Beijing! Part 1

Hello hello! I am back from my 8 days in Beijing and settling back into my Shanghai routine. Beijing was very fun, and it was quite refreshing to have complete freedom to set my own agenda. But coming back to Shanghai felt very much like coming home, and I’m happy to be back.

I have a lot of ground to cover, and I need to go to bed early tonight, so I’m setting myself a time limit and I’ll finish the rest tomorrow. OK….GO!

Thursday, October 1 was China’s National Day, and the 60th anniversary of the founding of the PRC. You might have heard about a small parade that happened in Beijing, it was a pretty humble affair, no big deal or anything. KIDDING. I watched it on TV (we left for Beijing that night, as we were basically told that foreigners were not welcome in Beijing while the parade was going on…) with my host family. It was visually stunning, an amazing feat of organization and coordination, a jaw-dropping display of nationalism and might and accomplishment. My host family’s reaction was interesting…they sang along to some of the songs, and my host mom and host sister watched the whole thing, but my host dad seemed pretty disinterested and even laughed at it a few times, and my host mom and sister spent a good portion cuddling and tickling on the couch. This was disconcerting but adorable…nukes and tanks parade across the screen, and my host sister is hitting her mother with a pillow. Another favorite moment was spotting the Taiwan float, the last of the floats for the Chinese provinces. I chuckled. China is very persistent in keeping up that particular appearance. While watching, I couldn’t help but think of the Tiananmen Square protests of 20 years ago as I watched thousands of college students dance in the parade, next to tanks and soldiers. In fact, I’ve been shocked for weeks by how China Daily refers to the parade and all the National Day festivities in Beijing as simply “Tiananmen”…as in, on the front page, there would be a box saying “Turn to Page 6 for pictures from Tiananmen!” or “Students Gather to Rehearse for Tiananmen.” Very startling for me, and perfectly intentional I’m sure for the much censored/ state-controlled China Daily (they also refer to any member of Taiwan’s government as the Taiwanese “President” or “Minister of Education”, using the quotation marks). I guess they want to reclaim the term “Tiananmen” as a reference to the protests. I also couldn’t help but think about how happy I am to be American, where people march through the streets for social causes or protests, or to see a President inaugurated, but not in highly orchestrated affairs. And we’d certainly never send soldiers marching through our streets. It’s a silly symbolic thing, I guess, but it felt symptomatic of some of the differences between the two countries. Also the fact that there were no spectators to the Chinese parade, just invited “guests.” How lame is that?

We arrived in Beijing late Thursday night. Friday we went to the Summer Palace, which was lovely. Bright bright sunshine, absolutely perfect weather. My favorite part was exploring the ruins at Yuanmingyuan, a park a few kilometers from the Summer Palace. The ruins are of a Greek/Roman style palace built for one of the last Chinese emperors by some Jesuit monks, destroyed by British and American forces during the Second Opium War. I could barely handle the irony, and the sight of these beautiful, forlorn ruins in a Chinese park, with the late afternoon sunshine dappling pillars and slabs of stone and Chinese tourists climbing all over and posing for pictures was incredibly memorable. It would also be a great place to perform Shakespeare…I’m going to make it happen, some day. Stay tuned for my 2030 production of “Midsummer” or “Romeo and Juliet”, staged in these ruins. It’s gonna be great. A fascinating moment at the ruins was when a Chinese man approached me and my friends and asked us if we knew the history of the place. I said that we did, and he asked how we felt about it. I said that it felt strange to see these ruins here, and it made the West look very bad, but that it was still very beautiful. He responded that, for him and his friends, the history was too heavy for it to be beautiful. An interesting comment to hear a day after watching the exuberant display in Tiananmen Square…despite what the Chinese government perhaps wants the world to think, history still lays heavily on China in some ways.

Saturday was a crazy day. We went on an ill-fated and ill-advised excursion into Tiananmen Square. The two metro stops in the square were closed, and the one we could finally get off at was SO INCREDIBLY PACKED I CAN’T EVEN DESCRIBE IT. AHHHHH. Imagine the scene getting off the subway at Fenway Park, multiplied by a million bajillion. Parents were carrying their children on their shoulders, I think so they wouldn’t get crushed. It was unbelievable. Then, a very disoriented Abby led her little band of friends on a long, circuitous route to Tiananmen because I didn’t really know where we were, but the book had a walking tour to the square from where we were, and it seemed like a good idea at the time…ha. After a long (and vaguely mutinous) walk, the Square was little better than the subway station in terms of how crowded it was. At least it was sunny and open and there was air….And then, in our next mistake, we decided to walk under the main gate in Tiananmen (the one with Mao’s picture), but they wouldn’t let us turn around for probably almost a mile, and then we had to walk back through this park….it was a mess. But entertaining, and such an experience to see all these Chinese on holiday enjoying their national space and their families and friends. When we finally got back to the Square, we checked out the floats from the parade, and then fled to the Olympic Stadium, which was much less crowded and crazy. That was pretty cool. We collapsed in the Water Cube for a while and took pictures of the scene of Michael Phelps’ glory.

Sunday was more low key. We slept in, went to the Wangfujing Snack Street for a fun lunch of noodles, scorpion (I only tried one), coconut milk, Chinese fried dough, and other yummy things. After lunch, we went to the zoo! To see pandas. News flash: they’re cute.

Monday was Great Wall day! We went to the Simatai portion, which is roughly 2.5 hours outside Beijing (as opposed to the more visited Badaling section, which is only an hour or so away). It’s a pretty tough hike in some places, and I definitely made some bad choices about what to bring in my backpack (like…Bananagrams, three books, a rain jacket on a cloudless day…), so I definitely got some exercise. I lagged behind the rest of my group, to take pictures, and because of back pack issues, and because I wanted a day on my own (traveling with 6 other people was really fun and we had a great time as a group, but it was really really nice to get some time on my own, and I made friends with the other people I met along the way). At the end of the long hike was a pretty lake, over which I rode a zipline. It was a really very lovely day. I don’t know, though, if the Great Wall is really that “Great”…I mean, is it really something China should be proud of? Sure, it’s a great feat of organization and engineering, and it’s super beautiful, but isn’t it also a symbol of a xenophobic, authoritarian, closed-off, myopic and ultimately failed government? I guess in Chinese it’s not called the Great Wall, it’s the Long Wall. But I was definitely thinking hard as I climbed, about what I want the relics of my society to be, and what I want them to say about us. In centuries to come, will tourists walk along our freeways, or through our malls, or along our airstrips, and wonder what the point was? What will be our Great Wall? What will be the monuments of our civilization, constructed, metaphorically or actually, over the bones of those who suffered while building them? Nuclear weapons? Felled forests? Dams? Irrigation systems in deserts of our own making?

It was getting pretty emo up on that wall. Me with my fancy camera… pondering…. staring at the mountains…oy vey.

Tuesday, I went off with my friend Katherine (everyone else wanted to sleep) to see the 798 modern art district, which was maybe my favorite part of Beijing. I can’t wait to go back someday for a more thorough visit. It’s an old industrial park/warehouse district that has been converted into a huge complex of art galleries, shops, and cafes. Sooo cool. The art was hit or miss (I’m also just not that in to modern art…). I think my favorite thing was an exhibit on “Neo-historicism” that tracked the ways a famous painting depicting the proclamation of the People’s Republic had been revised during the Cultural Revolution and as the founding Party members depicted in it fell in and out of favor. The painting was apparently a favorite of Mao’s and is very famous and well known in China. That afternoon, we went to the Lama Temple, the largest Tibetan Buddhist temple in Beijing. No trace of the Dalai Lama, of course, and it felt exactly the same as every other Buddhist temple I’ve been to in China, except there were some prayer flags fluttering (half-heartedly, it seemed) in the wind. It was beautiful and there was a giant Buddha statue, but I found it interesting mostly for what it wasn’t. Next stop was the Confucian Temple and imperial college for some peace and quiet, then a long walk through a hutong to the Bell and Drum Towers, which were closed. Undiscouraged, Katherine and I (we never managed to make our agenda work with the rest of the group that day) walked another long way to Hou Hai, a lake surrounded by bars and restaurants, where we rented a paddle boat for an hour as the sun set. Then we walked again until we found a cute “homestyle” Chinese restaurant where we had delicious noodles. So much walking that day, but it was totally worth it, I felt like I really got a feel for Beijing.

And with that, to bed I go. Tomorrow, I will write about the next three days, as well as the very interesting lecture I went to today and the amazing book I just read (get excited!). Until next time. Peace.