11.
ProgressChange and urban improvement had finally reached even the backwater of Outer Dongzhimen Side Street. One day in the middle of October, I heard the rattling of chainsaws, and looked across the street to see a crew taking down the trees on the overgrown vacant lot—full, mature trees, the last trace of whatever neighborhood had been there before. The logs were piled high and trucked out.
The worry this raised was counterbalanced by a thrill: we were about to be part of something bygone. The price of progress is well recorded, but the dividend of progress is nostalgia. Beijing, devouring itself, was a great city for souvenirs. Weekends at the Panjiayuan flea market, you could buy posters of the old revolution, cheap. And old Mao buttons and statues, but also apolitical detritus: old cameras, old eyeglasses, old housewares, collected and speculated into curios of someone’s idea of the past. (I liked old trays of Chinese printers’ type, myself.)
East and south of the Drum Tower, on a very handsome and important alley, there was a T-shirt shop called Plastered that specialized in a sort of anticipatory retro. There were shirts with red ovals reading “1.20,” the discontinued rate sticker from the discontinued low-end Xiali taxicabs. In the old days (last year?), I had ridden in Xiali cabs. I went looking for shirts with the iconic blue-and-white image of Beijing’s Line 2 subway ticket—which a few weeks before had become the former subway ticket, replaced by a four-color design, though still on paper. They were out of stock in my size. It seemed to me that they were giving too much space to a new line of Olympic-inspired sports-themed shirts, and I caught myself brooding that the shop wasn’t as good as it used to be, before.
The nice alley with the T-shirt shop was called Nanluogu Xiang, in a neighborhood of hutongs that had been not demolished but renovated. “Preserved” is not quite the word. The low courtyard houses lining the way were now coffee shops and boutiques, their crumbling gray bricks replaced with clean-edged new ones. The paving underfoot was flat and true; the alley had become a raceway for bicycles, electric bicycles, and hutong-tour tricycle rickshaws.
Outer Dongzhimen Side Street had been evolving at its own pace, by its own logic. The bicycle shop had disappeared at some point. The poultry-slaughtering stall, under threat of avian flu, replaced its wire pens with tubs of water and started slaughtering carp instead. Then it became a restaurant selling food on skewers—part of an alley-wide fad for skewers. At the peak, at least eight stalls were offering either grilled skewers, known as chuan’r, or stewed ones, called mala tang, served with beer at scavenged-looking alleyside tables.
But now the alley was in professional hands. The repaving project in front of the corner store was spreading up the street: a crew set to work breaking up the pavement in front of the shops, leveling the dirt margins, and laying curbstones. Then, with mallets and string, they started installing the pavement blocks for a sidewalk. Or two sidewalks, one on each side, as if Outer Dongzhimen Side Street were a real thoroughfare. They were the standard-issue new municipal sidewalk, made of dark-gray blocks, with a row of larger, textured yellow ones down the middle to guide the disabled.
The crew worked in sections, here and there, squeezing the sidewalk as well as they could. The cargo tricycles and mounds of stuff by the alley wall were cleared aside to make way for the new surface. Then they were moved right back. At dusk, a chuan’r vendor set up his charcoal burner on the freshly laid pavement, posting a menu on the wall behind.
Finally, with the other obstacles overcome, the sidewalk reached the back end of the defunct minibus turned fruit stand that marked the end of the retail strip. Crates of fruit were piled against it, as high as the windows. I had been waiting to see what would give: Was progress a resistible force, after all? Or was the bus, against appearances, a movable object?
The next morning, the bus was hunkered down a few yards up the alley from its usual hunkering spot. So there was the answer. One answer, anyway. By afternoon, the bus had resumed its old position. The sidewalk was under its wheels. If you had just arrived, you would never know it had budged.
Christmas was coming, and the Chinese were perfectly willing to observe it. The secular, commercial Christmas, ritually denounced by would-be Puritans in the United States every year, had established itself in Beijing. Who doesn’t welcome an occasion to decorate a shopping mall? In the new mall where the Japanese supermarket used to be, the checkers wore headbands with stuffed antlers on them. The big Manchurian restaurant nearby displayed a stuffed and mounted young deer, red bow between its little antlers, harnessed with tinsel to a cart full of wrapped gifts.
Chinese people were open-minded about festivities, because the official calendar of celebrations was endlessly being revised. In November, the news reported a government plan to celebrate three pre-revolutionary traditional festivals—Tomb-Sweeping Day, the Mid-Autumn Festival, and the Dragon Boat Festival—as legal holidays in 2008, while chopping the weeklong Labor Day break to one day.
At the Liangma Flower Market, in a riot of low-end ornaments and tinsel, Santa decorations were accompanied by a Golliwog blackface doll swinging on a swing. I bought a few batches of colored balls and ornaments, a string of white lights, and some sort of short-needled evergreen—a spruce or fir—a bit taller than waist-high. The vendor agreed to trade the plastic pot for a blue ceramic one and deliver it later. It arrived repotted at a crooked angle, still in its original hard clayey soil, its needles filling the apartment with the smell of cigarette smoke from the delivery van. Along with the Christmas decorations, I hung from its branches a set of charms depicting the five Fuwa, meant to be dangled from cell phones.
The Olympics were eight months away. The Yuyang Hotel, a high-rise just east of Hujiauyuan, was being gutted so it could be renovated before then. A skin of ice, or possibly scum that looked like ice, was on the Liangma River. Heavy olive quilts were going up over the doorways of the markets to keep out the cold. Tall green-fabric windbreaks went up on frames on the north side of the city’s trees; green slipcovers went over the roadside hedges. My heel began to crack open from the dryness.
On the road by the bus depot, west of our apartment, construction fencing was up and demolition workers were well along with the chaiing. Along the Third Ring, a crew with a cherry-picker was hanging ornament balls and tinsel on tall evergreens in planters; the trees had arrived by the truckload, roots in balls, a week before. Farther down, toward the Central Business District, a low-rise building was being demolished, leaving a scabby line along the face of the newer tower behind it, where the roof of the other building had touched it. The narrow alley between the two buildings was being peeled open.
The two halves of the CCTV building—each one a thick, leaning tower—had reached their full height and then spread sideways, cantilevering toward each other. Up in the sky, orange sparks rained into space as workers closed the loop, one thin joint at a time. Glass skin was rising up the building’s legs.
A ridged metal façade was creeping up the new skyscraper across the way—the China World Trade Center Tower Three, its prodigious shaft facing the vertical opening of the CCTV building over the Third Ring in a colossal Freudian standoff. It was going to be 1,000 feet tall, the tallest building in Beijing, and in the architectural furor, hardly anyone paid any attention to it at all.
In the lobby of some friends’ new apartment building, where a Christmas party was being held to recruit buyers, we ran into a hired Mao impersonator, part of the entertainment. The impersonator had blackened hair and a high hairline and otherwise looked nothing at all like Mao. He posed with us for a picture, unsmiling, in front of a Christmas tree.
New, empty flowerpots lined the streets leading north to the Olympic Green. According to plan, there would be 30 million of them by the Olympics, and with flowers. It was December 1, a day the city government had announced on posters as a cockroach-elimination day; people had been calling in to the radio to share their methods of killing roaches.
The Good Luck games, working their way up from the more obscure events and venues, had finally reached the main Olympic Green, with gymnastics in the National Indoor Stadium. For this, a sport China was good at, in a major Olympic arena, the public was coming out. The security checkpoints were overwhelmed; the crowd backed up on the south side of the building. It was long past sundown, and there were no lights on the surrounding grounds yet. The footing was lumpy dirt, covered with netting that had been weighted down with chunks of concrete and broken paving blocks. Christina and I had left Mack at home with the ayi and come with another couple. Volunteers steered our part of the crowd around to the east entrance, where the backup was even worse. Wire fences held the crowd back. Volunteers in headsets yelled conflicting instructions.
As the six-o’clock start time approached, after a long spell of no movement at all, something suddenly gave way. The crowd crushed forward; people went yelling and stumbling over the uneven ground, kicking up billows of dirt in the dark. It was verging on a stampede, bodies on bodies, with no way to stop moving or change direction. Then, as the mass surged into the glow of the building lights, the frenzy subsided. The volunteers herded men and women into separate security lines. Calm was restored.
Inside, operations were still at less than Olympic levels of readiness. The concession stand was offering popcorn, cooked one bag at a time in a single microwave, as customers piled up to wait. The bathrooms were furnished with Chinese-style squat toilets. Spectators had been equipped with inflatable thundersticks, sponsored by Crocs. Crocs was heavily invested in Good Luck Beijing.
Our seats were up on the end, in a section that was empty when we arrived. As we settled in, an army of boys and young men showed up—all of them slightly built, most of them wearing baggy jackets. Some of the jackets had a Chinese flag on them and the logo of Li Ning sportswear, the company started by the Chinese gold-medal gymnast of that name. One of the boys, finding himself in the wrong row, nonchalantly vaulted himself over the seatbacks. Somehow, the tickets I had bought at the box office were in the midst of the national gymnastics program. “Only 180 degrees,” one youth said, watching someone do a superficially impressive half-spin below. “Boring.”
The gymnasts were effusive, piping up with “Jia you!” cheers for the Chinese, but also applauding an American’s “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll” floor routine. The American was named Chellsie Memmel, and she ended up with the bronze. A gymnast named Jiang Yuyuan had won the women’s all-around the previous morning—I had jotted in my notebook that she looked about eight years old—but tonight, in front of the adoring crowd, she powered herself out of bounds on the tumbling floor. China’s Cheng Fei won the floor gold, and took gold in the vault as well. Two nights later, she would win the balance beam, as China came away with one-third of all the available gymnastics medals.
A teenager next to us broke down his predictions for the men’s pommel horse. Lu Bo of China would do well, he said. He was in a position to know, because he was Lu Bo’s roommate. But a different Lu, Lu Bin, would get first place for sure. Lu Bin won the pommel horse. Lu Bo was fifth.
The pollution rolled in, thicker and thicker, the daylight getting weaker even as it got shorter. Beijingers were burning coal against the chill. I came down with a racking cough and fever, and an expat clinic took a chest X-ray and sent me off with something like two weeks’ worth of hydrocodone. They were thorough about medication in the expat places. Little Mack came down with a wheezing cough of his own, and the doctor prescribed two steroids and a bronchodilator. None of those were of much use for an infant, according to drug studies online. Two weeks after the cough subsided, he started coughing again.
On Christmas Eve, utter filth hung in the air. English-language radio instruction in our cab explained the concept of knock-knock jokes—“Mary who?” “Merry Christmas”—and then discussed the question of whether or not there were pawnshops in the West. The cabbie offered a “Thank you” and “Merry Christmas” in English at the end of the ride.
The official blue-sky count for the year was at 244 days, one short of the target of 245, but it had been stuck there since the middle of the month, as the days got darker and dirtier. The sun on Christmas morning was a dull tangerine. The gray carried on to Boxing Day, and the next day was grayer still. On Outer Dongzhimen Street, the Agricultural Exhibition Center—three long blocks away—was invisible; the landscape of the Third Ring was a blur. The official pollution reading was 500, the top of the scale, apocalypse.
There would be no sun the next morning at all: the morning of the 28th was lightless, with snow falling unseen through the clotted air, wetting the pavement. Then, at last, the wind came: pushing debris up the alley, tossing a traffic cone around in front of the English school, and throwing grit in my face. Eventually, the sun emerged. It would take another day of wind to bring the pollution down to the legal blue-sky threshold, but the wind obliged. The 30th was spectacular, the mountains in view. The 31st brought the blue-sky count to 246. The last year before the Olympics was done, and the air quality had exceeded expectations.