Epilogue
The air at the gate to the Olympic Green was sweet with flowers. There were dense beds of them, lush bands of pink, red, yellow, purple, leading from North Pole Star Road toward the Bird’s Nest. The sky above the Bird’s Nest was blue, with clean white clouds.
It was May 2010, nearly a year and a half after we’d left, and we were back in Beijing for the month. Christina had one last project to wind up. This time around, we had caught up with the surge of progress: we were staying on the twelfth floor of a plush hotel apartment at the southwest corner of Dongzhimen Bridge, a tower sprouting from the top of a five-story shopping mall, next to the big four-legged bronze gui. We had seen the building go up, but it hadn’t opened till we were gone. The façade was decked out in irregular glass facets, black-and-white graphics, color-shifting LEDs, and video screens. In the hotel lobby was a bronze of a reclining mother holding up her child, the baby with an adorable curling forelock, that I immediately recognized as the work of Han Meilin. Little Mack, now almost three years old, liked to sit by the living room’s full-length windows in the evening and look down at the roof of the mall part, through the angled skylights to the shoppers and the hotel swimming pool below. “Night is falling,” he said. He wanted to be told and retold the story of how one would get to the hotel: onto the airport expressway and through the great expanse of city, past the Fifth Ring, the Fourth Ring, the Third Ring, to the Second Ring and Dongzhimen.
Diagonally across the bridge from the hotel was the Dongzhimen transit station, still missing parts of its glass skin, the construction not visibly advanced since 2008. Christina asked a cabdriver when it was supposed to be finished. “Shei dou bu zhidao,” he said. Nobody knows.
Some things were as they’d ever been. We had been back in Beijing for forty-eight hours before I even realized that our windows faced the mountains in the west. The usual yellow-brown pall had been there to greet us when we arrived; the blurry cityscape faded out in the middle distance. Then, on the second full afternoon, there was thunder and a bit of rain, and suddenly we were looking at the old CCTV tower—not the twenty-first-century Koolhaas loop, but the 1990s broadcast tower, a spike like a lacquered souvenir, all the way across town, with mountains upon mountains behind it.
The more celebrated CCTV building, to our south and east, was still empty. Two more Spring Festival Galas had come and gone, and the would-be studio space had yet to host one. During Chinese New Year in 2009, its companion building, the Television Cultural Center, went up in flames—a fireworks accident, investigators said—days before a luxury hotel was supposed to have opened there. The blackened hulk of the TVCC building remained there, next to the unopened architectural masterpiece. Officially, it was structurally sound, but nobody appeared to be in any hurry to renovate it and move in. From a certain angle, driving past the complex on the south, you could see the scorched form of the second building framed perfectly in the silvery loop of the first, like a gigantic and useless art installation, or a monument to the space between intention and reality.
I was prepared for more desolation at the Olympic Green. The monumental construction rarely holds up well in any Olympic city, once the event is gone, and I had heard about fumbling attempts to make use of the empty venues: there’d been a water-ballet version of Swan Lake at the Water Cube, and over the past winter, someone had pumped artificial snow into the Bird’s Nest to make a bunny-slope ski park. The posts holding up the flowerpots on the road north to the Green were rusting, but they did have flowers in them, even snow.
And the way into the Green had never looked so good. Dozens of tourists were ambling around the site, spread out and uncrowded in the open space. The trees around the Bird’s Nest had grown and leafed out; grasses were tall and thick; the fences and gates and barriers had been scaled back. Water lilies bloomed in the reflecting pond beside the stadium. “The Grass Is Smiling at You, Please Detour,” a sign advised. Pedestrians stopped on the footbridge to admire the view. “Lean Against the Guardrail with Care,” another sign warned. A booth offered to print photos of people posing in front of the scene: a six-inch print for 10 yuan, a twelve-inch print for 30. Beside the pathway were rolls of new sod, bundled in red-white-and-blue-striped tarps.
At the ticket windows outside the Bird’s Nest, signs and banners announced that it was hosting the “Unlimited Sky Adventure” of Ahdili, an endurance tightrope walker from Xinjiang. He had been walking back and forth on a cable across the open top of the stadium for three weeks, five hours a day, and would keep going until July. I tried to buy a ticket, and the clerk asked me if I spoke Chinese. My Mandarin had faded badly, but it had begun coming back. If it was too windy, she said—the clean north breeze had been blowing all day—he wouldn’t walk today. At 50 yuan a ticket, it seemed wiser to wait for a return visit.
On the plaza west of the Nest, peddlers were selling replicas of the Olympic gold medals, complete with inset imitation-jade rings. A mute woman sketched the price in the air: 15 yuan. I haggled down to 10, which was still five times too expensive, then went ahead and bought one. It would fall apart by the next day.
The ethylene-tetrafluoroethylene bubbles of the Water Cube looked rumpled and a little baggy in the sunlight. The Cube itself was fenced off for its renovation into a water park, but the gift shop next door was open: blue-on-white-on-blue merchandise with bubble-cell patterns. Your Chinese zodiac symbol in blue glass, on top of a rippled glass box. There were some leftover Fuwa pencil sets, but mostly the Water Cube had become its own brand. I bought an inflatable swimming ring, in the standard pattern, for Mack to wear in the hotel pool.
Loudspeakers on the plaza were playing the old Olympic songs in surround sound. “One World, One Dream” thrummed over the pavement, and then, unavoidably, the now familiar opening notes. Back in America, the summer before, a Chinese-American toddler friend had shown Mack the video on YouTube, on her parents’ iPhone, and he had kept asking to see it thereafter, over and over, the song that would never fade or end. “Di ji ci lia mei guanxi,” the voices sang, “you tai duo huati. BEEEI-JINNG HUANYING NIII . . .”
On the way home, I asked the cabdriver to circle the whole Green and the Olympic Forest. Undergrowth had filled in the bare ground, until it almost looked natural. Something else had come in, too, on the east side—a cluster of rooftops, peeking up behind the treetops. All the new greenery made it hard to tell what they might be.
The new city had plans for an even newer city. Reports had just come out that the heart of the Drum Tower neighborhood, the gentrifying hutongs north of the Forbidden City, would be torn down and would be reinvented as something called “Beijing Time Cultural City,” anchored by a museum of timekeeping and an underground shopping mall.
Along Outer Dongzhimen Side Street, the new towers across from the old apartment had reached their full height. Glass and brown stone panels were going on the outside, and high up in the interior shadows, welding sparks were shining. Down at the corner, where the restroom had been, the new stretch of blank wall was already chipped and begrimed to match the rest of the alley. Somehow a fecal smell still hovered there. Cargo tricycles passed: watercooler bottles, old quilts, a mixed cargo of baby cabbages and flattened cardboard.
Wang Jiashui and his cargo tricycle were still inside the gate of Yard No. 26. He was binding together a fresh load of scrap. How was business? In this line of work, he said, you won’t starve.
Moderate prosperity. The world economic crisis had set the new Chinese era off to a wobbly start, even as the United States seemed lost and stagnated. Migrant workers had been put out of work by the tens of millions. Around China, there had been a string of haunting, vicious attacks: crazed lone men with knives invading well-to-do kindergartens, killing the innocent children of the moneyed class. Workers in a factory that made iPhones were killing themselves. The murders were suppressed in the official media; the suicides were played up—a symbol of China’s refusal to be exploited, or its refusal to be seen as being willing to be exploited. The provinces were raising their minimum wages; in Beijing, the minimum would go up 20 percent, to 960 yuan a month.
China was on the top of the pile and on the bottom, all at once. Inside our mall downstairs was an H&M, a brand built on cheap Chinese-made fashion exports, now selling direct to Beijingers. China could now exploit China all on its own. The cars on the streets were bigger and shinier than before. The young men and women gliding through the logo-glow of the shops in the Village at Sanlitun all seemed to be six feet tall. They moved as if they owned a piece of the century to come.
The Dongsi Community was still holding English classes. Some three dozen students were there when I dropped in. The Olympic countdown sign still stood outside, its numbers blank. “When did you go to Athens?” the lesson on the chalkboard read. “I went to Athens last week. When will you go to Beijing? I will go to Beijing next week.”
I led the class through a reading of a lesson about train tickets. Two travelers duck into a pub by the station to wait for the 8:19 to London. “We’ve got plenty of time.” But the station clock is ten minutes slow, and they miss their train. When’s the next one? “In five hours’ time.”
The Three Represents man came by my seat to welcome me back. Beijing has changed since 2008, he told me. “Rule of law more and more,” he said. “Democracy more.”
This was a debatable interpretation. In 2008, a few hundred intellectuals, caught up in the Olympic-year notion of internationalism and liberalization, had signed a document called Charter 08, calling for government reform. Discussion of the petition was banned in the media, its authors were detained and harassed, and one of them, Li Xiaobo, was arrested and sentenced to prison for subversion of state power. In the fall of 2010, he would win the Nobel Peace Prize, an item of news that was first censored, then denounced, in China. The metaphoric zone of freedom accompanying the Olympics was as much an illusion as the free-speech zones had been. Ai Weiwei, the designer-turned-denouncer of the Bird’s Nest, had become a public crusader for the rights of earthquake victims, and local police in the earthquake zone had beaten him into a cerebral hemorrhage for it. As the government pushed back ever harder against its critics and would-be reformers, not even Ai’s stature could protect him; in April 2011, he would be seized at the Beijing airport and taken into detention. The riots of Lhasa had repeated themselves in Urumqi in 2009, with Uighur mobs and Han Chinese mobs beating each other to death. The government blamed “splittists,” again, and cut off all Internet service to Xinjiang.
China was proving too large to be conquered, by the social and political reformers or the inquiring press. The walls of Beijing had held; the spectacle of the Olympics had served its purpose. No one had been obviously poisoned by the air or the food. The tanks had not rolled in. The ambition and nationalism behind the show was implied, not expressed. China was a phenomenon the world believed it could absorb.
Who could deny that China had joined the world? Something was circling the world, drawing us all together. But after my time in modern, international-minded Beijing, I had trouble believing the unifying force was liberal democracy. Growth, development, security—these were the values that marked a nation as a twenty-first-century power. Maybe that was all it had taken to mark a twentieth-century power, too.
The Olympics were going on to London, and then, for 2016, the International Olympic Committee had chosen Rio de Janeiro—a city that wore its internal contradictions even closer to the surface than Beijing did. Christina and I had been to Rio in 2007, with Mack in the womb; the week before we got there, grenade and gun warfare between gangs and police had killed nineteen people. Buses had been burned. Yet the IOC, fresh from its triumph in Beijing, expected that Brazil could tidy up the city to its satisfaction. Among the other finalists, stable, reliable, all-American Chicago was rejected on the first ballot.
Liu Xiang was nowhere to be seen. I ate three scorpion skewers at the Donghuamen market and then walked up and down the Wangfujing shopping street, looking for a single billboard or poster of him. The Nike store, where the hurdling mannequin had been in the window, was full of World Cup gear. The Olympic merchandise flagship store was now the flagship store for the Shanghai World’s Fair, Expo 2010. Copies of the Shanghai Expo’s blue wave-shaped mascot, Haibao, stood where the rows of Beibei, Jingjing, Huanhuan, Yingying, and Nini had been.
Late in the month, Liu appeared in a track meet in Shanghai. He had been racing for a year, but he was still trying to recover from surgery. He had not threatened a world record in a long time, and was not expected to do so this time around. I watched on the hotel TV as he burst from the starting blocks in the final. David Oliver of the United States surged ahead, decisively, the way Liu had once surged ahead of the field. Liu staggered wildly as he headed for the finish line, battling a Chinese teammate for second place. He lost even that, in a photo finish, by a hundredth of a second.
If you looked closely enough around town, the silver panels on the store façades were grimy with age. Poplar fluff still swirled in the air; the city had redoubled its efforts to hormonally suppress it, and had somehow only prolonged the fluff season. But at the bus stops, people in jackets with the Line Up Day 11 logo were herding the crowd into more orderly lines.
I met Soojin Cho at a Starbucks in Jianwai Soho. She had closed her dance studio in the downturn, and a rival cheerleading company had poached a batch of her dancers. She had sued one of them for making off with some of her cheerleading costumes, after seeing a photograph of the wayward dancer wearing the uniform at an event at Hooters. “I called her up and the girl refused to apologize,” she said. “So I sued her.” After two rounds of litigation, Cho was waiting to find out what the judgment would be.
But Cho’s plan to become a media personality was working out. She was hosting a talk show on Hunan Television called Her Village, a Chinese equivalent of The View, and she was serving as a celebrity judge for reality-TV shows in which women competed to become cheerleaders for the Chinese Basketball Association or the upcoming Asian Games. In the latest edition, the winners would dance as a team in the United States, at an NBA game.
Cho was engaged to a fellow foreigner, an American named Nicholas Krippendorf, who had helped bring the New England Patriots cheerleaders over for cheerleading camp in the spring of 2008. He had proposed to her during Her Village, on camera, at the end of a segment about older women who hadn’t married yet. The producers were talking to the couple about having the wedding itself on TV.
Big Mack was tired of Beijing, he said. His neighborhood out at Wangjing, which had been towers in empty bulldozed land when he bought his apartment, was now noisy and bustling at street level. Beijing’s official population, residents and migrants together, would be announced at 20 million over the summer.
I had come by for a lesson in cooking Beijing noodles, zhajiangmian. Ginger, leek, garlic; two kinds of bean sauce. Ground pork. Dry tofu and garlic shoots for texture. The kitchen counter was installed higher than normal, so Big Mack could work comfortably. He wanted to unload his apartment before the real estate bubble burst—that there was a bubble, and that it would burst, was a given; the government had just tightened loan regulations to make it harder for speculators to accumulate second and third apartments—and move somewhere more peaceful, a nice seaside city of a few million.
Ahdili, the tightrope walker, was a tiny red-clad figure, moving back and forth across the sky. There were something like two hundred people in the Bird’s Nest to watch him, but the pixel pattern of the tens of thousands of empty seats kept it from feeling deserted. At one end of the rope, on the edge of the stadium’s eye, was a little hut where he stayed when not walking. Every now and then he would wave, or sit down on the rope, or do a little heel-toe dance.
Because of the nature of his project, Ahdili was not available for an interview. In a basement room, with Christina translating, I talked to his wife of sixteen years, Yebaguli Abedurizake. Her husband was getting blisters on his feet, she said, and it was lonely for him up there. Over time, his tightrope was sagging closer and closer to the cables that were still strung across the stadium from the opening ceremony. Every day, his three daughters would call him on the phone. “For him,” she said, “the Bird’s Nest is what all Chinese people look to, the heart of the country.”
The concourse of the Bird’s Nest was lined with large color photographs, a historical record of the Games. On the inner side were pictures of Olympic athletes; on the outer were portraits of construction workers. There was a gallery of wax figures of IOC presidents—Jacques Rogge, looking solicitous, hands clasped; Juan Antonio Samaranch, who had died the month before, smiling from a chair carved with golden dragons. A gift shop farther around the concourse had leftover Olympic merchandise. For 100 yuan, there were little boxes of turf from the stadium field itself, “rapidly collected and processed” as soon as the Games were over. One rack was filled with souvenir countdown pins: “900 Days to Go.” 800. 700. 200. 100. 3. 5.
This time, the sky was gray and drizzly. Up close, the silver columns were streaked with dirt, and patches of paint had fallen away. The damage seemed less a defacement than part of a natural process, the climate of Beijing marking the stadium as its own. Birds chattered inside the structure. The curving bulk of it was still engrossing, even its new state of pointlessness. I stood on the plaza for a while, letting it loom over me once more.
Across from the Planning Exhibition Hall was yet another new luxury complex. Banners announced it as “Ch’ienmen 23,” using the old Westernimperialist-era transliteration of the name Qianmen, for the emperor’s south-facing Front Gate. I went into the museum, heading for the third floor. The escalators were motion-activated, and attendants waited beside them, stepping out to trip the sensor in advance of each visitor. I rode past the bronze city of 1949, with its expanse of tiny rooftops, and made my way for one last look at the Planning Model.
I had not been back since my first visit. Now, as I surveyed the miniature city, I could follow the plan, reading the model in space and time. I drifted around the room, taking it in from every angle. There was the gleaming Egg, the concrete-and-glass Danish at the Dongsi Bridge, the White Dagoba rising above Xicheng. The undulating dragon’s neck of the 7 Star Hotel, with a tiny cutout for the giant video screen. The Altar of Heaven and the Altar of Earth. The Drum Tower and the Bell Tower, and the low gray roofs that spread out around them, for now. I could look west over our little hotel tower to the CCTV spike across the room.
It was the city, and it was not. The gui at Dongzhimen was absent. The wavy municipal information building was missing its mate. The TVCC building was undamaged. Throughout the model were buildings done in colorless plexiglass, representing the next round of development. Dongzhimen Station was still in plexiglass. More ghost buildings marched south along Fuxingmen, west of the Egg; they occupied the space south of the Asian Games complex; they filled in the east side of the Olympic Green, where a science and technology museum had just opened.
In the miniature Olympic Forest, I found the buildings I’d glimpsed from the taxi, some four dozen in all. These were not plexiglass, but solid, finished works. A Chinese tour group was passing through, and I asked the guide what they were. “Biesu qu,” she said. Villa development. The more-than-moderately-prosperous class had claimed a piece of the Olympic site all for itself.
By the escalator, I studied the 1949 bronze relief map, the city of the buried past. Dongzhimen, to the far northeast, was high up, almost out of view. I zoomed my camera in on it and snapped a few pictures. Later, back in the hotel, I enlarged them more on my computer. There was the tower of the gate and the fortification in front of it. The hutongs of Inner Dongzhimen were packed inside the city wall, while the land outside—beyond the old city limit—sat almost empty.
Almost. A cluster of buildings, forming a sort of crooked wedge, led away from the imperial gate. There was a narrow gap running through the middle of them: a sagging east-west line. I knew that line. I had picked out its angle time and again, on pocket maps and road atlases, on Internet satellite photos, on the floor of the planning model. I had walked it every day, steered the Great Wall SUV along it, ridden up it in a taxi with our newborn son.
I e-mailed the photo to a friend, an expert on the layers of Old Beijing, to make sure. Yes, he wrote back, that was Outer Dongzhimen Side Street. Back then, it was just Outer Dongzhimen Street. The reason our old alley fit awkwardly into its surroundings was that it had been there first, before the boulevard, before the embassies, before Workers’ Stadium. On that side of town, it was the oldest thing outside the Second Ring Road.
From the Planning Exhibition Hall, I walked west and south, toward Qianmen proper, at the foot of Tian’anmen Square. There, at the south end of the capital’s ceremonial axis, was the renovated Beijing, the twenty-first-century city, the ragged old commercial district remade into a wide pedestrian shopping zone, Chinese and international all at once. The surface roads approaching it were fenced off to foot traffic and choked with cars. A surviving Fuwa sign welcomed me to Beijing as I descended the stairs into a network of grim underpasses. In the tunnel, a beggar was doubled over on the floor, facedown by a metal cup.
At the head of the Qianmen shopping zone were a polychrome quintuple wooden arch and a fountain blowing spray. Before I entered the pedestrian mall, I veered west, toward the side lanes where I had seen eviction notices posted four years before. In less than a minute, passing a Porsche Cayenne parked with two wheels on the sidewalk, I had reached a galvanized metal construction wall and a rubble zone.
It was two years since the new Qianmen had opened for business, right in time for the Olympics, but the neighborhood here was frozen in mid-demolition. Walls or corners of buildings were still standing, even as the rest of the structure slumped into piles of broken bricks, or twisted steel and concrete. Dirt and debris spilled out of empty shopfronts into the street. There was still a little work going on; a demolition crew was perched on the ruins, having a snack of ice cream. But mostly there were mounds and mounds of rubble. Someone had scrawled graffiti in dripping white characters on a wall: Those who litter here are donkey cunts; those who piss here are pig cunts; those who litter here are dog cunts.
A sign said this was Langfang No. 1 Street. I rounded the corner, reversed direction, and found Langfang No. 2. Here, the redevelopment had stopped halfway: the south side of the lane had been redone in carved wood and gray brick veneer; the north side was walled off and partly demolished. Roasted ducks hung behind plate glass in a new restaurant, while a dog wandered through the wreckage across the way.
Where Langfang No. 2 Street approached the Qianmen shopping zone, a vendor had hung out a row of T-shirts. One of them had the Beijing 2008 logo, and another had the Water Cube pattern on it. Alongside were shirts featuring Mao, pandas, a dragon, the Great Wall, a red star, and Peking Opera masks. Five thousand years of civilization. More vendors had set up in a crowded, narrow corridor running north and south, parallel to the main street, their stalls filled with everyday Chinese merchandise—clothes, trinkets, luggage. Mandarin pop songs played. It all looked the way things had looked in 2006, before anyone tried to improve it.
Then I was out in the wide, smooth new Qianmen Avenue. A strip of white marble ran down the middle of it—the center line of the capital, of the world—in imitation of the marble path in the Forbidden City, reserved for the feet of the emperor.
Trolley tracks flanked it. The buildings were gray brick-look, trimmed in carved stone, and were mostly two stories, in a reproduction of the early-twentieth-century Republican style. Security cameras were everywhere. A four-sided clock tower bore the Rolex logo on every face. There was a Uniqlo, a Swatch store, a Häagen-Dazs, and also a shop called Sweet Sweets Family and a shop selling China Intangible Cultural Heritage, which seemed to mean snack food. There was a Starbucks done up in green and gold and latticework like a parody of the high Chinese manner, the beached double-decker pleasure boat of a degenerate aristocrat.
Everywhere on the street, if you looked, there was something odd about the details. A wood-paneled trolley went by, its overhead brushes reaching into empty air, where electrical wires would have been. The shop signs were rendered in elaborate pre-Revolutionary characters, but they read from left to right, in the modern manner. The manhole covers identified the street in English as “Qianmen Emperor’s Avenue,” then said “Hundred-Year-Old Street” in Chinese—both claims couldn’t simultaneously be true, since the emperor had been gone for more than a century.
A store called Me & City covered an entire block—nine different façades of two or three stories, each with its own “Me & City” sign, were grafted onto an enormous beige box. It was a feat of bullshit architecture that would have done any post–New Urbanist American mall developer proud. It was fake as fake could be, this China. A revolutionary Communist state gone over to luxury consumer goods. Incoherent, ahistoric, self-contradictory, all-devouring.
But if you walked twenty yards away from this glib prosperity, you could stand in the rubble, graffiti, and squalor, the Beijing of ruins and unfinished works. Ten yards back, and there was a crowd of people getting along with their ordinary business, buying and selling. These three Beijings—the moneyed artificial one, the wretched and broken one, the live and bustling one—stretched on in parallel, just out of sight of one another. You could stand in each one, any one, and believe you were seeing the true thing.
