Beijing Welcomes You

It was August 8, 2007, or 8/8/07, two-thirds of the way to numerological completeness. An opening celebration for the countdown day, a pre-celebration of the pre-celebration of next year’s celebration, was happening at the Millennium Monument, a block-long concrete creation that commemorated the last indispensable abstract moment in time. It was off to the west, beyond the imperial Altar of the Moon and just south of the nine-hundred-year-old scenic ground of Deep Jade Pool Park. The early sky was blue, the haze light but certain. There had been an ominous downpour the day before, and my shoes were still damp. Police lined the Second Ring at intervals for the occasion; a municipal police officer by the roadside hawked a gob. Twelve months of civilization lessons to go.

Troupes of performers were doing their routines at the lower end of a long, narrow plaza, which rose in tiers toward a sort of mast or sundial at the north side. Whatever the structure had signified about the turn of the millennium, it was now strung all over with pennants like the ones on used-car lots. Grandstands below the sundial needle were full of people in identical neon-lime T-shirts. Gold confetti shot into the air; there were lion costumes, and banners with Fuwa, and inflatable Fuwa with substandard renderings of their facial features. A white-clad tai chi troupe finished doing its slow-motion exercises on the plaza and filed out—up close, they were mostly female, mostly middle-aged or beyond. They fanned themselves with the red fans they had used in their performance. Dragonflies hovered, and the heat and glare intensified.

Out behind the monument was a display of Olympic statuary, part of an ongoing sculpture contest. An earlier installment had been on the Wangfujing shopping street the year before, with 200 scale models of proposed monumental works. The artists were mostly from China or C-list European nations, and their entries had made up a survey of the kitsch potential of twentieth-century art—from lifelike kitsch bronzes to kitsch Cubo-Futurism, kitsch abstraction, and finally, with a proposed monumental line of color-painted, O-mouthed synchronized swimmers, kitsch kitsch. A sculptor from Tianjin had created a slit-eyed, Vandyke-bearded Chinese man and a thick-lipped African Sambo playing hacky sack together; one from Slovakia had made a grotesque spherelike starburst by fusing together two or three dozen stiff human figures by their heads, so that their legs and bodies radiated outward.

Now some of the model works had been blown up to full size: one of the Qin emperor’s terra-cotta warriors using a terra-cotta army horse as a pommel horse, a red plastic or fiberglass sprinter with a silver prosthetic leg and an expression of anguish. I stood in the shade of the monument as the performers streamed offstage and up into Deep Jade Pool Park. A dirty man with blue clothes and crusty eyes stepped on my foot, then circled in close, touched my shoulder, and said something unintelligible to me. It sounded like “Cheney.” Behind his back, he was clutching a grubby wad of cord.

The countdown itself was in the evening. At the fancy new Olympic press headquarters, the center atrium was filled all the way to the top with scaffolding—the swooping glass roof had failed under the weight of the rain. For the working press, there were bottles of water and bags of McDonald’s food; staffers marked people’s neck credentials with a pen to keep track of who had already gotten theirs.

The press was delivered to Tian’anmen Square by motor coach. Imprisonment by motor coach is part of what certifies a major event as major—part of the ritual certification and quarantine of the media. We (there was no sense thinking of oneself in the first person singular) stepped out into a narrow chute, between two of the rows and rows of tightly packed buses at the south end of the square.

It would have been possible to fit many, many motor coaches into Tian’anmen Square. The space is, beyond its various historical resonances, the great open public space in the city, like Central Park in New York, if Central Park were totally flat, treeless, paved over, and crawling with undercover police. People go strolling there on normal days, and fly kites. When Beijing had won the Olympic bid, a million people had reportedly filled the square for spontaneous celebration. Tonight’s production was invitation-only and tightly limited. Around us, disembarking from their own motor coaches, were teams of people in colored T-shirts: lime green again, yellow, black, royal blue, red. The shirts read “Weixiao Beijing,” meaning “Smile, Beijing.” Inside the security perimeter were K-9 cops in black fatigue pants, real U.S.A.-style jump-out uniforms. Their effect was diminished by the fact that the dogs came in a sundry assortment of breeds.

At Mao’s mausoleum, renovations were unfinished. The National Museum on the east side of the square, likewise in mid-renovation, had been draped with a scrim that vaguely resembled an intact building façade. The press was on risers facing the stage and Tian’anmen—the gate itself—beyond, with its endlessly photographed portrait of Mao gazing back. The colored T-shirts filled rows of chairs around the stage. It all seemed tiny and constrained against the immensity of the square; the crowd was no bigger than was necessary to fill up a TV program. That was how Beijingers were going to experience the countdown, not as a street party but as a telecast. The security perimeter was less a show of police force than an aggressive act of entertainment production: a protest banner would have interfered with the stagecraft. I wondered what would happen if someone were to unfurl an Iraq protest banner in the middle of the Super Bowl halftime show.

An introduction was read over loudspeakers, repeatedly, in a last-minute rehearsal. Video of fireworks ran backward and forward on big screens. The real production began with singing at ten minutes after seven, by performers in tuxedos and ball gowns. Then came a Paralympic music video starring Andy Lau, the superstar actor and singer from Hong Kong, equally popular on the mainland. In the video, he was a runner who lost a leg in a car crash. He threw out his running trophies and drank heavily, then (with the help of Adidas running gear) rehabbed himself, went running on the Great Wall on his prosthesis, and became an elite amputee runner. On the stage, the real-life, two-legged Andy Lau sang, or seemed to sing, along with the video. I had always thought he looked tall in the movies, but Hong Kong, like Hollywood, inflates its leading men, and he was a wee elfin figure compared with his backup dancers. “Everyone is number one,” he sang. Then came Chinese ethnic-minority musicians onstage, followed by a children’s choir.

The sun went down, and the lights came up on the Gate of Heavenly Peace—white lightbulbs tracing its outlines and the unreal glory rays of spotlights radiating out from it, solid-looking in the smog. The volunteer cheerers waved placards and purplish pinwheels as the show headed into a big number, the new theme song of the Olympic preparations, “We Are Ready.” More and more singers appeared on stage, revealed one by one, all in matching white polo shirts. There were dozens of them; the whole Chinese-language pop-music community had mobilized for the effort. I was still bad at identifying Chinese stars, but I recognized the androgynous winner of the national Super Girl TV singing competition in the mix. Pigeons were released, and balloons. Men in white uniforms with black caps and black boots marched in, carrying a stream of flags of Olympic nations, military parade troops for One World. Jackie Chan, looking tiny, appeared onstage with a little girl toting a red lantern. The countdown was in Chinese, and it ended at eight o’clock sharp. This was a point of confusion: there had been conflicting word about whether the official Olympic start time would be 8:00 p.m. or the even more auspicious 8:08. A ripple of consternation went through the international media, where people had prewritten the 8:08 figure into their coverage. Fireworks went off, and more dancers filled the stage, including teams in traditional lion-dancing costumes.

A few pigeons were still lingering around the square. The dancetacular went on and on. On camera, the floor on the edge of the stage was twinkly underfoot, an effect not clearly visible from the press section. There were drummers, and the rhythm of the whole frenetic scene was not unlike the rhythm of “We Will Rock You.” At 8:08—there, the magic minute—it all subsided, and a podium rolled out for a reading of ceremonial paperwork. We were into the performative part of the Olympic experience, but we were still in China, where every important moment must be bureaucratically solemnized. The flags of nations and their black-booted bearers filled the stage. The Olympic anthem played, and the flags of the Olympics, the People’s Republic, and the Beijing organizing committee were presented. The minister of sports spoke. The president of the organizing committee spoke. “Principle of being frugal” . . . “final and most crucial stage” . . . “winning honor for our nation” . . . “respect and understanding.”

Three times, speakers brought up the subject of China’s “century-old dream” of hosting the Olympics. This had surfaced recently in Olympic coverage, and it would be a recurring theme through the next twelve months. It referred not to any national goals expressed by the crumbling Qing dynasty in 1908, but to an apparently obscure article published in a newspaper in Tianjin that year—unearthed, it seemed, through a heroic bit of applied research.

The speakers kept going, invoking former president Jiang Zemin’s “moderately prosperous society” and the points of his political philosophy, the “Three Represents.” International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge then handed out formal invitations, one by one, to presidents of national Olympic committees in attendance. The Greek Olympic Committee president went first. Then the Canadian Olympic Committee. The British Olympic Committee. The Russian. The Americans were absent. Finally, China’s own Olympic committee received an envelope, inviting it to come to Beijing. Then the required official speech act: “The invitation ceremony now concludes. Please enjoy the performance.”

A video of a gleaming and clear Beijing played as a multitude of dancers and drummers reappeared. A bright-red piano with the Olympic logo on it was moved into position, then the whole platform with the piano rolled from west to east, a seated orchestra trailing along behind the piano. At the piano, in a red tailcoat with gold buttons and gold lapels, was the Chinese virtuoso Lang Lang.

Behind the risers, there was a stirring so sharp it seemed as if security had been breached after all. The press whipped around to look, and there was the towering form of Yao Ming, being hustled around the stands by a CCTV crew. A spontaneous cheer broke out as the crowd caught sight of him moving through the darkness offstage. The wide-necked superstar Liu Huan, with his signature gray ponytail, was singing a duet with someone, with lavender-lit dancers all around, and nobody cared. The flags of nations streamed back onstage; the singing was operatic. Uniformed soldiers appeared on the media riser—coming up for a better look. Yao emerged onstage, in the thick of the national flags, carrying a big Olympic flag of his own. Fireworks went off again, and more fireworks, indigo and green and magenta. The music, subdued, kept playing, even after a final volley, and the flags kept waving, even as the crowd began to filter out. One thing about Chinese people is that they head for the exits. They may be the heading-for-the-exits-est nation on earth.

There were almost no empty cabs on the road, after the motor-coach ride back to the press center, and the empty ones wouldn’t stop. After something like half an hour of trying, I took the subway home. The next morning, a taxi driver told me that the drivers had all stayed home to watch the countdown on television.

“No” didn’t seem to be a workable answer. They were very polite, which may come easily without the Fourth Amendment in the way. They didn’t need to explain or justify their presence; the state was everywhere, and now the state was inside the apartment. They came in with their shoes on, despite Chinese custom and the freshly cleaned floors, and sat down at the dining table to study the family’s documents. I was barefoot. My wife and baby were asleep in the bedroom.

I rummaged for the passports and certificates. For once, all the household’s paperwork was in order. We had recently extricated Mack from a bureaucratic Kafka-loop: the local police station wouldn’t issue him a residence-registration certificate without a visa, and the main Public Security office wouldn’t issue him a visa without a residence-registration certificate. In the end, as usual, the local cops yielded to reason before the main office would.

Still, it was one thing to have a problem with the security-bureaucracy paperwork, and another to have the undercoordinated security apparatus suddenly coordinate itself into the dining room. What if the police had showed up one of the many times my foreigner registration had lapsed? What if we had missed something this time?

The officers copied the information from our papers onto their own papers, with unnerving slowness. I asked if they were local, and they said they were from immigration. So we were not a neighborhood matter, but part of a bigger national concern. When they finished, they asked if I knew any other foreigners in the building, gesturing up and down toward the other apartments. Not having been introduced to any of them, I said truthfully that I did not.

One by one, the first set of sports facilities was being finished on schedule, or mostly finished, and so each one was to host a test sporting event, of variable wattage: the women’s soccer World Cup, the world junior wrestling championships, a low-ranking ITF tennis tournament. The whole series of warm-ups, stretching from the summer of 2007 into the spring of 2008, was called “Haoyun Beijing” in Chinese, a play on Aoyun, or “Olympics.” In English it translated to “Good Luck, Beijing,” a phrase that could be said with several different inflections.

For the beginning of the Good Luck games, the city was cutting back again on traffic—not just government cars this time, but private cars as well. Odd- and even-numbered license plates would stay home on alternating days. It had been announced as a two-week exercise, but by the time August came, it had been cut down to four days, two of them on the weekend. Citizens and businesses were only willing to rehearse their Olympic privations so much.

The first event was beach volleyball—a fourth-tier pro tournament, the lower tier of the lower-tier international pro league—in Chaoyang Park, by the east side of the Fourth Ring. The park was so big that I had never quite understood where its edges were, partly because it kept expanding over demolition zones. The arena was itself a transient phenomenon, built of struts and sheets of gray-painted steel, designed to be dismantled once the Olympics were done. The sand, after a lengthy sand-evaluation process, had been brought in from the celebrated tourist beaches of Hainan Island in the south.

On the Saturday of the semifinals, the traffic restrictions had just gone into effect, and the air was grayish. Turnout was light, but the arena was ringed and threaded through with volunteer staff. The only truly full section of seats was occupied by people in matching T-shirts, like the audience brought in for the countdown ceremony. Down on the court were Chinese cheerleaders, dancing to “Who Let the Dogs Out?” The cheer squad was a special touch that had been announced for the Good Luck games. They were Chinese Basketball Association dancers, someone said. Male dancers joined them, along with a pair of inflatable-costumed Fuwa—Huanhuan the flame and Nini the swallow. The other three mascots were missing. After a Brazilian team rallied to defeat a team from Thailand, the cheerleaders threw collapsible souvenir cups and flying discs to the crowd. The mood was sweet and backyardy.

I had come to Chaoyang Park with a Chinese-American friend, an intellectual-property lawyer and volleyball fanatic. Intellectual-property protection is labor-intensive work in China, because the law is inclined to treat small tweaks to a stolen design (the body of one car, say, with the grille of another) as enough to establish a wholly new product. Near us in the stands was a female photographer wearing a pair of what had the unmistakable look of New Balance sneakers, with a few key differences: the N on the sides was backward, and the sole had been quadrupled or sextupled in height, so that the original orthopedic struts and bulges had become a too-trendy-for-walking platform. I snapped a photo of them, and my camera informed me that the file was corrupted. The memory card, which I had haggled for in a tourist shop, had quit working. It was labeled as San Disk brand, but I suddenly had doubts.

Now a Chinese team was playing a Swiss one. The crowd gave the Chinese players the universal national sports cheer: “Jia you!” meaning, literally, “Add gas!” With the Swiss trailing 10–8 in the first set, the public-address announcer gave them a “Jia you!” too. China won, but Switzerland stretched things to three sets.

Attendance was better for the tournament finals the next day, though the haze was thicker. After the Games, the Olympic organizing committee would report that the traffic restrictions had reduced particulate matter 10 to 15 percent. The cheerleaders wore violently fluorescent-orange bikinis and rainbow Afro wigs. Then came yellow-gold top hats, like the ones the NBA dancers wear, to go with outfits of red bandanna tops and gray bottoms. Beibei the fish and Yingying the antelope now showed up, almost completing the set of Fuwa.

The Chinese played Brazil for the championship. Brazil picked on the weaker of the Chinese players for an easy win in the first set, but China got out ahead in the second set and stayed in front, all the way to set point. The public address announcer was hoarse; the audience yelled “Jia you!” on its own, caught up in the action. Then, although trailing 20–17, Brazil came back to wrap up the match.

The crowd thinned, but not with the usual Beijing rapidity. There was still a bit of spectacle to be had. The cheerleaders remained on the court, in pink skirts, dancing with the Fuwa. As volunteers prepared a podium for the medal ceremony, a second cheer squad appeared, in silver bikini tops and red boy-shorts, waving red fans. This was how there had been so many different costume changes. An inflatable Jingjing the panda also arrived, the final Fuwa. Only half of the split cheerleading squad seemed to have an actual dance routine at any time. The team in silver and red kicked the sand desultorily while the pink skirts danced a number; then the silver-and-red squad jumped into motion to dance to “The Twist”—the remake with the Fat Boys joining Chubby Checker.

Volunteers surrounded the court for the medal ceremony, arms swaying to a recording of “We Are Ready.” Outside the arena was a sand volleyball court for the public. People were eagerly taking possession of their piece of the Olympics, squeezing into the court to play a game of more or less fourteen on sixteen, while children dug in the few open spots of sand.

The grounds around the Chaoyang volleyball site, according to an official Xinhua News Agency report, were one of the sites where Olympic organizers had planted a collection of 2 million flowers, specially bred to bloom out of season and survive in the August weather. I wandered south, along the flower beds. Chrysanthemums, marigolds, petunias, and Chinese roses held themselves up in the haze and glare. On the way out of the park, a crew was installing Fuwa signage. They were debating which one was named what. Wasn’t the antelope Nini?

The heart of the Olympic Green was still under construction and off limits, so the first round of Good Luck games was marginal, in terms of the sports involved and the locations. The baseball tournament was out in the western neighborhood of Wukesong, on the inner edge of the far side of the Fourth Ring. Baseball was a curiosity in China; the national team would be granted an Olympic berth as the host country, but it had no hopes of winning a medal, and there was no point in trying to get better, since the Olympics were dropping baseball after 2008.

But even a lame-duck sport needed to try out its venues. In the smaller of the two ballparks, I watched a French baseball team put on an implausible exhibition of how not to run the bases against the Czech Republic, somehow turning eleven hits into only one run, while the Czechs scored six on nine hits. For entertainment, there were two people in inflatable Jingjing suits, another case of mascot mismanagement. The Fuwa seemed to have Beijingers’ natural aversion to systematic lining-up.

The crowd numbered no more than 250 people, and many of them kept binoculars trained on the next field over, where Japan had built a 2–1 lead against China in a sold-out game. The listed capacity of the larger park was 12,000, but it was hard to tell if it held that many yet: in our own field, the grandstand only extended from one on-deck circle to the other; a gravel bed ringed the rest of the field, marking where the rest of the ballpark would go. Over the left-field fence were at least fourteen cranes, slowly vanishing in the polluted dusk along with the green monolithic bulk of the unfinished basketball arena.

Archery was in the middle of things, by comparison with the distant baseball fields—in a cluster of venues between the main Olympic Green to the south and the unfinished Olympic Forest to the north. The drive took me past the Bird’s Nest, where people were standing on the highway guardrail to film the construction. The archery stadium was another temporary steel job, like the volleyball arena, this one shaped like a not-quite-folded fan. And as with the baseball field, the venue was ready only in the narrow sense that it was possible to hold a sporting event in it. Big stretches of the stands were missing seats, and out beyond the archery targets were mounds of dirt and sections of uninstalled sewer pipe.

In the archery semifinals, South Korea was facing a team called “Chinese Taipei,” which was competing under a neutral Olympic-committee flag. One common prediction in the Western press as 2008 approached was that the People’s Republic might take the occasion to threaten or invade Taiwan. From inside Beijing, though, the One China problem seemed to be anything but a casus belli. The governments were constitutionally antagonistic, and reciprocally so: even as the mainland counted Taiwan as a renegade province, Taiwan counted the mainland as thirty-some renegade provinces. But no one was in a hurry to settle the irreconcilable claims. The mainland press used scare quotes in all its political coverage of Taiwan—the “legislature” did this, the “president” said that—but in most other respects, where Americans might have expected to see the cross-straits equivalent of Freedom Fries, Taiwan’s existence and influence were freely and frankly identified as such. The new Beijing was full of Taiwanese restaurants and Taiwanese luxury malls, with a Taiwan Hotel downtown and a complex in the works called Taiwan Center. Taiwanese pop stars sang alongside mainland and Hong Kong ones on “We Are Ready.”

Between South Korea and Taiwan, certainly, the archery crowd was pulling for Taiwan. Korea had a slim lead, but maintained it with pitiless precision, matching every bull’s-eye and near-bull’s-eye the Taiwanese could muster. By one point, Korea sent Taipei into the consolation round against the United States. As soon as the bronze-medal match was over, the whole row of Chinese spectators in front of me cleared out, not waiting around to see the Koreans shoot for gold against Malaysia.

Zhang Xiaoguang—since we’d had the baby, he’d been known as Big Mack to us—came along to see the wrestling. In his undocumented days, he had once lived in an unheated room on the Agricultural University campus, with an uncle who worked there. We had visited the Agricultural University months before, when the gym was still under construction. Workers were crawling on the roof, and a construction fence along the front proclaimed the future “Olympic Rassling Site.”

Now it was completed, with an elaborate entrance walkway of gravel under glass, from which a squeegee-and-mop crew was busily cleaning water from an earlier rain shower. Inside, the ceiling was studded with at least thirty hanging security cameras, and the wrestling was going on in three rings at once. After each championship match, the finalists were brought back for a medal ceremony, escorted through a double door by tall, maidenly attendants while a fog machine went off.

An Iranian wrestler overwhelmed an American at 84 kilograms, to the crowd’s warm approval. Other contestants hailed from Germany, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan. Something resembling the world, at least enough of the world to fill a gym, had arrived in Beijing. Another American, by the name of Bubba Jenkins, took on a Turkish opponent named Okay Köksal for the gold and won. In victory, he bounced on his toes and did a high-stepping dance, then kissed his hand and pointed to the rafters, and wrapped it up by doing a flying leap off the platform. America! It implicated or embraced the sportsgoing crowd in its self-centeredness: I love myself, because I love a winner!

The Weather Modification Office was not practicing rainstorm suppression during the Good Luck rehearsals. One evening in August, we took the baby out to a restaurant a few blocks away, under clear skies, in a Little Angel–brand stroller that Big Mack had given him. We got out of dinner as the summer rains erupted, sheets of water pouring from the sky. Till that moment, we had insisted on using the safety seat, which Beijingers saw as incomprehensible American folly. I had learned how to ask for a rear seat belt to hook around it—“Houmian you meiyou anquandai?”—and had kept using it, looking for the one cab in four (if not five, or ten) that would have belts. Now, in the dark and in the rain, there was only one cab to be seen, and we didn’t have the seat anyway. We got in with the baby loose and rolled slowly home, through a foot of floodwater. Full-grown poplars had toppled along Outer Dongzhimen Avenue; waves rolled across the intersections, and pedestrians waded by. There were limits to how safe Beijing would let you be.

Chinese folk belief said that children born premature at seven months were better—tougher, stronger, smarter—than the ones born at eight months. No one had an explanation; possibly, in the traditional past, sickly eight-month preemies might have grown up sickly, while only the hardiest seven-monthers survived at all. This, along with our success in having a male baby, was one of the few points of Chinese tradition that went in our favor. Little Mack had expressed his own will to survive by packing on fat till he resembled a bright-eyed, stubby link of sausage, but strangers still exclaimed “So small!” or “Too small!” at the sight of him. A baby that young belonged at home, confined with his mother, and with the air-conditioning turned off. Store clerks would lunge to shut off the air when we carried him in.

By early September, he was old enough to fly to the United States. Our last night before leaving, we hauled the car seat out to a fancy French restaurant in a Taiwanese mall by the Central Business District, a pink-and-silver shrine to wealth and cosmopolitanism. The baby slept through the meal, in his seat, while stylish people came and went from a promotional cocktail party outside the restaurant. At the end of the meal, he woke up hungry. The mall was forward-looking enough to have a nursing lounge and changing room on the top floor, so mother and child went off to it.

While they were away, as the rest of our dinner group wandered the complex, the clerks began drifting toward the front of their shops or departments, standing silently by the walkways. Finally, one of us asked what was going on. A clerk explained that it was closing time and they were waiting for the last customers to leave, but the staff was under orders not to clear anyone out. So they waited, hovering. The moment we got the baby and headed for the elevators, the lights dimmed and the clerks hastily broke formation, hustling us into the elevator with them en masse. Public time was over; we were behind the shiny backdrop now, backstage. Here was a bit of the human infrastructure that made it possible. On the first floor, we were steered toward a back exit and into a Pamplona of shopgirls, almost all of them already out of uniform and quick-changed into civilian clothes—running to grab their time cards, hit the exit, and get on a row of waiting buses. They hurried by on all sides, flowing around us. In the middle of the stampede, one walked slowly, with a cigarette.