Beijing Welcomes You

26.

One World

Here and there, as the end came closer, the Olympic rules were starting to crack. The migrant laborers were still missing, and the Uighur nut-loaf vendors, but traffic was getting thicker—rumor had it that government workers’ cars were back on the roads—and a small construction team had erected a new white-and-blue barracks overlooking the alley, on the edge of the building site.

Even though there was scarcely anything left of the Olympics to prepare for, there were more than fifty people in the Dongsi Olympic Community Public Welfare English Class. Shao and Hu told me that they had been working for the Olympic security watch, the teams in Yanjing Beer shirts, four hours each day.

An Olympic countdown board was still outside, with a pigtailed mascot on it—another mascot, this one, particular to the Dongsi Community. Its name was Dongdong, but with a different character for dong from that used for Dongdong the cheering mascot.

The class was on Lesson 47, which involved inviting someone to have tea. On the board were the words “jasmine” and “chrysanthemum.” The teacher was named David and was young, a little heavyset, with a buzz cut. “Try some of,” he read.

“Try some of,” the class echoed.

“Our wonderful green tea.”

“Try some of our wonderful green tea.”

The word “chrysanthemum,” it emerged, was an almost impossible hurdle. David had a good, natural-sounding American accent overall, but when the dialogue reached chrysanthemum tea, it came out “kryzanzmum”: “Kryzanzmum sounds interesting.”

On break, the students came around to talk. The senior citizens had gone to CCTV to film a singing program on the twentieth, they told me. One old man, with thick square glasses and abundant nose hair, was new to me, and kept pushing up close. Did I know about class struggle? he wanted to know. And about opening and reform? Could I name the Three Represents of Jiang Zemin? In English, he called them the “Three Representatives.” I could not name the Three Represents. He was exasperated, a satisfied exasperation, having caught the foreigner in a shortcoming. The Three Representatives were very, very important. Number one, the Party stands for advanced production force. Number two, the Party stands for advanced culture. Number three, the Party stands for the most people’s interests. I wrote them down dutifully.

The teacher, David, approached. The students were wondering, could I demonstrate the pronunciation for them? I took the microphone. “Chrysanthemum.”

“Krzyzanzmum.”

“Chrys-”

“Khryz-”

Wait, where did the syllable breaks go? “-san-” Oops, I’d accidentally doubled the s.

“-zan-” It was dawning on me I had never really thought about how to say the word “chrysanthemum” in my entire life.

“-the-”

“-de-”

“-mum.”

“-mum.” There. Again:

“Chry-”

“Kree-” Yes, better.

“-san-” (Or was it “-santh-”?) Uh-oh.

“-san-”

“-the-”

“-mum.”

“Chrysanthemum.”

Okay. “Jasmine.”

“Jasmeen.”

“Jas-min.”

“Jasmine.” I was entering one of those states where you contemplate a word for so long that it stops seeming like an intelligible word at all. But I was doing it up on a stage in front of half a hundred eagerly attentive senior citizens, people who had been through revolution, famine, isolation, the Red Guards. Someone off to the right had out a video recorder.

The more attention I paid to Lesson 47, the less sense the dialogue made. “Try some of our wonderful green tea,” the Chinese host would say, and the foreigner would assent, and so why was the Chinese host then going on to push flower teas, after they’d already agreed on green tea?

Luckily the students were looking to study the real topic at hand. Could I write “I love Beijing” on the blackboard in Chinese? As a matter of fact, I could. “Wo ai Beijing,” I wrote in characters, to their approval. We put up the words “reporter” and “interviewer” for consideration. What sports did I like?

Once I was back at my seat, my political examiner came by for another visit. Did I know what the best country in the world was? He had read that it was Finland. China was too big. America was too big, too. Finland was small. It had lots of forests and lakes. Finland was the best country.

After he’d left, one of the women gave a dismissive frown. He was taoyan, she said—did I know taoyan? I went into the dictionary on my phone. First definition: “disagreeable.” No, that wasn’t it. Further down: “nasty.” Yes. That was it. Bukesiyi: unbelievable.

The Bird’s Nest beckoned once more: the men’s soccer final, Argentina versus Nigeria. There was a spare ticket. I gathered up little Mack, so he could someday say he’d seen the Beijing Olympics. He dozed in his stroller across the regular-irregular flagstones on the way in.

The seats were down low, right by the field, just in the shade, directly behind the New York Times columnist and globalization guru Thomas Friedman. The state-approved cheerleaders down on the track wore blue and white, with pompoms. They were accompanied by Fuwa of different sizes—the big inflatable ones and the little plush ones. There were two Yingyings and two Beibeis—no, there were two of each. Ten Fuwa, jumbled together.

Mack woke up, gazed with interest at the green grass, and ate an ice cream cone. I was congratulating myself on taking my son to such a stimulating experience when Argentina broke loose and scored. Ninety thousand people leaped to their feet and started screaming. The roar faded down, and a single scream rose up in its place—a child’s howl of fright and alarm. I wiped his tears and calmed him down. See? It’s okay. Everything’s fine. Then came another rush on goal, a shot, a save—ROOOOARrrrw from the crowd and waaaAAAAHHH from the baby. Enough. I bundled him off to the concourse, where the Olympic experience was darker and quieter, and watched the sliver of the field I could see from there, with televisions for reference.

Out on the plaza of the Green, the sun was powerful, and the mountains were visible through clear air. We traversed the imposing sunken garden one last time, passed the great red gateway and the McDonald’s. A small Chinese boy stood just off the sidewalk with his pants down, urinating on a grate.

Jacques Rogge was giving his farewell press conference, summing up the Beijing Olympics for the gathered press. The People’s Armed Police were out by the roads again, blocking the on-ramp to the Second Ring. My driver headed for the backstreets. The radio was playing a passage from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a fourteenth-century epic novel about the wars to unify third-century China. The Three Kingdoms was everywhere this year; the last two times we had gone out to see a movie, we had ended up seeing different Three Kingdoms epics. The second time, we had tried to see Hancock, but the American alcoholic-superhero movie was sold out, so we grabbed what was available, entered the movie five minutes late, and gradually realized we were watching the actor Hu Jun doing exactly what we had seen Andy Lau doing before. Now that I had picked up the names of the multitude of main characters, I was able to tell it was always on the radio, too, a murmuring Chinese counterpoint to the internationalism all around. “Liu Bei hen bu gaoxing,” the radio said. Liu Bei (the good-guy leader in the story) was very unhappy.

In the Plum Blossom Hall, Jacques Rogge said the IOC was “extremely pleased by the organization of the Games.” China had won the gold medal count, going away. The United States had barely come out ahead in the number of total medals, but unless you really did count bronze medals as equal to gold, China had surpassed the United States overall, too, under any known system of weighting the results. “I believe each country will highlight what suits it best,” Rogge said. “We take no position on that matter.”

Rogge took very little position on anything, and took even less responsibility. The blocking of the Internet? “We acknowledge that the situation has not been perfect.” Reports in the press that China’s gold-medal gymnasts, including the young-looking Jiang Yuyuan, might have been underage? “Eligibility of the athletes is the responsibility of the international federations, not the IOC.” A reporter asked him about the fate of the latest would-be protesters, a pair of women in their seventies, who had been sentenced to house arrest for daring to apply to use the Olympic protest zones. The authorities had told the IOC, Rogge said, that “this is an application of Chinese law. The IOC is not a sovereign organization. We have to respect Chinese law.”

And there were your international norms. The Chinese authorities were abusing dissidents, because abusing dissidents was an old habit for them. It was the IOC who had suggested setting up the protest zones, and it was only because the IOC was involved that people had accepted the invitation to try to protest. And now the people who had trusted Rogge and his organization were locked up. China had dishonored the IOC’s promises, and Rogge was willing to stand up at the podium and accept the dishonor. One World, One Dream.

Hawkers outside the press center were trying to move pins and caps and shirts while they still could. Along the ground level of the Pangu Plaza, by the 7 Star Hotel, signs announced a “Famous Stores Corridor”: one more coming attraction that had failed to arrive in time for the big event.

The cab ride home took a different route from usual, through a neighborhood decked with Olympic banners, in Chinese and English: “Seize the opportunity of the century to seize the dream of a century.” “Brighten the Dream with Passion, Build the Olympic Legend.”