Beijing Welcomes You

In the late middle of January, a whitish tent appeared by the Liangma River, near the Pizza Hut. A banner on it announced yan hua—“smoke flowers,” or fireworks. Checking the banner against the dictionary on my smartphone, I transposed the words and called up an entry for hua yan guan, meaning “girlie opium den.” The dictionary was always coming up with surprisingly particular phrases (“to remain poor and clean at retirement [of officials],” “obstruction from middle-level cadres”), but the revolution had not reversed itself quite that much. Two days later, another tent appeared, farther east along the river. Another Spring Festival, or Chinese New Year, was nigh.

This was the peak season for alcohol and tobacco sales. Beijingers marked the New Year by expressing their gratitude and friendship toward their bosses, business contacts, and government officials—premium liquor and expensive cigarettes being the acknowledged signs of appreciation. Right after the holiday, there would be a thriving resale market, as the officials unloaded the surplus tribute they couldn’t consume. A friend had told a story, too well sourced to be apocryphal, of someone who’d bought a secondhand carton of cigarettes after one Chinese New Year and opened it to find it stuffed with hundred-yuan bills—a bribe that had gone unnoticed in the annual bounty.

In the liquor trade, China’s traditional past trickled into the boomtime future, by way of the industrial present. A club that specialized in Chinese culture tours had arranged a visit for foreigners to the Niulanshan Distillery. Niulanshan had been in business since 1952, and it specialized in the clear liquor called erguotou, a sorghum-based, twice-distilled version of baijiu, white liquor, the standard Chinese drink—a national constant, like scotch in Scotland, slivovitz in the Czech Republic, or ouzo in Greece. Patriotic alcoholic drinks are usually acquired tastes; their being tough to swallow adds to the national mystique. But the flavor of baijiu might have been the single most insurmountable thing to the foreign palate in all of China. Flavor profiles varied, but a bottle I’d bought at the airport was typical: it began with a nose-filling, cloying floral aroma like that of fabric softener, then washed through the mouth like smoky kerosene, leaving in its trail the stinging, acrid taste of the vomit after a vodka binge.

The plant employed 1,500 people, working eight-hour days, with two days off each month. With the holidays coming, there were shifts round the clock. Workers in bright-blue coveralls carried burlap packages of liquor bottles or shoveled steaming piles of mash around the floor. The liquor came in two varieties, light fragrance and heavy fragrance. The light was fermented for thirty days, in neat ceramic-lined tanks set in the floor. The heavy went for forty-five days in pits lined with mud. At a tasting in an unheated room, I tried to compare the two, but the little cups got jumbled and I was loath to keep nipping until I tasted the difference.

Five bottling lines were going at once, in parallel. Newly filled bottles would come off a filling machine, and a woman would set a loose cap on top of each one, by hand. Nearly all the line workers were women, with white bonnets over their hair. Another woman would pick up each bottle, stick the top into a cap-tightening machine, and return it to the conveyor. The next would check the volume against an illuminated panel as it traveled by. Then someone would pick up the bottle, wipe it dry with cardboard, put it back. Pick up the bottle, stick on a label, put it back. The nearer lines were handling little green flask-shaped bottles, with gold-on-red labels; farther back, the bottles were tall and colorless. Pick up the bottle, put it in a foam-netting sleeve, put it back, and then on out through a hole in the wall, to where crews of men were loading them into cartons. There were something like a hundred people in this one bottling section, hands moving nonstop, none of them doing anything that couldn’t have been done by machinery.

The Water Cube, pearly white in the sun, was ready for the press, or ready enough. The ethylene-tetrafluoroethylene membrane bubble wall bulged out against a blue sky and high cirrus clouds. Dark streaks of dirt ran down the faces of the bubbles.

Inside, there was a blissful swimming-pool warmth to the air. The interior surfaces were clean and white, with attractive circle patterns on them. Television camera crews clustered by the railing overlooking the main swimming pool, trying to secure the best access they could get. Gradually, it dawned on them that the press was free to roam one whole side of the hall, with unprecedented ease of movement. A reporter for the Xinhua News Agency interviewed me about what I thought of the building. Afterward, I asked him what he thought. He said he thought the interior of the building looked ordinary.

That seemed a bit jaded. The struts of the bubble framework made dramatic patterns overhead; the spectator seats were either blue or white, the frequency of each color shifting from all blue in the bottom rows through a pixelated middle to all white at the top. The press handout said that the project had been financed by donations from overseas Chinese, at a total cost of 830 million yuan, or about $110 million; later the declared figure would end up above the 1 billion yuan mark. It was something to look at while officials, down on the pool deck, delivered lengthy remarks in untranslated Mandarin. The fittings on the springboards were ivory; the panels on the diving towers were mottled greenish-white. The cold blue-tinted interior light was unkind to the differences in the whites. There was a presentation of a big gold-toned key, not the least bit bubble-themed, with a red tassel hanging off it. The dignitaries stooped to ceremonially touch the pool water.

Then the officials were turned loose in the stands for chaotic interview scrums. The press—the usual Olympics-beat foreign and local reporters, now joined by lead-news correspondents—closed in around the head of construction, Yi Zhun. How many people were killed in construction? Was it true ten people had died building the Bird’s Nest? That was a “rumor,” Yi said. How many bubbles were there in the building’s exterior? More than 3,000. You could see brown dirt streaks through the roof from below; the press had noticed the dirt; the dirt was a story. How much of a challenge was it to clean this? Why were the Australian architects not at the ceremony? “I don’t know. They should be here.” What about the reported deaths? “I personally think it must be rumor.”

Another scrum, with another official, more on the dirt. “It will be totally clean.... To clean the whole façade will take a week.” When was the last time it was cleaned? “About three weeks ago.” Who gets the design credit? What are the safety standards? Why are there cracks on the diving boards? What about feng shui? Feng shui was “sort of” considered, but they had not consulted a feng shui expert. An answer that would neither satisfy nor dissatisfy anyone.

Away from Beijing, by the end of January, China was a disaster zone. Blizzards had struck the center and south of the country, killing dozens, causing fuel shortages and blackouts, and shutting down the national transportation system while more than 100 million people were trying to travel for the Chinese New Year’s holiday. The vaccines for Mack’s scheduled immunizations were stuck in transit from Hong Kong; television was full of images of rescuers from the People’s Liberation Army digging through the snowdrifts. Olympic meteorological officials assured alarmed reporters that “we have very little probability of extreme weather conditions during the Games.”

The capital, however, was sunny and almost tranquil—but for the early arrival of New Year’s fireworks. At odd hours of the day or night, there would be a whiz, squeal, and bang, accompanied by delighted screams of children. A power shovel had appeared on the vacant lot across from our apartment, and a team of laborers set to work with some sort of drilling machine, a tall metal screw that sent brown water gushing from the ground.

Five days before the New Year, I visited the headquarters of Chinese Central Television, still across town from the looping CCTV building. Every year, CCTV broadcasts a live show, the Spring Festival Gala, a variety program that puts the ratings boasts of the Oscars and the Super Bowl in humbling perspective: every year, more or less everyone with a television in China watches the CCTV Gala—meaning, by the most conservative estimates, more than twice as many people as have ever watched an American TV broadcast. It certifies new stars and affirms old ones; its comedy sketches launch national catchphrases—including the original appearance of the slogan “Beijing Huanying Ni,” in a bit in which migrant workers were welcomed to the capital in ever more formal terms.

“The Gala usually is four hours and twenty minutes long,” Chen Linchun, that year’s director, said in Chinese. Pan Deng, a part-time researcher I’d hired who happened to work for CCTV’s international station, helped with translation. There would be roughly two and a half hours of comedy, Chen said, an hour for song and dance, and about another hour for interactive programs with the audience. There were no commercial breaks; instead, advertisers would pay millions of dollars for passing mentions by the hosts and placements in sketches.

This would be CCTV’s twenty-seventh Gala, and Chen’s first turn as the lead director. According to plan, it would be the final edition to be broadcast from the old CCTV campus; the 2009 show would move into the brand-new CCTV building. “I think I will definitely miss this place,” Chen said.

The Gala was the definition of mass entertainment. “The Gala cannot be done in a Westernized way,” Chen said. “It must have a strong Chinese flavor. It is a Chinese tradition that a whole family stay together and wait for the New Year to come.” So the whole thing had to be rigorously structured. The comedy bits, Chen said, were scripted to follow a pace modeled on that of “the famous American comedian Charlie Chaplin”: “We require our comedy programs, which are usually twelve minutes long, to have the same number of laughing points as his movies.”

The pop group S.H.E. and Taiwanese singer Jay Chou would be performing, Chen said, as would veterans with more than twenty Galas to their credit: comedian Zhao Benshan and folksinger Peng Liyun, the wife of Politburo member Xi Jinping. (A month later, Xi would be named vice president of China.) The budget was a relatively low 20 million yuan, or about $3 million—since the cost of paying performers was minimal. “This is the program with the highest audience rating in China,” Chen said. “If you don’t get a chance to perform in the Spring Gala, then you will be forgotten by everyone in several years.”

The Gala would go through a full dress rehearsal, which would be taped. The night of the live broadcast, the tape would be kept running, so that in the event of an on-air gaffe or other disruption, the producers could switch seamlessly to the canned version. There would be no way to tell the difference between the live event and the taped one.

The Gala stage was set up in the largest studio, a round auditorium covering more that 10,000 square feet. The circular hallway around it was serving as one large dressing room; child performers wandered around and dancers applied their makeup. Some of the dancers, from the military’s performing-arts program, were half changed between warm-up wear and their People’s Liberation Army uniforms.

A half-moon-shaped platform alternately rose above and sank below the stage. Little white starry lights shone against dark backgrounds off toward the wings. Rain effects and fountains came on and off. There were ten pillars covered with LED screens, with swirling patterns on them. A test pattern played on a video screen on the back wall, then gave way to images of tumbling flowers, followed by the character for “spring.”

An Olympic torch—the curving silver official Beijing 2008 torch design—was being tested onstage. On cue, it shot sparks, and one of the codirectors caught the sparks on a sheaf of paper. The paper began to burn, which was not supposed to happen. This was a cold pyrotechnic effect. The director stomped it out, the torch underwent adjustment, and they tried again. The fire stayed where it was supposed to be.

New Year’s Eve would be February 6. The Year of the Pig would give way to the Year of the Rat, the beginning of a new twelve-year cycle. Down at the corner market, two days before that, I stopped at another newly installed fireworks stand. The merchandise was out on a table on the sidewalk, with tall boxed pyrotechnics displays at either end, and littler explosives in the middle. The bigger boxes were priced in the hundreds of yuan. I fought off the clerk’s effort to upsell me and picked out a box for 180 yuan, a knee-high block with a single fuse. Then I grabbed some addons: little cardboard tanks with missiles on them, extra-long sparklers, brightly wrapped cardboard tubes.

Fireworks had been subject to off-and-on bans in the past, but for 2008 it was open season. By the night of February 5, the alley smelled of gunpowder. A volley of explosions sounded after nine p.m.; then, after midnight, another barrage went off on Outer Dongzhimen Street. I could see colored sparks reflected in the building windows out there. Deeper in the night, the explosions got louder.

By the sixth, the explosions were going on all day. The sound carried inside the windowless bathroom while I took a shower. The shredded red remains of firecrackers lay at the foot of a street sign declaring a no-firecracker zone near the embassies.

After nightfall, there was smoke inside the apartment. We dressed Mack in his Chinese inheritance, one of the thick padded jackets from the Henan relatives, bundled him under a matching quilt in his stroller, and set out for a walk. Skyrockets were flying everywhere, squeaking and trailing brushes of sparks behind the Heaven Beyond Heaven restaurant in the main Hujiayuan compound, down by the alley mouth. The fireworks sellers stood at their table outside the market, heads tilted up, watching the soaring merchandise, with banks of fire extinguishers at the ready. At the China National Offshore Oil Company building, the guards were playing with sparklers. Little bursts of sparks were going off, and pyrotechnics suitable for a municipal Fourth of July show. Eventually, as we rolled Mack through the din and flash and smoke, he fell asleep.

We went down by the riverside to light our own load of fireworks. There was a breeze, and the lighter we had would barely work. We started with the long, droopy sparklers, which threw off the sparks loosely, nothing like the tight, contained sizzle of American sparklers. We moved away from Mack’s stroller, to make sure we didn’t light the handmade quilt. There was no reason to think that the Henan relatives’ trousseau would be fireproof. Up the riverbank, on the roadside by the Pizza Hut, two women were setting paper on fire, in the absence of gunpowder products. I took a burning sparkler and used it to light the fuse of one of the cardboard tubes, gripping the tube by the other end, pointing it away from me.

Years ago, in my middle childhood, my Uncle Ray once visited from California bearing a whole suitcase full of fireworks. (I assume he traveled by plane.) These would have been wholly illegal in Maryland, a sparklers-only state, and my parents were usually inclined to abide by laws in general and safety laws in particular. But probably for our sake, or our Uncle Ray’s, the usual rules had gone on jubilee, and we were allowed to stage a one-time-only fireworks display at the head of the driveway: cones that sent up fountains of colored fire, and devilish little numbers that blazed and whirled on the ground, and maybe even a few Roman candles. My favorite was something called a “California sparkler”—a red-white-and-blue cardboard tube you could hold by one end while it sent a plume of sparks out the other. It was not alarming or intimidating; it was simply, and satisfyingly, better than the usual puny variety of sparkler.

I supposed that I had found something like those California sparklers again, in Beijing. Here, though, the fuse burned down into the tube, and no spray of sparks came out. Instead there was a pause, then a muffled boom as the tube bucked a little in my hand. The tube boomed again, and again, and I sluggishly realized I had been looking around for the sparks too close nearby: the tube was an artillery piece, and it was blasting orange-white pyrotechnic rounds way out (boom!) into the darkness . . . across the frozen river (boom!) and . . . over the fence into a luxury expat apartment-tower compound. (Boom!) I swung the tube upright, so it would send the rest of its magazine harmlessly toward the sky.

Alarmed—and worrying about the guards—I turned away from the river, just as my wife set herself on fire. Her sparkler had thrown a spark the wrong way, and flames were burning in the flank of her coat, an old fake-fur one, fire racing upward through the synthetic fibers. She beat at the flames; I reached out to try to tear the coat off her. A stranger, an expat woman who had wandered onto the scene, began yelling “Roll! Roll!”—not good advice, when plastic is burning, but also not helpful for making decisions. There are times when you don’t want to think about multiple strategies. Christina stayed with her original plan, beating out the flames with her hands. There was a long ragged burn through the coat, and the fire had burned holes through her pants, stopping shy of the long underwear beneath. A few more seconds—

The baby was still asleep in his stroller. We gathered the unused fireworks and the stinking remains of the coat and retreated to the apartment, through the unfaltering festivities. Rockets kept exploding. In the span of one minute, around nine o’clock, I counted roughly seventy-five booms; the longest pause in the barrage was less than three seconds. It was a typical minute.

What was happening outside was anarchy—actual anarchy, the kind the idealists dream of. People were roaming around individually or forming into little bands to set off explosions however they pleased, and wherever: on the street corners, in their courtyards, out in the middle of the roadways. There was no center or focus or program to it; the whole city was boiling with fire.

On CCTV, the official, centralized Gala was on, in the background. I went from window to TV and back again. Dancers in bare midriffs and round red hats—a sort of ethnic go-go costume—were doing frenetic NBA-dance-squad moves to slow, piping music. Then came more dancers, on treadmills. A woman in a ruffled white dress sang a musical number while floating across a pool of water inside a boat-sized inverted green umbrella, then somehow got out of the umbrella and turned it right-side-up to finish the song.

The fireworks outside kept gathering force. A little before eleven, a full volley of professional-grade ones bloomed high in the air halfway out to the main boulevard. In the Gala, there was a skit about a man who had accidentally locked his ID inside a chest and then was unable to show the locksmith any ID to prove that the chest was his to open. Wang Zhizhi and other athletes came on for a group musical number. A ceremony honored heroes, including a man, left a widower a year into his marriage, who had kept supporting his late wife’s parents for thirty years. A pair of comedians playing peasanty old people did a long bit about waiting for the Olympic torch. The dialogue on the TV speakers was drowned out by the rising sound of fireworks outside. In mid-sketch, one of the performers delivered a message to the snowbound south: With the government taking care of things, we’ll be fine. The Olympic torch arrived on the scene. The comedian playing the common man held it aloft, and it spat out its sparks, without incident.

Now the fireworks were roaring with no pause at all. In the near distance, the lights in apartment-building stairwells flickered on and off, again and again in random patterns, their sound-sensing switches overwhelmed. A white glow suffused the sky. Jay Chou was singing something about porcelain in front of an image of a traditional blue-and-white vase. Then, as midnight came swooping down, they brought out astronauts from the Shenzhou space program. The barrage was everywhere at once, deafening white noise punctuated by flash bombs. The vacant lot looked as if someone were shining a floodlight on it—a steady brightness, with only the shifting tint betraying the chaos of the source, gleaming on the surviving trees and the worker barracks and the icy puddles.

Right below the window, out of view, the whole alley was lit with a sustained green glow. I put on my coat and shoes, grabbed the second cardboard tube, and went outside to see what was making it. A crowd had gathered in the mouth of the apartment gate, and Outer Dongzhimen Side Street had become a free-fire zone. Multiple boxes of skyrockets, fat coils of firecrackers, little handheld explosives—everything was erupting at once, from curb to curb. The pavement was covered with scorched scraps of paper and cardboard. A policeman in a blue uniform coat was out in the street smoking, stooping down to light flashpots and mortars with his cigarette. People shuffled forward to add their own contributions. An old woman stood with a thick bouquet of the dangerous sparklers, all burning at once. A car crept up the alley, waited for a lull, then got waved through.

I held out my tube, labeled a “dragon tube,” for a light, pointing it upward. The fuse burned down, then nothing happened. Just before my doubt reached the point of getting me to do something stupid—Daffy Duck peering down a gun barrel—it went off. And off. And off. Down by the river, in my confusion, I thought the tube had maybe popped off a half-dozen rounds. This time, I counted ten shots, twinkling gold, high up above the rooftop. I added the spent tube to the mountain of used cardboard ordnance by the guardhouse, and went back upstairs to bed.

Fireworks kept going off through the next day, and the noise began building again after dark. By nine, it sounded like a thunderstorm. Shortly after that, the skyrockets began again, backed by a steady roll of explosions. Something began booming sharply enough to create a delayed double echo: BOOM!—BUM-BUM! BOOM!—BUM-BUM! Then came a series of loud whams that seemed unlike anything from the day before. The real difference was that there were spaces between the whams. The night before, there had been no pause. The third day, blasts were still setting off car alarms. The explosions would go on for more than two weeks, slowly diminishing, till everyone rallied for the holiday-ending Lantern Festival, one final blast of all-night white noise.

Across town at Wukesong, the basketball arena opened for another of the press sessions. The informational march toward the Olympics was growing in size and pace. Since August, the green exterior of the arena had been painted gold. The outside had been covered with an LED display in the original plans, so that the whole building would be a video screen for people outside, but austerity had eliminated that feature. Now the leading opinion among reporters was that the surface, with its striated vertical panels, looked like it was made of pressed tofu skins.

The theme from Star Wars played in the press conference hall, down in the underparts of the building. This time, the presentation focused not on the wonders of the construction, but on the relocation of the people who had lived on the Olympic sites before. Beijing was showing it could address outside criticism. Human-rights activists were putting the number of dislocated people citywide at more than 1 million; the organizing committee, dealing specifically with people whose homes had been on Olympic grounds, said that relocation had involved 6,037 households and a total of 14,901 people. Of those, 10,355 people had been moved from the Olympic Green—low density, for Beijing—and the rest had been moved from other Olympic sites.

As presented, it would have been irresponsible not to relocate people. The city’s 1983 master plan, nearly two decades before Beijing was awarded the Games, had identified the Olympic Green as “an important urban function area for culture, sports, exhibitions, and leisure,” the press handout explained. As for Wukesong, “this area has always been reserved for sports facilities. To build the Olympic venues here is to materialize the planning.” Because the sites were outside the old city center, there was only one historic site involved, the Niangniang Temple, for the sake of which the Water Cube had moved a hundred meters north of its planned location.

A slide show supplied aerial photos of the sites as they had been before, as “relatively much more vacant” areas. The lack of population was not especially evident from the pictures. Then came the question period. How much had been spent on relocation? They had not yet come up with a number for release. Had people needed Beijing residence permits to get compensation? Well, the compensation was for homeowners, so a Beijing residence card was necessary to own a house, so of course everyone involved had been a legal resident of Beijing.

So renters had not been compensated? Er, no, there were compensation rules for renters, too, but they were too complicated to explain. What about the farmers who’d been moved off agricultural land? They had been legally converted from villagers to urban residents, which entitled them to social welfare programs, and they had been trained in other lines of work—vehicle maintenance, cleaning, and such.

To illustrate the generosity of the arrangements, the presenters told a story: for many of the people, the compensation was so generous and the new housing they’d chosen was so affordable, they had money left over to buy cars. People who’d taken jobs as street cleaners were able to drive themselves to work in the morning. Street cleaners with cars! It was a marvel.

Questions of social justice settled, it was time to see the arena: 18,000 seats, 42 skyboxes, and a 22-ton video scoreboard. The interior LED system had been approved by the NBA. A program was running on the wraparound screen, urging the nonexistent crowd to “Make . . . Some . . . Noise.” As it cycled through messages, tiny logos for the New Jersey Devils and New Jersey Nets appeared. Presumably some of the software had been remaindered from the Meadowlands. “Count the basket . . . and the foul,” the screen said. Then the word “Awesome” appeared, with an A that appeared to be the logo of the Arizona Diamondbacks. The Star Wars theme was pumped in at brutal volume. Then the LED filled with an image of a billowing Chinese flag.