Beijing Welcomes You

When we finally got into an argument with the Chinese security, it was over an oddly American thing. We had gone to Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, on a short trip for Christina’s job. Most of the troubles on the trip had been the usual Chinese ones: the flight from Beijing had been late because the whole plane, in this egalitarian workers’ paradise, was held to wait for a tardy first-class passenger to show up. Someone somewhere on the flight had lit up a cigarette. There was violent, tossing turbulence. The beverage service ran out of water. When the baby finally started screaming from it all, the steward came back to our seats, near the pitching tail of the plane, and asked us to stop him from crying because the other passengers were trying to sleep. The way out of the Urumqi airport was clogged by an almost impassable pressing crowd. Because of the Olympics, our driver told us after helping us squeeze free, people were not allowed to wait inside the terminal for arrivals anymore, so they just formed a mob outside.

Then, as we headed back through the airport, for the flight back to Beijing, the security screeners pulled aside our diaper bag. The airport-security wringer was a fairly new feature of life in China. When I started traveling between the United States and the People’s Republic in 2004, only one side of the trip had airports that felt like they belonged to a totalitarian state: America. The home of the Bill of Rights was where you had to strip off your shoes and belt, where checked baggage would be diverted and pawed through by inspectors, where guards would stop you if you tried to make a cell-phone call from baggage claim. Eventually, after the liquid-explosives scare, it was where you couldn’t even bring a drink of water on the flight.

What was America’s real contribution to global culture in the twenty-first century? In the airport line, as in so many other parts of modern life, China was catching up with the way things were done in the United States. While our actors and activists lectured China about how the advance of liberty cannot and must not be stopped, the American experience was sending out the opposite message: in a dangerous world, freedom and privacy must yield to the demands of law and order.

In March, state-run news had reported that a passenger or passengers had tried to bring down a flight out of Urumqi, using gasoline as the would-be weapon. The details of the gasoline plot were never quite clear, but the result was: soon after, China instituted an American-style liquids ban of its own.

It is necessary, in a campaign against terrorism, to emphasize insecurity. A worried public is more cooperative with its protectors. The rioting in Lhasa didn’t undermine public confidence in the Chinese government’s legitimacy; it fortified it: These are the kind of people we have to deal with.

China had pledged greater openness and adherence to human-rights norms, but it had also promised that the Beijing Games would be safe. And safety came first. Beijing was hosting a major international event, in what everyone agreed were perilous times. The New York Times had reported that American companies, including IBM, Honeywell, and General Electric, were supplying hardware and software to help Beijing build a state-of-the-art surveillance system to protect itself for the Games. Any terrorist who tried to disrupt Beijing would confront a security network of hundreds of thousands of cameras, programmed to automatically recognize suspicious people or detect unusual crowd behavior. That surveillance ability—to identify unwanted faces, to prevent the unexpected—would still be there after the Olympics were over, for the Public Security Bureau to use however it might choose.

On our way out of Urumqi, the X-ray machine said we were suspect people. Two officers, a man and a woman, were hand-inspecting bags that had flunked the scan. From the diaper bag, they produced two bottles of sunscreen, mine and the baby’s. I constantly forget to put sunscreen in checked baggage. The last time I’d forgotten, it had just been the baby’s sun lotion, and an officer had waved it through out of sympathy. But two bottles? I stood convicted of boneheadedness. The sunscreen (irreplaceable on the Chinese market) went into the bin by the officers’ feet, with other fliers’ cast-off bottled water and snacks.

Technically, baby food was illegal under the new Chinese security rules. This marked one of the key differences between Chinese and American security procedures. In America, the rules might be intrusive, inconvenient, and pointless—and they could be foolishly and inflexibly applied—but customers expected there to be, at bottom, some sign of reasonableness. Passengers need to be able to take their medicine on a plane, or take out their contact lenses. Babies need to eat.

What had once been easy had now skipped past American-grade difficulty, into the impossible. It was a little before six p.m., the baby’s dinnertime. If he didn’t eat, he would scream all the way back to the capital. We offered to feed him right there, at the security checkpoint. None of the baby food would go onto the plane, except inside the baby. But the officers were inflated, petty authority seizing a petty problem. Baby food was not allowed. It had to be confiscated.

Somehow, while I argued with the female officer, my wife got her hands on one of the jars and began spooning fruit into the baby’s mouth. The baby did not burst into flames. Unimpressed, the officer held on to the second jar. Perhaps the blueberries were a decoy, and the strained peas were the real explosives.

Was terrorist attack against the Olympics a genuine threat? It was hard to know in Beijing, as it is in New York. Besides the reported airplane attack, there had been a bus explosion in Shanghai in the spring, and the government had reported raids in the west on heavily armed Uighur and Tibetan groups, including finds of weapons cached in Buddhist monasteries. The armed-monk plot sounded far-fetched to American ears, but it was not much more implausible than the kung fu terrorist cell our own government announced it had broken up in Miami, or the feebleminded alleged schemes to flood Lower Manhattan or cut the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge with wire nippers.

In Beijing, the police were stopping foreigners more and more frequently on the street, even in expat-friendly neighborhoods, and asking to see their passports and visas. Every outsider was a potential security threat. Visa renewals had replaced air quality as the inescapable topic of conversation. The year before, declaring you wanted to get out of the country for the Olympics was an affectation, a way for old China hands to express their dismay at the thought of a once challenging city being overrun by soft hordes of first-time tourists. But it was becoming a practical decision—better to wait out the security squeeze back home than to put up with the new annoyances.

We managed to pry the peas away, and we shoveled them into the baby’s mouth. Our terrorist co-conspirators in the baby-food industry had outwitted security, replacing the explosives with harmless vegetables. Mack finished the entire jar. When he was done, we tossed the dripping jars back into the confiscation bin, as hard as we dared, and were rewarded with the sound of breaking glass.

The press briefings kept coming. The Beijing Tourism Administration announced that the city of Beijing now had 815 star-rated hotels, 5,892 lodging places overall, 336,000 guest rooms, and 660,000 beds. In 2001, the city had promised the IOC 350 more star-rated hotels, for a total of 800 by the time of the Games. Two hundred thousand staffers would receive training in foreign languages and etiquette. The color of towels, and the softness of those towels, would be standardized citywide. There would be a city tourism manual and a television channel dedicated to tourism. There would be a hotline to a tourists’ call center.

Would there be tourists? The forecast was for 450,000 to 500,000, no more than there would be in a normal summer. The Olympics was driving off as many people as it was attracting. What about the problems people were having getting tourist visas? “Well, all Olympic host cities will strengthen security measures during the Olympic Games.... Beijing has done likewise, and we have strengthened reviews on tourist applications. I believe if the applicants follow our requirements, for example identification of their hotels, I believe they will get their visas smoothly.”

What were the reservation rates at the moment? For the five-star hotels, the rate was 77 percent. For four-stars, it was 44 percent. The shortfall was “not entirely” due to the security measures. Three-star and lower hotels “have plenty of rooms.” The wintertime shortage of reservations, it now appeared, was failed speculation.

Then came the press conference on medical preparations. There would be 5,800 hospital beds available, and the city was laying in a supply of blood types suitable for foreigners. Less than one percent of the Chinese population had Rh-negative blood. The public health system would be prepared for black plague and food poisoning alike.

What about transparency in the handling of health matters? “Open, fair, and transparent is the responsibility of our government.” Jin Dapeng, the party secretary of the municipal health bureau, was a heavy-faced man with wavy hair, a touch of gray at the temples, in a blue suit, blue shirt, and blue tie. He spoke slowly and oratorically. His eyebrows were impressive. He had gone into Tangshan, where an earthquake killed something like a quarter of a million people in 1976, as a twenty-nine-year-old medical staffer, he said. Unlike the ongoing spectacle of Sichuan, the extent of the calamity in Tangshan had been a mystery: Mao was on his deathbed, the Cultural Revolution was falling apart, and the death toll was treated as an internal matter. “At the time, the government wasn’t open enough to release the information,” Jin said. “This time, in Sichuan, you could witness the openness and transparency.”

“We will prepare ourselves for all kinds of daunting difficulties,” Jin said. “We will dedicate ourselves to achieving our goal, despite all kinds of difficulties.... We will go through this historical moment, and history will tell others that our medical team is capable and professional. . . .” He went on to a booming finish: “Just as the Chinese people have demonstrated in the earthquake. They have shown their strong character. We will also show our strong character.”

Across from the alley mouth, the corner store and the corner itself were in total disorder. Inside the market, the cold case was all that remained of the grocery section. The rest had been gutted; torn-out ceiling tiles lay on the floor. The old overhead signs, announcing the “Family Planning” and “Little Edible” departments in English, were gone. All the surviving grocery goods had been crammed into the middle, where the fruit and eyeglasses used to be. A curtain of the striped plastic fabric imperfectly separated the work zone from the checkout, where the cashier was coughing from the dust.

The public toilet across the intersection was now four-fifths demolished, with only the east end standing. The newsstand had been shuttered and moved, in its entirety, a few yards to the rear. The vendor had set out papers and magazines in the open, on racks and a table, next to where the stand had been. The bicycle repairman who used to work alongside the toilet had set up shop on the amputated tile floor of the newsstand itself, inside the abandoned half-octagon foundation.

For Mack’s first birthday, we took him to the zoo in the morning to see the Earthquake Pandas. Officially, they had been booked as the Olympic Pandas, but the Sichuan earthquake had struck the heart of the panda reserve, sending the collection of young pandas north ahead of schedule, as refugees.

The earthquake recovery remained the ongoing counterpoint to the Olympic preparations. Christina had found another ballet class to go to, a self-organized band of amateur dance aficionados—a shipping-industry logistics worker, a cabdriver—who would find empty studios and convene via text message. One of their preferred sites was the studio of the dance corps of the Chinese Coal Mining Association. Like other Chinese organizations, up to and including the People’s Liberation Army, the coal association maintained a cultural wing. Since the dancers were frequently away, entertaining the coal miners, the studio was available. One night, there was a fund-raiser going on there, with genuine Sichuan orphans as the guests.

On the taxi drivers’ radio station, an announcer was saying that taxis ought to make it possible for passengers to use child safety seats. By now, we had guiltily gone native; Mack had outgrown his infant seat, and lugging a larger version around from cab to cab was too much to contemplate. Also, the radio warned, one should be careful not to blow cold air on the babies.

People lined the windows in the Olympic Panda House, waiting for the pandas to show up. Around eight a.m., keepers wearing rubber boots began strewing armloads of bamboo around the enclosure. Then, to cheers, the pandas were released from a door in the rear, eight of them in all. They were two years old, a bit taller on all fours than knee-high to an adult human. Appearing all at once, they gave the impression of actually, adorably, tumbling into view. Panda abundance was new to me; I was used to the display at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., with the expensively leased pandas displayed in individual settings, like the Hope Diamond, to be contemplated by reverent viewers. A young female keeper, skipping and clapping, led the pandas forward and spread them out at different piles of food, so everyone could see. The surge of panda admirers pinned me against the window frame.

We retreated to the outside. Next door and a little downhill was the Asia Games Panda House, built in honor of the 1990 games in Beijing. Outside it, in a pit with a sliding board and teeter-totter overgrown with weeds, a full-grown panda was sitting in near anonymity. People gave it a glance as they hurried toward the Olympic Pandas. “The Olympic Pandas can’t be that lazy and dirty,” someone said.

Away from the pandas, at a photo-taking station, a young chimp in a rugby shirt slumped between two zoo staffers, who were also slumped. The gorilla habitat was empty, with painted Chinese masks on the wall leering at the space where the apes would go. People plucked leaves off the shrubbery at random and fed them to the animals. Around one fair-sized glass enclosure, with open mesh at the top, a small crowd watched some exotic animals from abroad showing off their climbing skills: huanxiong, or “washing bears.” Procyon lotor. The raccoon.

Ice dancing was playing on the sports channel once known as CCTV-5, now renamed the CCTV Olympics channel. Odd hours of the TV day that might once have brought snooker or bullfighting now delivered Olympic preliminaries and Olympic retrospectives. One special consisted of footage of opening ceremonies from the past, including a slow-motion replay of the moment in Seoul in 1988 when a few white doves, lingering after a mass release early in the ceremony, perched in the stadium’s cauldron and were incinerated by the lighting of the Olympic flame.

So the ice dancers twirled and glittered on dozens of televisions at once, all along the shore of the scenic lake called Houhai, through the open windows and French doors of dozens of bars. Houhai, part of a string of landscaped lakes leading north and west from alongside the Forbidden City, was a phenomenon of the New Beijing—a quiet stretch of parkland devoured in less than a decade by a nightlife land rush. A few bars where the hutongs met the lakeshore had attracted expats and Beijingers with money to spend, and those bars had attracted imitators, and the imitators had attracted more people, more money, and more imitators. The chain reaction would run out of shoreline before it ran out of fuel. There were restaurants in the mix, and a Starbucks, and a plaza at one end where middle-aged and elderly Beijingers would waltz in the open air. But those were grace notes against the frantic, eagerly debauched air of a boardwalk during spring break—tinged by the interethnic May-December satisfaction of Chinese-expat couples on the make.

I was talking to a woman named Eva Shen, who had stepped outside of the club she co-owned. It was not a lady bar, though it could have been mistaken for one; it was a place where couples or friends might go for drinks. Over the door, in glowing characters, was the Chinese name of the club, Yuwang Chengshi; above that, in larger letters, was its other name: SEX AND DA CITY.

The movie of Sex and the City was opening in America, and the sign on the bar had made me curious about the outpost of intellectual property. I had long since discovered that my job for The New York Observer was too recursive and confusing to explain to people in Beijing—a newspaper reporter who reported on newspapers and reporters?—but I recognized that people would be excited and satisfied if I simply told them it was the paper where the “Sex and the City” column was published.

But in what shape had this stylized concept of New York life arrived on the shores of the imperial lakes? “Of course, nobody wants to be Samantha,” Shen said. It was a warm Saturday night. She spoke English and wore yoga pants, a white T-shirt, and flip-flops. (“I do yoga a lot,” she said.) Her hair was reddish and pulled back. Around her, the night was full of women in short-shorts, teetering heels, sparkly things; among the women were all the men looking for women.

Sex and Da City opened in 2003, Shen said. She and about a dozen friends had been out at a nightspot called the World of Suzy Wong Club, and everyone agreed they might as well open a bar of their own. When they convened to discuss the idea again in the daytime, the group had dwindled to five. When it came time to talk about investing money, Shen said, it was down to four women.

That night, she said, she went home and watched HBO. And right there was a show—she had already been a fan—about “exactly four girls,” pursuing independence and glamour in the big city. Before Shen and her partners went to the bank, another one of them dropped out, but she had already settled on the name. Replacing “the” with “da” was, by Chinese standards, a fairly respectful nod to trademark rights.

Sex and Da City was a modest-sized club, with a square floor plan and a square bar in the middle, with a two-story mural of Marilyn Monroe above the liquor bottles. Jodi Xu, a reporter born in Shanghai and bound for journalism school in New York, had met me at the club to help with Chinese-language interviews. A DJ booth was playing hip-hop, loudly. Marilyn’s face looked into a three-sided loft where tables were 500 yuan. The drinks menu was long and included an “Absolut Astronaut Shooter,” a “Sex and Da City Absolut Cosmopolitan,” and an “Olympic Cocktail.” The last was orange-ish and fruity, and it came in a big martini glass with a cherry notched onto its rim.

On each side of the bar was a shiny metal pole, running up to the facing of the loft. Around eleven p.m., a young woman in a snug black dress and shiny boots that rose past her knees climbed up on the bar and began dancing around and on the pole. The dancer had a cheery smile and wore square-cut bangs down past her eyebrows. She danced in a matter-of-fact style, wrapping it up by shinnying up the pole, as if in gym class, and doing a back bend.

Another dancer, skinnier and in a blousy, shorter dress, took the next shift. Men paused outside in the lane, goggling through the clear part of the glass door. Shen said she added the pole dancers in 2005. “Actually, there is a school, a pole dancers’ school, in Beijing,” she said. Occasionally, she said, the district police would come by and tell them to make sure nobody did anything too provocative.

Inside, a Chinese couple in their twenties were having a drink at one of the tables. The man told Jodi and me that they had come to the club because of the pole dancers. It was the only pole dancing on the whole street, he said. The dancers used to be more sexy, and they had more moves, he said, but the police had made them cut down on the erotic dancing for the Olympics, to keep the city from seeming sleazy.

Up in the loft, by the top of the stairs, the other dancer was slouched in a chair, wearing earbuds. She took them out to talk to us about Sex and Da City. She came to Beijing from Shanxi Province two years ago, she said, and she had been an instructor at the Beijing pole-dancing school. She danced ten minutes a shift—she held up her index fingers to make a cross, the Chinese symbol for “ten”—eight shifts a night, till one a.m.

Downstairs at the center of the bar, a Chinese woman in a dull-patterned dress had been sitting for a long time with her back to the door, talking to no one, stooped over a lowball glass. A bartender set a bottle of Corona beer, with a lime in the neck, beside her. Then he put fresh ice in a glass and poured the beer over it for her.

Another thing about Chinese people would be that Chinese people love Kobe Bryant. The NBA Finals were on, Bryant’s Lakers against the Celtics, and Ma Jian was hosting a viewing party at a sports bar. The bar took up the third floor of a hotel outside the Jianguomen interchange on the Second Ring; across the roadway and a little to the north was a surviving piece of the city wall, topped by the platform of the Ancient Observatory and its bronze astronomical implements, or replicas thereof. The original implements had been looted by Western powers during the Boxer Rebellion, and only some had been returned—an early one of China’s accumulated twentieth-century historical indignities.

Ma was still working on the financing for his sports-education plans. Meanwhile, he had been doing NBA announcing work for a new sports network called CSPN, a collaboration among provincial TV stations. The network, whose logo lettering bore a strong resemblance to that of ESPN, would carry the satellite video feed from America, and Ma would supply Chinese commentary over it. CSPN was not available to viewers in Beijing, but the studios were down at the south end of the city. I’d joined Ma there one frigid winter morning, as he broadcast one of the most boring matchups imaginable—Yi Jianlian and the lousy Milwaukee Bucks against the awful New York Knicks. People wanted to see Yi, even if there was nothing else worth watching about the game. The studio was cavernous (the largest sports studio in Asia, Ma said), cold, and deserted: no receptionist, no one bringing coffee, no lights on in the lobby or stairwells. The Bucks took a commanding lead in the third quarter, then gave it all back. Ma narrated the action—“You le!” he called as a shot went up. Got it!—and supplied occasional notes on strategy, as much as he thought the audience could tolerate. “They’re not very knowledgeable about the game,” he said, ruefully. “I wish they could understand.” If they were technically minded, viewers would have wanted to see some other game. Yi scored four points and sat on the bench in the final minutes as the Knicks finished their comeback.

The NBA had vanished from Chinese television after the earthquake, under a national mourning ban on lighthearted programming. Now the NBA had reportedly donated 14 million yuan to earthquake relief, and the grief had eased enough that the finals were back on TV, and the league was sponsoring a party for 200 people to watch game four, with a breakfast buffet.

Ma was in a curtained-off VIP lounge, preparing to announce the game for the party guests. He wore jeans with a Kobe Bryant jersey over a pink polo shirt. The jersey was cut to be fashionably baggy on someone much smaller than Ma; on his actual player’s build, the proportions were snug and short-waisted. His cohost, Gu Yu, was younger and skinnier, and he wore a Paul Pierce jersey. On the way to the hotel, there had been a billboard of Yi Jianlian. Twenty years ago, Ma said, he could have been the player on the billboard.

To emphasize its goodwill toward China, the NBA had sent over a platoon of Miami Heat cheerleaders. They arrived in sparkle-trimmed warm-ups, toting black-and-white Heat bags. Bananas and bottled water were sitting out, and the cheerleaders asked very politely if they could have some, their manner so winsome and multiethnically all-American that I felt a pang of homesickness for the first time in months. Ma tore off a banana and handed it over. One of them plugged in a curling iron, and it heated up fast. We warned them that the Chinese current was 220. They had already burnt out one curling iron on the trip.

Chairs had been set up facing a stage, where a full-color NBA Finals backdrop was flanked by two big projection screens. Roving spotlights projected Lakers and Celtics logos. Before the game, public-service announcements for earthquake relief played over and over; LeBron James and Yao Ming spoke somberly into the camera, wearing plain gray sweatshirts. Sichuan’s tragedy belonged to the world.

Ma and Gu warmed up the crowd, then sat down in the front row with microphones to comment on the action. The big screen was bleary, and they quickly relocated off to the side, where Ma could follow the action on a smaller, crisper television. The crowd cheered as Los Angeles surged out to a big lead. A fan borrowed my pen to go get Ma’s autograph.

During one of the breaks, the Miami cheerleaders came on and danced to “The Heat Is On,” wearing string-bikini-style outfits and hats with the Heat logo. They danced with the force to project to a 15,000-seat arena, and it was impressive, and a little alarming, to be in a small space with them.

A woman in a halter top and satiny pants sat down by Ma. She was a friend of his, she said, and she worked for a modeling firm that hired European models for shoots in China. For the Olympics, she would be working with another company, one that projected advertising onto inflatable domes. It would be installing a big setup in Chaoyang Park for the appliance company Haier. “I didn’t know he was so famous,” she said, as Ma worked the crowd from the stage. “When he was famous, I wasn’t born yet.”

The Olympics were less than two months away. New street signs were up on the major roads, directing the way to the athletic venues. When we took Mack to the hospital for a checkup, the massage parlors across the street were shut. A friend bought a bootleg copy of No Country for Old Men, and the paper sleeve inside the package had the Beijing 2008 logo on it.

Olympic iconography had crept into everything, even where it made no sense. The company that delivered Pampers and baby wipes would throw in a bonus toy if we spent enough money. One of the prizes was possibly the most unsafe toy ever created: a ball made of two clear plastic hemispheres tinted a sickly glowing green, its surface studded with soft, thimble-like plastic cleats, which pulled off easily and appeared to be the perfect size to clog a child’s windpipe. When you tugged a nail-like metal pin sticking out of the ball, an off-center-weighted electric motor in the middle would begin spinning, causing the ball to hop and flip and skitter around the floor on the cleats, while LEDs inside flashed and the thing played an off-tempo, flat-pitched version of “Axel F.” There were five irregular-shaped vent holes on each side of the twitching, flashing, tootling ball—holes cut out in the tiny, unmistakable, counterfeit silhouettes of Beibei, Jingjing, Huanhuan, Yingying, and Nini.

Out by Dongzhimen Bridge, the giant bronze vessel had vanished. Its pedestal was wrapped in red-white-and-blue tarps, with rubble peeking out the top. On our alley, down at the corner, the newsstand was rapidly losing its new piece of ground. The digging closed in on it, till it stood alone on a little peninsula, surrounded by trenchwork. Then, one day, it jumped diagonally across the intersection, to the corner in front of the now vacant bank. The public restroom was completely demolished, but when I reported to Christina that it was gone without a trace, she challenged the premise. No trace? Was the smell really gone, too? (It was not.)

I had begun, over time, to have a tenuous sort of faith in the promises of improved air quality for the Olympics. Unquestionably, since 2004, the air had been getting better—not only in the “blue sky” count, but in the number of days when the color of the sky was objectively blue. “Better,” in this case, meant “less bad,” but that was the point: with nowhere to go but up, things did seem to be going up. In May, the authorities had presented the details of their plan to get clear air for the Games: by August, even more industry would be shut down; half the private cars would be off the road each day; construction—or at least excavation and concrete work—would be halted.

As June stretched on, though, I wondered if I was being a Pollyanna. Construction showed no signs of slowing; crews were already digging and pouring the buildings that would open after the Olympics, when Beijing’s future continued. Cement mixers had been lining up at the construction pit, ten or more at a time. Dust clouds rose to mingle with the haze. The air quality reached the don’t-go-outside level, then got worse.

On a particularly gray afternoon, I set out for English class. Thanks to an introduction by Big Mack in May, I had fallen in with a group of retirees in the Dongsi neighborhood, a designated Olympic Community, who were studying English in preparation for August. Showing up in the classroom had automatically made me a sort of adjunct instructor, available to explain why was it preferable to say “had never imagined” rather than “have never imagined,” and why you would say “How long have you studied English?” instead of “How long have you learned English?” In return, the students were providing me with their own advice and opinions: I should take the 106 bus or the 24 bus from Dongzhimen to get to class; my community, Hujiayuan, was a very famous one, with rich and colorful activities; a daytime ayi like ours should be paid only 1,000 yuan a month.

English improvement, like pollution control, was not a matter of straight-line progress. A banner in the third-floor classroom read “Public Welfore English Class or Citizens of Dongsi Olympic Community.” This was better than I would have done trying to render that sort of phrase in Chinese, but it did capture the problem. The official line on English was that embarrassing errors in signage would all be rectified before the Olympics. There were, in practice, two difficulties with that plan. The first was in the strange, pedantic not-quite-accuracy of the language police. An official municipal magazine, presenting a top-ten list of errors in public signage, named such celebrated examples as “Racist Park” (for “Minorities Park”) and “The Slippery Are Very Crafty” (for “Slippery When Wet”), but also gave, as self-evidently hilarious solecisms, “Room Price” in a hotel for “Room Rate,” and “Eye Hospital” for “Ophthalmology Hospital.” (The last was evidently based on a misunderstanding of why there had previously been merriment over an “Anus Hospital.”)

The other trouble was that new English signs were spreading too fast for any correction effort to keep pace with. No matter how plentiful the correction squads, they would always be outnumbered by the sign installers. The new plastic-lettered storefronts, still multiplying in all directions, were a trove of typos and befuddling usage: “FOOT AND DADY MASSAGE”; “Different quality trade clothing”; “CLG A RETTE SHOP”; “Meat Patty Explode.” A trashcan at the Imperial Academy was divided into bins for “Recycled” and “Organism.” In the Olympic Panda house, all the signs and banners rendered “Beijing” itself as “Baijing.”

Outside the classroom, in the community office compound, a count-down sign said there were forty-nine days till the Olympics. It felt further off that that. When I got upstairs, the lights were off and only one student was there—the electricity to the compound was out and the class had decamped for a different community center, on the next alley to the south. I trailed along behind the college-student instructors through a maze of cross-lanes to get there.

The substitute classroom was in a renovated courtyard house, around a big table in one of the subbuildings. A CCTV crew was filming, and the space along the edges of the room was packed. A sign on the wall read “Great the Olympics / Learning English / Go with 2008.” I had been spending most of my time with Sha Meiyuan, an oval-faced woman who was retired from her job as a quality inspector in a watch factory, and with her friend Hu Yuesheng, who had curled hair, smiling cheeks, and sharp eyes. “My brain is no good,” Hu had told me last time, cheerfully, making a study example out of self-deprecation.

I sat down with them on the far side of the table, and they brought out the words and phrases they wanted to know about: “uncomfortable,” “sweltering,” “humid.” We worked some in reverse, from Chinese to English: shi . . . humid; men . . . stuffy; men re . . . muggy. Then more English. “The room feels cool.” “It’s cool in the room.” There was rain in the forecast. How do you say that in English? “There will be a storm.” “There will be thunderstorms” (or: “a thunderstorm”). “There will be heavy showers.” Tea was served in paper cups. “The tea is too strong.” Were we burnishing Beijing’s credentials as a cosmopolitan city? The ladies were using language to say what they wanted to say. “I am sleepy.” “I will take a nap.” More: “I take a nap after lunch every afternoon.” “We learned many sentences, but we can’t remember them.”

In the evening, I met Jodi Xu in one of the sleek white towers of the Jianwai Soho complex, at the offices of Soojin Dance Team, the cheerleaders from the baseball exhibition. I had kept the business card of the director, Soojin Cho, and e-mailed to ask if the dance squad was involved at all in the Olympic cheerleading.

“I’m the director of the basketball tournament,” Cho said. What she meant was that she was in charge of lining up the non-basketball part of the program in the basketball arena. The entrance to her office suite was lined with bags and bags of cheerleading equipment and costumes, with spangles and pompoms spilling out. She wore a Guess T-shirt and red gym shorts that said “Junior Varsity”; far below the shorts was a pair of low-top sneakers. Two little dogs ran in and out of her office. Their names were Mikey and Mini, she said. A carton labeled “Kimchi Ramen” sat in one corner.

Cho spoke in Korean-accented Mandarin, with Jodi translating whenever a break in the narrative stream happened to present itself. She hadn’t been sleeping lately, she said, because she had been fighting with the construction crew that was supposed to be building a new dance studio for her. She had paid 90 percent of the price—the renovations were costing 200,000 yuan—but she wouldn’t pay the last 10 percent till the work was done, and the workers said they wouldn’t finish till she paid the last 10 percent.

The Olympics, she said, would be a good chance to promote Asian cultural elements in the dance program, “instead of just letting the good-looking girls with big boobs show their cute faces.” It was the first time there would be performances during the Olympic basketball games, she said. Asian-themed dance would be part of a spectrum of international arenaclass entertainment: Ukrainian cheerleaders were coming in to perform, and she was planning to have a trampoline-dunk squad.

Cho was born to a “pretty poor family” in Korea, she said. “My dad was a taxi driver,” she said, and the family lived in a basement apartment. She wanted to study dance, but there wasn’t enough money for dance school, so she took aerobics classes instead. After high school, she became an aerobics instructor, and a trip to Sydney for an aerobics workshop convinced her life would be better outside Korea. “It’s been changing,” she said, “but when I was living in Korea, the society would rate women by how well they married.... I don’t want my life to be decided by someone else.”

Her choice of a land of opportunity was limited by her budget: China was close, and it was cheap. So in 1994, she moved to Beijing, with $4,000 to her name. When the money ran out, after half a year, she got a job teaching aerobics in a small gym for 50 yuan, or about six dollars, an hour. “I needed to teach in Chinese,” she said, “so my Chinese improved fast.”

Her classes were popular, and she put effort into designing her clothes and giving a lively presentation. By 1999, she was working in bigger gyms, earning 2,000 yuan an hour, and appearing in exercise programs on television, and she was hired by the Chinese Aerobics Association as a foreign expert.

That was her first career peak, she said. Then her relationship with the state aerobics administration soured—they found her teaching style “unprofessional,” she said—and she clashed with gym management. “A lot of the bosses asked me out at night to go to karaoke bars with their investors. I said, ‘I’m a gym teacher, not an escort.’”

She quit the gym work and started her own team to perform aerobics demonstrations. When the World Cup came to Korea and Japan in 2002, she sent the team as a cheering dance squad for China—China’s first cheerleaders. “The Koreans felt it was kind of unpatriotic to represent another country,” she said. When the plane with the dancers returned to China, photographers were waiting. “I felt like a celebrity,” she said. She published an autobiography in Korean.

The Chinese Basketball Association invited her to develop cheerleaders for the league. “I didn’t understand basketball,” she said. Sometimes, when the game stopped for a quick substitution, the dancers would jump out on the floor by mistake—Cho acted out a false start, by way of illustration. Fans were unfamiliar with the dance-team entertainment concept, too; out in the provinces, they assumed the women had come from Beijing to cheer against the home team, and pelted them with sunflower seeds.

So Cho made her first trip to the United States, to see the Laker Girls in action. She gazed upward, remembering. “I paid a lot of attention to the dancing. I said, ‘I promise, CBA cheerleaders will be catching up with NBA cheerleaders.’” She began to incorporate Chinese themes—ethnic-minority dancing—into the team’s work.

Then the CBA fired her. One of Korea’s major exports to China is drama; its various soap-opera series, dubbed into Mandarin, are usually running on several stations at once. Jodi ventured that Cho’s story sounded like one of those. Cho said she never watched the Korean shows. “All those TV dramas are always talking about how you love someone you’re not supposed to love, and then when you get together, the person is dying.” (This was, for someone who didn’t watch Korean soaps, a pretty accurate summary.) “My life is more of a TV drama than the TV dramas, so I don’t need to watch,” she said. “Even though my love life wasn’t the juiciest for the last couple of years . . . everything in my life is not less dramatic than Angelina Jolie’s.”

The replacement cheerleaders, she said, were no good. She launched into an extended narrative of their shortcomings, crowding out the translation, talking with her hands. In the middle of it, she reached up and lifted an imaginary object off her shoulders, tucking it under her arms—one of the Ducks mascots, removing its head on court. Cho had been as dismayed by it as I was.

The dance squad kept performing at functions for business enterprises, which paid as much per person as a CBA game paid the whole squad. And Cho did choreography for dancers promoting Coca-Cola and other corporate clients. But she had wanted to find a way to contribute to 2008. “Even though I’m not a Chinese person, I felt like I wanted to prepare for the Olympics,” she said.

The organizing committee, however, told her that they had already lined up cheerleaders—Cho’s old nemesis, the Chinese Aerobics Administration, had gotten into the cheering business on its own. “I said, okay, if you don’t want me to get involved with the Olympics, I’ll go off on my own.” As the Good Luck beach volleyball event approached, though, the organizers had doubts—senior leaders would be there, and the official dance squad was underwhelming. Cho, at a cheerleading competition in Hong Kong, got a call with two weeks to spare. She flew to Korea and bought 400 pounds of costumes, and slept in the office. Cho pointed to the spot on the floor where she’d lain.

What I’d seen at the beach volleyball grounds—one set of cheerleaders performing while the other looked indifferent—had been a showdown between the competing squads. Afterward, the beach volleyball and basketball cheering duties for the Olympics were awarded to the Soojin Dance Team, with the other team going to other events. “They saw who was the best, and they gave the job to them,” Cho said.

The triumph at Chaoyang helped Cho force another dance-off, this one to get her team back into the CBA. The chairman of one of the league’s corporate sponsors, Cho said, was dead set against letting her team perform, because he thought her dancers weren’t pretty enough. “The team leaders of the other teams were standing by him like bodyguards,” she said. “They were treating my team very differently from the other ones.” She told the chairman that men like him were the reason Chinese women became mistresses, why the generation born in the eighties would sleep with someone for money to buy a cell phone. “I was very angry leaving the room,” she said. “At the entrance of the building, there was a cleaning lady who was sweeping the floor. She said, ‘If we had a vote, you were the best team.’ When I heard that, I started to cry.” Cho acted out the moment, the way her team had gathered around her, while she had pounded out furious text messages to the chairman through her tears. He began sending her text messages back, apologizing, and the CBA duties were divided three ways, with the Soojin Dance Team alternating with two teams from the aerobics authority.

Cho had a saying, she said: “TIC: This Is China.” “China is very sexy,” she said. This was a generalization about China I had not encountered before. It looks very simple from outside, she said, but once you’ve been in the country a year or two, you realize—“Mo bu dao,” she said. You can’t get hold of it.

The usual tone of deference one heard from Olympic participants was not forthcoming. She brought up the subject of the corps of women who made the medal-presentations—young, maidenly figures, selected for symmetry, height, and poise, whose training photos were saturating the press. In front of the cameras—Cho pulled herself upright and smiled overdemurely, holding up a pretend medal with both hands. Away from the cameras—she flopped back against the window, slovenly, puffing fiercely on an imaginary cigarette. “Also the mascots,” she said. “I don’t understand why those five mascots were released. The purpose of the mascots is to be liked by all the people. They’re not serving this need.”

Outside the tower, dusk and pollution were annihilating the view. A violent downpour was on its way. “I used to be a very typical Korean girl when I was in primary school,” Cho said. “Very quiet, very introverted.... I became something that is not a woman, not a man. Something in between.... When I was training students, I beat them up.

Her ambitions went beyond dancing. She pulled out a proposal for a reality show, to be called Cheerleader Fever, in which women would work to become CBA dancers: “As girls from the sophisticated cities such as Shanghai and Beijing bump up against girls from rural inner China, sparks fly as cultural and regional differences become evident.” Another write-up proposed The Cho Show, a talk show hosted by “Oprah Winfrey with Tyra Banks’s figure.”