5.
FuwaThe public face of the Beijing Olympics was five faces. In tribute to populousness or bureaucracy, the organizing committee had come up with a team of five cartoon mascots—a new Olympic record. The Cold War superpowers had gotten by with single mascots, Misha the Bear against Sam the Eagle, in the boycotted and counter-boycotted games of 1980 and 1984. Barcelona had the indolent doodle of Cobi the sheepdog; Atlanta the focus-grouped disaster of Izzy, the shape-shifting blob. Athens had indulged in a pair of fleshy Olympian god-cartoons, Athenà and Phèvos.
But Beijing would have a mascot for each color of the Olympic rings: the blue one was Beibei, the fish; black was Jingjing, the panda; red was Huanhuan, the Olympic flame; yellow was Yingying, the Tibetan antelope; and green was Nini, the swallow. Not that they were exactly animals (except for Jingjing, who was an exception in other ways, too). They were animal-themed, totemic. There was a great deal more to them than met the eye. Their names, taken together in the correct order, made up the phrase Beijing Huanying Ni—Beijing Welcomes You.
The mascots had been brought out three months behind schedule, but they made up for lost time through sheer ubiquity. Their images adorned billboards, taxi partitions, phone calling cards, notebooks, cell-phone charms. Sheet-metal versions of them danced on the surface of the pond in a local park, frozen in mid-caper. They had their own animated TV series. The buildings of the future might be scaffolding and dust, but the mascots were ready.
The design of the mascots was credited to an artist named Han Meilin. Han had survived persecution in the Cultural Revolution to become a treasured artist of the Chinese establishment, working in every medium and every scale. Elderly and short, he was a Picasso for the current age, if Picasso’s most famous innovation had been an ink-painting technique that produced animals of unparalleled fluffiness. While working on the mascots, he had suffered two heart attacks, the Chinese press reported.
In fact, Han alone had been unable to satisfy the Olympic organizers. A committee of eight artists and designers, convened to help him, concluded that the organizing committee’s design suggestions—an assortment that included a tiger, the legendary Monkey King, and an anthropomorphized rattle drum—were unworkable, and a subcommittee of the committee was formed to come up with a new plan.
The subcommittee decided to come up with a different set of mascots, five in number, inspired by the five Olympic colors and the five elements in traditional Chinese cosmology—metal, wood, water, fire, and earth. The artists wanted a dragon, but their supervisors on the Olympic organizing committee vetoed it: the dragon was a sacred mythic animal, and it couldn’t be seen on a team with any secular creatures. In addition, the organizers had consulted Chinese experts on Western attitudes, who declared that Westerners did not like dragons and associated them with evil. “We thought it was a pity,” said Chen Nan, one of the designers.
Western sensibilities, or Chinese ideas about Western sensibilities, haunted the Olympic planning. Beijing would show it could respect foreign values, no matter how alien and inimical. The more alien and inimical, the more satisfaction was to be had. Westerners would never be comfortable with China’s love of the dragon. The dragon had to go.
The panda, conversely, was added by fiat—“because foreign friends were so much in love with the panda,” Chen said. Chinese people loved pandas, too, but might find a panda mascot a little trite or generic. Nevertheless, foreigners would expect a panda. A golden-haired monkey was kicked out to make room.
On it went. A phoenix was too sacred, a crane was too skinny, a black-and-white magpie conflicted with the panda’s color scheme. Chen suggested a swallow—the shayan, technically the sand martin. Yanjing, or Swallow Capital, was one of the ancient names for Beijing, surviving as an Olympic-sponsor beer brand, and in a few other incarnations.
Tibetan antelope conservation had been in the news while the committee was working, Chen said. The fish and the Olympic flame came naturally from the Chinese elements of water and fire. The organizing committee’s judges kept suggesting changes. “Some were government officials, some were athletes, some were kids,” Chen said. One person told them the characters had too many symbolic features; another decided there wasn’t enough symbolism. Someone thought the characters were too reminiscent of Japanese or Korean toys; someone else thought they were too traditionally Chinese-looking. Eventually, the designers decided to attach meaningful symbols to the mascots’ heads, as needed, till each one was wearing a headdress of ludicrous size.
Jingjing the panda and Huanhuan the Olympic flame were male characters, and Beibei the fish and Nini the swallow were female. Yingying the antelope had been conceived as a girl, but had been given a sex change when the designers learned that only the male Tibetan antelopes had horns. Beyond his transgender status, Yingying was freighted with politics: the Tibetan antelope, according to the official materials about the mascots, was a “symbol of the vastness of China’s landscape.” He was an ethnic palimpsest; the crown of his headgear was based on a roof design from the western region of Xinjiang, minus its traditional Islamic crescent; his ear ornaments were of Tibetan design; his hair was curly, Chen said, because baby antelopes have curly coats, and “people in western areas tend to have curly hair.”
Collectively, the mascots were known as the Friendlies, and for all the fine-tuning, people despised them. At least, people professed to despise them. One side effect of China’s restrictions on dissent was that people tended to be extravagantly outraged about those things that were safe to criticize. Negative consensus spread rapidly through the Internet, as long as the target was small enough—a Starbucks in the Forbidden City, for instance, or a set of aggressively cute, big-headed Olympic mascots.
None of the complaints seemed to depress the sales of the mascots, or the proliferation of homemade or counterfeit versions. Still, the complaining people won one victory, over the name. “Friendlies,” they said, was an embarrassment to China. First of all, it was English, not Chinese. Second, it was not a real word in English. And third, it resembled, in English, the phrase “friend lies,” or the word “friendless.”
To hold all parts of this critique in mind at once, one had to simultaneously disdain the use of English, cling to a punctilious standard of English usage, and propound a wholly imaginary set of principles of English wordplay. No native speaker of English would see “Friend Lies” in “Friendlies,” unless suffering from an Oliver Sacks–grade cognitive abnormality. But the distaste for English and the oversolicitious English grammar standards were not, for the Chinese, unrelated; the worst sticklers were people who in their hearts believed that the English language was absurd and incomprehensible. A related attitude could be seen in certain Chinese-run Western restaurants, where salad would arrive as a heap of intact, full-sized lettuce leaves: salad was inherently inedible, so why try to make it possible for people to eat it?
So after less than a year, “Friendlies” was stricken from the official mascot materials and merchandise packaging and replaced with “Fuwa,” meaning “Lucky Babies,” which is what they had been called in Chinese characters all along. People hawking bootleg ones at tourist sites, where the mascots had become as commonplace as postcard books and fake Rolexes, continued to call them “Olympic babies.”
Trailing along behind the five Fuwa was a sixth mascot: an anthropomorphic figure with an oversized bovine head tilted at an angle that made it look quizzical or melancholy. It was principally pink and white, but with one green arm, one yellow leg, one yellow ear, and a mismatched pair of green and blue horns. The harlequin treatment I took for a cartoonist’s decorative whimsy, till I saw it was accompanied by the logo for the 2008 Beijing Paralympics, which would follow the Olympics. This was Fu Niu Lele, the Lucky Cow, and I realized with a combination of dismay and delight that her color scheme was intentional and significant. Lele was not put together like the normal mascots. She was different.
The Dongzhimen interchange, our nearest interchange, was going to be an important place in the new, international Beijing. The east side of the Second Ring was becoming a solid canyon of office blocks, like Madison Avenue in Midtown Manhattan; an additional building or three would appear every few months, filling in the set. All four corners of the Dongzhimen interchange held a new building, the rising frame of one, or a construction pit.
The biggest project was on the northeast corner, where the long-distance bus depot met the subway station. By the Olympics, the buses and the two subway lines were to be joined by an express rail line to the airport, making a comprehensive transit hub in one gargantuan station complex. Behind the construction walls, in the expanse where the new building would go, no less than eleven cranes were working at once, so many it was hard to get a clear count.
Creation and entropy were collapsing into one another. A chunk of the Third Ring Road fell into a sinkhole where the No. 10 subway line was being dug, paralyzing traffic. Part of the planned No. 4 line caved in a few months later, shortly followed by a second collapse on the No. 10, which killed two workers. Their surnames, according to a report in the Chinese press, were Xiong and Wang.
Twenty-six months before the Games, the city’s vice mayor, the official in charge of Olympic construction, was removed from office and charged with “corruption and degeneration.” The crime was vague; there were reports of a house full of mistresses. The building and unbuilding continued.
To keep traffic moving at all, Beijing law barred trucks from the streets by day. When the streets cleared out after dinner, the trucks would roll in, like a stage crew changing the set—moving trucks, cargo trucks, dump trucks clearing construction dirt. We rode one night past a procession of trucks bearing trees for planting: not only saplings but several larger ones, and one fully grown mature tree, taking up a whole truck bed by itself.
Reconstruction extended beyond buildings and parkland to the city’s taxi fleet, the cabs an ever-changing Old Beijing all to themselves. Recent history could be dated by the evolution of the taxi fleet: I had arrived not long after the elimination of the mianbao che, bread-loaf cars, cheap and dirty microvans. Now the era of the next cheapest and dirtiest taxis, the tiny Xiali sedans, was ending, and a new fleet of Hyundais, Volkswagens, and Citroëns spread out, in gold-and-green or gold-and-blue or gold-and-wine livery. The city’s three-tiered fare system was unified at the highest price, which was still as cheap as mass transit in America.
The low fares—and matching low wages—made the taxis the meeting ground for two kinds of new arrivals: the international visitors looking for a ride, and the internal migrants looking for a job. This was a point of concern for the Olympic organizers, the fact that grubby, garlicky rustics would be the city’s first line of contact with foreigners. And it gave the cabbies an audience, as much as the language line would allow, for their own inquiries and disquisitions about this new city and the new world they were suddenly navigating.
The expat population was growing. More foreign faces appeared in our apartment building, from Europe and the Americas, drawn by cheap sublets near the diplomatic compounds. In the corner store, where the butcher chopped ribs on a piece of log, extra-virgin olive oil showed up on a shelf.
Even so, it was not easy to be a Chinese homemaker. There was, for instance, the problem of simmering. The apartment kitchen had a two-burner cooktop, with double rings of gas designed for pounding flames against the bottom of a wok. On the lowest setting, the inner ring still flared like a small, insistent blowtorch, scorching unattended tomato sauce. To make macaroni and cheese, we first had to buy an oven—meaning a countertop model, essentially a double-sized toaster oven. The macaroni got a nice brown crust on it, but oddly, the oven was never good at making toast.
Beijing was rife with things that looked normal but would fail in ways in which a twenty-first-century American consumer would never imagine things would fail. Thick plastic coat hangers, visually identical to American coat hangers, would snap at the neck under the strain of hanging up a coat. Fur-trimmed gloves would shed profusely; water bottles would crumple and spray their contents when you tried to unscrew their caps. The kitchen-sink drainpipe, one piece of plastic plumbing stuck loosely into another, would disconnect itself. A strip of brown cellophane would bob to the surface of a cup of tea, untangling itself from the tea leaves. A cotton swab would have a sharp end sticking out of it.
Under these conditions, Ikea began to seem less a mildly totalizing convenience than a gesture of cross-cultural engagement, a material Esperanto of universally agreeable goods. Amid aisles thronging with Chinese couples—radiant with the combined glow of upward mobility and joint householding—I could find a pepper grinder, a bread knife, or the same Turkish-made shower curtain that hung in our New York apartment. To hide the cheap circular fluorescent lights in the living room, Christina rigged up a pair of “Oriental”-looking white paper lanterns, courtesy of the Swedes. The final touch was an eight-foot-long oval dining table, another item we had ended up acquiring a copy of on both continents. The last stretch of the table delivery, from my wife’s office to the apartment, had been handled by a man named Wang Jiashui, who kept a cargo tricycle parked inside the gate of Yard No. 26. Wang was in his late thirties, neatly dressed, with wavy hair and light eyes. He had migrated to Beijing from Henan Province, where his wife and three children still lived. His main job was collecting scrap, which he would sort and stack next to the compound’s guardhouse: cartons, bottles, unopened cases of obsolete software.
I considered myself a hero for having single-handedly wrestled the matching table into a Volkswagen Golf (it stretched from the front windshield all the way out the tied-down rear hatch), driven it along the Long Island Expressway, and dragged it into and out of an elevator. Meanwhile, in Beijing, Wang Jiashui—solidly built, but by no means brawny—had pedaled a fully assembled version more than a quarter mile, then somehow carried it up four flights of stairs.
The bulk of the housework was handled by the part-time cleaning lady—an ayi in Chinese, a term that literally means “aunt” and can cover any and all sorts of domestic work: cleaning, cooking, shopping, child care. Our original ayi was a round-faced young woman who had come with the apartment; her husband, it seemed, had done the renovation work for the landlord. She had an obsessive floor-cleaning technique that involved at least three passes over the tiles, but she was less interested in anything more than an inch off the ground. Eventually, for unclear reasons, she started skipping work, and the landlady replaced her with a taller, ruddy woman who insisted on starting the workday before six a.m.
And so this is how one ends up living abroad and complaining about the help. You know that you are doing it (But really, five-thirty in the morning! Clattering dishes!), and then someone else recalls coming home early to find her own ayi in the shower—and not removing the hair from the drain when she was done, even. What can you do?
The Year of the Pig would begin in February. At the Carrefour super-market, by the north side of the Third Ring, the entrance ramp was lined with pig merchandise and decorations in the red of the festival season till it resembled an inflamed esophagus. There were to be no pigs on CCTV, however. In a gesture of intranational (rather than international) hypersensitivity, the state broadcaster was banning on-air pig imagery, so as not to offend the sensibilities of China’s Muslim minority.
This was, according to most reports, a super-propitious year in the traditional animal zodiac, a Year of the Golden Pig. Actually, by the sixdecade cycle of five elements and twelve animals, it was supposed to be a Fire Pig year; the Golden Pig had come up in 1971, in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. But people liked the idea of a Golden Pig. It sounded fat and prosperous.
Chinese culture was proving oddly malleable. The thing about Chinese people is that they are always telling you what the thing about Chinese people is. For a long time, I made the mistake of trying to pay attention to the specific things themselves. The Chinese will tell you that Chinese people are less formal than Westerners, and they will tell you that Chinese people are more formal than Westerners. Chinese people are outspoken, and Chinese people are reserved. They are very blunt, and they are very indirect. They are too curious and not curious enough. Chinese people are naturally thrifty (or cheap); they are inherently generous (or wasteful). The outlook of the Chinese is inflexible, and it is adaptable.
Once you get going, it’s hard to stop. The thing about Chinese people is that they insist on bundling up against the slightest threat of cold. The thing about Chinese people is that they wear replica basketball uniforms without player names or numbers on them. The thing about Chinese people is that they love watermelon and fried chicken. The thing about Chinese people is that they never take the manufacturer’s sticker or plastic label off anything they buy, ever—microwaves, security doors, rice cookers, DVD players, bathroom sinks—even when the paper starts to wear away or the edges of the plastic film peel up on their own.
Americans tend to get their backs up if anyone (particularly a foreigner) tries to make any sort of sweeping claim about our national habits. I more or less reflexively inserted “tend to” in the preceding sentence, as a bit of protective chaff, to soften the generalization. We will consent to be called “freedom-loving” or “entrepreneurial,” but more concrete collective observations—that we watch a lot of television, say, or that we are getting kind of heavyset, or that we shoot guns at each other more often than people of most other nationalities do—are an insult to our sense of dignity as free individuals.
But the Chinese are eager to hear what foreigners think about them, as a nation and a people, to the point of helpfully suggesting essentialist pigeonholes the observer might want to put them into. One prevailing explanation for the countries’ different attitudes is that America has always had a dynamic culture, while China is more tradition-bound. This is a terrible explanation. A thirty-year-old Chinese citizen has seen more disruption and change than a sixty-year-old American has; a sixty-year-old Chinese citizen has seen more than a two-hundred-year-old American would have. It was routine business for the government to rewrite the entire holiday calendar, or outlaw a whole category of motor vehicles, or ban and un-ban particular enterprises or classes of merchandise or kinds of information.
So what was one more spasm of change? Out behind the apartment, where a dead-end street crossed an arm of the Liangma River, construction walls had appeared, with heavy machinery working behind them. When I peered through the fence one afternoon, I saw that there wasn’t a building going in; what was under construction was the river itself, in its man-made banks. A cement truck was parked at the bottom of the riverbed, waiting to pour new pavement.
In the demolition zone at Xingfucun, where the graffiti had been before, the remaining buildings had been leveled, the trees cut down and carted off in autumn. All that was left by winter was a wide, bare lot, strewn with rubble and patrolled by magpies. The lone structure in the space was a small open shack, furnished with a filthy tan armchair and wooden dining chair gone pigeon-toed in its old age. In places, the floors and foundations of the vanished houses still showed on the ground. Between two poles that were left standing, fish had been strung up to dry. For some reason I couldn’t imagine, deep deposits of broken eggshells filled the hollows in the dirt, along with broken bricks and burnt-out fuel cakes of pressed coal. Two men on the west side of the lot were tending a motorized pump, the only sign of any work going on at all. A smartly dressed woman passed through, walking a fluffy dog. The dog was grimy.
On February 11, the city sent out a text message to everyone’s cell phone, declaring that “line-up day” had arrived. This was part of the Olympic effort to reform public manners, one day each month when Beijingers were supposed to practice forming orderly lines at entrances, ticket windows, public-transit stops, and everywhere else an outsider might be appalled or endangered by the city’s usual jostling, swarming free-for-all. The date chosen was the 11th because the two 1’s represented the principle that even if only two people were waiting for something, one should line up behind the other.
At the Dongzhimen transit hub, as the 966 bus pulled up on the avenue, waiting passengers crowded the entrance, refusing to yield to the people getting off. A motorized tricycle cab weaved aggressively through the pedestrians. Where the 623 bus stopped, more would-be passengers formed themselves into a solid wall, again blocking the doors. The same happened for the 916. Down inside the subway station, people were sacked out in the pedestrian tunnel, lying on thick beds of dirty blankets and rags. At the ticket window, things were less crowded, but the rule was clear: even if only two people were trying to buy tickets, one would be shouldering in while the other was still finishing up. Habit was stronger than etiquette, or numerology.