Beijing Welcomes You

The next morning’s press session was about the weather, and a cleansing downpour had obligingly begun to fall. The People’s Armed Police had put on olive-colored rain suits, the first concession I had seen them make to weather conditions. In the floral starburst by the Second Ring ramp, new growth was starting to engulf the pictures of the Fuwa.

In the press hall, I studied a China Daily, looking for a mention of the stabbings. Chen Xiexia’s picture took up the top of the front page. Down at the bottom, just above the box with the countdown to the Paralympics (twenty-seven days), there was a small headline: “US Tourist Killed in Beijing Attack.” It directed readers to page 5, where a short thirteen-paragraph story said that a Chinese man had stabbed two American tourists, one fatally, and then jumped to his death from the Drum Tower. “Local authorities are investigating the case,” it said. (The final three paragraphs began: “In another development, Chinese people condemned and protested against five foreigners for fomenting ‘Tibetan independence’ at Tian’anmen Square yesterday noon.”)

Also on the front page, below the fold, a yellow box carried the news that on the night of August 8, the Weather Modification Office had successfully intercepted and suppressed oncoming rainstorms. Over the course of the afternoon and evening, 1,104 rockets had been fired to keep the opening ceremony dry.

Zhang Qiang, the modification office chief, filled in the details from up on the rostrum: the bureau had spotted clouds moving in from the west and the south during the afternoon. Around four p.m., they began firing into the western clouds, while also attacking a small convective system that was threatening from the northwest. Rockets went up from Fangshan, Mentogou, Haidian, and Yanqing. After ninety minutes, they paused for half an hour, then in coordination with the Baoding batteries in Hebei Province, they launched rockets into the southern and southwestern skies, continuing until around eleven at night.

The clouds had come within ten or fifteen miles of the Bird’s Nest, Deputy Director Wang Jianjie said. On all fronts the goal had been to overseed the clouds so they wouldn’t rain, rather than trying to precipitate rain before it reached the city. By the bureau’s calculations, it had used one gram of silver iodide per square kilometer—a volume, Zhang said, that “would not cause any harm to the human beings or to the environment.”

Even in triumph, Zhang was as judicious as ever: those cloud systems on August 8, she said, had been small ones. If the bureau tried to mitigate rain as powerful as what was currently falling outside, she said, it “might not be able to.” Had today’s rain been assisted by the bureau? I asked. “Today’s rain,” Wang Jianjie said, “is natural.”

The China Daily had also printed two separate tables of the medal standings, both saying the same thing: China was in first place, with two gold medals; the United States was in second, with one gold, one silver, and one bronze. American media, at the same point, had the U.S. in front, with three medals to China’s two. There was no official correct way of scoring the medal count, because officially the medal count was a regrettable jingoistic overlay on the pure athletic spirit of the Games. Especially if your country was losing. So China maintained that silver and bronze didn’t count; the United States maintained that finishing third in an event was as good as finishing first.

A little after five in the evening, amid a renewed downpour, the power went out. Then it came back on. I tuned in the big television to watch Team China in basketball. Yao Ming hit a three-pointer; Sun Yue made a big shot early. Between the third and fourth quarters, the Soojin Dancers came out, brandishing their red fans.

Two days in, the murder story was already withering, as a story. At the time of the attack, it had seemed that something drastic and irrevocable had happened. But now, on the American side, it was developing into a story about tragedy striking the extended family of the national volleyball team—the murder victim had been a coach’s father—the sort of tragedy that forces athletes to play on, valiantly, through their tears. Not a bad sort of tragedy, as far as the Olympics was concerned. And on the Chinese side, the moment of horror was obscured by the procedural and detail-free announcements of the local authorities, as they investigated. The killer was an unemployed and divorced man, forty-seven years old, from Hangzhou. A disturbed individual. There must have been video surveillance at the Drum Tower, but who wanted to know what the camera might have known? An unfortunate incident had happened, for no reason worth mentioning, and now it was over.

The rain had left the city clean, cool, and wet; the Liangma River was running high in its repaved banks. On a tip from a fellow American, I went looking for scalped tickets outside the boxing site, at the Workers’ Gymnasium, a few blocks south of home. A thick-necked Liverpudlian tout with receding ginger hair—the very same scalper my friend had met, to go by his description—found me as soon as I stepped out of my cab. His colleague had a ticket to the current session, for 500 yuan, he said. I told him the price sounded too high, and we talked shop for a while: there were dozens of scalpers in town for the occasion, he said, and the resale market was busy. The cops were no trouble at all. Swimming was tough to get, he said, as was any sport with a lot of the Aussies in it. It was important to get good seats, he said, because some of the upper-level stuff people were selling was terrible.

We settled on 300 yuan, and another Brit swung by and handed over the ticket. This was, I discovered, a 900 percent markup over face value. Inside the Workers’ Gymnasium, ushers and signs directed me up and up again—to a seat in the second row from the top, behind the ring of national flags hanging from the arena’s upper rim. When I lifted my eyes from the boxers far below, I was staring at the bottom halves of the flags of Ireland and, unsettlingly, Georgia, where the Russian army was busily ignoring the tradition of the Olympic truce. The video screen was up there, too. On it, a boxer’s uniform read ENIARKU, because I was seeing the back side of the projection.

The next evening, there was women’s soccer at the Workers’ Stadium. The stadium, like the indoor arena, had disappeared behind green mesh and scaffolding for months upon months during the Olympic preparations, but the renovations couldn’t change the fact that it was a relic of the pre-entertainment era, with grim narrow concrete corridors and no built-in snack stands. The concessions were outside, in the parking lot, and they were overrun, with a deep formless mob crowding around the two stands closest to our gate.

The stands farther around back were less crowded, or people were at least standing in line at them. As I waited at one, Chinese people began sidling up to the counter at an angle, forming a competing auxiliary line. All the Lining-Up Days had failed to cure Beijingers’ pushiness. This was the Olympics, the object of all the civilization campaigns. It was time to stand up for international norms. “Pai dui ba!” I barked. Line up! “Pai dui ba!” I jerked a thumb over my shoulder to show where the line began. Sheepishly, the line jumpers began clearing out. A Chinese woman appointed herself monitor and dispersed the stragglers.

I bought ice cream, some popcorn—prepopped, now, rather than coming from an overburdened microwave—and beverages. I had a sharp, atavistic craving: I was an American and I wanted some Coca-Cola. The beverages came without bottles, poured into wobbly oversized paper cups, so that no hooligan fans of women’s soccer could throw them. Security again.

On the stadium video screen, computer-rendered Fuwa capered, glossy and plastic-looking, accompanied by the exhortation “Let’s Do the Mexican Wave.” This was the place where tens of thousands of Red Guards had gathered for rallies and mass denunciations in the Cultural Revolution, smashing the old society. Now men in tan button-front shirts and olive slacks, wearing white caps, sat in folding chairs around the track, with their backs to the field. This, I realized, was a new, dresscasual incarnation of the People’s Armed Police. The uniforms might have been more soothing if the officer nearest us hadn’t been sitting bolt upright and scanning the crowd with barely contained tension and alarm, like a Doberman on alert.

On the aisle to our left, there was a young man in a volunteer shirt who looked more muscular than the average college student. He surveyed the stands, then took a seat opposite a uniformed city police officer.

The cheerleaders wore blue-and-white outfits, cheerleader gear without a trace of Chinese cultural influence, and danced to “It’s Tricky.” The public-address announcer recited the medal standings—the “gold medal standings”—with China comfortably in front. At day’s end, China led, 13 to 7. Or, if you preferred, it trailed, 21 to 20.

Bad news continued to trickle out. There had been rumors in the Beijing dance community about an accident during the opening-ceremony rehearsals, and the Chinese press confirmed it: Liu Yan, one of the country’s most decorated dancers, had fallen from the elevated platform representing the Silk Road while practicing a solo, and she was apparently paralyzed. A report in the paper said that she couldn’t feel anything in her legs, but that she believed that if a dancer had to go down, the Olympics was a good reason. According to the story, Liu said that she planned to find some other way of bringing beauty into the world.

Meanwhile, TV cameras were showing the world embarrassing expanses of empty seats. The ticket allocation had been so botched that sections of volunteer cheerers were being bused in to fill swaths of empty seats at the events.

Also empty were the official protest zones. No one had succeeded in staging a protest in the lawfully assigned areas; people who had applied to try to protest were being charged with “disturbing the social order.” And the air was turning foul again. As I rode toward the field hockey venue, to watch China take on South Korea, I could barely see the tower of the newly built 7 Star Hotel, shaped like a dragon’s undulating neck, marking the southwest corner of the Olympic Green.

As I reached my seat, Song Yi, the karaoke-singing Chinese team captain, scored a goal to give China a 2–0 lead. Korea quickly scored in response. Big Mack joined me in the stands. Without the Lantern Courtyard to deal with, he had found another project to keep him busy. Through the earlier part of the summer, he had been traveling around China with a Singaporean reality-TV crew, setting out as a fixer and then taking an on-camera turn as a camp chef for the show’s contestants.

We were sitting next to a section of people in matching yellow shirts, with “Cheering from Beijing Workers” printed on their thundersticks—part of the emergency cheering corps. There were other color-coordinated sections around the stadium, where more empty seats had been filled. Swallows flitted by. As time expired in the first half, Korea was granted a penalty shot, and made it. It was 2–2.

Cheerleaders with little bells on their costumes came on and did a halftime routine. The last one off the field looked winded by the effort. Mack asked if I had seen the Internet video parody of “Beijing Huanying Ni,” about the national men’s soccer team. Chinese people hated the men’s soccer team, he said. While European soccer players reportedly earned twenty-seven times the average European’s income, he said, Chinese players got fifty times the national average. And they were dirty and uninspired players, whose principal highlight in these Olympics had been when one of them punched a foe in the crotch. The new song was “Guozu Huanying Ni”—“National Soccer Welcomes You.” Our goal is open wide, the parodists sang.

The field hockey team was not doing much for national honor, either. In the second half, the Chinese kept fouling the Koreans, setting up penalty shots. Before each penalty, the players would go behind the goal and pick up headguards, then stuff protective cups down their pants. Korea took a 3–2 lead on a penalty, then went up 4–2 on another.

China’s best boxer, Zou Shiming, had a bout scheduled for the afternoon. I had found another source of tickets, a reselling website with a shaky interface. There, the boxing tickets were marked up with only an $18 service charge on top of the $30 face value. The pick-up office was down in Jianwai Soho; a steady trickle of foreigners was flowing through the grassy plazas, among the white towers. Ticket reallocation was beginning to clean up the mess of ticket allocation.

My seat was low down in the first section, by the red corner. I could see everything. If I turned my head and squinted way up, I could even see my previous seat. Nearby fans chanted “Ka! Zakh! Stan!” With one bout to go till Zou’s turn—a France–Uzbekistan matchup—there was a stirring on the far side of the seating bowl. Don King had appeared.

Zou, quick and self-assured, was taking on a Venezuelan. Cheers of “Jia you!” rolled around the arena, not quite in phase. The only drama was around whether the Venezuelan would land any scoring punches at all, or Zou would get a shutout. The Venezuelan trailed 8–0 after three rounds, and was wobbling. He came out in the fourth and scored with two punches, but Zou, backpedaling, had everything in hand. The final score was 11–2. Zou stood in the middle of the ring and blew kisses, one step closer to his share of China’s medal count. In his yellow robe, he did a TV standup interview, hands folded behind his back. The crowd kept its eyes on him as he went down the row of TV cameras. A Dominican fighter arrived for the next bout, playing to the crowd by wearing a poncho made up of one Dominican flag and one Chinese one. The Dominican’s bout was in the third round before Zou finally blew more kisses and exited.

Thursday brought thunderstorms, sending sheets of water rolling through the neighborhood streets. Rowing, softball, and tennis were rescheduled. The press had spread out into the city, looking for the authentic Beijing. On our own alley, I passed a crew from TV of Catalonia interviewing one of the shopkeepers. The Olympics were a week old, and Little Mack was still sick, with coughing and diarrhea through the night.

Friday morning was the best weather yet, clear and mild, under a blue sky with wispy white clouds. Looking west down North Workers’ Stadium Road, by the tourist-thronged Yashow Market and the mirror-faceted Adidas store, I could see the mountains, blue on blue. Yingying the antelope beamed from the side of a pedestrian overpass, with the clean, beautiful scenery behind him. Beijing Welcomes You.

In the evening, there were empty seats all around the beach volleyball arena. We grabbed better seats than the ones on our tickets, and when some Chinese people approached, looking like the actual ticket-holders, an usher steered them away. The cheerleaders wore aqua bikinis. An Austrian duo beat a German one, and inflated Fuwa and extra dancers filed into the stadium. Jingjing and Nini clasped each other in a carnal, humping embrace. There were two dozen cheerleaders, half of them Soojin’s Chinese dancers and the other half a team from the Canary Islands. To the strains of the Offspring’s “Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)” they tossed their hair and did air-guitar moves, welcoming Chinese and Cuban women’s teams. Then came “Whoop, There It Is.” The Chinese team, Xie Chen and Zhang Jie, held off a Cuban rally in the first set, then won the second easily, to the shrieking approval of the crowd.

A bright white moon rose over the stands. The Chinese cheerleaders retired for the night, giving way to the Canary Islanders: bigger-looking hair, smaller-looking shorts. Some Norwegians ran a lap around the grandstands with their flag. Then three Germans and an Australian took a flag lap. Then some Americans and Canadians. The whole happy world was inside Chaoyang Park.