Beijing Welcomes You

Saturday morning was so clear we could see an airplane rising far away in the sky above the Western Hills, from the military and government airfield that all the maps omitted. Big Mack and I were on our way to join a group interview with Han Meilin, the Fuwa artist, at the Han Meilin Museum. Big Mack was not fond of the Fuwa, himself; he said he didn’t see why Beijing couldn’t have just reused Pan Pan, the panda mascot of the 1990 Asian Games.

The streets were quiet. All over town, elderly security volunteers sat by the roadsides, wearing white-and-red Yanjing Beer polo shirts and red armbands, but there was hardly anyone for them to watch. The construction ban had settled the debate over whether to send the undercivilized migrant workers home for the Olympics or to let them enjoy the festive city they had built: with no work for three months, the labor force couldn’t afford to stay. Some Beijing professionals were choosing, when they could, to get out of town till the Olympics were over. The flight was called biyun, or “avoiding the Games”—a play on biyun, meaning “contraception.” Longtime expat residents were taking a few months abroad, frustrated by the visa crackdown.

So many people had left, Mack said, that vendors were stuck with unsold peaches. And even if there were customers, because no out-of-town vehicles were allowed on the roads, farmers in Hebei couldn’t bring produce into the city. Many markets were closed to prevent the sale of bootleg merchandise. The auto-parts bazaar Mack liked to go to, on the northeast bend of the Fourth Ring, had been closed down.

The media bus took us east and south, out along the Batong subway line. The bus driver stopped to ask people sitting by the roadside for directions. Then he stopped again, to flag a passing woman on a bicycle to double-check the directions. A GPS unit, ignored, was mounted on the windshield of the bus. The bus made a U-turn.

The tour organizer and the bus driver were discussing, with some heat, whether they were heading to the Han Meilin Museum or the Han Meilin Workshop. The bus had looped back around to where it had been before. More passersby were questioned. Then, a short way down the road, there was a gate, flanked by a pair of fancily rendered dragon statues.

We disembarked. Han was still in poor health, we were told, and this was the last time he would do an interview before he went in for an operation. We should please stay focused and keep it short, so he wouldn’t get tired out.

The museum was modernist and new, with wood-grain marks in its concrete walls. Han Meilin was running late, so a young female docent in a Han Meilin–logo polo shirt, with the collar turned up to show a multicolored lining, led the group of journalists through the whole place. “Han’s name has become a household name because of his small kittens, poodles, wolves and monkeys,” the English portion of an introductory sign said. “Even when he has created huge works of art, he remains true to his cute, sweet, and charmingly naive small creatures.”

The tour moved swiftly through the winding multiple levels of the museum, the pace emphasizing the proprietor’s productivity: quickly past a multistory stone Buddha, a yards-long painting of horses with exaggerated circle-curves on their necks and flanks, a yards-long tapestry of panthers—and but also a room of huge ceramics, and another room of huge ceramics, and a wall of little teapots in little niches and another wall of little teapots in more little niches, and sketches and logos. A series of buxom bronze mothers embraced adorable bronze babies in various appropriated modernist styles. The emblem of Air China—the red letters “VIP,” curlicued into a phoenix—hung alone in a spotlight, like a canvas.

We passed down a ramp lined with sketchbook drafts of the Fuwa: little pandas and monkeys, round schematic masks, capering cartoon figures. There was more than one set of what looked suspiciously like the multicolored dancing-bears logo of the Grateful Dead. Some pages featured sketches of nude women—narrow-waisted, high-breasted, and full-hipped—with little proto-Friendlies flitting around their curves.

The room for the interview was long and dark, with heavy drapes over a wall of windows and a table the size of a driveway running down the middle. There were loosely rolled sheets of paper at the near end, and the cloth on the table was blotched with ink. We took seats in armchairs at the far end of the room, and Han was ushered in to sit on a leather couch.

He was a small man, with rounded shoulders and double bags under his eyes, but his hair had been dyed a not-too-inauthentic black and he looked better than his age, let alone his advertised condition. He wore a blue polo shirt with a gray collar, and he was in a talkative mood.

“I feel sorry for these five Fuwa, because they have to wear such heavy hats,” Han said. “If you asked me to single-handedly design this, I would definitely design it better, more fun. I wouldn’t say this is my work. I have to consider a lot of other people’s interests.”

Now that the Olympics were safely under way, he said, he didn’t mind telling stories. He held up a completed rendering of the abandoned Dragon Fuwa, in red, with round dragon-eyes glaring from its headdress. Then there had been the idea of using a crane. “I thought this was not a good idea,” he said. A long beak would endanger children who bought souvenirs.

A reporter raised the fact that the Fuwa had been absent from the solemn artistry of Zhang Yimou’s opening ceremony. “I don’t care,” Han said. “I’m very busy. Even my seats were changed. I was supposed to sit behind Hu Jintao. . . . I don’t care about that. I’m famous enough. I’m so famous that I don’t care.”

“These are the little stories, small things,” he said. “I haven’t told you the big stories. I won’t tell you the big stories, because I still love this country. . . . I maintain a positive attitude. I do not include sad feelings in my work. I look down on these people that have gone overseas and got educated and started to come back to China and criticize.”

It is not easy to eliminate Chinese elements from culture, he said. The pinyin romanization system for spelling out words would never replace characters. Picasso had once said he wished he were Chinese, so he could have learned calligraphy. Han swooped his arm in a brushstroke. “Waaa!” he yelled. “You don’t do calligraphy with brush and ink, you write it with your qi.”

He brought out a copy of his book Tian Shu (Book of Heaven), a compendium of ancient characters, rendered in his own writing. “I collected all these during the most dark years during the Cultural Revolution,” he said. “I got out of prison in ’seventy-two.... Then I started to travel around the country to research about cave paintings. I visited secondhand bookshops.”

He offered a disquisition on the yin and yang symbol, explaining how he had sought to render it in three-dimensional form as a pierced jade disc, an example of which he had been fiddling with as he spoke. He drew a yin and yang on his sketchpad, and pointed to the museum logo on a staffer’s polo shirt: a dot and a curling line. He drew an egg and sperm. Then he tore off a strip of paper and made it into a loop. A tai chi master had visited him, he said, and had told him he didn’t believe Han Meilin could achieve the goal of making a satisfying three-dimensional yin and yang. The master drove a Mercedes 560, Han said, and he had thrown the keys on the table and said he would give Han the car if he succeeded. Han twisted the paper loop to make a Möbius strip, then flattened it into a triangle. And that was how he had won a Mercedes-Benz, he said.

With further refinement, he had smoothed the triangle into the disc, with one half of its face covered with a tapered groove, spiraling to a hole through its center and out the other side, an endless surface.

He began autographing copies of the Book of Heaven. “The most power comes from being humiliated,” he said. “This is my biggest source of power. If you say that I can’t do something, then I will not only do it, I will be the best.” He was at work on a sculpture that would be 120 meters tall—the tallest sculpture in the world. A phoenix sculpture he had made had used 400 tons of copper, 500 tons of clay, and 4,000 tons of plaster. “That comes from the power of being humiliated,” he said.

A reporter asked him about a notion that had been circulating on the Internet, that the Fuwa were cursed, and that they corresponded to the year’s disasters: Jingjing with the Sichuan earthquake, Yingying with the Lhasa riots—

Han had been quoted recently in the press saying that he had only been promised one yuan in payment for making the Fuwa, and that he hadn’t even been paid that. Now he said he had told that anecdote about the nonpayment at a banquet with officials, and Wen Jiabao had said that it showed that China still didn’t respect knowledge or art. Not long after, he and his fellow designers had received 300,000 yuan as payment for the design, to be split among nine people. His share, as leader, was 80,000, which he donated to a schools project for rural children.

At the southeast corner of the Olympic Green, outside the Bird’s Nest, humanity spilled out into the streets from the backup at the security lines. The evening sessions of track-and-field didn’t need volunteer cheerers to pad them out. Everyone, including me, was holding up a camera to record the chaos.

Volunteers urged spectators to get on a shuttle to Gate 8, where the lines would be shorter. We got on the bus and rode off and kept on riding, and riding, and riding. Gate 8 was uncrowded because it fed onto the Olympic Green somewhere north of the International Broadcast Center, which was north of the Digital Beijing building, which was north of the National Indoor Stadium, which was north of the Water Cube, which was north of the Bird’s Nest—a long hike back down the spine of the Green to the event. Along the way, we kept running into little girls with heavy green eye makeup—they were from the Dance Academy, two of them told Christina, and were performers in the daily Fuwa parade. Did we have any Olympic pins? they asked.

Our seats in the Bird’s Nest were in the dark, at the back of the bottom deck, in Section L. Stickers saying “Beijing 2008” had been pasted over the molded oil-company logos on the seat backs. On the big screen, a computer-animated Yingying represented the 100 meters. We were at the top of the stretch, the sprinters heading away from us. Usain Bolt of Jamaica ran a 9.85, in gold shoes, to win a heat. Tyson Gay of the United States finished fifth, eliminated from the final. On the slow-motion replay, his face held a pained expression as it flapped against the resisting air.

A boy with heart-shaped Chinese-flag stickers on his cheeks played with a PlayStation Portable in his seat. The women’s shot put event was directly in front of us. Under the overhang, the air was getting close and mosquitoey. Three Chinese women and two Americans were in the final. The video screen was focused on the start of the 400-meter hurdles, but the crowd kept yelling “Jia you!” for the home country’s shot-putters, till the public address announcer had to tell them to pipe down so the runners could hear the gun.

There was a certain lack of drama built into the shot put. Valerie Vili, a New Zealander, went nearly 20 meters with her first toss, and before long it was clear that none of the other women could possibly throw the shot as far. Round after round, she heaved it comfortably past the 20-meter mark, while only one other competitor even cleared twenty. Both Americans and one of the Chinese were eliminated in the first cut-down.

On the track, the women’s heptathletes were finishing their event with the 800-meter run. The Chinese entrant, Liu Haili, was all the way at the back. “We’re not asking you to win!” someone exhorted from the stands. “Just don’t be last!” Liu obligingly passed someone, moving into next-to-last place. “Pass the next one!” the person shouted.

After a long mass victory lap by the heptathletes—a show of sisterhood and sportsmanship undermined only afterward, when the silver medalist was disqualified for failing a drug test—it was time for the men’s 100-meter final. Bolt towered over the other finalists, his shoes gleaming in the lights. It took about two seconds from the starting pistol to tell that both U.S. runners were beaten, and as Bolt kept running away from us, maybe another two seconds to tell that everyone else was beaten, too.

Then came a sort of confused mass hypnosis, as 91,000 minds staggered together toward the same conclusion: He is . . . he just . . . the clock . . . point what? . . . point SIX?? The sign said: 9.68. Followed by, in understatement: “Olympic record.”

The replay came up, and the crowd laughed, shrill with amazement, at the sight of Bolt breaking form and celebrating before he’d even finished. It was the greatest sprint ever. The Bird’s Nest had hosted something immortal.

We left the stadium and headed back north up the Green, toward the subway station. The bubbles of the Water Cube glowed blue, then magenta, then blue again. More color-shifting lights flowed along a three-sided observation tower, crowned by the shining hoops of the Olympic rings. The pathway carried the crowd down into a sunken garden plaza, through a red-lit monumental arch. There were stone lattices and a wall made of illuminated red-and-white drums. It was the lurid, electric China at its most stunning, a vision of pure future, marred only by the odor of frying from the showpiece McDonald’s, mingled with a whiff of sewage.

Little Mack was feeling better. I took him out with me to Ritan Park, the Altar of the Sun, looking for any sign of the official protest zone. The afternoon was gray, a rare clean and natural gray after rain, and it was quiet; a few sightseers wandered here and there. If there were undercover police among them, they weren’t obvious. Toy motorboats zipped around on a pond. The protest space seemed to be as hypothetical as the protesters. The altar itself was flat and square, paved with plain square blocks. Mack stood on top of it contemplatively, sucking his thumb—Chinese people are scandalized by babies that suck their thumbs—then began toddling around the altar platform. The social order was undisturbed.