Beijing Welcomes You

On May 12, around two-thirty in the afternoon, I took a sip of water in my fifth-story Chinese language classroom and felt suddenly, fleetingly queasy. The teacher felt nauseated, too, but neither of us said anything. Though we didn’t realize it, the sky-bridge we were in was swaying invisibly. A friend of my wife’s thought that something had slipped or broken in his office chair.

Nine hundred fifty miles away, in Wenchuan County in Sichuan Province, the Longmenshan geologic fault had ruptured. The earthquake measured 7.9 on the Richter scale. An early report on the China Daily website announced that there were 117 dead and that Premier Wen Jiabao was rushing to the scene. Then a report said that “up to 8,500” people were dead.

A week later, the death toll was in the tens of thousands. One way to try to envision tens of thousands of dead might be to stand in the midst of tens of thousands of living people. I couldn’t say how many people were on Tian’anmen Square on May 19. I usually am not bad at crowd counts—cut out a section by eyeball, tally heads, multiply by the space—but the people spreading back from the flagpole on the north end of the square were an indivisible mass. The square was vastly wide and flat, and from down on the ground among them, I couldn’t possible take all the people in, which was probably as good a way as any to stop and think about the earthquake.

A Chinese reporter guessed there were 30,000 people on the square, if we understood each other right. He may have been talking about the death toll itself. Saying 30,000 meant rounding 2,476 dead people off the count that was in the morning newspaper, or rounding 20,000 off the estimates that day of what the final number might be. Something like 50,000 people had been killed in Wenchuan County, Beichan County, and the surrounding areas. Nobody knew for sure. Eventually, the estimates would add almost another 20,000 to that.

After I got home from the mourning ceremony, I read that 158 rescue workers (or 200, depending on the report) had died in mudslides in the quake zone. One hundred fifty-eight more dead people didn’t budge the needle. They weren’t even killed in the earthquake; they were killed by the side effects of the earthquake.

The crowd arrived on the square from the south, filing past Mao’s mausoleum and the obelisk of the Monument to the People’s Heroes toward the top of the square, where the flagpole faces the Tian’anmen itself, across Chang’an Boulevard. The sky had a hazy white glare to it. The breeze blew from the south, and the red flag was flying in it at halfmast, which I had never seen before.

In America, the flag gets lowered at the first hint of tragedy. It was tempting to suppose that China’s usual restraint meant that the Chinese must be inured to mass death. Dozens of people had died in a high-speed train wreck earlier in the month; coal miners died all the time by the scores. Our history books (though not always China’s) recount millions and tens of millions of Chinese lives lost to famine or war or political turmoil.

But 32,476 dead—or 50,000 dead—was a staggering number, even against a background of 1.3 billion people, and China was staggered by it. It took a while to recognize what had happened. If you took China again to be more or less the size of the United States, the part of Sichuan where the quake hit was more or less where rural Missouri would be, if rural Missouri towns had 100,000 souls in them.

It was the tarps that began to tell what had happened. American news coverage, describing the scene, mentioned that some of the victims were being covered by red-white-and-blue tarpaulins. That referred to a very particular thing: a kind of striped fabric, a plasticky burlap, that was ubiquitous on the Chinese landscape. Sometimes it came in other colors, but the red-white-and-blue was the most common. This was the material of curtains on the windows of gut-renovation construction sites, of rain covers on the fruit stands, of cargo covers in the beds of the tricycle rickshaws and the blankets over the cargo-rickshaw drivers when they took a nap. It made tents in the migrant-worker encampments. Sewn into square-sided bags, it was the luggage of peasants arriving at the long-distance bus station. The week of the earthquake, I could look out the kitchen window and see a sheet of it laid in the courtyard as a dropcloth for the painting crew at the apartment. It was the fabric people used for the cheapest and commonest everyday jobs, and in Sichuan they were using it to wrap the dead and wounded.

How do you react to something like that? The practical response was immediate: the People’s Liberation Army swung into action; helicopters and earth movers and rescue teams began working their way toward the epicenter. International relief organizations and foreign disaster squads followed. The symbolic response came together more slowly. China had not developed the American rituals of instant, willed grieving—candles, teddy bears, trauma counselors. Wen and President Hu Jintao did appear on television amid the rubble, as national leaders ought. But there was no coordinated expression of national sorrow in the beginning. The morning after the earthquake, the Beijing Olympic organizing committee had yet to prepare any official statement on the disaster. No one had thought about what to do if May became more important than August. A representative of the committee thanked the press for showing concern and took a question about the state of the torch relay as a technical matter: “The earthquake-affected area is not on the route of the torch relay, so it will not be affected.” The Olympics could consider only the Olympics.

What took shape over the following week was considerably more raw than the American version of public grief. The Chinese press, shaking off the usual official censorship to swarm the quake zone, did not fall back on self-censorship. There was no consensus of tastefulness like the one that led to photos of jumpers and body parts being memory-holed shortly after 9/11. On the radio, as part of an earthquake broadcast, a child survivor sobbed while describing limbs sticking from the ruins of a collapsed school. The May 19 Beijing News, announcing the beginning of three days of official mourning, offered a front-page blowup of a photo of a dead and blackened fist clutching a broken toothbrush. I flipped the paper over for relief, and the back-page photo displayed a girl in a hospital bed, viewed from above, with a Barbie doll in her arms and a red stain spreading out from under her blanket, from where her left leg used to be.

The three-day mourning period itself was to begin with a three-minute nationwide observation, starting at 2:28 p.m. on Monday, exactly seven days after the quake. Citizens nationwide would stop what they were doing and stand silently, while motor vehicles laid on their horns and air-raid sirens sounded.

On Tian’anmen Square, the buildup was dizzying—people strolling or hurrying north, in crossing paths, till they ran out of room to walk. When 2:28 arrived, the pause itself felt curiously inadequate. The vastness of the square worked against it: the horns and sirens came from far off, a faint disturbance carrying across the open space. Camera shutters clicked and clicked. A silver-haired woman in a wheelchair bowed her head, and the photographers moved in on her.

Then it was over, officially. China had stopped—the entire nation, as instructed—and something had to come next. The crowd held its place, murmuring, considering. Near me, a man broke huskily into song: “Qilai! Qilai! Qilai!”—Arise! Arise! Arise!—the words of the national anthem. The singing faltered. A chant began: “Zhongguo jia you!” The sports chant, apostrophized to the whole country, Zhongguo, the Central Nation. Go, China!

For a few minutes, the singing and chanting continued raggedly, at odds, among different knots of people: Arise, you who refuse to be slaves . . . “Jia you! Zhonggou! Jia you!” . . . Then, swiftly, the crowd made up its mind: “ZHONGGUO! JIA YOU!” Thousands of fists pumped in unison, amid phones and cameras held aloft. Newspapers, their front pages done in somber black-and-white, bobbed along. A call-and-response developed: dozens of people, leaders of their vicinity, offering “Zhongguo!” and tens of thousands returning “JIA YOU!” A small man rode above the crowd, clutching a flag and a poster and a flower, thrusting his arms up over and over again in a Y of rapture.

After five or ten minutes, the chanting gave way to applause. A new call immediately picked up: “Zhongguo!” “WAN SUI!” Ten thousand years!—the old cry for wishing long life to Mao. Off across the crowd and across the street, the Great Helmsman’s portrait looked down from the gate, but the masses were hailing their own country, themselves. “Zhongguo!” “WAN SUI!” “Zhongguo!” “WAN SUI!” “Sichuan!” “WAN SUI!”

The crowd milled, not pressed to the front any longer. People snapped pictures of each other, of the most fervent demonstrators, the elderly, children, pretty girls. Cameras pointed in my face. It occurred to me that I was an obvious foreigner in the middle of an impromptu nationalist rally, but that was too specific and intellectual to be a real worry. It was enough that I was in a numberless, agitated crowd, one that hadn’t figured out what it was doing. “Country?” a man demanded, after snapping my picture. “Meiguo,” I said. America. He grinned and gave a thumbs-up.

Waves of chanting came and went, for twenty minutes, half an hour, on and on. Men were raw-voiced or panting with exertion. Uniformed police officers moved among them, with no obvious concern or emphasis. Then someone unfurled a large Chinese flag, and people began to push in toward him in excitement. A middle-aged man in a blue-on-blue dress shirt moved toward the flag-bearer, unobtrusively, and said something to him, and the flag began to retreat to the south and east, pulling part of the crowd with it. Another middle-aged man, wearing a blue pullover, held a walkie-talkie down by his side and watched.

Then the whole back of the crowd broke into a march, a river of people flowing from west to east, where the flag had gone. “China rising! China rising!” a gaunt young man in lensless hipster glasses called out in English, grinning, as he passed me. The river eddied into new vortexes of chanting: “Sichuan!” “JIA YOU!” The sixty-year campaign for international recognition, the hundred-year dream of hosting the Olympics—these were nothing next to the 5,000-year struggle of human civilization against heaven and earth. The man in the blue-on-blue shirt appeared again, steering a white man and woman out of the thick of one vortex. The chanting carried on.

It was more than an hour before the authorities finally decided to end it. The normal method of clearing the square, if an event required it, was for a line of soldiers to march down from the north and sweep it clear. This time, the soldiers worked their way south at a stroll, in no formation, wearing pale-green shirtsleeves. A baby-faced NCO took some pictures. The crowd began to move along. One man turned back and tried one more yell: “ZHONGGUO!” The plainclothesman in the dress shirt stepped over to him. Take a rest, he said, mildly.

Within two weeks of the earthquake, Sichuan was in the Bird’s Nest, running and jumping. TV and radio were still full of disaster reports and fund-raising specials; orphans were everywhere. But it was time for the Good Luck Beijing Track and Field Open, with a mix of national, international, and provincial athletes. Tragedy and spectacle would make accommodation for each other. The Beijing crowd cheered pointedly when the stadium cameras settled on a Sichuan uniform, or when “Sichuan” appeared on the scoreboard.

Still, the Good Luck meet was above all a showcase for Liu Xiang. The hurdler had followed up his Athens gold medal by setting a new world record, 12.88 seconds, in the summer of 2006. He had become possibly the most famous person in China, beyond even Yao Ming. Now he was having a public rehearsal on the Olympic stage.

The overall national campaign for gold medals was principally about tactics and manpower, not individual heroism; the goal had been to find sports in which Chinese athletes could most feasibly compete, and train them up to win. If the gold medal count were going to be won, it would be won by an army of target shooters, weight lifters, and synchronized divers.

But Liu Xiang was an athlete in the Western, heroic mode. Chinese people had not believed that a Chinese competitor could possess natural superiority in running and jumping. Even when Liu had won in Athens, Chinese observers (and Liu himself) tried to credit it to his timing and technique, rather than sheer speed and muscle.

As Liu kept winning, people stopped trying to rationalize it and yielded to awe. By 2008, he was the subject of a commercial and popular personality cult, ubiquitous beyond comprehension. If he wasn’t hurdling something on a billboard for Lenovo computers or Haier appliances or Visa credit cards, he was drinking Coca-Cola; if he wasn’t drinking Coca-Cola, he was drinking Yili-brand dairy products. The face and legs of Liu Xiang soared over the entire landscape. China Daily would report before the Games that his commercial endorsements had fused together in the public’s mind such that 15 percent of the public wrongly assumed that he must have been associated with Pepsi, too.

Before I saw Liu Xiang, I had business with the Bird’s Nest itself. Down in the basement, outside an empty press conference hall, I finally put my finger on the stadium problem. I mean this literally. In front of me, plunging at an angle from the ceiling to the floor, was one of the stadium’s columns, like the one I had rapped on at the Racewalking Challenge. On one edge, the silvery surface had been chipped by some passing object. In the chip, a dark gray was showing. I pressed my fingertip into the chipped part. When I pulled it back, there was concrete dust on it.

By now, I had been reading and writing about the stadium structure from various distances for years: “a lattice of interwoven steel” (The New York Times) . . . “a tangle of steel trusses” (The Times) . . . “mesmeric steel frame” (The Guardian) . . . “monumental steel thatching” (me). Describing it was like reviewing restaurants and groping for ways to say “tasty”—it was a bird’s nest. Made of metal. The end.

The weight of the whole edifice was hanging over me. I had come there in the deserted afternoon between sessions of the Good Luck Beijing Track and Field Open for a seminar on Olympic reporting, presented by the organizing committee, to be held in the stadium’s press conference hall. This had been yet another inoperative piece of information, a red herring, a wild goose: the room was vacant and undisturbed—almost sterile—rows of white plastic seats under blue-tinged lights, flanked by coolers with every shelf full of untouched water bottles.

I began to review in my mind a rough list I had been making since the first tap on the pillar in April, the list of all the editors to whom I might now owe a correction. Due to a reporting error . . . ? Due to impenetrable confusion about stadium-engineering techniques . . . ? Due to the fundamental unreliability of received information . . . ?

But what would the substance of the correction be? My knowledge extended only an eighth of an inch below the surface. Maybe there was steel below the concrete. Maybe there was more concrete below the steel below the concrete. It was not a sensitive or controversial subject, as far as I could imagine, like the number of relocated residents was. The Chinese authorities were not trying to be obfuscating about it. Yet this basic point of fact was buried in layers of confusion. After more than two years of reporting on the New Beijing, I had no idea what the National Stadium was made of.

The reporting seminar had been canceled due to lack of interest from the domestic and foreign press. Time to get back to dealing with the facts on my own. I went home and rummaged through my notes. Deep in my clip file, I found an official story from the government’s Xinhua News Agency, in English. It was an interview with Li Jiulun, identified as the “chief engineer” of the Bird’s Nest. It described how Li and his colleagues had “stuffed the steel tubes with concrete bars” and “poured concrete into the tubes from underneath to custom-make over 1,300 concrete columns and trusses” (“which are three times as efficient as those made through foreign methods”). When I was done reading it, I had even less of an idea of how the stadium had been built.

I went back to the stadium in the evening, to cover the track-and-field competition. It was the night of the semifinal in the 110 meters, Liu’s event. The crowd roared for his warm-up jog. A sepia-tinted replay of his highlights ran on the video board. Camera flashes and screaming. Liu false-started in his heat, in a group combining Chinese and foreign runners. It was charged to the field, so nobody else could try to sneak out of the blocks. The race was over by the time Liu reached the third hurdle. He won in 13.46, far off his record of 12.88. The stadium bowl emptied out as soon as he was done, leaving empty seats for the men’s and women’s 100-meter sprint finals, usually the glamour races. Deng Yaping—a two-time gold medalist in table tennis, who had once been the most popular athlete in China herself—would publicly criticize the crowd afterward for its bad manners toward the other competitors.

Down under the stadium, I asked two Australian sprinters from the ignored men’s 100-meter final what they’d thought of the stadium and the air. In less than three months, Olympic athletes would be trying to get oxygen—if more of them didn’t give up and decide Beijing was irredeemably polluted. “The air, huh!” Joshua Ross said. Ross had finished fourth. “A bit dusty. I dunno, it’s just thick, thick air.”

“It’s a beautiful stadium,” said Patrick Johnson, who had finished one-hundredth of a second ahead of Ross for the bronze, in 10.31 seconds. Johnson predicted, in what would retrospectively look like wild understatement, that the track would get quicker as it aged over the summer. “It’s a bit polluted,” he said, of the air, “but the reality is, everyone’s got the same conditions.... If you decide not to come, then, fine enough, it’s your personal opinion.”

The underground concourse was big enough to drive a bus on. Full-sized buses had been driving on it, with room to spare. As the night was winding down, a band of people walked by, wearing what looked like saggy overalls—blue, red, yellow . . . These were the Fuwa, half dressed and uninflated. Right in front of me, they struggled into their uppers and fired up their backpack air pumps, the forms of Beibei, Jingjing, and Huanhuan swelling into shape. Giggling volunteers snapped photos as the Fuwa shook their newly inflated bottoms. The bottoms had round little mesh portals on them, right where an anus would have been. I was looking at the anuses of the Fuwa.

The next night was Liu’s final, and the rest of the track meet struggled for the crowd’s attention. Big cheers rose when Sichuan won a heat in the men’s 4-by-100-meter relay; the anchor-leg runner looked into a stadium video camera and pointed to the characters for “Sichuan” on his chest. Poplar fluff and dead bugs and living bugs swirled in the stadium lights, raining down on the people below. In a duel for the women’s pole vault title, Sichuan moved ahead of Beijing.

A roar went up for Liu toting his gear onto the track. Earthquake sympathy and the drama of the pole vault were forgotten. He was wearing a form-fitting red-and-yellow running outfit, with the Chinese flag on his right pectoral and the Nike emblem on his left, and with straps that came together in a skinny Y down his back, like a halter top worn backward.

Liu false-started again, to gasps from the crowd. This time the penalty was assessed to him personally. He would have to make sure to lag behind the starting gun, but it made no difference. He won in 13.18, with his teammate Shi Dupeng lunging hard at the end to get a 13.29. The interviews began down on the track. What did he think of the Bird’s Nest? “Bu cuo.” Not bad. He worked his way up through the gantlet of interviewers on the walkway out of the stadium bowl. Volunteers lined up with linked arms to keep the press in check. The women’s steeplechase medal ceremony started. When the Chinese anthem began to play for the winner, Liu used it as cover to move along.

That just brought him into the second gantlet, the underground rope line of print reporters. I plunged in. Liu was eight feet away—he was surprisingly tall, and had acne on his jawline—but forty people were closer. Volunteers in coral-colored shirts and police in blue crowded around the exit, clearing a space for him. He worked his way through the line and out the far end, sticking to a wall, with a teammate swinging wide to screen him. As soon as he was clear, the volunteers broke ranks and went scampering after him.

Liu’s press conference was scheduled for the very end of the evening. On the concourse, in the meantime, reporters had found J Parrish, the director of Arup Sport, the engineering firm that had worked on the stadium design. It was not a structured press availability, with handouts and interpreters; he was just there. Parrish was tall and bearded and loquacious, a person talking about what he did. According to his business card, the J had no period after it. He was politely telling a radio reporter that he had no idea what the opening ceremonies might involve.

I double-checked: Steel? The outermost layer of columns in the Nest, the key to the structure, was indeed steel, he said. Steel boxes, in cross section, of various thicknesses. The thicket of columns on the inside, crisscrossing the concourses, was concrete, mostly. All the columns were painted silver, to match.

Liu was late to the press conference. Till that moment, the track open had run precisely on time. The press applauded as he entered. Were the false starts part of his strategy? The first one, the day before, had been deliberate, he said. “Today, I just started a bit faster than the gun,” he said, through the official translator. What about the pressure and publicity surrounding him? “I just keep a balance mentally.”

Who, a perky male reporter with an American accent asked, would he describe as his role model? “Zhende hai meiyou,” Liu said, beginning his response. (“I don’t have any particular role model or idols,” the translator said.)

He had expected to win the Good Luck event, he said. “The most important thing for me is in August,” he said. A female reporter from Hong Kong had two questions: How would he handle the pressure at the Olympics? And would he be wearing his sexy gear then? “I think it all depends on myself,” he said, about the pressure. As for the outfit, “I think this is only given by Nike for a trial.”

It was near midnight when the press conference adjourned. Someone had drawn a heart around the characters for “Liu Xiang” on the white board by the door. I had a long hike ahead to get a cab. First, though, on my way out of the stadium, I veered back to the outer row of columns and knocked on one with force. It rang.

A giant rendering of Liu Xiang’s eyes looked down from the Nike store on Wangfujing, the downtown street of department stores and shopping malls, where I was shopping for children’s books for a baby shower. Inside the store, a mannequin in a Team China track outfit was posed leaping over a hurdle. China’s athletic program had been subdivided among the international sports-marketing superpowers: Adidas had secured the exclusive rights to the uniforms they would wear on the medal stand, so Nike was investing heavily in the outfits for competition proper. The racks were full of Chinese national team gear; you could dress up as a Chinese wrestler, if you so chose. There were basketball uniforms, but in a fit of Western individualism, the only jersey was Yi Jianlian’s. Yao Ming was with Reebok, now owned by Adidas.

Liu’s victory in the Good Luck hurdles was the last win he would get in the spring. A week later, he dropped out of a meet in New York with a sore hamstring. In his next meet, he would be disqualified for a false start. Then, early in June, in a meet without Liu, Dayron Robles of Cuba would win the 110-meter hurdles with a time of 12.87 seconds, shaving a hundredth of a second off the record. Liu Xiang was no longer the world’s fastest hurdler. The public was not too concerned. By then Liu was off the circuit, resting and training for August, the only event that mattered.