Acknowledgments

This book is a work of reported nonfiction; the people in it are all actual people, and the events happened as described and in that order.

I wouldn’t have dared to write a book about Beijing without the help of an ad hoc work unit of expert friends and friendly experts, of which the leader was Zhang Xiaoguang. Phil Pan, my college roommate, was already in the city when I arrived, and his guidance and wisdom were all over these pages before there even were any pages. Gady Epstein and Sarah Schafer were likewise there for the book’s beginnings; Susan Jakes and Evan Osnos did me the honor and favor of reading the manuscript. To the extent the facts are straight, credit goes to them, and to Jeffrey Prescott, Mayling Birney, Alex Wang, Hyeon-Ju Rho, and Glenn Tiffert, who kept me supplied with information and companionship. Jodi Xu’s reporting and translation skills saved the day at least twice. Alex Pasternack, Adriane Quinlan, Joe Kahn, and Jim Yardley all gave me crucial help at one time or another. Eric Abrahamsen (and his Beijing by Foot guide) supplied vital and obscure information. Pan Deng provided able research and translation. The teachers of the Taipei Language Institute did wonders in getting my Mandarin up to a passably rudimentary level.

Nor would there have been any book if the subjects of it had not been so generous with their time, especially Ma Jian, Soojin Cho, and the Dongsi Olympic Community English class. Zhang Qiang of the Weather Modification Office went out of her way to explain the cloud seeding. The staff of BOCOG was patient and professional; Jeff Ruffolo put in extra effort to keep me in the ever-shifting loop.

In the United States, I owe thanks to Peter Kaplan for bringing me to New York to work for his Observer, and for then letting me shuttle back and forth to the far side of the globe. Once I was gone from the Observer office for good, Tom McGeveran and Josh Benson kept finding ways to fit foreign dispatches into a New York–centric newspaper. Gareth Cook and Steve Heuser at The Boston Globe and David Plotz and Josh Levin at Slate also kept me in assignments through lean times in the industry; so did Anuj Desai at the late Plenty magazine and Mark Bryant at the late Play, while they could. Portions of this book got their start in those publications.

Larry Weissman, my agent, persuaded Sean McDonald at Riverhead to publish the book. Sean, Geoff Kloske, and Laura Perciasepe edited the manuscript, with Ed Cohen copyediting it.

Choire Sicha was a good-enough friend and adviser to read the first pile of words, before it even qualified as a manuscript; he and Suzy Hansen absorbed the worst side effects of the writing—complaints, drafts of paragraphs in progress, more complaints.

I thank Ting and Lily Ho, my father- and mother-in-law, for all their help and kindness, whether joining us in our travels or welcoming us home.

Jane and John Scocca, my first readers and editors, supported and sustained this work to a degree that could be called extraordinary, were it not of a piece with thirty-nine years of the same.

The first word and the last, and everything in between, go to Christina Ho and Mack Scocca-Ho.