Beijing Welcomes You

Cutting Wind Combs Bones,” the weather headline on the back page of the Beijing News said, in Chinese. “New Year Enters Sternly.” Cranes were lit against the evening sky, and the stars were out. This was 2008.

To mark the occasion, we’d hung a new poster over the couch. It was a photo of a sixteen-story Beijing apartment tower, green and white, its geometry irregularly dotted and checkered with the markings of actual life: varied models of air conditioners, mismatched windows, laundry up and drying. We chose it because it seemed to epitomize the shabby-but-not-squalid Beijing, the unimproved city that we’d arrived into.

Half attentively, I studied the background, trying to place the general area in the city of millions. The towers behind it were hopelessly generic. In the lower right was a gas station with no distinctive features. I knew an apartment tower next to a gas station. No. Something clicked. I knew this apartment tower next to this gas station. It was on Xinyuan South Road, just east of where it meets Xindong Road, a short offset block from the eastern mouth of Outer Dongzhimen Side Street. I could walk there. I had walked there. This was the route home from Chinese school. This was the way we went to go to the tailor. The trees were the trees the pesticide crew had been hosing down. The Platonic image of Beijing was where we lived.

Two days later, I went looking for it. The weather was merciful; light reverberated through clear air. The afternoon sun made plain buildings’ surfaces bright and sharp, and glowed through the glassed-in balconies on their corners. A crew of workers with shovels was out on the frozen Liangma River; the sunlight fell on the bare, drooping branches of the willows on the bank. Firemen were out jogging. A man slept in the bed of his cargo tricycle on the bridge. Four people rode by on a single motor scooter. I found the building, the easternmost of a set of three, almost as it was on the poster. The green and white of the façade had been intensified with new paint; the towers had already gotten their Olympic facelift.

The other kind of Olympic treatment was still spreading down the opposite side of the neighborhood. The east side of the street leading away from it was all a rubble field now; the west side was painted with chai characters, marking it for destruction, but it was still standing. Farther west was even more expansive rubble, in front of the string of apartment complexes called Moma.

Moma was a still-evolving monument to the compressed timetable of Beijing architecture: its first towers in the vulgar mode of early Chinese prosperity, with curving mint-tinted windows; then, later, politely modernist dark-gray ones; then a more flashy modernism, with copper highlights. Finally, under construction in the newest position, would come a state-of-the-art, green-technology-equipped cluster of buildings called the Linked Hybrid, a must-see destination for the architectural critics who were descending on the city in advance of the Olympics. The buildings would have flat, cutout-looking faces, and their unifying gimmick would be a series of skybridges connecting them all—not an unusual feature of Beijing buildings, but evidently exciting to the rest of the world, or at least the architecture writers of the rest of the world.

Trees were still standing in the wreckage. Chinese slogans had been stenciled repeatedly on the metal fences: “Remaking the environment benefits the people,” “Safe demolition and relocation depends on everyone,” “The Olympics connects you, me, and him.” Opposite Moma, there was a closed restaurant, with a sign in English identifying it as “Top Chef Snacks & take-away.” On the north side of the stripped interior, a 2007 calendar was still hanging, with a picture on it of Nini, the green Fuwa, advertising beer. Plates were stacked on the floor, and a paper Chinese flag was taped to the inside of the glass door, flying from a little plastic stick.

The Kirov Ballet was performing at the new National Grand Theater, or the National Center for the Performing Arts, or the National Opera Hall—the facility had just opened in December, after long construction delays, and no one had settled on what to call the building or its subparts in English. Mostly people were calling it the Egg: a titanium-paneled dome, 150 feet high, off Tian’anmen Square beside the Great Hall of the People.

Literally, the Mandarin nickname was “The Boiled Egg,” which was not quite right. It was shaped more like the contents of a fresh, raw egg, with the wide, bulging dome as the yolk and a broad moat as the puddle of egg white.

Still, the point was, the Egg was one of the first pieces of Beijing’s international trophy architecture to have actually been completed, and Chinese people were unimpressed. The project had been one more target for the Internet mobs; its French architect, Paul Andreu, had designed the new terminal at Charles de Gaulle Airport, which collapsed in 2004, in the middle of the Egg’s construction. Not only was the design alien, unattractive, and (thanks to the moat and the underground entrance) reckless about feng shui, it was dangerous.

After more slowdowns and cost overruns, no one seemed worried anymore that the dome would cave in. That still left the aesthetic question. One line of criticism was that the Egg was insensitive to its surrounding context—a reasonable-sounding thing to say about an immense, shiny dome, until you looked next door and saw the brooding rectangular mass of the Great Hall of the People. The edge of Tian’anmen Square was no place for welcoming, human-scaled architecture.

But if its size did seem appropriate, that still didn’t mean the big architectural idea of the Egg was a particularly good idea, or an interesting one. The Egg was conceptually and actually hollow: three separate theater buildings with a cover plopped over them, like dishes on a hospital lunch tray.

The sunken entrance was on the north side. The trees outside were festooned with strings of lights, with electrical cords roping them all together. The face of the entrance was a dark red, with gold characters on it—a commonplace treatment, and a sign of things to come. The passageway under the water had dark sludge on the glass ceiling, ambient Beijing dust that had already settled as silt to the bottom of the moat.

Once inside, there was no sign of the stark simplicity of the outer dome. The decorating of the Egg was scrambled. Here, around the concourses of the opera hall, were bronze-toned screens resembling roll-down storefront security gates; over there were stairways of white marble wrapped around white-marble elevator shafts, bright and sarcophageal, like phone booths for the dead. There were dim burgundy-colored passageways—dim, dim, dim—the lighting feeble, energy-conscious, and erratically colored. Far overhead, the inner surface of the dome was paneled in wooden slats. The symbols marking the bathrooms were so elongated and stylized as to be unrecognizable. The interior of the theater was in medium-brown wood with red web-weave seats, the balcony facings covered with fields of cutout dots lit from within.

Down in the orchestra seats, a woman was wearing leather pants and a dowdy striped sweater. The pants were baggy, their cut and fit at odds with the whole idea of leather pants. This was in keeping with the Egg itself. We were in the sleekest and newest theater in the capital, with a crowd that could afford expensive tickets, and there was no sense that anyone agreed on what dressing up might entail. It was not like an American crowd, where clashing dress standards marked clashing ideas about fashion and formality. Rather, there was not even a language for taste. Prosperity and consumerism had come up all at once, with no historical context for style. How could you have seventies or eighties retro where the seventies and eighties hadn’t happened?

Entire aesthetic categories failed to translate. The idea, for instance, of bourgeois people wearing work clothes as a class-status antisignifier, of hipsters in work boots and utility pants, was inexpressibly alien. Even workingmen didn’t wear work clothes. Waist-deep in a pit, a pick-wielding laborer might wear slacks and a sweater and a floppy knit hat with earflaps.

And so, confronted with a plain metal dome, people couldn’t help but suspect that a fancy foreign architect might be trying to put one over on them. The hodgepodge of materials inside was meant by the builders to be reassuring: Look at all the different kinds of stone and wood and metal we spent our money on. Rumor had it that something similar was in the works for the CCTV building—that having agreed to the crazy-angled loop of a structure, the career bureaucrats of the national television authority were planning to fill it with the things they understood, so that they would float high above the New Beijing in offices trimmed with heavy marble and dark, thickly ornamented wood.

Getting rid of the Christmas tree was a challenge. Things did not have the courtesy to disappear once you tried to dispose of them, the way they would in America. Instead, they entered a chain of review, as other people tried to extract value from them—not far-off strangers at scrap yards and recycling stations, but people right around you.

First came the ayi. To help care for the baby, we had hired a new ayi, full-time, an enterprising young woman named Chen Yanqun from rural Sichuan Province, who divided her time among child care, cleaning, and cooking lunch. She herself was one of eleven children, and she would tell Christina anecdotes about her upbringing: when she was six years old, say, an older sister had given her a real pair of pants; till then, all her clothes had been pieced together out of dishrags. So the ayi would always double-check: Had we meant to throw this or that away?

Then Wang Jiashui, the cargo-tricycle man by the gate, would review the leavings. Beyond his scrap-collecting work, or as an outgrowth of it, Wang acted as an unofficial ombudsman for the apartment compound. As the gatehouse guards got younger and more incompetent over time, he took it upon himself to announce when packages had arrived, or to explain when the water service might come back on. Meanwhile, he would gather and bundle anything that might make saleable cargo. After that would come the actual garbage collectors, in orange coveralls, who would go through what remained in the bins, separating the still somehow recyclable from the tiny remaining fraction of actually worthless refuse.

The tree was an embarrassment. We had bought it only a month before, and it had been delivered, and now we were done with it? Chen Yanqun was flummoxed. Admittedly, it was dropping needles and failing to thrive in its clayey old soil, but still, it was a whole tree, and in a pot. She referred the problem to Wang Jiashui, and he told her to have us put the tree on the landing. I dragged it out to the stairwell, scattering needles in my wake. There were needles on top of the door latch box when I came back in. The next morning, the tree was gone.

Olympic tourists would be upon the city in eight months. By then, Big Mack planned to be in the hotel business. Big Mack was perpetually starting something or other, in tribute to the city’s expanding possibilities; over time, I had gotten used to being asked for advice about what might be a good name for a cell-phone media company, or for a women’swear brand. Now, with friends, he had secured a lease on a courtyard house, down a side lane in Xisi in Xicheng District, the western part of the ancient city center. The idea was to renovate it into a boutique hotel for foreigners.

Amid the beige haze of a cold morning, the neighborhood’s distinguishing feature, the seven-hundred-year-old White Pagoda Temple, poked above the buildings out across the main avenue. Xicheng was less of a destination than its eastern counterpart, Dongcheng; its oldness not quite as layered with self-awareness. In the alley itself, there wasn’t much to see. No coffee shops or crafts dealers had put out windows here yet. Any people who were out were on their own business. This was Old Beijing at its most drab and introverted: the plain gray walls, gray pavement underfoot, all its centuries of life and history somewhere behind a surface as monotonous as a cinder-block basement. It called for imagination.

Down the alley was a recessed set of double doors, painted red with gold trim and shaded by an ornate polychrome overhang. I had been preparing for decay, heritage sadly left to crumble. Instead, Mack opened the doors onto a tidy entrance court, like an open-air hallway, framed by painted latticework. Straight ahead, in a sort of viewing niche, were two pillar-shaped decorative stones, one tall and one squat. Along the left wall, under ruffled, multicolored eaves, were two doorways, dark red, trimmed in mint green and gold. Above the nearer doorway was a panel with a rustic landscape on it, trees by the water with little boats in the middle distance.

The house was an er jin, Mack said, a compound with two main courtyards. It had not been occupied lately, but the owner had gotten it painted in the elaborate, old-fashioned mode. The front courtyard was surrounded by a colonnade, its open crossbeams covered with interlocking designs: gold over blue, green twining with teal, teal under gold. Pink-on-pink blossoms adorned the blocks atop the supporting pillars; green-and-red latticework filled in the sides. And that was before the eye made it down to the fan-shaped blind windows, with pictures painted on their backs, or the rails and lattices at knee level, or the gateways framed by big golden characters.

Some part of the renovation would mean paring back the Chinese version of antique style into something more simple. What did I think of the paint job as it was? Mack wanted to know. In other words: What would I, as a foreign visitor, prefer a traditional Chinese courtyard to look like? A less minty shade of green would be good, I allowed. Or maybe it might be a good idea to knock out the green entirely, to replace one-third of the dominant mint-gold-red scheme with something more subdued, like black. Or bare wood. Bare wood with red and gold would look old-fashioned for sure.

At the very front of the courtyard was the largest of the buildings, with a steeply pitched roof. Inside, it had shabby flooring and a dropped ceiling, with a gold-highlighted molding and compact fluorescent bulbs poking out of can lights. Mack planned to tear out the whole thing up to the rafters, opening up a space that might even be high enough for a loft. They could put a kitchen in at one end and serve coffee.

The guest rooms would be on the second courtyard, in the rear. From the doorway of the front building, you could look straight down the main axis of the house, across the first courtyard, through a connecting doorway, across the rear court, and into the doorway of the rearmost building. Against the back wall was a tall potted plant, scruffy but green.

An old, thick jujube tree grew up out of the rear court, and a few dates were still scattered on the paving stones. The rooms around it would all need work: a ruinous kitchen had to go; the floors stepped up and down irregularly; a wall would have to be recentered. At the very rear were the bathrooms—narrow afterthoughts, tacked on outside the back door a few centuries after the rest of the house had been laid out. To contemplate the awkwardness of them was to feel the weight of history. The toilets were the squatting kind, and each bathroom was barely even wide enough for that. A sloping glass roof offered dirty sunlight through bamboo leaves, and the promise of frigid winter mornings—and, at the moment, a glass-bottomed view of a neighborhood cat strolling overhead. A narrow bathtub could fit, maybe, sideways, but you’d have to step on the toilet seat to get into it. Indoor plumbing was not traditional. Later, when a work crew dug up the courtyard, they would discover that there were no real drainpipes leading away from the toilets, only skinny water pipes.

The bathroom, I advised Big Mack, was where the Western traveler would prefer that all signs of the archaic and unfamiliar be suppressed. The fixtures need not be luxury brands, but they would have to be reassuring and sturdy. Not the rattling Chinese-made modern toilets in our own apartment. Out in the courtyard were more of the marks of the everyday. Below the picturesque tiled roofline, cables sagged haphazardly, slung from one building to the next. A jumble of air-conditioning units and rusting electrical boxes stood out in the open. The hardware would need to go.

The goal was a combination of clean ancient and clean modern, with art involved. Mack wanted some sort of large artwork in the front court, to set the tone—a tall contemporary vase, maybe, or a sculpture. We could see where it would go, by the colonnade, where foreign visitors would stroll by it with their morning coffee. Eventually, he would settle on the idea of an outsized lantern: the hotel would be the Lantern Courtyard. The big front building would visually counterbalance it. From where we were standing, its roof rose so steeply that it blocked out the low dusty haze. A pigeon flew past against the part of the sky that we could see, which was blue.