Beijing

After a 747 ride filled with Asian businessmen in black suits with Mao hairdos (except one dude with a fauxhawk!) we finally arrived in a country where I speak even less of the language than I did in Japan.

Today dealing with the taxi driver (not wearing white gloves—in fact, caged in by bars and Plexiglas) involved Caroline and my grinning idiotically as mom my spurted out “Esta bien, esta bien!” Though I should temper the criticism. Today the fam took a look at what I’ve been writing and revolted collectively. My dad proposes less “fuck” and “shit” in my language and more respect for my elders—my mom more bluntly asked that I stop making everyone besides me look like an asshole. I told them that if they had a problem with what I was writing (which, it goes without saying, is wholly affectionate in nature and simply flippant stylistically) they could write their own blog. They reminded me who was paying for this vacation and that I could easily be left behind in Shanghai. Their repressed anger came out tonight when everyone was a little tipsy at dinner (my dad started sticking breadsticks in the candlewax, and they all fell asleep in the taxi on the ten-minute ride back to the hotel). “Don’t even pretend like you have a heart,” said my sister in response to some sentimental comment I made, and when I came back from the bathroom with a slightly different hairdo my mom took one look and said “No. Fix it. Fix it.”
Their ways of telling me I’m not loved are not subtle.

Beijing is as overwhelming as Tokyo, but in a very different way. Instead of Tokyo’s seas of Burberry umbrellas warding off rain, Chinese women hold their umbrellas up en masse to keep the sun from darkening their skin. People are back on the right side of the road (though they’re still reading magazines right to left), but there are so goddamn many of them. The city’s far more modern than I expected, though, with broad sweeping boulevards and ginkgos shading wide pedestrian streets. But if Japan is Asia’s Switzerland, China’s its Mexico. Here people aren’t afraid to hock up loogies and spit them out (although in cities you now get fined rather heavily for it) and stare are you brashly and drive like anarchists. The situation on the road is unbelievable. I remember being in awe at how few accidents I saw in Mexico, even though every thirty seconds I had to cover my eyes because I was sure someone was going to die on the spot. That was nothing.
In Beijing, the bicycles think they’re cars. They weave between bike path and street, they cross eight-lane boulevards on the red, and they will not be pressured by the trolley turning right. Even with the honking and cursing and slamming on the brakes everyone’s still zen. It’s made me decide that American caution and organization—on the road, in life—sometimes works against us. Convenience, while it has its obvious advantages, makes us soft and slow, too. These motherfuckers are HARD—while waiting at a stoplight in front of a hospital (Hospital of Eternal Friendship or something of the sort) I saw a man in a hospital gown with tubes up his nose stagger across the street to buy a newspaper, holding his own bag of bile. We, in contrast, are considering levying a tax on fatty foods because we can’t put away the party-size Doritos.

It was at the Great Wall that I realized that last week I was in Providence, graduating. And that I can’t really consider myself on summer vacation anymore. But then I was like, hey, it feels like summer vacation—and it’s pretty great. So I stopped stressing.

Maybe my favorite thing so far has been watching the kites—shaped like birds, faces, angry Chinese men—on Tiananmen Square (they’re all over Beijing—too bad the sky they fly in is always gray from the smog that cloaks the city…). At night some of them glow in the dark. And my second favorite has been turning over in my mind how big Beijing and China are. Tiananmen Square can fit Times Square, Trafalgar Square and the Red Square inside it with room to spare; if you put two Chinese people on each stone slab, we were told, you’ll have a million people looking at Mao (the next block over houses a hall that fits ten thousand). My least favorites have been the two things I hated most about Mexico; being stared at and sold to, and the heat. When it’s hot, I stop paying attention—which is unfortunate when there’s so much to see. Vietnam is going to be a fucking sauna.

So yesterday in exchange for taking a picture with Japanese people we got some origami, but today in China an extremely flexible six-year-old gave us a little acrobatics show after we posed with her. (Speaking of—it’s a little eerie to see how many guests at the hotel we’re staying are couples picking up Mandarin girl-babies for adoption.) Pictures with blonds apparently rain good luck down onto Asian children, and considering the amount of photos we’ve posed for we’re destined to end up on half the country’s mantelpieces. Slightly less charming are the creepy Asian men who want pictures with us too. They’ll come up out of nowhere, grab Caroline or me round the waist, and excitedly jabber the equivalent of “cheese” (I think) as their friends snap a shot, and then we have to repeat the whole charade with the lot of them. Doubtful those pics are going up on mantelpieces, but I really don’t want to know.

Most bizarre about coming to Asia is seeing what’s the same and what’s different. Sometimes when I wake up it feels like I’m home, only with certain cables in my brain switched; looks like a city, but words are written in unrecognizable characters, everyone’s Asian, and homeless people are picking food out of the trash—with chopsticks.

I love the slogans on the clothes I’ve been seeing around. My favorites so far have been a shirt on a sweet-looking Chinese teenager that said “I am super kinky,” a dude with “I am pretty, I am bad man” on his pants, and a little girl whose shirt cautioned, “Never smile at crocodiles.”
Reminds me of the time I was at this country fair in the Belgian boonies where the drunken farmers belted out the chorus to “Halleluiah, it’s raining men” without any idea what they were singing about. Boy, do these people massacre the English language (although our own attempts at Mandarin are preposterous). Even people who speak well enough to correctly use terms like “exotic appeal” and “bourgeois” and “incremental” sound aphasic because their accents are so horrible. The best kicks come from the official translations of postings at the monuments; the Temple of Eminent Ambition, et al. (recall the writing on the chopsticks of every Asian restaurant in the States “Welcome to Chinese Restaurant! Here how to use Chop Stick.”). Best was the sense of cultural mores that leaked through in one of the rules at the Ming Tombs we visited: “Promote social morality, be polite, respect elders, take care of the children, no spitting.”

I’m still formulating my thoughts on the weird communist-capitalist, highly-developed/Third-World (although historically speaking I guess it’s Second-World?) mix they’ve got going here. On one hand the repressive, communist side is still totally evident—this morning my dad was filming some military exercises on Tiananmen Square and got the camera ripped out of his hands.  Now there’s a bunch of footage of this big hand blocking the camera. Walking off the plane the ten or so cleaning ladies waiting to board were standing like soldiers in two parallel lines, and in stores clerks stand sentry in front of their appointed aisles (severs have numbers instead of names). And if you search the Internet for anything on the ’89 Tiananmen massacre all the pages come up empty (they’ve effaced all the bullet holes, too). But then you go to the Forbidden City, and there’s a Starbucks right under the “Gate of Eternal Harmony.” The ironically named “Endless Culture Plaza” is lined with KFC and McDonald’s surf shops, shoe stores, Haagen-Dazs—and yet in the morning soldiers practice their marching there. It’s bizarre to watch this illustrated modernization in motion. You’ll have an old communist concrete box next to a big sign that says “Ermengildo Zegna—Coming Soon” next to a newly opened Max Mara. What’s most shocking about Beijing’s gold is the speed at which it’s gilding. Although I’m sure as soon as we leave the city how little gold we’ll see will shock us far more.

Still not sure whether it’s even possible to take a train from Hong Kong to Hanoi, but I’ve got faith.