Beijing Welcomes You

And now it was time for Beijing to say good-bye to the world. Until we meet again. There were empty seats on television for the closing ceremony. The cameras followed Hu Jintao as he entered, then Jiang Zemin, the past and present leaders on the road to prosperity and the Olympics. Fireworks formed numerals in the sky to count down to the beginning of the farewell.

On the ground of the Bird’s Nest were drummers, these ones wearing painted bicycle helmets. Had someone decided to add safety equipment? There were advancing columns of people in yellow with bells on them. Flying drums. The belled dancers made an insectoid chattering as they closed in. People were riding around inside lighted hoops, and bouncing around on stilts. In place of the solemn, intimidating synchrony of the opening ceremony, there was the spectacle of imperfect mass human movement, doodads and gewgaws. The athletes came running in, in chaos. There were tiny children on drum kits, and a female drum corps in red leatherette.

Representatives of the roughly 100,000 Olympic volunteers were brought out to be honored, accompanied by children, most in colorful dresses and pigtails. Jacques Rogge and the head of the Beijing organizing committee, Liu Qi, entered. Rogge waved to the crowd as if he were a head of state. They entered on a red carpet, with red-gowned women arranged along it as a decorative fringe. The committee chief’s dye job was dark and impressive.

On came the rest of the world, then, with its part of the program: a prop double-decker omnibus representing London 2012, with a multiethnic, multicultural dance troupe swarming over it, the stale Cool Britannia rebranding left over from the last century. The bus opened out into topiary and David Beckham of the Los Angeles Galaxy emerged to kick a soccer ball nowhere in particular. The pickled remains of Jimmy Page played a song that was new thirty-nine years before. The British press would trash the London segment the next day as a national disgrace, a painfully feeble showing next to all the Chinese spectacle; the Chinese press didn’t disagree. A pair of performers dressed as suitcasetoting Britons climbed a staircase up into the air, presumably toward their future, to a platform high on a cherry-picker. Then they were left there and forgotten.

The host country handled the rest of the show. A tower framework appeared, covered with performers, like a croquembouche made of people instead of creampuffs. Or like an ear of corn swarming with bugs. The people wore two-sided suits in red and silver, making pictures as they turned one way or the other. They formed the Beijing Games logo on the tower.

A musical number: “Beijing, Beijing, wo ai Beijing . . .” That was what years of songwriting competitions had yielded: “I love Beijing,” as a rhyme for “Beijing, Beijing.” Then more music: someone singing in Peking Opera style, then a tedious operatic duet, and then a Big Windup: Jackie Chan in a volunteer’s polo shirt, complete with a credential around his neck; Andy Lau. The human mass on the tower waved Fuwa dolls, and costumed mascots appeared around the pop-singer collective. The Fuwa had made it into the production.

We Are the Champions” played on the radio; Beijing Television ran a montage of all fifty-one Chinese gold-medal victories, in the order in which they were won. But the Olympic banners were already gone, replaced by Paralympics banners in less than a day. Roving volunteers had switched to wearing Paralympics shirts, in a plainer pattern than their swirly Olympics ones. Old people played hacky sack, the first sign of normal street life I’d seen in weeks. A newsstand clipped up a China Mobile sign to replace the one that had been covered over. Bootleg DVDs were available. Crews set out with crates of fresh flowers, replacing the blooms along the roadways. Fu Niu Lele, the Paralympics cow, made her entrance: on a four-part banner down the side of the Poly Plaza tower, and in floral figures on the road north toward the Olympic Green.

On the lane outside the Imperial Academy, a new facility had opened, the De Xian Ge Sweet Home for the Disabled. It was in a refurbished courtyard house, with the front room set up as a shop to sell arts and crafts made by disabled citizens. Even among the disabled artists, the Olympic mascots were evidently more popular than the Paralympic one. The Fuwa were variously rendered in thread, cloth, paper, paper cuts, and beadwork; Fu Niu Lele was restricted to a few ornaments in the corner. Also among the merchandise were small boxes containing little humanoid figures, assembled out of insect parts with something furry like a pussy willow for the torso. One of the shaggy-bodied creatures stood on a tiny teeter-totter, holding a tiny sign over its gleaming chitin bug-head: “Beijing Huanying Ni.”

A passage lined with calligraphy led to the rear of the building. A tag in the corner of each calligraphic work described the creator’s specific disability—there were a lot of amputees—and sometimes the cause. Electrical accidents seemed common. In the back was a life-training area, where the disabled could practice cooking and other domestic skills. On a wall in the courtyard was a Chinese rendering of a quotation attributed to Goethe, with an English version below it reading “People of happiness lies in the heart happy.”

Translation was an ongoing struggle. Outside the Sweet Home, a sign with Fu Niu Lele offered an attempt at one of the Paralympics mottos: “Beyond, Integration, Sharing.” Officially, it was supposed to be “Transcendence, Integration, Equality.” At its most mangled, it showed up as “Surmounting Fusion Sharing.”

The other motto was “Two Games, Equal Splendor.” It was one of those slogans whose existence undercut its own message—nobody needed to assure able-bodied Olympians that their games would be equal to the Paralympics. Still, equality was important. A press conference was held to promote the new Sweet Homes. The Olympic media workrooms were empty and ravaged-looking. Officials, accompanied by a “representative of disabled persons” in a wheelchair, were in the press hall to report on the progress that Beijing had made in securing integration and opportunity for the disabled. But they could not admit that there had previously been any mistreatment or denial of opportunity. As with the food-safety briefings, the problem had been solved, but there had never been a problem. “I would like to say, I have never encountered any discrimination after I became a disabled person,” the representative in the wheelchair, a woman named Li Nan, said. “I receive more caring and more support.”

So what sorts of complaints from the disabled did the city’s office for disabled advocacy deal with? The question drew a perfect, timeless specimen of the procedural answer: “The protection of the rights of the persons with disability is an important part of the law of the People’s Republic of China for the protection of the rights of people with disability. In Beijing, the municipal government has also come up with the implementation regulations for implementing that law for the protection of the rights and interests of the people with disability, both for the rights, education, and the jobs, also for the transport and for the laws used once their rights have been infringed upon. The government has a very detailed implementation regulation.” There.

At the back of the neighborhood, instant parks had been built in the demolition zone by Moma: an open green vista framed by undulating rows of flowers, for the benefit of passing cars. There was nothing there for pedestrians to walk to or from. Up close, the grass was sparse, with dried mud showing between. Chunks of brick, concrete, rock, and pipe were strewn on the hard surface—left scattered behind, or coming unburied. The concrete had paint on it. From the field, there was a clear view all the way to Sanyuan Bridge and the banner of the field hockey player.

Electrical poles were still standing in the patchy green blankness, leaning at angles. Their tops were a tangle of chopped-off wires, splayed like Medusa hair—lines for powering an entire neighborhood. The surviving trees were tapered low down, their branches only spreading out above the invisible line of the alley walls and courtyards that had surrounded them.

To the east, by the river, a London-style taxicab was parked on the street, in white-and-gold Beijing livery. It was a Chinese-made TX4; the badge on the rear said “The London Taxi Company.” Thirty of them had just been added to the city fleet, as handicapped-accessible vehicles. Maybe London would buy some for 2012.

As I went into the study to get my things for English class, one of the overhead lightbulbs exploded again. Glass, some of it scorched, scattered out into the hallway, all the way to Mack’s bedroom door. Glass shards lay on his play mat. It had blown the circuit breaker, and I fumbled for flip-flops in the darkness of the vestibule so I could go out on the landing and turn the power back on.

They were writing the words for numbers on the board when I got to the classroom. Lesson 51 was “What’s your room number?” If you were telling someone your room number, 1288, you could say “one two eight eight,” or you could say “twelve eighty-eight.” I hadn’t thought about this before.

One man brought over a drawing of something—a sort of rounded box on wheels, with something sticking out the top. What was it in English? Well, first, what was it at all? It was a vehicle that drew electrical power from overhead wires, but had no tracks below it. One of . . . those things. Electric-bus things. You could call it a “trolley bus,” I declared. If it had tracks, it would be a trolley.

Then it was time for me to read to the class, from Lesson 52, “What’s your mobile number?” I had been figuring that as long as I policed my natural tendencies to drawl or be mushmouthed, my fairly neutral American accent would serve the students. But as a fairly neutral American, I say the word “mobile” as “mo-b’l.” And Chinese people are taught to say “mo-BILE.” “Mo-BILE,” I said. “Have a nice day . . . I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” The class was delighted. I was a ming xing, someone told me, a star.

Our family was heading to a new hamburger place, supposedly a good one. The cabbie on the way there told little Mack not to suck his thumb. Then, hygienic standards having been established, he spat repeatedly out the window. The burgers were on Sanlitun, near the new kitchen-goods shop. We stopped by there, looking for kitchen shears, to help cut up food into baby-sized bites.

There was no cutlery in sight. A sign on the wall where the knives had been, dated two days after the stabbing at the Drum Tower, announced that knife sales were suspended through the end of the Paralympics. It was a citywide ban. Kitchen scissors were also included. As we were digesting the news, the store staff opened a drawer and surreptitiously produced a pair of shears.

City cops and the People’s Armed Police were out again to mark the opening night of the Paralympics, but the streets stayed full of people and traffic. We skipped watching the ceremony to go out to a Spanish restaurant, run by a self-taught Chinese tapas chef, in a courtyard house near the Lama Temple. Downstairs, a wedding was going on and on.

The Fuwa had been around too long and too pervasively for me to let go of them, or for their influence to disappear, overnight. Even Pan Pan, from the 1990 Asian Games, was still lurking: after Big Mack had brought him to my attention, I noticed I had been walking by him every day, on a manufacturer’s sticker the downstairs neighbors had left on their steel security door. Later I would spot him on the back of a China Southern Airlines boarding pass and, most confusingly, on the side of a truck in downtown Taipei.

Before entering the mascot afterlife themselves, the Fuwa would remain on sale until March 2009, the Fuwa designer Chen Nan said. Big Mack and I had come to Chen’s office suite, in an aging apartment tower in the northeast part of the city, for a final accounting of where the mascots had come from and where they were going. He wore a black shirt, jeans, and silver sneakers; his hair was styled upward. Where the Han Meilin Museum had been a shrine to some artistic concept of Chineseness, Chen’s office was a bazaar of global iconography. On a crowded cabinet top behind him, two fu lion sculptures with gilt on them stood on each side of a white bust of Mao, with old-fashioned paper-cutout puppets and figurines of Robocop and Boba Fett nearby. A row of stuffed Fuwa stood across the back of a couch, accompanied by the Euro-flesh-colored, floppy mascots of the Athens Games, Athenà and Phèvos. Shelves were filled with jumbled cartoon or science-fictional armies: more Star Wars characters, the alien from Alien, blank-faced custom-painted vinyl bear figures, old-fashioned windup toys, prototypes of the Fuwa themselves. “Often, during my work time, I would sneak into my room and play with my toys,” Chen said.

One of Chen’s assistants brought tea in paper cups, the office’s own blend of jasmine and oolong. A fresh breeze blew in through south-facing windows. The names of the Fuwa, spelling out “Beijing Huanying Ni,” had been Chen’s idea, he said. Besides his work on the Fuwa, he had helped the Olympic committee design Olympic merchandise. He got out a notepad shaped like a ping-pong paddle, with a screw-out pen as the handle; a wooden baseball bat that opened up to reveal a little baseball-bat-shaped pen. And now, he said, he was also helping the China Duty-Free Corporation design a set of cartoon characters to star in tourist merchandise once the Fuwa were gone.

“In the past,” Chen said, “China has been predominantly involved in manufacturing, not design.” His ambition, he said, was for “Designed in China” to surpass “Made in China” as a reference point for goods. He taught commercial design at Tsinghua University, where he had come to college after growing up in Tianjin. His parents had both worked in artistic fields—his father in woodblock prints and lithography, his mother in decorative design for ceramics. “She’s now focusing on Buddhist painting,” he said.

What about the riot of other cartoon mascots in the city—I Participate, I Contribute, I Enjoy, the two different Dongdongs, and so on? Wenwen and Mingming urged people to act civilized (wenming) on the subway. Weiwei and Shengsheng promoted sanitation (weisheng). A line of notebooks with the official Olympic-sponsor logo on them, from the Beifa company, had a grinning monkey named Beifa Winny on them, and the promise of more characters, his friends Ooh, Jiji, Xiangxiang, and Woowoo. Even the Public Security Bureau had a set of keychains with its own cartoon figures: a riot cop with big cute eyes behind his plastic face guard, clutching a shotgun; a saluting man in the dress greens of the People’s Armed Police; an officer in uniform at a computer terminal, busily policing the Internet.

If the Fuwa had come out sooner and been kept less secret, Chen said, “you might see cheering Fuwa as well.” And perhaps they would have been integrated into the medal presentation and the opening ceremonies—one of Chen’s main regrets, he said.

Now it was the era of Fu Niu Lele. The Paralympic cow, Chen said, was not his design. But he was pleased about the name. The organizers had chosen “Lele” because le meant “joy.” But with a different character and a neutral tone, le could also fit at the end of a sentence, marking a completed action. Beijing huanying ni le. Beijing Welcomed You.

China was winning the Paralympics medal count even more handily than it had won the Olympic one, but not in the events I was seeing. My first glimpse of Lele on the hoof came at a wheelchair-basketball game. With the United States beating China, 43–14, a pair of inflatable Leles, one of them with a sagging, underinflated head, came out to dance. They did an oafish ballet routine, and then one of the arena volunteers bull-fought them, brandishing a Chinese flag folded over into a red rag.

In quad rugby, Japan’s team sported a blond mohawk, spiked hair, blue hair, a shaved head. The Chinese mostly had their hair cropped conservatively. Four fluffy Leles were dancing around. The Japanese players were too fast in their wheelchairs for China’s defense to stop them.

Something was wrong with the milk supply now. Or with the powdered milk supply, at least, for starters. It had been adulterated with industrial melamine, which allowed inferior or diluted milk to pass for the regular product. In factory testing, that is. If you actually drank the milk, it was poisonous.

Little Mack had moved on to solid food and regular milk, but we had fed him plenty of formula powder before, from the Carrefour market. We had bought an American brand, or what was packaged as an American brand, but who knew? Top Chinese brands were tainted, and the details were still emerging. Officials had reportedly discovered the contaminated milk powder weeks before and kept it quiet, so no food-safety scandal would break during the Olympics, while infants were falling sick and dying of kidney failure.

So a slow-motion run was unfolding on imported foreign milk. One brand after another, the boxed ultra-pasteurized imports gradually disappeared from the shelves of our nearest expat market—first the French, then the New Zealand. The locally produced organic milk remained in the cold case, presenting a challenge. Organic milk was exactly the sort of product that should be encouraged in the Chinese marketplace. It represented the hope for safe, high-quality foodstuffs in a country where no one had pursued such a thing till recently. But with the food-supply system as corrupt as it was, what if the organic milk itself was fake?

Zhang Yimou, for one, had taken the Paralympic promise of equal splendor seriously. Philip Craven, the Paralympics president, seemed, in his final press conference, to be still a bit awed that Beijing had filled up the Bird’s Nest with spectators and special effects for the second round of games. “We had tears in our eyes,” Craven said.

A crowded delegation of Chinese officials followed Craven, reporting that “the Chinese team has established a very proud result.” China had won 89 gold medals, and 211 medals overall; the runner-up, Britain, had 42 golds and 102 total medals. Surmounting, indeed.

In the closing ceremony, on television, a blizzard of red leaves fell and fell and fell and fell from the top of the Bird’s Nest, forming drifts on the track. Dancers in full-body flower costumes formed the outlines of an envelope, a “Letter to the Future,” from Beijing to the world. Performers in bulbous brown shoes tottered around stiff-legged. Were they supposed to be children? They had wigs and false eyelashes—they were dolls. A middle-aged woman stood in among them, directing traffic. A glowing tangled something-or-other was held aloft—trees? False eyelashes? A girl on a park bench, wearing a Paralympics cap, clutched an envelope, as metallic-painted men posed behind her. She got up, walked over flower petals, and dropped the envelope in a clear China Post mailbox.

A flute played. Pink flowers suddenly emerged through the fake turf. The flutist seemed to be blind, being guided around the set. Dancers came out with a crowned hat in each hand, slapping them on their heads, passing the hats down the line one head at a time. Under the hats were headscarves. World-music music and world-music costumes. Insects kept flying into the camera. Performers on wires rose and fell in a wave around the stadium. People stuffed envelopes into the mailbox, moving robotically. Podlike parachute-balloons, floating cloudlike, had people hanging from them. Hanging by their feet. Upsetting. Inexplicable. Zhang was holding nothing back.

People acting as human mailboxes, wearing skirts made of letter boxes, were in the aisles, collecting letters from people. A choir sang “God Save the Queen.” Your show, again, London. Fireworks went off in the shape of an envelope. An army of Leles appeared. Fireworks boomed outside, again.

Now it was all over. Day by day, the regular Beijing was coming back, or the improved version of the regular city. A horse-cart of melons was out on Outer Dongzhimen Avenue. By the Dongzhimen Bridge, slats were being installed for a variable-ad billboard. Commercialism was reemerging, large and small. Signs for new developments returned on the fences—“Seducing Modern and Romantic Emotion,” one promised. A cargo tricycle carried coal cakes. Men in hard hats were down in the pit; clanging sounds rose. The yellow boom crane was in action, picking up a wire cage full of pipe segments and setting it down a little ways off.

I stopped by the United States embassy to apply for absentee election ballots. George W. Bush had officially opened a new embassy compound on August 8, but the president was simply another peri-Olympic Potemkinist: the facility wasn’t really open, and the old embassy was staying in business till October at least.

The periods of clanging from the pit grew more frequent, till they lasted through the night, while green-tinged floodlights shone into the apartment. A guard at the gate had told me that the project was a twenty-eight-story residential tower, due to be finished in 2009. There would be three underground levels for parking. The new building would be for both Chinese people and foreigners—“youqiande ren,” he said, rich people.

The air turned gray, the sun white and wan, till a downpour came and flooded the streets, heralding another clear spell. The roadside flowers, in the local portion of the 40 million flowerpots, were still plentiful and flourishing. The old bank on the corner was being gutted, behind a curtain of red-white-and-blue-striped utility cloth. A beggar with a blue jacket and a long goatee reappeared outside the imported-foods market on Sanlitun.

One day the courtyard felt different: there was empty space where all the parked cars had been. The odd-and-even driving ban was over—though it had been deemed such a success that a modified version, barring plates with certain specified digits every weekday, would eventually take its place. The Second Ring was jammed, irritating but also familiar, the usual old feeling of being part of a crawling mass of cars. The north wind turned over leaves and made the Paralympics banners, lingering longer than the Olympic ones had, billow southward. At sunset, the mountains were spectacular against a sky like hammered metal; clouds cut in sharp diagonals behind them, like a greater and more distant range. “Shan wai you shan,” a provincial official had once told me, introducing a Chinese aphorism: Beyond the mountains are more mountains.

The news was on: a typhoon had hit Guangdong, killing six people; the earthquake site in Sichuan was swamped by torrential rains, killing thirteen. Liu Xiang had held his first public training session. Sun Yue of the national basketball team had signed with the Los Angeles Lakers. Wax statues of Olympians had been added to the National Museum, preserved in history. And astronauts were preparing for liftoff of the Shenzhou 7 rocket.

The rocket launched on live TV. Had I watched a space flight in the last twenty years, since the United States stopped trying to go anywhere new? Shenzhou 7 had a space-Moorish aspect: a needly nose, then a cone with a flaring bulge to it, and then the long body of the rocket with a ring of four boosters around the base. The astronauts lounged around the inside of the capsule in their spacesuits, helmets off, waiting while mission-control personnel in tan suits with red or yellow armbands worked at terminals. The control room looked exactly like the Beijing traffic-control bureau.

The spacesuits were white, with blue trim and dark-green knee joints. The green knees jiggled as the astronauts fidgeted. The crew put on their helmets and waved at the camera, their lounging posture still intact. A voice from ground control began speaking, loudly and commandingly. Four crane arms pulled away from the rocket, and the countdown came in Chinese: “Jiu! Ba! Qi! Liu! Wu! Si! San! Er! Yi!” One! A dark orange billow, like a pumpkin, appeared under the rocket, followed by a white flame. The whole thing lifted off, moving slowly.

The camera cut to a view looking down the rocket from its nose, at a burn with yellow-green edges. Then it cut to a glowing white blob against a cloudy sky. Then the view looking down the rocket again, turning purple and pixelated. One screen at mission control showed two diverging trajectories, as the booster rockets fell away.

After a while, a computer rendering of what was left of the rocket appeared: two beer cans, or a beer can and a squat thermos, nuzzling each other. Over on Phoenix TV, the flight was on a split screen. On one side, Wen Jiabao was addressing the United Nations about global poverty alleviation; on the other side were the astronauts, in their capsule, one of their notebooks floating weightless up toward the camera.

Chen Yanqun sang songs to Mack around the house, as she worked. “Wo ai Beijing Tian’anmen,” she sang:

I love Beijing Tian’anmen.

The sun rises above the Gate of Heavenly Peace.

Great leader Chairman Mao

Leads us toward the future.

She had another song, which she called “Tibetan Plateau”:

From the golden hilltop in Beijing, brilliant light radiates to the four directions.

The shining golden sun is Chairman Mao.

How warmly, how kindly, the rays illuminate the hearts of us serfs.

We are marching on the blessed path of Communism.

Hey, ba zha, hey!

At least, those were the official words; as Chen Yanqun sang it, “the four directions” became “the Fourth Ring.” Mack would dance happily to the music. My wife, meanwhile, was teaching him a rhyme she had learned from her parents—or what she could remember of it:

Yi, er, san, dao Taiwan.

Taiwan you ge Ali Shan.

Ali Shan shang you tielu . . .

One, two, three, to Taiwan.

On Taiwan is Mount Ali.

On Mount Ali is a railroad . . .

By the end of September, the air outside had the smell of Beijing again—a bit of burning, some exhaust, and plenty of dust. It was not that it was overpowering, but it was the complete familiar scent returning, in all its polluted roundness. And it was a Beijing day again, a comfortable fall day that would have been pretty but for the generalized haze lying on it.

Inside the floral starburst by the entry ramp, the Paralympics logo was slowly disappearing into new foliage, just as the Fuwa had before it, the greenery continuing to grow even in its pots and cages. The banners were finally down from the Second Ring, and the yellow and white stripes of the Olympic lane dividers had been repainted, so that they were alternating bright white and faded white. The front page of the Beijing News, the Xin Jing Bao—“Bao! Bao! Bao!” Mack cried—showed an astronaut planting a Chinese flag in space.