18.
CheerleadersBefore the Olympics, we had had to make one last visa run. Returning with our visas, entering the new Beijing, our final descent was into the familiar featureless gray haze. The opening ceremony was twenty-eight days away, but clouds and pollution were pulling the dusk forward into the day, now as before. On Terminal 3’s brand-new people-movers, people were not walking. Welcome back.
We cleared baggage claim and customs, with Mack perched atop the luggage cart, and exited into a thickening swarm of photographers. A stout little girl ahead of us had a bouquet thrust into her hand as shutters fired. The mainland and Taiwan had begun allowing direct flights, and we had arrived at the same time as the first return flight from Taipei. Men pushed carts piled high with cartons labeled “Made in Taiwan,” as camera crews focused on them.
When we’d left, the outbound plane supplied us with a copy of China Daily: “Visa policy will not deter visitors,” a front-page teaser said. “Those who apply to come to China for justifiable reasons will be given every convenience,” an official said in the story, on page three. The official “also denied reports that the visa policy had led to low hotel occupancy rates. He said hotel occupancy is affected by many factors, such as room prices and market fluctuations.”
In other news a Foreign Ministry spokesperson had said that Tibet was not open for discussion at international conferences. Hedgehogs and squirrels were finding their way into the Olympic Forest Park. (Hedgehogs?) A wire-service story credited democracy as one of the reasons Denmark had polled as the happiest country in the world. China’s results were not listed. (I later looked up the results: China was in the lower middle of the pack, between the Czech Republic and Mali—a little below Taiwan, a little bit above Hong Kong.) An annual plague of locusts was spreading through Inner Mongolia “in the region’s three areas close to Beijing. . . . But there have been no reports in recent years of any swarms of locusts in the region flying to Beijing.”
Another paper greeted us on the flight back. A business-section story reported that companies not sponsoring the Olympics had been making inroads in customers’ consciousness, causing them to misidentify companies as sponsors. Besides the cloud of confusion around the tireless Liu Xiang, it quoted a Nielsen official saying that Adidas, the Olympic-certified brand of athletic wear, was barely more associated with the Games than the ubiquitous and homegrown Li Ning brand, a nonsponsor—“with identifying rates of the two at 34 percent and 29 percent respectively,” a Nielsen official said.
Out on the expressway, the newest tufty saplings were still propped up, their puffs of leaves fading green against the gray light. The left lane had been painted as a reserved lane for Olympics vehicles, with alternating white and yellow dashes and the Olympic flag painted in the roadway at intervals. Olympic banners hung from the light posts. We closed in on home, past apartment towers that were still empty concrete shells. As our cab reached the Fourth Ring, a wash of decorative lights came on, sweeping a cream-colored glow across a flyover ramp, then more white lights on the overpass, and then red lights on the pillars beside us as we passed under. There were new flowers in beds by the road, and people strolling in the park beyond. Public exercise equipment was in use.
The Yuyang Hotel, no longer gutted, had its sign lit. The approach to it, still strewn with construction material, was flanked by a shiny galvanized construction wall; a half-installed chandelier showed through a window. A man in a pink polo shirt walked down the steps, cell phone held to his ear, as workers kept laboring around him.
On the alley, the row of portable toilets that had replaced the restroom—squat-style toilets, with mounds of feces around the holes—had been taken away. A plain brick wall wrapped around the corner, as if that were all that had ever been there.
The next day was clear and blazing, the streets desolate in the baking sun. What people were outside were under parasols: silver ones, a yellow one, a pink one. The fruit bus was closed. The street leading out to Dongzhimen had been widened, and the roadway had been extended north across the center of the main Hujiayuan community compound—cutting all the way to the rear gate, plain asphalt where a plaza and fountain and benches had been.
Out back, to the west, the demolition crews had come through at last. I had begun to think the area might survive, but Beijing was too thorough for that. A Hyundai digger was parked on the north side of the street and a Komatsu on the south. The Peugeot service center back there was gone, as was the kitchen supply store and the stereo store—nothing but rubble on vacant lots, all the way out to the cross street, and beyond, a clear vista to the new Moma Linked Hybrid and its skybridges, as celebrated in a copy of The New Yorker that had arrived while we were gone. The light-green buses from the depot passed, one after another, out in the open. A bird fluttered by. A few people sat in the shade of a mature tree that had been exposed by the demolition. There was something oddly pastoral about it. The demolition zone wrapped around the corner. A giant statue of a roasted duck had emerged into view, on a surviving restaurant set back from the road. Men sorted through a tangle of shredded metal, brilliant silver in the sun.
Along the Third Ring, the potted evergreens from Christmastime had been replaced by potted palms. I began logging the surviving shabbiness: tattered awnings here, a slummy retail strip there. A scrim of shiny panels had gone up in front of the slummy strip, and there were scrims going up on apartment buildings, silvery gratelike things to hide the air conditioners and crumbling parts.
On Monday, Mack was going to preschool day camp. We rode there in a cab with the windows down, with Mack on my lap. On Outer Dongzhimen, I smelled something familiar—an acrid, sweet smell, which I mistook at first for the smell of welding and renovation. Why was I smelling it out on the boulevard? Then I saw the spray truck—pesticide again, being hosed onto the trees and the traffic alike at a quarter to nine in the morning. I dived for the window crank; a spray of insecticide drops splattered against the window as I closed it. The front window had stayed half open; I could taste the stuff. I swore and spat across the backseat, as the cabbie calmly flipped on the wipers to clear his windshield.
The old Beijing organizing committee media operation had shut down, to restart as the Olympic press center for media that had registered to cover the Games themselves. To get myself into future briefings and press tours, I picked up a noncredentialed Olympic journalist’s credential at the Beijing International Media Center, the press operation away from the Olympic Green. It was where the organizing committee press center had been two incarnations before—the shabby hotel now wholly renovated and clad in bluish-white glass, with numbers and letters etched into it in the various scripts of the world. On the way there, I passed still more apartments with new scrims hiding their air conditioners. The rows of the cover-ups were not entirely even, and with the old building surface showing in the gaps, the towers looked like thirty-story battered air filters.
The underpass to the media center was damp, with a smell like new sneakers sweated in for the first time. On a big television in the reception tent, I could see Wang Hui addressing the press. At the south end of the tent was a bookstore for foreign press: Paulo Coelho, Anne Tyler, Agatha Christie, Philip Roth. Yao: A Life in Two Worlds. One shelf featured photo books with such titles as Artists’ Nude Models—distributed through a cultural loophole in the antipornography laws.
Then it was off to the police substation to reregister as a foreigner. The officer at the registration desk had exchanged his usual uniform for a T-shirt that said “Get Pepsi for Surfing.” And he had acquired an assistant, a skinny young woman in a vest and a Levi’s T-shirt with a cartoon of a girlie-girl on it. The shaky radio signal of my Chinese comprehension was tuning in: Get me some tea in my mug, he told her. It’s the one with the little bear on it. The assistant brought him a cup with a bear on it. Maybe we were getting used to each other, the police and I.
The ayi was teaching Mack to clap along with a chant: “Huanying, huanying!” (Clap, clap, clap-clap!) “Aoyun jia you! Aoyun jia you!” (Clap, clap, clap-clap!) “Zhongguo jia you! Zhongguo jia you!” (Clap, clap, clap-clap!) Welcome, welcome! Go, Olympics! Go, Olympics! Go, China! Go, China!
Soojin Cho had resolved her troubles with the renovation crew. The new studio, labeled Soojin Dance Team—Soul of Dance Academy, was on the top floor, the twenty-ninth, of Jianwai Soho’s Tower No. 17. It was glassed in, decorated in white on white, with mirrors on two walls. There was a loft overhead, reached by spiral stairs at one end and a straight open stairway at the other. Cho was away when I arrived, but more than a dozen dancers were there, most wearing Soojin Dance T-shirts, and a photo shoot was under way upstairs.
The dancers, in formation, went through routines to blasting music: “Sexy Back,” “It’s Raining Men,” “Let’s Get Retarded,” “We Will Rock You.” Spin, kick, front roll. Then they sat on the floor in a circle and a dancer in plaid shorts, a lieutenant of Soojin’s, divided them into teams for a competition: two dancers, with silver-sequined purple tops tied over their eyes for blindfolds, groped for a set of keys on the floor while their team-mates shouted instructions. After a few rounds of blindfold work, the circle broke up and the dancers sat down facing the mirror, with their backs to the window, and began putting on makeup. Ballads played on the sound system.
Upstairs, off the loft, there was a deck area open to the sky. A dancer in purple, with an iridescent white cowboy hat, was posing for photos with an iPod Touch. It was clear and bright out, and behind her, through the glass wall, was the loop of the CCTV building—fully formed now, the planning model rendered on the real skyline. Behind the solid surface, though, the icon of Beijing’s future was empty and unready inside. CCTV had hoped to rig up a studio on the interior, so the new building could at least host broadcasts during the Games. But time had run out. The epochal architecture would only be a decoration.
The dancers downstairs had been primping for a good twenty minutes: eyelids, foundation, lashes, eye shadow. Gradually their complexions were becoming tanned and unreal, their eyes lengthening into startlement. Their faces glimmered. Around the twenty-five-minute mark, they started applying blush.
The cheerleader in purple was doing leaps in the sun with the iPod, over and over. The photographers were from Nanren Zhuang, a men’s magazine; there were three still cameras and two video cameras. The cheerleader was not leaping very high. The lead photographer, a man in a blue tank top and flip flops, with a samurai ponytail, demonstrated the desired jump: a running leap that left him staggering to a halt, slapping the wall. A female assistant, in tartan shorts and knee-high stockings, with a pierced nose, darted out to blot sweat from the cheerleader’s lip and lower eyelids.
Besides the magazine people, there was a South Korean photographer for a Chinese publication as well as a Korean TV crew. The makeup kept going on, forty minutes of it now. Yet another team of reporters showed up. It was getting hot in the studio, and the ratio of dancers to other people was near one-to-one. There was a loud thump as a dancer, trying to enter the studio, walked headfirst into the glass wall. She found the door and entered, with laughter and chagrin.
At last, Cho arrived, with a bandanna on her head and a gray T-shirt with a winged Superman logo. She talked with the press in Korean, English, and Chinese, handing out business cards as she moved. How was she doing? “Mang,” she said, with a shrug of exhaustion. Busy.
The dancer who’d walked into the glass read off a list of names and gave instructions. Eight dancers trooped upstairs and returned wearing orange and white. The music came on: Chubby Checker and the Fat Boys. Link arms, hop, kick—windup . . . clap and yell on the turns. The routine was over in moments. A second team, dressed in blue ruffles, took over, dancing to “Proud Mary,” rolling their arms, tossing their hair.
Then came new outfits—shiny red dresses, with loudly snapping fans to match, and red elbow-length gauntlets. The dresses were halter dresses, with Mandarin collars and with pleats at the back, some idea of Western meeting some idea of Eastern at the outer limits of sartorial terminology. Cho had wrapped up a round of interviews upstairs, and stood watching with her back to the mirrors. A squad of dancers in white bell-bottoms was on. “Cuo le,” Cho said. Wrong. She watched them repeat it, her arms loosely folded, eyes tracking the left side of the formation. Then she dashed over to the sound board and cranked up the music, making them repeat it again. She grabbed a cameraman and repositioned him. The dancers posed for still photos, holding stuffed penguins. Cho showed them how to cuddle the penguins.
At the foot of the stairs, I talked with a dancer named Sun Zheng. She was an advertising student at Beijing Technology and Business University, she said, and she had found the Soojin Dance Team on the Internet. “I love dancing, so I wanted to join them,” she said. “To be a cheerleader, it’s a proud thing for me. I’m very proud.”
What was it like to study under Cho? She was very—Sun couldn’t think of the English. She wrote down the Chinese characters: yan li. Stern, severe. “For example, our movement, when we do this”—she stuck out one arm and held the other back by her head, then corrected the angle. “She is professional. Like our hairstyle and how we do makeup and all our clothes are the best.... Before a show, she is very kind. She likes to help us, and she is a funny woman.”
“I think Soojin is the best team, so we have a responsibility during the Olympics to be the best,” she said. “And I think not everyone can join Olympics as a cheerleader, so it’s a very good chance.” After these rehearsals, the team would spend the rest of the month in seclusion in Hebei, an hour away by bus. There was nothing to do but practice and wait.