a brand-new flatscreen TV big enough burn your shadow into the wall behind you (but inevitably paired with a 200 kuai cheapie DVD player).

    Here’s an idea: Take the money you’ve spent on the forty-inch LCD television and plow it into some decent lighting and tolerable fucking furniture. There’s an Ikea in this town. I know; I’ve seen it. It’s the size of a small planet. It’s Ikea-World. It’s so big that there are probably people who have been lost inside since the day it opened, subsisting on Swedish meatballs that have rolled under the displays. I don’t like Ikea. In fact, in Singapore I was busy purging the Ikea furniture from my house. But it’s so big that, even if they’re catering to dire, nouveau riche tastes, they must have some furniture that, if not exactly nice, is at least bland and inoffensive. I’ll take a piece of furniture called “Kysblispinyx” or some other too-precious Nordic name if that’s what I have to endure in order to have a couch that supports my legs completely rather than suddenly folding down when I slide forward and slamming my face into the glass coffee table. Honestly, why not just have knives shoot out of the cushions?

    I know, I know. You’re thinking I should get an unfurnished place and buy my own furniture. I would, but I already had to sell one houseful of furniture when I moved to China. I don’t relish the idea of accumulating another raft of miscellaneous possessions that I’ll have to unload three or four years hence when I move back to Singapore. And, from what I’ve seen, the chances of my buying anything here that I’ll want to treasure for the rest of my life are slim.

    So I’m sucking it up. I’ll find a chandelier-free apartment with classy furniture in this town if it kills me. It can be the dankest, most cockroach-ridden, formaldehyde-infused shithole in Beijing as long as the furniture doesn’t give me cataracts. If I can’t manage that, I’ll just buy a used car and sleep in that.

    Note: Imagethief would like to tip his hat to his current landlord who, with the exception of the couch, did a reasonable job furnishing his apartment.

  • Escalation

    Getting from point A to point B in Beijing, assuming point A and B aren’t right next to each other, is one of the daily adventures that makes life here so interesting. Aside from a certain hyper-linear approach to walking that can make the most casual stroll an exercise in ducking and weaving and the well-documented board-first/exit second approach to subways and elevators, there is also the near mystical ability of Chinese people to suddenly stop at choke points such as doorways. Hilarity ensues.

    Nowhere is this tendency more infuriating than at the tops and bottoms of escalators. I work in an office tower atop a glitzy supermall awash in escalators. My commute requires no less than three escalator rides from the subway station to the lift lobby. Without fail someone will be standing smack at the top of one of those escalators wondering whether to get breakfast from Dairy Queen or Bread Talk while angry people pile up behind. This is far more obnoxious than the local tendency to stand two-abreast and leave no lane for walking on the elevator. That’s obstructive but at least it’s not dangerous.

    I am most likely to be riding escalators when I am on my way to work or back home from work. Neither is a time when I am blessed with surplus patience, and the sight of a teenage couple parked on the elevator landing wondering which retail paradise or food-service outlet to avail themselves of makes me want to lower my shoulder and blow through them like Ronnie Lott.

    At this point I must digress and explain something of the phenomenon that was Ronnie Lott. If you didn’t grow up in San Francisco in the 1980s or are not huge American football fan, you probably have no idea who Ronnie Lott is. That’s a shame, because Ronnie was one of the most exciting professional athletes ever to grace a television near you. Ronnie was a free safety for the San Francisco Forty-Niners back when the  Niners were the most feared American football team in the league. Ronnie played three different positions well, but he made his career as a free safety. For those who don’t understand American football, I’ll explain. One of the ways you can advance the ball in football is by making a forward pass, literally throwing the ball down the field where, hopefully, someone on the same team will catch it.

    This can be surprisingly difficult, not least because there are usually several extremely large and freakishly fast defenders roaming around the “backfield” (the area where the ball is likely to be caught) waiting to dispense pain upon anyone who dares to try to catch a lofted ball. Free safeties are one of those defenders, and the best of them have an uncanny ability to tell how a play will unfold and to be in the right place to dispense that pain. For more than a decade, Ronnie Lott was the NFL’s chief backfield pain dispenser.

    Although smart, tough and fast, much of Ronnie’s effectiveness was psychological. A receiver –the guy trying to catch the ball– would be streaking down the field when a pass would head his way. Man, he was open and it was a perfect throw. He could smell the goal line already. He’d reach out his arms to pull in the pass, but just as his fingertips were brushing the pigskin BLAM! All 203 pounds of Ronnie would come blazing out of nowhere and lay into the poor schmoe’s unprotected, stretched-out ribs at a full-on sprint. Some dudes turned 360 degree somersaults in the air on taking hits like that from Ronnie. The football would go bouncing off down the field and a bunch of guys with polo shirts and black bags would run onto the field to administer smelling salts and ask the dazed receiver what day of the week it was.

    That’s when the psychological effect would take over. Ronnie would terrorize the backfield for a while, and then receivers would start to terrorize themselves. A receiver would be streaking down the field again, another perfect looking pass would float his way and, just as he was reaching for it, you would see the thought float through his head: Oh shit! Where’s Ronnie? He’d take his eye off the ball for a split second to find out where Ronnie was and miss the catch. And, as often as not, Ronnie was right there anyway, KAPOW!Ecstasy.

    That’s the effect I want to have on people who stop at the tops or bottoms of escalators. I want to lower my shoulder and set a few painful examples. I want the teenage guy and his spindly girlfriend blocking the landing to think, “Dairy Queen or Bread Talk? Oh shit! Where’s Will?” KABLAM! Only my natural restraint and lack of shoulder pads keeps me from living this fantasy. But someday that restraint will break.

    I used to also be much more annoyed by the behavior of Beijingers getting onto escalators as well as off of them. I don’t break stride when I walk onto an escalator and I expect other people to behave the same way. It’s easy enough to shift a few inches backward or forward if you feel the step splitting beneath your feet. Nevertheless, I see a lot of people here stopping at the foot of escalators and carefully and deliberately stepping onto them. But after careful observation I’ve noticed a number of western tourists doing the same thing, so it’s not just a Chinese thing. And, in fairness to the Chinese, the only person I’ve ever seen who utterly failed to manage an escalator was an Australian woman at the airport who appeared to have had a few too many mini-bottles of Johnnie Walker on her flight up from Sydney. She simply toppled over backward and would have been on her way to Beijing United with a “V” shaped groove across the back of her skull had she not fortunately landed on a large suitcase. It took a frantic effort by me and one of her friends to get her upright before we reached the landing. Perhaps the cautious, Chinese approach is sensible. Of course, escalators also have a somewhat shorter tradition here than they do in the west. An article in The Economist (subscription) from last December pointed out that even in the west…

    …[Escalators] were initially regarded as terrifying: when Harrods, a London department store, introduced its first escalator in 1898, smelling salts and brandy were provided to revive customers overcome by the experience.

    So I could understand when I once had to watch an attendant at the Blue Zoo, a Beijing aquarium, painstakingly explain the turnstile and escalators to a bunch of provincial tourists and then talk them through one at a time. After all, everybody has a first time. But what I can forgive in an elderly man from a semi-rural part of Anhui and what I can forgive in Beijing’s young, urban sophisticates are different. If you have an iPod, you should know better than to stop at the end of the escalator. Better keep your eyes open, because I’m out there somewhere, roaming the backfield of Oriental Plaza. CRUNCH!

    Note: In writing this post I had to use a proxy server to access the Pro Football Hall of Fame website in the USA. Come on, Nanny; the BBC, Wikipedia and Blogspot I can understand. But the Hall of Fame? That’s just wrong.

  • Haircut

    I decided to try out a new hair place in my building this weekend. Back when I was in my glorious, long-haired hippy phase (’89 – ’99 roughly), I only had to worry about getting a haircut once every year and a half or so. Now that I’m 38 and keep my hair business-consultant short, I need to hit the barber every four or five weeks. My hair doesn’t grow out elegantly, and the transition to doofus-looking is shockingly fast. (The doofus phase lasted nearly two years when I grew my hair out. Some say it lasted the entire decade.) At this age, I’ve also reached the point in my life where advertisers and marketers have started to write me off. As I move into middle-age, I’ve developed what they call “brand loyalty”. When I find something I like, I tend to stick with it relentlessly. Unto death. The products I use today will, it seems, be the ones I take with me to the grave, decades hence. (When I am laid to rest, put a stick of “Gilette Cool Wave” deodorant on each eye so I won’t stink up the afterlife.) Thus, having found a decent hair place near my apartment in Beijing, I had some resistance to trying a switch. But in this situation, laziness trumped loyalty. The prospect of finding a good cut literally right below my apartment was too compelling to ignore.

    When I first arrived in Beijing, and was living up in the Northwest, I used to get a 10 kuai cut from the barber at the BLCU gymnasium. It wasn’t elegant, but with hair as short as mine that’s not really a concern. Your worst cut grows out in about three weeks. Since moving downtown, I’ve gone to a flashier, unisex stylist at Soho/New Town, where I now pay 80 kuai a shot, recently raised from the 60 they used to charge for their entry-level, Chinese styliststs. Such is the price for moving into the fashionable area of town. Of  course, all neighborhoods in Beijing have their supply of cheap’n’cheerful, local haircut parlors. But I am always a touch wary of the low-end because brothels notoriously masquerade as hair joints in many parts of Beijing. Frankly, I think blow-jobs and scissors mix badly. But maybe that’s just me; people looking for no-anaesthetic vasectomies may have a different take. Of course you can usually spot the hair brothels because they are visibly overstaffed with Rubenesque, provincial young women in far too much makeup who sit conspicuously close to the window or door and gaze at male passers-by with expressions that do not, in all honesty, suggest haircuts. Nevertheless, discretion is the better part of keeping your balls attached, so I normally select the more upmarket joints.

    My long-haired phase aside, I’m a fan of simplicity when it comes to haircuts. Until moving to Beijing, it had almost always been a race to rock-bottom for me. Back when I was in college, but before I started growing my hair out, I used to get my trims for $6 from a guy called Capers who had a place down in the Seabright neighborhood of Santa Cruz. Capers had been cutting hair since being in the Navy in WWII or Korea, or one of those grand-adventure wars they used to have before the Aquarians ruined that idea for everybody with Vietnam. Apparently he’d had both ears blown off –must have been a combat barber– as he wore a pair of conspicuously prosthetic ears on a metal headband. Or perhaps he cut them off shaving, but that was too terrifying a prospect to contemplate. Capers gave one of the world’s great, power-assisted scalp massages with a device I’ve never seen anywhere else, but wouldn’t be surprised to stumble upon in a Beijing hair brothel. Twenty years later I still get tingly thinking about it. He lasted until my long-hair decade, during which I only had five or six trims, and so didn’t have any particular loyalty to hair joints, although I developed rigid tastes in conditioners and hair mousses. Those were dark times.

    I was living in Singapore when heat, boredom, advancing age and the visible signs of a receding hairline made me realize the long hair had to go. I went to a place in Great World City called “Jantzen Hair Design” and told them to get rid of it all. All those years of long hair had made me surprisingly tolerant of places billing themselves as “hair design” or “stylists”. Like I said, those were dark times. Jantzen whacked the lot off and I spent the next day wandering around, feeling my scrubby scalp in delight like a dorm-rat on X. Out of inertia I took my shorn head back to Jantzen for several months until I realized the Malay barber in Holland Village, walking distance from my house, would give me the exact same haircut for one quarter the price. I stuck with those guys until I left Singapore.

    The place downstairs in my apartment building is clearly “hair design”. At the low end they charge 98 kuai for a cut from a Korean stylist, 68 for a Chinese stylist. This graded pricing is a peculiarity of Beijing hair salons, where the operating assumption is that maximum style can never be achieved through the services of a Beijing native. Having walked many of Beijing’s malls, it is possible that there is a grain of truth in this assumption. But I think it’s mostly about playing to people’s infatuation with exotic imports. My previous hair place charged more for stylists from Hong Kong, while the Toni & Guy up the road at Sunshine 100 charges big bucks for the sophisticated caresses of a Canadian stylist (no doubt of Hongkie extraction).

    The place had only been opened for a few days and customers were still in short supply, so I was descended upon by a well-coiffed mob the moment I entered and gently ushered upstairs into serene, white-paneled bliss. There the attendants locked my coat in a cabinet (for my protection), seated me on a luxuriously soft couch, and placed The Book on the coffee table before me. The Book was opened to reveal photograph after photograph of gorgeous, high-cheekboned, effeminate looking Asian men with spiky, frosted hair. Which gay, Korean popstar would I most like to resemble?

    I have nothing against gay, Korean popstars (or straight but devastatingly androgynous ones, for that matter). But as a thirty-eight year old white man with broad shoulders, a generous nose and prominent brow line, no amount of hair engineering on earth is going to make me look like one. But they were game for a try. Everybody seemed a bit crestfallen when I said that I simply wanted my hair cut short, and a little longer on top was OK. I was seated in a spanking, new salon chair with not a strand of previously cut hair upon it, and a gorgeous, high-cheekboned, effeminate looking Chinese man (remember, I didn’t stump for a Korean) with spiky, frosted hair went to work on me. Meanwhile, two attendants hovered over the chair ready to do…anything that might be necessary. Or, almost anything. This was not, after all, a hair brothel. The only contribution that they made during the actual haircut was when one held a transparent shield over my face for thirty seconds while my bangs were being cut. If I hadn’t lowballed on the stylist, I’d have assumed they were sitting at the feet of the master. As it was, they were sitting at the feet of the discount.

    At the end of the process was where we ran into communication difficulties. I have hair best described as “unruly”. As usual, there were two or three little sprigs on the top of my head that refused to lie flat. I said to the stylist, “I always have some that stand up. Use a little gel.” (Actually I used the English word for gel, I have to confess to not knowing the Chinese.) Naturally, this was perceived as “use some gel to make my hair stand up”. I had just issued an invitation to spike up my hair to a man who saw all unspiked hair as falling far short of its full, glorious potential. I realized what was happening when, after rubbing in some gel, Mr. Frosty started using his thumb and forefingers to roll tufts of my hair into spikes. I did a quick inventory of my Chinese vocabulary and realized rapidly that I did not have the words to politely say, “I’m sorry. You have misapprehended me. I do not wish to have my hair spiked. Just use gel to make it lie flat.” So, in the best Beijing fashion, I decided to roll with it. After all, it wasn’t like he was trying to give me a dye job. I’d have drawn the line at that.

    Five minutes later I was looking smooth. Youthful and trendy. I went down to the counter to pay. There was an opening week 30% discount, so I only owed 47 kuai. Six bucks. Same as I paid Capers 20 years ago. And Capers worked without help (or ears). I love Beijing.

    I took my stylish self back up to my apartment where my wife said, “You paid 50 kuai for bed hair?”

    I went into the bathroom and brushed it flat.

  • Decadent Beijing suburbanites give me da bomb

    A current of dissolution runs through Beijing’s expatriate professional community. The city doesn’t have the loutish licentiousness of Hong Kong, the world-weary NGO clubbishness of Phnom Penh, or the dangerous-living frisson of Port Harcourt, or some other oil-drenched African hellhole.  But, with limited entertainment options and a large population of foreigners paid more money than can reasonably be spent*, there is a certain inevitable drainage toward the underlit low spots where large pools of alcohol have collected.

    Perhaps if Beijing was more family friendly and developed this would be less obvious. Or perhaps I simply run with a bad element. I am, after all, employed in an industry with a legendary, institutional fondness for adult beverages. I tend to hang out in a crowd rich in fellow flacks, journalists and Australians. If this isn’t courting danger and inebriation, I don’t know what is.

    As befits someone with my godless inclinations, I went for a full-body wallow in the soft, white underbelly of expat Beijing this holiday weekend, resulting in a positively Roman display of indulgence and self-gratification that did superb justice to the pagan roots of Christmas, and no justice at all to the rather more ascetic spiritual aspects. The first stop was a catered dinner on Saturday evening, hosted by a couple who live in a villa in suburban, northeast Beijing.

    The “villas” are to Beijing what suburban Connecticut is to New York, if only Connecticut was ringed with an apocalyptic wasteland dotted with the desolate shells of enormous, uncompleted residential developments. They’re places where wealthy people, often with families, attempt to escape the hurly-burly, in-your-face, gob-on-the-sidewalk lifestyle of downtown Beijing. In a city where the vast majority of people live in microscopic apartments, the villas really are absurdities; gated simulacra of American suburbs complete with wide sidewalks and picket fences. Fantasy re-creations of single-family, detached bliss. If you’re a foreign executive for an MNC who has just been rotated into Beijing for two years, and you have a large housing allowance, a car and driver, and no real desire to interact with the city, they’re the place to be. Many are near the airport, which increases the appeal for frequent fliers, and other people often seen getting the fuck out of Beijing.

    The slightly contemptuous description above doesn’t describe all villa residents. One very good friend of mine, an old China hand who works at home, lives in a villa house because it provides ample space for his family and his business. He’s done his downtown time and doesn’t have much else to prove. And the couple who entertained us on Saturday night probably don’t fit into my angry, stereotype box either. A mixed English-Hongkie couple, both are fluent Mandarin speakers who don’t seem to have any need to insulate themselves from China. In fact, the house belongs to the woman’s grandmother. The two of them were fine hosts once we got past the man’s enthusiasm for a wicked, electronic party game that punished the slow or anxious with nasty electric shocks. I hate electric shocks, and took care not to lose. Our hosts laid on a catered spread that was, by my math, exactly twice as much food as could possibly be consumed by the eight of us who were there. The liquor and tobacco were scarcely dented. Dessert was an all-night love-affair with pancreatic suicide. I ate. I drank. I wept for the sheer joy of it.

    For all my bitter, underprivileged sarcasm, there are certain advantages to villas. This place had a large kitchen, a roaring wood wire in an open fireplace, and a dining-room table that could comfortably seat ten. My dining room table seats four, and only if everybody exhales, we put the cat out and we don’t actually eat anything. Villas also have the advantages that houses everywhere have over apartments: you can play your music loud, and you can set off enormous, dodgy fireworks. We did both.

    When I was young lad, I, as all young lads do, went through my pyromaniac phase. Living with my father in a 100 year old, dry-as-tinder redwood Victorian, this was a particularly fraught period in my life. In a series of episodes that an enterprising therapist could mine for book material, I blew up most of my toys and set the rest on fire, along with (at various times) my hands and eyebrows. While I usually laugh it off as just another bit of juvenile, male primate risk-courting (check it out, baby, I cheat fiery death!), looking back from the cusp of forty it now seems remarkable that I didn’t end up in a burn unit, jail or minus a couple of fingers.

    In those days, fireworks –the feedstock of my reckless entertainment– were illegal in San Francisco. In the run-up to the Fourth of July (America’s holiday for independence and blowing shit up), you could drive down to Daly City, ten minutes to the south, and buy an assortment of decorously restrained sparklers, cones, Piccolo Petes, ground flowers and snakes. Or you could do what I often did and go down to Chinatown to buy black-market bricks of firecrackers sold out of the backs of cars by young Cantonese guys. If you were particularly daring, you could lay hands on cherry bombs, or even the infamous, hand-pulverizing “M-80″, reported to have the lethal kick of a quarter-stick of dynamite. Looking back on it, this may be the start of my love affair with Asia.

    The biggest things you could get that had an aerial component were bottle rockets –enormous fun to shoot at friends and pets– and, of course, the legendary and poetically named Roman Candle, the firework that made “great balls of fire” more than just a Jerry Lee Lewis riff. Neither was capable of delivering significant explosive power onto your target, however. To get any more vigorous airborne, incendiary entertainment you either had to be into actual model rockets, which I briefly was (too much work), or into throwing ground-flowers just before they ignited. I was also, very briefly, into this before being scolded mightily by my father, who could visualize the clause in his insurance policy that said, “we will not pay for your house if your idiot son burns it down with fireworks”.

    Of course, I now live in China, where any firework small enough to actually be thrown is for pussies. This was amply demonstrated outside my apartment last Chinese New Year, when I was treated several hours of nonstop detonations that gave already surreal Beijing something of a dangerous, Sarajevo atmosphere. By the sound of it, M-80s were about the light end of the scale, despite a nominal ban on fireworks inside the fourth ring road. Coming from years in Singapore, where it was considered quite the daring scene when the Prime Minister recently lit a single string of firecrackers for the television cameras (the first heard in Singapore in several years, mind you), this was a refreshing change. Glued to the window of my apartment, with the throaty booms washing over me in waves, the infantile pyromaniac, long suppressed by an adulthood replete with neckties and responsibilities, stirred restively within my breast.

    That’s why I was propelled to Olympian heights of ecstasy at the sight of the climactic firework unveiled on Saturday night by our hosts. China, as we are often told, is the country that invented fireworks. To see the kinds of damp squibs we used to get in Daly City, the sanitized dregs of the Chinese fireworks industry, you could be forgiven for wondering how anyone could be killed in a “fireworks factory explosion”. Too see what we launched on Saturday night was to see that China was keeping the best for itself, and to understand exactly how a fireworks factory explosion could wipe out not only the people in the factory, but also the unfortunates in the next village up the road. It was a gaudily-wrapped cube the size of a filing cabinet, in which were enclosed sixteen cardboard mortars, each with a two-inch diameter. 600 kuai ($75) at your finer fireworks stalls, I was told. Surround with bricks and keep back fifty meters said the ominous instructions. It scarcely needed to add, “this side toward enemy”.  A straw poll was held, and the fireworks were launched from the nearest convenient launch pad, the roof of the servants’ quarters.

    Sixteen ear-shattering booms later we had been treated to a private, Christmas-eve fireworks display of monumental proportions, all the servants were awake, and every car alarm in the neighborhood was ringing. Stupendous, incandescent blossoms, twenty meters across. The lower fringes dusted the roof of the house itself. Oh, baby, where were you when I was hunting for the perfect bottle rocket, all those decades ago? The things you and I could have done together. I used to have to go to Candlestick Park (more recently 3Com Park and Monster Park thanks to the great American rejection of all traditions that aren’t evangelical Christian ones) and stand in the parking lot for this kind of display. Here anyone with a few bucks to spare can muster a Fourth of July fireworks exhibition that would be the pride of any stadium in America. I love China.

    We got home at 3AM, deaf and stuffed, with just enough time to sleep-off our excess before trooping out to the Hyatt’s Christmas champagne brunch with a different group of friends. This was the point at which my Christmas actually descended from indulgence into obscenity. Hotel brunches are nothing more than dares; challenges to eat enough to make it pay. In a world where people are going hungry –in a country with an income per-capita of $1290; or just about 20 times the cost of one seat at this brunch– it’s the ragged threshold of karmic self-immolation, invariably followed by weeks of self-flagellating penance on the treadmill. Mrs Imagethief, the pro nutritionist, has actually diagrammed her attack for maximum value: cheeses, seafoods, meats and desserts. Stay off the breads, potatoes and noodles. Those are sucker plays; cheap filler to woo you away from the meaty, gold-plated nuggets that make the buffet worthwhile. You have to admire the dedication to gustatory suicide.

    The Hyatt brunch is mediocre by international hotel brunch standards (I am a fan of the Ritz Carlton in Singapore – nice selection of food; unparalleled cheese plate; bright, airy space), but that didn’t stop us from working it until we were the last party in the restaurant and the wait-staff were shooting us nervous “please leave” looks. Only two of us coughed up the ruinous 488 kuai for free-flow champagne, and we had a solemn pact to make it pay. Between the pair of us, we managed to bury three bottles of Moet which, on top of the previous night’s festivity, all but ensured some kind of premature organ failure.

    Drunk, waddling and incapable of speaking in anything other than belches and groans, we did the only logical thing. We staggered off to frozen Houhai where my friend, Dennis, and I rented one of the two-seat sled chairs that extended Chinese families make into sled caterpillars and pole along the ice at excruciatingly slow speeds. We did not move at excruciatingly slow speeds. We moved at recklessly fast speeds, taking turns mushing one-another along like demented, Yukon dogsled drivers crocked on shots of Jagermeister and driven half-mad by long, sunless, Arctic winters spent in the company of nothing but Alaskan huskies. You can’t steer a sled-chair in any meaningful way, and we must have scared the bejeezus out of any number of apple-cheeked, pigtailed young Chinese girls who will spend weeks thrashing under sweaty sheets dreaming of maniacal, unshaven Laowais  careening toward them and screaming, “过一下儿!!! 过一下儿!!!” It’s only by some kind of Jimmy Stewart-style Christmas miracle that we didn’t sail through one of the flimsy barriers that surround the slushier sections of the lake, ride our hell-sled into the frigid darkness and end up drowning under the ice like rats.

    Provenance smiles upon idiots. It was the best Christmas ever.

    Imagethief wishes all readers a merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, a pious Ramadan and a happy New Year. And, because this is a properly ecumenical site, happy holidays, too.

    *Starving, idealistic English teachers are excepted from this generalization.

    A dissolute Imagethief wallows in empty, carnal indulgence on Christmas eve with a fat smoke and Finnish vodka. Jackie O. shades hide eyes full of shame.
    A dissolute Imagethief wallows in empty, carnal indulgence on Christmas eve with a fat smoke and Finnish vodka. Jackie O. shades hide eyes full of shame.

  • Beijing needs a giant monster attack

    When you are asked to name the great, metropolitan cities of the world, you will naturally consider certain factors. It’s not always size that makes the difference. If it was, then Chongqing would be the capital of the planet, a role I think we can all agree that Chongqing, for all its charms, is not quite ready for. Sure, size has its place, but it’s the more abstract qualities that really elevate certain cities to greatness, and that probably influence your choices: political influence; rich history; culture; cuisine; cosmopolitan buzz; and so on.

    Beijing has most of this –it’s working on the cosmopolitan buzz– but it conspicuously lacks the one other factor that defines many of the world’s other great metropolises: a giant monster attack.

    I’ve been giving this a lot of thought lately (a sure sign that the holidays are leading to a work slowdown), and I’ve come to the conclusion that Beijing cannot be a great, global metropolis until it is attacked by its own giant monster. Thanks to the encyclopaedic reference information contained in two invaluable websites, Stomptokyo.com andGiantmonstermovies.com, I’ve been able to research some of the cities that have been on the receiving end of giant monsters. Sure, you all know that Tokyo has had a fifty yearkaiju infestation that has included Godzilla, Gamera and friends. New York got King Kong on multiple occasions plus, as a bonus, the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (by the way, that’s 180,000 feet, or about six times deeper than the deepest part of the ocean). London was attacked by Gorgo. San Francisco got the five-armed octopus of It Came from Beneath the Sea. The list has also has some surprises, including some of Beijing’s key, regional rivals and a few cities you’d never expect:

    • Copenhagen was attacked by Reptilicus
    • Hong Kong was attacked by Mighty Peking Man in 1977, in an unintentional but apt metaphor for the city’s future
    • Rome’s Colosseum was destroyed by Ymir in 20 Million Miles to Earth
    • Los Angeles got Them
    • North Korea was attacked by Pulgasari, admittedly in ancient times
    • South Korea’s Seoul has had various monsters
    • Sweden got a monster, although it appears to have been confined to rural areas, in keeping with Scandinavian tidyness
    • Bangkok got Garuda
    • Even neutral Switzerland had a monster, although it was put there by Americans
    • Every tiny town in  the American southwest had a Gila Monster, Mantis or giant Lepus at some point, thanks to the tireless efforts of Bert I. Gordon and his contemporaries.

    As you would expect, Singapore is monster-proofed, although I think a romp by a giant merlion would do it a world of good.

    But let’s get back to Beijing. Those who like to quibble might be tempted to remind us that Mothra appeared in Beijing in Destroy All Monsters, but I am inclined to disqualify that for a couple of reasons. First, that’s a Japanese monster, and, as such, more insulting than terrifying. And, second, the climactic battle didn’t take place in Beijing.

    The problem for Beijing is, of course, that it has no skyline, and no easy monster access. If a monster was going to attack any mainland Chinese city, it would probably make a beeline (monsterline?) for Shanghai. Not only does it have the Huangpu River and the nearby Yangtze, which is more than big enough for your standard-guage kaiju, but it has the glittering Pudong skyline which has “ravage me” spelled out all over it in neon. If the Oriental Pearl Tower isn’t a secret Mysterian headquarters building just waiting to be scaled by something giant, scaly and radioactive, then I don’t know what is. And Jinmao Tower is a close number two.

    But what would a monster in Beijing attack? CCTV Tower? That’s way out west. The Great Hall of the People or the National Museum? Those low-rise, Stalinist wedding-cake buildings just aren’t all that satisfying as monster-fodder. Guomao’s twin towers are step in the right direction, but after Jianwai Soho, there’s precious little else smashable in that neighborhood. I guess a monster could kind of work it’s way down Jianwai and Chang’an Jie like a buffet line, stopping every kilometer or so to work on whatever medium-grade skyscraper or smokestack was convenient, but it seems like kind of a chore. Why waste the effort when the concentrated banquet tables of Shanghai and Hong Kong are so much more convenient?

    And that supposes that a monster could get to Beijing. But this may be easier to solve. Although we don’t have a major waterway nearby, it is conceivable that monster awakened by, say, the depletion of Beijing’s aquifer could arise from the bottom of Zhongnanhai, or perhaps tunnel up from underneath the Shougang plant (which would put it conveniently near the CCTV tower). I guess a monster could rise out of Tianjin harbor as well, and take Tianjin as a kind of hors’d’oeuvre on the way in, but it all seems very indirect. Plus any such monster could get misdirected and end up in Dalian, or, worse, Seoul (which has already had a monster, thank you very much).

    So I think Beijing has a clear mandate. If there is a better centerpiece for a giant monster attack than the 2008 Olympics, I cannot think of what it might be. Forget terrorist attack, I’m thinking giant monster attack. I think Beijing has a responsibility, a duty, to construct a monster-worthy skyline prior to the Olympics (it’s certainly working on this), and then take advantage of the games themselves to trash it utterly.

    Now that would be a spectacle worth staying for, and it would ensure Beijing’s entry into the pantheon of great World Cities far better than any measly athletic competition alone ever would.

  • I am Beijing’s decadent man bitch

    When I was back in the US recently I was often asked a deceptively simple question: “What is it like living Beijing?”

    This is a trap. It’s a trap because no-one living in the United States wants to hear in any great detail what your experience of living in another country is like. Most Americans don’t actually believe in other countries, except for France, and then only because they don’t like it. I am sure that most of my friends think I am assimilated bodily into the Internet for eighteen months at a time, beaming in for the odd-week to attend barbecues and weddings.

    I went through this indifference for years  when I was living in Singapore and, despite China’s slightly higher marquee value, the situation is not much different now. It could just be that I am a crappy raconteur. But I think people really just want some short, pithy exclamation or mini-anecdote that encapsulates everything that is exotic and frightening about where you live, provides them with reassurance about their own lives, and doesn’t challenge them with too much history, culture, political analysis or other complexity. Something like, “Well, did you know that, in China, it’s acceptable to walk around without any pants on and that people rub noses to say hello?” (Although, ideally, something true.) Speak for longer than about three sentences on the topic of living abroad at your standard cocktail party and people’s eyes glaze over and their hands start fumbling for a liquor refill. There are, of course, occasional exceptions to this rule from people with a particular interest, but I feel this accurately describes most such situations.

    So I’ve been confronted with the challenge finding a way to accurately sum up the experience of living in Beijing –to transmit the raw, visceral feel of it– without dwelling too deeply upon the nitty-gritty and nuance that washes right over people who’s conception of China is built entirely on takeaway moo goo gai pan and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And I think I’ve hit on a solution.

    Beijing is really about a mix of pleasure and pain accompanied by chronic, mild disorientation. I was reminded of this as I stepped out of my lovely, heated lobby this morning (pleasure) and the cold grabbed me by the collar and slapped me hard on both cheeks (pain). This was followed by my morning walk to the subway, amidst the smells of early-opening snack stalls (pleasure) and the open, neighborhood garbage tip (pain). A lovely Hunan meal (pleasure) is followed by the inevitable morning on the can working through an entire copy of The Economist (pain, but with a distraction). An autumn evening on the banks of Houhai (pleasure) is followed by the nasty taste of soot and pollution in one’s mouth the next morning (pain). The triumph of a successful conversation in Chinese (pleasure) is followed by the humiliation of failing utterly at some bit of communication that should be simple (pain). The pirate DVD you bought has a great picture (pleasure) but stops twenty minutes before the end of the movie (pain). You spy a lovely girl (pleasure); and she picks her nose (pain). And so on.

    So I’ve come up with an interactive method that I feel will enable my friends and family in the US to better understand the world  in which I live, without bogging them down in too much didacticism. It works like this:

    If you want to know what it’s like to live in Beijing, get yourself four shots of vodka (technically it should be baijiu, but that’s hard to get in the US), a packet of cheap cigarettes, a ball-peen hammer and a slightly dirty but beautiful, exotic-looking girl dressed in unfashionable clothes. Now,

    1. Drink all four shots of vodka.
    2. Take a drag on one of the cigarettes.
    3. Kiss the girl.
    4. Hit yourself on the hand with ball-peen hammer, really hard.
    5. Repeat.

    I think that about sums it up.

    Of course, being a completely masochistic Asiaphile, I love Beijing’s pleasure/pain duality. In a way, I guess that makes Beijing my nasty, whip-cracking mama, and me her decadent man-bitch. If you are low enough to want to think of it in such vulgar terms. Even now, a year-and-a-half later, my general complacency is often interrupted by moments of utter surprise that say, with knife-point keenness, “hey, asshole, you live in China”. I love that feeling. It was because I had long-since outgrown that feeling in Singapore that I came to China in the first place. I suppose when I no longer get that feeling here, it will be time to leave. But I think it will be a while. My cheeks still sting from the last slap.

  • The strange medical odyssey of Tiny Cat

    As regular readers know, I had to pay USD$600 in shady cat-graft to get my two, dime-a-dozen Singapore drain cats, Tiny and Xiao Xiong, out of Chinese kitty Stalag when they first arrived in China. (How’s that for your Foreign Corrupt Practices? I appear to be some kind of recidivist.)  My reward for this demonstration of heartwarming, “pets are for life” commitment was four months of complaints about the lack of wildlife available for murdering. Then Tiny got sick, and my wife and I spent every day of the Spring Festival, China’s biggest holiday, at the vet.

    The first symptom was the complete evaporation of his appetite. To know Tiny is to know how alarming this was. He’s not so much a cat as a fuzzy, ironically named jet engine that ingests all loose objects in his path, and, perforce, emits a noxious stream of pollutants and gas from the rear. This cat can hear the workmen at Goldfields open their tins of luncheon meat seventeen floors below us. He never met a meal he didn’t like.

    Appetite loss turned into vomiting. Finally, we awoke one morning just before the Spring holiday to find cat puke meticulously arranged on every fabric surface in the house (couch, living room rug and hallway runner), and thought it might, perhaps, be time to go to the vet.

    We hoisted Tiny off to the Beijing KPK Veterinary World Hospital, in the vet and pet shop ghetto on Gongtibeilu, west of the Worker’s Gymnasium. It didn’t take long for Dr. Xiang to make a diagnosis: liver failure.

    My cat has liver failure? From what? His late night Maotai benders?

    Brought on by obesity, you see. She pointed to a simple silhouette chart on her office wall, apparently designed for dullards like me, which showed a thin cat shape, normal cat shape, and obese cat shape. “He is like this,” she said, pointing at “obese cat”. A highly scientific assessment of his prognosis followed. “Maybe he’ll live, maybe he’ll die in the next week.” All hope lay in an aggressive program of intravenous medication to be administered every day until he recovered or expired.

    Well, that’s settled then. We’ll just leave him here. Phone us up when he’s better or dead.

    Not so fast. The Beijing KPK Veterinary World Hospital does not board animals. We would have to bring him in every day. My fantasies of a well deserved, indolent Spring Festival crumbled. I don’t want to seem callous, but it kills your vacation to go to the vet every day. It’s the immovable scheduling object that everything else must be scheduled around. Shall we go to Longqingxia to look at the ice sculptures? Sure, after the vet. Shall we have a long, indulgent breakfast at Steak and Eggs? You bet, but remember, we have to go the vet. Shall we go to Chaoyang Park and have a snowball fight? Absolutely. Right after we go to the goddamned vet!

    We began a daily schlep of dragging Tiny out from under the couch, cramming him into his cat carrier, wrapping it in a jacket to insulate him from the wintry, Siberian blast ripping through Beijing, and taxiing up to the vet for his fix.

    Under the People’s Olympic Beautification Plan, line item 857, Beijing is upgrading its fleet of disintegrating, rattletrap Xiali taxis to swish, new Hyundai Sonatas. This has three consequences. First, it is increasing the bottom-end taxi-fare from 1.2 yuan (14 cents) a kilometer to 1.6 yuan (19 cents) a kilometer. A scandalous outrage.

    Second, it is killing off a singular Beijing experience. Xialis (and many of the equally dire Citroens) are grungy and cramped beyond compare. Your average adult American has to break his own legs to sit behind the driver’s cage of a Xiali. During the sweaty summer, when I was going for job interviews, Xiali seatbelts often left broad, diagonal black stripes on my white business shirts. I learned to forgo the belts even though there are few experiences as nakedly terrifying as bombing through Beijing traffic at high speed in a car with the build and ride of a Radio Flyer wagon.

    The third consequence of the upgrade is that it has made taxi drivers choosy about what they will carry in their elegant, new cars. A Xiali driver will take your camel, if you can find a way to squeeze it in. (Hint: break its legs.) But Hyundais? No cats, please. One Hyundai taxi driver, after refusing to take us, kindly warned the driver of the next taxi in line (also a Hyundai) not to take us, as we were carrying a cat. Another Hyundai driver thoughtfully offered to put Tiny in the boot (trunk, Bob).

    I think this is all part of the great, Beijing double standard. As I have noted before, this is a dog town. My apartment building is infested with little dogs, and at least two large enough to be officially illegal inside the fourth ring road. Every evening the courtyard is a riot of minuscule dogs in precious winter outfits: checked coats, little dog sweaters, and such. I bet dogs get to ride in the swish taxis. But cat people are viewed with suspicion:

    What? You don’t have a dog? Didn’t you get the memo?

    (Of course, they also eat dog in Beijing, but there is clearly a mental separation between eatin’ dogs and huggin’ dogs. However, a few days ago we had lunch in one of our favorite cheap and cheerful jia chang cai joints, just across from the vet, and we noticed both a dog-meat special on the menu and an assortment of conspicuously doggy noises drifting out of the kitchen. Maybe the chef was feeding scraps to his pet…)

    Through cajolery, charm and luck we managed to taxi to the vet every day. And every day we would go through the same routine. We would take Tiny into the examination room and decant him from his box. Dr. Xiang would ask us if he was eating (yeah, some). She would gravely inspect the color of his skin and eyes (still yellow). Her eyes would narrow; did he poop? Then she would tsk a bit, write a daily prescription and send us to the treatment room. There we would pay 100 yuan, the nurses would greet Tiny with the usual exclamations of “Aiyohhh, so fat!” and he would be wired up for his cocktail of meds.

    The IV drip is Beijing’s catchall approach to veterinary medication. Whatever your pet, whatever its problem, the Beijing KPK Veterinary World Hospital has an IV for it. Cat, dog, parakeet, hamster, goldfish, whatever, they’ll needle it up for you. And every animal gets the same thing: a straw-colored concoction that looks like piss.

    From the crowd in the treatment room, winter was scything through the little pets of Beijing. Large, bullet-headed Chinese men, who would have owned ridgebacks or rottweilers in any other city, fussed over comically tiny, bug-eyed puppies wheezing and hacking their way through various ailments. One man tried to control three diarrhea-ridden husky puppies. Another miserable, palm-sized pup vomited onto its owner’s lap with mechanical regularity. Every animal was getting a drip. There was a sense of solidarity at the Beijing KPK Veterinary World, all of us spending the biggest holiday of the year cradling our pets, surrounded by the bunting of the IV lines.

    After a few days, Tiny began to recover. The vet commented on his rude glow. We started having to wrap him in a towel to restrain him during his drip. The bottle runs slowly when your re-invigorated cat is struggling to escape. Over three weeks we graduated from IVs to daily shots, to home treatment, to the ol’ jet engine. Tiny has had his second narrow escape in Beijing. I am out another 1500 kuai, grudging taxi rides included. And I am reminded, once again, of the folly of carrying cats to Beijing.

  • So you want to study Chinese in Beijing

    The pros and cons of Worldlink Education

    Last spring, for selfish personal reasons, I quit my perfectly good job in Singapore and abandoned my wife for three months to come to Beijing and study Mandarin. I am now living and working in Beijing, along with my wife, so I guess the whole crazy stunt can be considered a success.

    Before I came to Beijing I spent a lot of time trying to figure out exactly how I was going to study here. I had two years of Mandarin instruction in Singapore, so I wasn’t starting from scratch, but my skills were elementary. I had no idea which language programs or schools in Beijing were reputable or what would be a fair price to pay. I spent a lot of time on the web and wrote to acquaintances living in Beijing.

    I got a lot of different opinions. Some people told me to come to Beijing, hire a tutor and work one-on-one. Some people told me to attend classes. I heard BLCU (Beijing Language and Culture University) was great. I heard BLCU sucked. It didn’t add up to a really coherent picture. One problem was a shortage of useful information on the web. It was easy to find websites for Wordlink Education, BLCU, the Taipei Language Institute and other programs with registration information, classes, fees and so forth. What I couldn’t find was third-party reviews, real testimonials from students or critiques by people who had been through the programs.

    Ultimately I chose Worldlink Education’s Beijing language program, and instruction at their in-house school, the Beijing Chinese Language Academy. Worldlink seemed reputable and well organized and their office in Australia, through which I did registration, was responsive and quick. I chose their in-house classes rather than BLCU instruction (which they also offer) because of the smaller class sizes.

    On the whole, the experience was pretty good, but not perfect. I posted this article so that people who are considering Worldlink for study in Beijing know exactly what they will and won’t get from the program, and what kind of an experience they can expect.

    I am also including a little bit about Beijing itself. I am not going to write about the city in detail. Others have done that, including me in my China Diary blog (www.imagethief.com/china). Also, I am not an old China hand by any stretch. My total time in Beijing is now a year. But I’ve been in Asia for nearly ten years, so I have some perspective.

    All of this is based on my own experiences. Other people will have different opinions, and your mileage may vary. Shop around, and don’t make your decision based just on what I have to say. I invite other Worldlink Beijing alums to add their own comments, good or bad, using the form at the bottom of this page.

    Beijing
    “Motherfuckers,” muttered the American in line behind me, “I fucking hate the Chinese.” I was in Bangkok, boarding my most recent flight to Beijing on a transit from Singapore. The passengers were mostly Chinese and the queue to board the airplane was random disorganized at best. The angry American was coming to China on business for what I am sure were six long, miserable weeks. Clearly not all of this guy’s baggage was suitcases, if you know what I mean, but I think he was a pretty good example of how you can end up if you don’t learn to roll with the cultural punches.

    If you haven’t spent time in Asia, be prepared. Very little English is spoken away from the central business district. Although it’s modernizing fast, Beijing still has a lot of third-world grime, dust and odors. Much of the food is shockingly oily. Public transportation is crowded and, often, uncomfortable. Queuing (lining up for things) is an inexact science. People might seem rude and brusque at first glance. Service may sometimes seem appalling (although it can be surprisingly good at times). You’re a foreigner, so sometimes you’ll pay more for stuff.

    Relax. Things just don’t work the same here, and you have to have patience, tolerance and open-mindedness. Chinese social idiosyncrasies are as valid as American ones. Treat discovery of those idiosyncrasies as a cross-cultural adventure and you’ll have a good time. If you expect things to work like they do at home or are quick to get frustrated or angry, you’ll end up culture-shocked and miserable like my fellow traveler in Bangkok. Beijing is fascinating, generally inexpensive and great fun. Western comforts are easy to find once you know where to look. It is much more accessible and easy to get around than I thought it would be. In general I have found Chinese people to be friendly, enthusiastic about speaking Mandarin, and engaging and curious about me and my country.

    Some of this stuff seems obvious, but my own Wordlink roommate wrestled with a lot of these issues while he was in China. He was a great guy with good Mandarin skills from university, but this was his first time outside the US and I think a lot what he experienced here took him by surprise. There is no real way to know if you’ll like it or not before you arrive. Buy a good guidebook and read it thoroughly before you get on the plane. Track down people who have spent time in China and talk to them.

    Classes
    This is what you are coming for, so I’ll spend the most time on it.

    Worldlink classes consist of three sessions: Speaking, comprehension and listening. Normally these are taught by different instructors, and each session uses a different BLCU text provided by Worldlink. You have two of the three sessions each day, varying over the week. Speaking and comprehension provide the backbone of vocabulary and grammar while the listening course uses cassettes to get you used to hearing and understanding native speakers. I strongly advise going to the BLCU bookstore, near Worldlink, and buying your own set of the cassettes for your listening session. The entire set for one textbook costs about 80 yuan (US$10). If you take the “intensive” course there is an additional afternoon session which is mostly extra reading and vocabulary.

    The professors are mostly retired BLCU instructors and the instruction is Asian in style, which means a lot of working through the book by rote and not too much creativity. Homework consists of book exercises and memorizing vocabulary and characters. Different instructors encourage different amounts of discussion in class, but, generally, there is a serious lack of useful conversation time.

    You are expected to use language exchange partners or tuition for conversation, but there was a chronic shortage of tutors at Worldlink while I was there. Language exchange partners are local students who swap their Mandarin coaching for your English. If you’re lucky, as I was, you can get a great one who will become a good local friend. If you are unlucky, you’ll get someone who was roped in by being invited to a party where “there will be foreigners” and who has no real idea what he or she is getting into. Several of my friends’ language partners were recruited in this way. There is no shortage of energetic local students advertising to be tutors and language exchange partners, so if Worldlink isn’t providing what you need, don’t be afraid to swallow the modest cost and strike out on your own. If you want to progress, there is no substitute for speaking Chinese to locals.

    If you already have some Mandarin, Worldlink will give you a placement test when you arrive. It’s one-page, and no one actually speaks to you. One page is no basis for assessing someone’s language skills. If you’re having a bad day with your characters, or if there is some key vocabulary in the reading passage that trips you up, you get downgraded. If you’ve encountered the parable in the reading passage before and can explain it, you get placed high. To Worldlink’s credit, you can shift classes. They say you can do this during the first week, but they are fairly flexible about it throughout. If you feel uncomfortable with the level of the class you are in at any time, don’t be afraid to ask to change up or down.

    Worldlink does not offer all course levels all the time, and they shoehorn a lot of students into the next-best class level. A good friend of mine was not willing to settle for next-best, and browbeat Worldlink into opening a new class at his level. That was fortunate for me since I ended up joining him after spending one weeks in a course that was too easy and then another week in one that was too hard.

    But we learned another lesson: Worldlink’s quality of instructors varies wildly. Some are truly fantastic. Some are complete no-hopers. One friend of mine had his Mandarin skills ridiculed in class by his teacher. Not a constructive approach to instruction. Our new instructor was friendly and well meaning, but he had a complete inability to explain vocabulary and grammar in Mandarin, which some of the instructors are very good at. He also had not been trained for the listening class and had apparently never operated a cassette player before. There were some tragicomic moments as my friend and I used our bad Mandarin skills to explain to him how he was supposed to teach us.

    Again to Worldlink’s credit, they eventually replaced him with a significantly better instructor with whom I enjoyed studying. But it took a second round of furious lobbying and threats by my energetic classmate. All in, the first three weeks of my twelve week program were something of a write-off. Bear this in mind if you are coming for a month-long program.

    Students come to Worldlink for varying lengths of time, and the people in a class can change with time. In the nine weeks after I finalized my class our group ranged from two students to nine. I spent the final three weeks as the sole student in the class, which was at once useful and trying. Four to six people is very comfortable. Much above six and no one person gets to participate much in class. If there are more than ten people in your class at Beijing Chinese Language Academy, complain loud and hard. You are paying extra to avoid BLCU’s large classes.

    Often the students have substantially different skill levels. That is not necessarily bad, but it can be frustrating for everyone involved at times. More frustrating, motivation levels can vary dramatically from people who are driven to learn to complete tourists who cut most of their classes and only manage to slow class down at the odd times they show up. We had a one student who was in our class for one month during which he attended six times and contributed nothing but carbon dioxide and surplus body heat.

    I spoke to a lot of my friends and classmates about their experiences in Worldlink classes. Opinions ranged from those who felt it was tremendous experience to those who felt it was a total waste of time. On average my friends thought their classes were OK, but were disappointed because they felt that the classes could be significantly better. Better instructors, more conversation and less rote book-work were what many of them wanted.

    There is no doubt that you can learn from the Beijing Chinese Language Academy classes taught at Worldlink. I did. But use the classes a springboard to get vocabulary and grammar. You’ll gain much more actual speaking and listening ability from talking to locals, whether they are language exchange partners, tutors, taxi drivers or shopkeepers, than you will from the classes.

    Accommodation
    My experience was great. I had asked for a three-person apartment, but demand was high with the rush of students returning to Beijing after SARS and I was “upgraded” to a two person apartment. The apartment complex, Huaqing Jiayuan (Leisure Garden), was in a neighborhood called Wudaokou. At first I was alarmed by how far the apartment was from the school, nearly four kilometers. But I rapidly got over that.

    The apartment was clean, modern and spacious, if not overly stylish. Despite a very odd smell from the drains in the shower, it was a long way from the roach-infested pit I had mentally prepared myself for. Wudaokou was a great neighborhood to live in, with dozens of bars, restaurants, outdoor beer gardens, coffee houses and shops. A subway station right across from the apartment provided easy access to downtown. School was a ten minute bus ride away, but for most of the summer I walked the forty minutes to and from school. It was hot and dusty, but not unpleasant.

    There were a few issues in the apartment that you should prepare for. Although there was a fine fridge and microwave, total cookware consisted of a frying pan, a cleaver and a cutting board. Dishes were four bowls and eight chopsticks. Fortunately, the supermarket downstairs had a fine assortment of ridiculously cheap kitchenware. Also, in Beijing you often prepay for your power, which I didn’t know at the time. Although that was supposed to be taken care of for us, our power went out a couple of times, requiring frantic calls to the landlady, Worldlink etc.

    Worldlink’s website also made a few unsupported claims about the apartments. For instance, it says that “all apartments have Internet access”. It would better read, “Internet access can be arranged in all apartments.” It’s not hard to do, but you do have to pay for it yourself (80 yuan a month for broadband). Also, the website says that all rooms have desks and chairs. Well, I got to the apartment first, so I claimed the master bedroom, which did have a desk and a chair. My roommate was in the microscopic second bedroom, which fate he accepted with good cheer. But he had no desk or chair. The apartment also didn’t include the promised DVD player, but my roommate wasted no time prying one out of Worldlink. Ultimately, I was very comfortable there.

    Some of my friends who had opted for the dormitories were not so lucky. The dorms are rudimentary but serviceable, but they were also full. The overflow was placed in the Chengfu Hotel, right off of Beijing’s fourth ring road, about two kilometers from campus. The Chengfu was, not to put too fine a point on it, popular with the local whores. It was an adventure for male and female students alike. It didn’t have either the convenience of the dormitories or the charm of Wudaokou.

    Some students opt to stay at the Xijiao Hotel, also in Wudaokou. I put my father up there when he was visiting Beijing, and I have nothing bad to report.

    Home stays with Chinese families are another option, and I can’t really comment on them much since I didn’t do one myself. I will tell you that my friends who did home stays had mixed experiences. Some thought it was great, some thought it was weird and uncomfortable. Based on what I have heard, I will tell you this: The language benefits of a home stay are real (see “Immersion” below). But be prepared to gamble a bit on the quality of your family, and be ready to surrender some privacy and independence regardless. If your situation is uncomfortable, ask Worldlink to move you.

    Fellow Students
    My fellow students were the best part of my Worldlink experience. In three months in the program there I made many very good friends, some of whom I hope to stay in touch with. The ready-made social group is hard to beat when you come to a new city, especially one where there can be difficult to make local friends quickly. People were friendly, supportive and fun.

    They were, on average, younger than me. I was the rare mid-career professional, at the creaky age of 36. Many of my classmates were college students or grad students, with the occasional 30 something and one or two older people. But we were all strangers in Beijing, and I found it very natural to form friendships with people.

    Having a group made it that much easier to navigate restaurants, explore the city, be tourists, share experiences, and generally survive three months in a strange place without feeling stranded. Having moved back to Beijing to work just two weeks ago, I miss that ready-made group of friends, and I feel much more isolated.

    Immersion
    The trade-off of the social group is that Worldlink is not “immersion” in Chinese. I was constantly surrounded by English speakers, and hung out with English speakers in my spare time. For a while, I worried about this. “Don’t take anyone to Beijing who will speak English with you,” said my tutor in Singapore (who is from Beijing). Well, I didn’t need to take anyone with me. I found them all there. But I think the trade off of immersion for the support and fun of great was worth it.

    You can immerse yourself a bit more with a home stay, if you like. But unless you are relentlessly dedicated to speaking Mandarin all the time, you’ll end up speaking English to your classmates anyway, especially if you want any kind of social life.

    There are some non-Worldlink programs that pledge students to speaking nothing but Mandarin. Whatever works for you. Immersion is great, but there is plenty you can accomplish by simply making the most of opportunities to speak the language. My fellow-students and I had a series of “speak Mandarin” dinners where we spoke in Chinese to each other. But it seems a shame to limit all of your discourse to the lowest, linguistic common denominator for three months. If you want to immerse yourself, go backpacking on your own for a month through rural China or get yourself an English teaching job in the sticks for six months (not hard). Worldlink won’t do it.

    Extras
    Worldlink promotes a few bells and whistles to flesh out their package, including the weekend excursions and social outings, elective classes and the student-lounge with Internet access. As with everything else about Worldlink, it’s a grab-bag of good and bad.

    I never did any of the weekend trips, although they were very popular. They seemed quite expensive to me for what they were (often 1500 yuan or more for two days by train to Xian or Inner Mongolia, which is deceptively close to Beijing). Often fifty, sixty or more students went on the trips, and they were basically package tourism. Here is your schedule. On the bus, off the bus, eat here, sleep there. If you don’t mind that, go for it. A lot of people had good fun.

    For places like the Great Wall, the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace I suggest skipping the Worldlink trips and doing it on your own, or with a small group of friends. It’s easy to hire a driver and get to those places and more fun to chart your own course when you’re there.

    I only did one elective, a course on Chinese character writing. It covered stroke order and radicals. It was OK. I think the electives are very hit-and-miss, and I didn’t feel like I was sacrificing anything by only taking up one of my allotted four.

    As for the student lounge, the computers are full of spyware and tend to run badly, but they do generally work. Think twice before accessing your Internet banking. Demand is very high at peak hours (right before class and right after). If you have a laptop, it’s a better bet to bring it and plug it into the Worldlink network. The lounge is often a disaster area of pizza boxes and beer bottles. It’s not so good for lounging, but reasonably tolerable for checking your webmail and meeting your friends before lunch.

    Management and Organization
    Worldlink is bang-up at processing your application and getting you enrolled in the program. They will meet you at the airport, just like they say they will. They will have someplace tolerable for you to stay. The fundamentals work fine.

    The devil is in the details, however. As an academic program, Worldlink seems fairly haphazard. It all comes together in the end, but with rough edges. As we learned, if you don’t end up with the right class or the right instructor, you need to be prepared to make things happen. (Or, if you’re like me, find a friend who is prepared to make things happe). Things like tests and attendance are all fairly random, and depend a great deal on the individual instructor.

    Be prepared to be taken by surprise here and there, and to have to ask to office to help you with things that you might feel they ought to automatically take care of, like buying electricity for your apartment. The upside is that the staff were generally very helpful when I did have to ask for them to take care of things.

    Was it worth it?
    Unquestionably. If you want to come to study Chinese in Beijing, Worldlink makes it easy. The courses, the accommodation, the visa paperwork and the ready-made gang of friends are all taken care of. It’s the easiest way to get there, and it takes the burden of organization out of your hands.

    But you can expect some compromises in the classes and the quality of service. That’s the deal you make. I had a good experience, but I worked hard to speak Mandarin with regular Chinese people on a daily basis, and I had a head-start on the language. I also knew exactly what I wanted to get out of being in Beijing for three months, and I achieved that. Even though that didn’t all have to do with Worldlink, they served the purpose I needed and so I feel good about the experience. Not everyone felt the same. My roommate thought the whole thing was a poor second to his Duke University language program of the year before.

    It would be easy to come to Worldlink and piss the time away and not learn much, or to be scandalized by a poor experience and give up on it (which some people do). You’re paying a lot considering the local costs, so be willing to go to the mat with Worldlink to get your money’s worth if you feel jerked around. Be clear about what you want to get out of the experience and do what you need to in order to achieve that. Come into it with your eyes open and can be worth your while.

  • The standard issue chairman mao

    I had never before lived in a country where there was a real cult of personality. China has fixed that.

    Oh, Americans give it their best shot. God bless them if they don’t want Reagan on everything these days: Ships, money, Mount Rushmore, text books, dog licenses. But as a nation, they seem to have a fair aversion to elevating deceased leaders to godhood.

    This is a good thing. I am not in favor of cults of personality or the deification of human beings, living or dead. I am in favor of a scrappy press and an angry body politic that delight in jerking the rug out from underneath the people that run the country.

    I am not, however, opposed to enshrining the memory of leaders who have had a significant impact on the history of the nation. Even I misted up at the Lincoln Memorial as I read the Gettysburg Address, one of history’s great orations, from the text etched on the wall in the shadow of the great man’s statue.

    But what keeps America great, even in one of its darker periods, is that someone so inclined (perhaps a southerner with a Civil War chip) can stand on the steps of that very same monument and loudly declare, “Lincoln was an asshole!” without fear of state retribution or persecution.

    Just try that on the steps of the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall, smack bang in the center of Tiananmen Square, and see how long it takes the state to dish out some retribution.

    China knows cult of personality, and Mao is the beneficiary. I realize that “cult of personality” is often used with regards to a living person, but I suspect that, in the Chinese national consciousness, Mao is not entirely dead. One of the interesting things about being in China now is that the country still seems to be building the Mao mythology, even as it modernizes at a breakneck pace and wrestles with itself about Mao’s legacy.

    Before I share any further observations, I need to make a disclosure. I am not a China expert, nor a China historian. As with all the other entries in this journal, I write as a layperson awash in China for the first time. If you want to take scholarly issue with any of my observations, the comment form is at the bottom of the page. Among all the articles I have posted on this blog, this is the one for which I would most like to see some input from other people living in China.

    The thing that got me thinking about Mao’s place in the Chinese national consciousness was a small photograph that my father bought at a curio store when he was here for a recent visit. Prior to that, I had noted the giant painting on the Forbidden City, the Mausoleum, and Mao’s portrait on all the new currency in a kind of offhand way. The photograph was nothing special. A relic from the 1960s, it shows three students in, naturally, Mao jackets posing at the feet of a Mao statue in front of what appears to be a university or government building.

    The statue of Mao is large and imposing, perhaps near ten meters tall. He stands resolutely, gazing forward at the horizon/future/building across the street. He appears to be facing a moderate headwind, as the bottom of his greatcoat is swept back in the imaginary breeze.

    I was walking home from class by a back road a couple of days after my father bought the photograph when I passed one of the nearly one-hundred universities in the Haidian district. I can’t remember which university this was; the University of Panel Beating, or the University of Flocculent Textile Sciences or some such. What was important was that it had the Mao statue and what appeared to be the same building in the background! Oh my god, I thought, that’s the goddamn statue! This is the place in the photo! What a coincidence!

    I whipped out the digital camera and took a couple of furtive shots, and strolled on past the Starbucks, the Subway, and the other franchise businesses that were, cunningly, located down the street, just outside of Mao’s still resolutely communist gaze.

    Well, of course it was not the same statue or the same building. This became completely obvious when I spotted first one, then two, then three other identical Mao statues in front of the indistinguishably drab institutional buildings that still represent the cutting edge of Chinese academic architecture. This was, it turned out, the standard issue Mao statue, planted in front of what appeared to be all public facilities that existed during the 1960s or 70s. On Xueyuan Lu, not far from where I live and study, two of the statues gaze resolutely at each other from opposite sides of the street, in a breathtaking tableau of entombed narcissism.

    This experience got me thinking about the rest of the Mao iconography in Beijing, and about how Chinese people today actually perceive Mao. There is no doubt that the Chairman is omnipresent. If the statues on the university campuses aren’t enough, in many Beijing restaurants, a bust of Mao occupies the same spot of honor that, in Singapore, would have a small Buddhist or ancestral altar. Many taxi and van drivers have a Mao medallion hanging from the rearview mirror. On one side will be Mao, and on the other will be either Zhou Enlai or Kuan Yin. (I am not sure why the option.) At this moment the Chinese government is in the midst of introducing new currency in which all the bills feature the Chairman’s likeness.

    Tiananmen Square is, of course, the centre of the Mao cult in China. The Chairman’s immense portrait hangs on the front of the Forbidden City, gazing across the square at the Monument to the People’s Heroes and, beyond that, his own tomb, the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall. The portrait is a mandatory stop for the legions of Chinese tourists who make pilgrimages to Beijing to stand at the heart of the empire. Everyone has their photo taken in front of the Mao portrait. The tomb itself is a monumental attraction, and as the focal point of the average Chinese tourist’s Beijing pilgrimage, plays as a central and formalized a role as the Kabaa does in the Hajj.

    But despite the cult of personality, the mythmaking and the iconography, it seems that the Chinese don’t really agree on Mao’s legacy. During my father’s recent visit to Beijing, we were invited to the house of three academics whom, for obvious reasons, I won’t identify. In the midst of a lovely meal of home cooked dumplings, vegetables, and surprisingly palatable Chinese brandy, the topic of Mao came up. Two of the academics were in their fifties and had come from prosperous families. During the Cultural Revolution, as teenagers, they were both shipped to a northern province to till the earth for eight years. They were blunt in their assessment of the Chairman. “We hate him,” said one, leaving little room for argument.

    Also at the table was a younger academic, in her forties, who was the head of the institute where one of the other two worked. She was not a victim of the Cultural Revolution, and she had a different opinion. She saw Mao as the founder of modern China, and a figure to be revered. I don’t know much of this sentiment was sincere and how much was a political necessity of her position. I was, however, impressed with the fact that the three of them were willing to share their differing opinions with us, and able to be colleagues and friends despite their fundamentally different outlooks on the most charged figure in modern Chinese history.

    Originally, I thought the younger academic’s sentiment might be representative of post-Cultural Revolution Chinese in general. It seemed likely that, if you had not personally had to endure those miserable years, you might be more receptive to the modern mythmaking and reformation of Mao. But a read through the transcript of a Taiwan discussion forum on the Beijing University Website, provided by my friend Dave Hull, made me re-think that. Amidst the lively and somewhat worrying debate about whether China should invade Taiwan were several references to Mao. Clearly, as a group, educated Chinese youth aren’t really sure of Mao’s legacy either. Some admired his charisma and vision. One, screened by the anonymity of his posting, pointedly referred to him as “that madman”.

    Meanwhile, here in Beijing, the official iconography of Mao, while still powerful, is slowly being diluted by the transformation of Cultural Revolution imagery, including Mao imagery, into tourist kitsch. On any stroll through Tiananmen Square you will be besieged by hawkers touting Mao watches (the second hand is his waving arm, moving back and forth) and little red books of Mao Tse Dong thought, helpfully translated into English. Go to the Hongqiao Market, near the temple of heaven, and you will find dozens of curio stores selling reproduction Cultural Revolution posters featuring socialist-realist and revolutionary-romanticist renderings of the great figures of the Chinese revolution. Shops in Qianmen sell T-shirts with portraits of Lei Feng, the idealized communist soldier.

    The Chinese clearly recognize all of these things as kitsch, and no one seems to mind. Of course the Chinese History Museum, on Tiananmen Square, displays waxworks of the great figures of Chinese history, with a strong emphasis on revolutionary figures. This is done without any visible irony whatsoever, so who really knows how the Chinese view a Mao watch. They don’t wear them.

    With all of these conflicting signals, there was only one thing to do. I had to visit the heart of cult, and make the pilgrimage to Mao’s tomb. Technically the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall, this is an enormous, square, Stalinist edifice on the southern end of Tiananmen Square, near Qianmen. It is a huge attraction for the thousands of Chinese tourists who come to the capital.

    An artificial scarcity is maintained by only opening the tomb for two or three hours a day, five days a week. The result is a queue that can stretch well over a kilometer, enhancing the Chairman’s mystique. After all, it wouldn’t be so flattering if the Chairman was open round the clock, like a Seven-Eleven, and you could just wander in any time. (Notice: Cashier does not have the keys to the crypt.) No, the government has clearly taken a calculated step to enhance the sense that all the world has come to see Mao.

    If you are ever in Beijing, I highly recommend going to see the Chairman. The joy of it is not in actually seeing the body; it’s in witnessing one of the world’s last remaining bits of great, communist theater. Dave Hull and I spent an hour in the immense queue that wound, in crisp right angles, across half of Tiananmen Square. We baked in the brutal, Beijing summer with the salt of the Chinese earth; ordinary people who had come from across the country to see the big city sights. The crowd was a mix of families, old aunties and uncles, and colossal Chinese tour groups in matching caps, dutifully following young women with colored flags and megaphones. Foreigners were rare. People from the countryside, where, I am told, the cult of Mao still holds strong sway, were common. Kites flapped overhead, and water and ice cream hawkers roamed the line, flogging temporary relief and trailing a cloud of beggars who competed with each other for the empty plastic bottles.

    We moved quickly, under the constant bombardment of a public address system that explained, in Chinese and English, the decorum that should be observed in the queue and in the mausoleum. Every twenty yards or so, an attendant with a megaphone kept an eye open for queue jumpers and forbidden bags and parcels.

    After an hour of switchbacks we approached the entrance to the Memorial Hall. As we moved toward the front stairs, we passed the flower concession. Here you could spend two kuai on a bouquet of artificial flowers wrapped in official “Chairman Mao Memorial Hall” cellophane. Many people were buying the flowers. As we ascended the stairs we had a chance to buy the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall Official Pamphlet for one kuai. “Chairman Mao will always live in our hearts”, it proclaimed on the front, above a photograph of a still living Mao giving a speech. I bought one.

    Moments later we were at the grand entrance to the Memorial Hall. After an hour of flirting with heatstroke I was suddenly, gloriously, bathed in the air-conditioned breeze. Inside the doors the queue split into two, flowing to either side of a large statue of a seated Mao, arms in lap, legs casually crossed, gazing benevolently over the masses come to visit his corpse. In front of the statue were two enormous metal bins on wheels into which people duly threw the bouquets of artificial flowers they had purchased moments before. Some genuflected briefly, as they would with incense before a Buddhist shrine, before tossing their flowers into the bins. Obviously, when the bins were full, they would be wheeled back out to the flower stall and replaced with empty ones. Someone is doing well on that racket.

    Clouds of starched attendants manhandled the bifurcated queue into neat two-abreast rows and we were rudely prodded into the next room. There was some pressure to keep the visitor throughput up. An auntie and uncle in front of me attempted several times to walk single file so both could be on the inside to get a better glimpse of Chairman, only to be rudely wrenched back into line-abreast by the attendants. Anyone who slowed down or, heaven forbid, stopped was immediately upbraided and poked back into motion.

    Two doglegs later and we were in the Hall of Last Respects. There was the Great Helmsman, tucked under a Chinese flag with only his head and upper shoulders showing, as if napping in a refrigerated, glass coffin were simply the way to pass a hot afternoon. An honor guard of four soldiers kept watch. Of course, who knows if that really was him in the crypt. It could have been a bad waxwork. He did, after all, look puffy and, well, dead. Rumors float around Beijing that the real body is swapped with a wax one on alternate days. It is also said that, when not on display, the corpse is lowered on a hydraulic lift into the chamber below where the mausoleum ghouls perform their grisly maintenance tasks. One friend of mine thought that this meant the Chairman was raised into a standing position when on display, perhaps something like the “Evening with Mr. Lincoln” animatronic at Disneyland. I had to disappoint him, but I do think there is potential in the animatronic idea.

    In the Hall of Last Respects everyone craned their necks for the best look as we swept past. We all had line of sight on the body for perhaps ten or fifteen seconds. And then we went around the back wall and emerged into the gift shop.

    If ever an ironic shock could cause respiratory arrest and death, this was it. Fifteen feet behind the corpse of the literal embodiment of Chinese communism, the gift shop was flogging Mao paintings, Mao medallions, Mao figurines, Mao picture books, and Mao tributes of every other conceivable shape and form. If the gift shop didn’t have what you wanted, behind the mausoleum, stretching towards Qianmen, was a hundred yards of stalls selling even more Mao paraphernalia.

    And that was the Temple of Mao. Admission was free.

    My father, an Englishman by training, is convinced that the enshrinement of the corpse is a Chinese expression of the Arthurian myth. By not returning the body to the elements, Mao is kept alive in the public consciousness and the implicit suggestion is made that, perhaps, in China’s darkest hour, the Great Helmsman will rise again and steer China through its troubles. Then again, many people here believe that China’s darkest hour already came as a result of Mao’s stewardship.

    So Mao continues to loom over China, occupying an uneasy, conflicted spot in the national consciousness, half tyrant, half beloved founder of the modern state. Both views are correct. But the conflict doesn’t seem to be causing the nation any visible agonies. Even those who disparage Mao feel an obvious pride in Chinas current success. Perhaps, one of these days, the Chinese will reconcile their feelings about Mao’s role in their history. Meanwhile, the Chinese might not be sure of Mao’s place in the modern world, but they seem increasingly sure of their own.