Beijing Welcomes You

In late June, the Olympic press center telephoned: Would I be interested in getting a driver’s license? It was, as far as I could remember, the first time since I’d become a certified journalist that the media department had offered me something—an interview, a tour, a visa extension—without my asking. Till that moment, I hadn’t planned on getting a license. Beijing’s driver’s exam involved a grueling and pointless written test; the expat tales about it dealt with either brutal cram sessions or well-placed bribes. Since cars were expensive and taxis were cheap, it didn’t seem worth the bother.

But Beijing was working to make life easier for foreign journalists. I could drop in anytime that week, bring in my American license, and fill out a form. Maybe I did want a license. I pictured myself taking a rental car for a spin out the Liangma Bridge Road, to the neon-bedecked drive-in theater I kept seeing out my taxi windows. I told the press center I would sign up, then let a few days go by.

The press center called again and repeated the invitation: easy license, no hassle, come by this week. They also called to say that there would be a press conference—Sunday, nine a.m.—to announce the opening of a new one-stop service center for the media. If I applied before then, I could pick up my license at the service center that morning. I would be coming to the press conference, right?

Slowly, it dawned on me that there might be a reason behind their solicitousness. I told them I probably couldn’t drop off my application till Saturday afternoon. Would that be okay? The office would be open, they said.

The press center had left its first home, in a shabby hotel off to the north, for a space in a gleaming municipal office tower by Chaoyangmen Bridge, site of the Sun-Facing Gate in the old city wall, two interchanges south of Dongzhimen. It was more New Beijing architecture, with a wavelike glass roof and a full-height atrium, and a matching wavelike building was going up behind it. I arrived late, in heavy rain, to find four staffers from the Olympics and the Public Security Bureau (the Gong An) waiting. They took my New York license and gave me the application form. There was a space for the duration of the license—that, they explained, would be the same as the expiration period of my short-term visa. When I got my next ninety-day visa I would need to sign up for a new license to go with it.

Also, it needed a photo—did I have a photo? I had some spare ID photos left over from the Public Security Bureau’s visa office. The Public Security Bureau officer in charge of the driver’s license examined the pictures. They were the wrong size, she said.

There was a moment of mutual dismay. The one-stop media service center did not have a photo department. But! A market in the neighborhood could take the photos for me. Out the door, across Chaoyangmen Bridge, on the left. One of them wrote the size and background-color specifications out in Chinese for me.

Had I been considering only my own interests at the moment, I would have hailed a cab and gone home. But there were greater historical issues at stake. I was the Western media; China was trying to do me a favor. I set off through the downpour. The market was a ten-minute hike away. With soggy feet, I tramped up and down the escalators, looking for the photo department. I found it in the grocery section—a tripod, rate sheet, and foam-board backdrop set up by the checkout-line exits. I hunted up a clerk, sat for the pictures, collected them, and sloshed back.

The whole building was dim and empty by the time I got back, except for the guard at the door and the team in the one-stop center. As I handed the photos over, I tested my hunch. How many other journalists would be picking up their licenses the next day?

The next day’s program began in the press-conference hall on the top floor, under the swooping glass roof. A banner at the front read: “Launch of One-Stop Service for Media During the Beijing Olympic Games and the Preparatory Period.” A snippet of “Greatest Love of All” played, then went away. There were more than a hundred people in the audience. About half were from the press, mostly Chinese. The rest represented the agencies, bureaus, and companies taking part in the service center—twenty-nine organizations in all, including the Public Security Bureau; the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television; the Bank of China; the State Administration of Foreign Exchange; the People’s Liberation Army.

Even by the standards of press conferences, Chinese press conferences tended to be dry affairs. A series of officials took the microphone and hailed the service center as a “brand-new innovation” and an “unprecedented approach.” Invoking the new press-access rules, one declared the center “a solid step forward to implement these regulations and show that we really honor our promise to the media.” China, another said, will “bear in mind the principle of treating the media kindly.” With a flourish, the final speaker declared that “one-stop service for the media . . . now starts!” The crowd was invited, offhandedly, to stop by the fifth floor on the way out and see the center at work.

Whatever was in store for me was about to happen. Rather than waiting for the elevator, I took the stairs. As I hit the fifth floor, my cell phone was ringing: an Olympics official, checking to make sure I was there. Staffers intercepted me in the crowded hallway and guided me toward the room where I’d done the paperwork the day before. I went in like a man being escorted into his surprise fiftieth-birthday party.

At the far end, next to the driver’s-license station, a mass of photographers and television camera crews was waiting. Someone had put flower arrangements on the table. Behind the flowers was a smiling Public Security Bureau officer, a tiny woman in uniform. My completed application form was presented with a flourish and with remarks to me in Mandarin, untranslated. Camera flashes went off. The Gong An officer held up an ID card with my picture on it, in loose plastic, then gave it a ceremonial pass through a laminator, to the rattle of shutters going off. She handed it to me, still warm.

Officials closed in, shaking my hand, with cameras popping all the while. The card had a made-up Chinese name for me—“Tuo Ma Si” in characters—and an expiration date twenty-seven days in the future. It also said, in the fine print, that if the police stopped me, I would need to show them an official Chinese translation of my American license. So, technically speaking, the license alone did not allow me to drive. Could I get the translation at the one-stop service center? I could not.

The photographers asked to see my license, and began holding it up in the foreground as they kept snapping away. A man on the far side of the table began asking questions: How long had I been in Beijing? What sites had I seen? Had I eaten Beijing duck? When my answers flagged, he confided, sotto voce, that he was just trying to keep me talking and smiling for the cameras. This is kind of alarming, I told him, grinning. Yes, isn’t it? he smiled back. A photographer hollered something. She says, the man said, if you smile bigger, you’ll be on the front page.

Interview time. Going in, I had resolved not to be a stooge. My talking points would be strictly truthful: that I was glad to see this new emphasis on coordination and convenience, and that I hoped they would follow it up by making it easier to get a long-term visa. As far as I could tell, I repeated the message to everyone I saw. I did an interview for Beijing Television, then one for China Central Television.

The English translation of the official Beijing Olympic news story about the event described me as the “most elated” of the journalists at the event. “I am extremely happy,” the story quoted me as saying. “I know that traffic management in Beijing is very strict. I’d never have imagined that I’d get my driver’s license so quickly. Now I can drive by myself, which will make interviewing a lot more convenient.”

The last bit struck me as especially implausible. But who needed to know what I’d said? I was a representative of progress. And I was a picturesque one. Owing to a previous bad experience with the language barrier and thinning shears, I had not had a haircut since leaving New York. People began to stop me and tell me they’d seen me on TV or on the front page of the Beijing Evening News—a teacher at my Chinese school, a nurse in the pediatric ward, the man who sold phone cards outside the corner store. A sports newspaper invited me to write an essay about my observations of Beijing, for one yuan a word. Another TV station, Phoenix Television, asked if I would sit for a follow-up interview. I agreed. By text message, they sent an additional request: Could I drive my car to the interview?