Beijing Welcomes You

The last night of the old, normal life, July 19, was mild and beautiful. The air was clear, even though the Olympic rules would not take effect till the next day: the driving ban, alternating daily between odd- and even-numbered license plates; the halt to digging and concrete pouring; the closing of Olympic traffic lanes to unauthorized vehicles. Tomorrow, by plan, the Olympic city would be in place.

I had spent the morning and early afternoon eighty-some miles away, in Tianjin—the Newark to Beijing’s New York. I had in mind that I would return on the brand-new bullet train, but the bullet train wasn’t open to customers till August 1. Neither was the new Tianjin train station, so I waited in the old one, an enormous, unclear shed above the tracks.

It was getting easier and easier, staying within the busily improving capital, to forget what the ordinary infrastructure of China was like. Tianjin brought back the Beijing of 2004. Hand-painted train-announcement signs and LED ones contradicted each other; information moved through the sea of travelers by word of mouth or herd intuition. The crowd-mind absorbed the news that the 3:46 express to Beijing was delayed twenty minutes—thirty minutes—ten or fifteen minutes more—finally (a surge toward the stairways) boarding.

The train itself was clean and modern and completely sold out. I rode standing up, looking out the window in the train door at the tedious landscape. In America, I usually enjoy the view from trains, the shacks and junkyards and industrial wreckage of the country’s backside. But China was already one big rail bed; the backside of the country was everywhere. If anything, the railway scenery seemed tidier than average. In the train car, a seated passenger was reading a magazine article with the headline, in English, “Keep Fit While Learning English / Simple Ways to Suppress Your Appetite.”

Construction was still in full swing on the approach to the Beijing station. Inside, the hallways had been given over to endlessly repeating lit-up advertising posters of the Fuwa: Beijing Huanying Ni . . . Beibei Jingjing Huanhuan Yingying Nini . . . Beibeibei Jingjingjing Huanhuanhuan Yingyingying Ninini . . . The cab stand was jammed; I filed along to the front, then squeezed my way back down the line of parked taxis to sit in one, unmoving. “Zhongguoren tai duo!” the driver said. There are too many Chinese people! Standard disgruntled observation number one. The real problem wasn’t the numbers but what the taxi stand was doing with them, feeding people into the traffic jam rather than waiting for empty cabs to come up.

I had come back from Tianjin early in case the new subway lines had started running. A few days before, the Olympic press center had called a sudden news conference—a “flash”—to announce that the final Olympic subway lines would be opening . . . soon. Probably before the end of the weekend. As usual, a reporter who was there told me, such specifics as a date or a time went unoffered.

A text message arrived from a friend: The subway was open. Another, from a different friend: The new Apple store was open. “People keep pulling the security cord off the laptops, setting off alarms . . .”

With Big Mack, I swung by the Donghuamen night market, the organized center of Beijing street food—a row of clean, standardized stalls under striped awnings, stretching westward from the Wangfujing shopping street. Donghuamen was largely a stage for a culinary-theatrical carny hustle, on the theme Crazy Things the Chinese Eat: self-consciously exotic displays of skewered snakes and skewered frogs and skewered centipedes and skewered testicles pulled in the passersby, native and foreign alike—while other vendors in between offered the thrilled gawkers a chance to buy fried banana balls, minced-pork sandwiches, or chao mian. Authentic street food!

On a corner across from the food stalls, a young Chinese woman in a black polo shirt stopped me—Would I take a survey? The lanyard around her neck said “Nielsen.” She held up a tiny, featherweight notebook computer. I clicked through the questions. How long had I been in China? (Longer than a year.) Did I recognize the Olympic slogan? (“One World, One Dream.”) Did I agree, disagree, or not know whether each part of the three Olympic concepts was accurate: Green Olympics (agree; for public transit alone), High-Tech Olympics (agree; the surveillance system was astonishing), People Olympics (didn’t know). Had I bought any Olympic merchandise? (Yes.)

Did I think that the Olympics would be a success? (Didn’t know.) Mack and I had been going to Donghuamen to investigate the boundary between the performative and the edible. Also, I was hungry. A would-be participant in foreign folkways couldn’t help but notice that the Chinese themselves would giggle and pull out their cell-phone cameras before trying the leggiest and crawliest morsels. And many of the things laid out on skewers were flatly impossible to chew off a stick with your teeth: How could you gnaw on a whole crayfish? Or a starfish?

We headed to stall 56, where a red cloth flag certified that the operations were a model of sanitation. The proprietor, Zheng Zhongbin, had the market’s legal monopoly on fried scorpions. He had been at the market since 1991, and had put scorpions on his menu in 1996. Vendors who came up with a new recipe or new food could get a specialty license to be the exclusive vendor. “Everybody knows about scorpions, but no one thought to sell them here,” he had told us.

The scorpions presented one of Beijing’s mysteries. A friend of mine, living in a courtyard house on a hutong, had been stung by a scorpion in his bed once. He caught and killed it, and though the neurotoxins hadn’t seemed to be spreading beyond his leg, he went to see a doctor. The doctor, a Canadian, said there were no scorpions in Beijing. He suggested that the scorpion (indisputable: a scorpion, dead, in a plastic bag) had hidden in my friend’s luggage during a visit to Spain, and had made it into his bed that way. This satisfied the doctor, but it didn’t explain why the authentic Beijing food market sold fried scorpions, or where those scorpions might have come from. It also didn’t explain why the cat caught another scorpion in the same courtyard house later on.

Zheng’s scorpions came from a can. Due to hygiene regulations, he used scorpions packed in brine. “No doubt, the live ones taste better than the canned ones,” he said. He prepared them by soaking them in fresh water, then giving them a preliminary fry in oil to make them look nice. When a customer ordered a skewer, he would give it a final fry in oil—too long, he said, and the taste gets bitter; too short, and the flavor doesn’t fully develop. The oil was a standard cooking mix. “If you fry them with pure sesame oil, they will taste even better,” he said.

Zheng had large, shiny black scorpions, three to a skewer, for 50 yuan, and an assortment of other arthropods—crickets, silkworm pupae—but he recommended the small, drab pincer scorpions, for 15 yuan. “Of all the food that I sell,” Zheng said, “the scorpions sell and taste the best. And whoever comes to my stall, I tell him that the scorpions are the best. It doesn’t matter if they’re foreign or Chinese.”

The press loved his scorpions. He held up his hands to show how big his photo had been in The New York Times. A lot of Korean TV stations had come through, too, he said.

Before 1991, he said, he had no fixed job. His parents were from Dongbei and had once owned a photography studio, “but during the Cultural Revolution they were suppressed,” he said. “It is a historical matter.”

Some people bought the scorpions for fun, Zheng said; others bought them as medicine. “Some people eat them because they have pimples.... In Chinese medicine, it’s supposed to reduce heat, or cleanse the body.”

Foreigners would buy one three-scorpion skewer at a time, usually. Chinese people might buy ten, Zheng said. Sometimes he cooked scorpions for himself at home, he said, and had them with erguotou liquor that he’d infused with herbs. Big restaurants like the Quanjude duck chain might sell scorpions, too, he said, but they didn’t get enough regular practice cooking them.

The little scorpions came off the skewer perfectly crisped, tasty fried bites of nothing much. I moved on along the rows, eating and taking notes as I went, on fried bees, a fried starfish, a bowl of pork-intestine soup. The starfish was full of a gummy gray mass like flavorless, overcooked fish eggs, and was so messy to pry open that I gave up after two of the five arms. Everything else was fine.

When we got into a taxi to leave, the cabbie confessed he had no idea how to get from downtown to Dongzhimen. He was fresh from the countryside, and he had been driving a cab for less than ten days. Big Mack and I got him to the Second Ring Road, then gave him a quick tutorial on the layout of the Northeast as we went: Chaoyangmen interchange, then Dongsishitiao, and finally Dongzhimen. His driving experience was no more extensive than his geographical knowledge; the cab flinched in and out of lanes. In less than twenty days, Olympic visitors would be trying to hail his taxi.

There was still time to catch a ride on the subway. I took another cab out to the Third Ring, under which the new No. 10 line ran, and entered at the Liangma Bridge station. The hallways were a tasteful gray, and a breeze was blowing through them. I bought a one-ride card—at a cost of about thirty cents—and rode one stop to the Sanyuan Bridge station, to see if I could transfer to take the new airport express train home. I could, the station attendant told me, but it would be more than ten times as expensive—twice as much as a taxi ride. I was not that curious. I surfaced and got a cab.

The 20th was hot but clear and clean. The inner driveway of the apartment building was lined with now banned cars, their plates ending in 9 . . . 3 . . . 9 . . . 7 . . . 5. But in the construction pit across the alley, a crane was still moving.

Toward evening, we went to Sanlitun, the old embassy-district bar street a few blocks east of home. The west side of the street had been redeveloped into a series of shopping complexes. In a white Moorishstyle building, we found a new branch of an Asian chain selling Western kitchenware: tri-ply copper-stainless cookware, silicone cake molds and basting brushes, pepper mills, enameled cast-iron casseroles. A year ago, a place like that would have been unimaginable. We had been cooking with a hodgepodge of pans and utensils collected from supermarkets, the corner store, and parts unknown.

In the courtyard outside the kitchen store, Tex-Mex music was blaring from a restaurant with a cactus on the signboard. Workers were finishing store interiors. At the front of the building, signs announced that an American Apparel was coming soon.

Farther down Sanlitun, at the corner with North Workers’ Stadium Road, was the new Adidas superstore, the world’s largest. Next to it was a nearly finished Uniqlo. The two marked the south end of the Village, a collection of retail buildings drawn up by avant-garde architects, all steel and angled glass walls and gold-tinged materials. Farther into the compound was a Nike store, and then the Apple store: a glowing white logo on a gray box, two or three stories above an open square dominating the scene—the old Macintosh “1984” commercial perfectly reversed. Inside, a clerk greeted me in English so flawless that I didn’t notice it was English till a second clerk did the same.

It was getting dark. Back outside the Apple store, a billboard-sized video screen announced: “The paint is almost dry, and the first villagers are moving in.” A slapping sound echoed off the walls. Up on a scaffold, a worker was gluing tall purple letters to the glass, rising from left to right, thumping each one into place with his hands. He was just putting the N on “STEVE MADDEN.”

There were seventeen days to go. The full security lockdown of the Olympic Green was still a few days off, and the press center there was holding a briefing on forestry. On the way, we hit a traffic jam, on the Second Ring. The left lane was closed to regular traffic, as one of the reserved Olympics lanes, and through some sort of traffic-engineering algebra, half as many private cars driving in two-thirds as many lanes worked out to much worse traffic than usual. When he saw me looking at my watch, the cabbie began fighting his way around the traffic, tapping his horn with his thumb. To keep demonstrating his concern, he continued tooting along the Third Ring when we got there, even though there was no Olympic lane and the traffic was moving.

“The Olympic things are only convenient for the Olympics,” I said, in a flash of Mandarin competence. “For everyone else, they’re annoying.” The driver clapped a hand over his mouth and held it there theatrically. Then he put it back on the steering wheel. “Understand?” he said.

The on-site press center was less plush than the off-site one. The renovations at the latter were cushy, the elevators so lavishly mirrored, inside and out, that it was hard to tell when the doors had opened. Outside the biggest press conference hall, a uniformed employee tended a silver dispenser of ice water, with lemon in the water.

The front end of the Olympic Green center, on the other hand, was built to serve as a convention center after the Games: broad concrete hallways, with exposed pipes and ductwork in a black-painted ceiling. Then, right before the largest of the press-conference halls—Hall No. 1, the “Plum Blossom” hall—visitors crossed over into the part of the building that would be converted into the five-star InterContinental Beijing Beichen Hotel after the Games. There, off to the right, was a soaring lobby with multistory wall art, and polished surfaces everywhere (except underfoot, where gray industrial carpet awaited a monthlong trampling). The seats in the Plum Blossom hall were red, and there were some eight hundred of them.

There were wireless translation receivers available for the international press, with a whole counter full of volunteers to meet the demand for them. They headsets did something to breach the language barrier, but not enough. The translation was smooth during the scripted part of the forestry briefing: in accordance with Beijing’s master plan, there were now 12,600 hectares of parkland along the ring roads and major arteries; 43 percent of the city was green space now, up from 36 percent in 2000; 40 million flowers were being prepared for the Olympics.

In the question-and-answer period, though, I wanted to know specifically what varieties of trees had been planted in Beijing. The vice-director of the forestry bureau explained that they had different kinds of trees for different areas, and began listing some, briskly, in Mandarin. Over the earpiece, the translator reduced it in English to “poplar and other kinds of trees.” The online transcript in Chinese left out the list altogether, though it included a photograph of me asking the question. The gesture of providing an answer had been enough.

Sixteen days. The international press was settling in and discovering that the Internet was blocked, even in the press center. The foreign anonymizer site I had been using as a slow, ad-filled workaround at home had finally been shut out, too. The morning briefing was about security: during the Games, an official announced, there would be authorized zones set aside for protests in three city parks. Reporters huddled afterward to figure out where the third of the three parks, World Park, which nobody had heard of, was located—halfway out to Hebei Province, according to the street atlas. But the other two, Purple Bamboo Park and Altar of the Sun Park, weren’t bad. Was China really making space for dissent?