Letter
from Beijing
July
27-29, 2000
Michael
Hawley / mike@media.mit.edu
the
wall cloisonné forbidden
city pepper fish concubines eunuchs
shampoo shopping alvin's
tips
photo
archive
There
is really not too much to report from Beijing as I had rather little time here
(2.5 days, packed in after the launch of MediaLabEurope) and only a tiny taste
of a vast country. John Markoff and I had hoped to hook up in Asia but
schedules couldn't quite sync up (he was flying out as I was flying in); and I
had some pressing appointments back home.
So,
as I write this we are flying out of Beijing in spectacular summer weather.
A huge plain of farmland is below, with rugged mountains cutting abruptly up out
of the plateau to the north. Even the flight attendants are remarking on
what a stunning day it is. This view is a big reminder of how little I've
seen. The matronly flight attendants, enjoying the "perk" of a
trans-pacific route, are looking after us like grandmothers ("eat, eat,
you're skin and bones"). Oy. Time to reflect.
I flew to Beijing to give a showboat lecture for Daikin, a Japanese
company that makes airconditioners, does advertising, and all sorts of other
stuff. Was met at the shiny new airport by Hiro, from Daikin, and Clara,
who is from Beijing and is the executive assistant to the president of Daikin
here. Whisked to the Kunlun hotel (which is a 5-star, one of the Leading
Hotels of the World chain), I note there appear to be traffic lights and a
right/left divider but not really a believable traffic system, as we
maneuver across lanes of bikes, pedestrians and rickshaws. Window on the
22nd floor overlooking the dusty sprawl of Beijing. It's 94F and humid,
although there isn't enough humidity to go around — Beijing is a dry place and
water is very scarce per capita. Dinner at the Shanghai Restaurant here in
the hotel. Clara orders way too many dishes: crystal shrimp, spicy fried
chili peppers, szechuan beef, eels, on and on. They're going easy on
me. This is pretty tame fare compared to the sorts of eyeballs and turtles
and monkey brains and deer penis wine I was anticipating. After the 16 hour transit from Dublin,
I was a zombie and my stomach was upside down, so I was just tasting. And
it tasted real good, but not great. Throughout, a little man with a
ponytail in a dark blue silk suit wandered around the tables carrying a tea
kettle. This is a serious job in China. Most Beijing folks prefer
jasmine tea (I do, too: no caffeine, no headaches). And a little jasmine
flower on the pillow is a wonderful sleep inducer. I did not need the
flower that night.
At the crack of noon the next day I am escorted to the lecture hall in stages, through a series of
stops in a couple different green rooms. At about 2pm I fall sound asleep
in my chair, and folks are kind enough to let me stay that way until my talk.
Hearing the introduction and applause, I stride out and my foot solidly catches
the big step up that was cunningly placed there with no lights or safety marks,
and I stumble onto the stage and crash into the podium, a classic Chevy Chase
pratfall, barely hanging onto my laptop. Ugh. Apart from that,
my lecture was uneventful, although the simultaneous translation into Mandarin,
Japanese, etc, turned me into one of the Slow Talkers of America. I
finished with a discussion of the schools
that Bernie Krisher has been building in Cambodia, more than appropriate
since Bernie was the one who made this lecture happen. The audience was
impeccably polite, and afterwards we all rolled out into a phenomenal banquet.
Yes, I had "Beijing Duck" as they call it here, and my gracious hosts
showered me with gifts of all sorts. "Dees won for you, and dees for
you gullflend... and dees won for gullflend too, for her."
Clara Guan has been asked to look after my needs. She has recently married
(coming up on one year) and is by her own admission a fantastic cook. Her
husband is in the manufacturing import/export business and has to travel about
half the year, so she has the weekend free. They have a car, but she is
understandably terrified of driving around Beijing. So she hires drivers. And
Saturday morning at 7:30am, she's in the lobby with a driver out front. We head
out to see some sites — the Great Wall, a cloisonné pottery factory, the
Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, etc.
We head north about an hour out of the city towards Mongolia
and The Wall — specifically, to the Badaling portion, one of the most
frequented sites. The mountains here are wonderfully sculpted, slightly
surreal. Think of Chinese silk paintings of landscapes and you'll get the
picture. As the road climbs up, a dark green train with a big red star on
it chugs through the hills on our right: it's an international train, bound for
Russia. The Wall occasionally crosses the highway here, snaking over the
hills in tantalizing glimpses.
Parking
lot at Badaling.
Badaling is a mob scene, even at 9:30 in the morning. The parking lots are
jammed, and we head up into the last dirt lot and find a space of sorts. Clara
and I grab a lift on the cable car up to a high portion of the wall. Turns out
she has been here hundreds of times, and used to be a tour guide at this spot.
Handy. She jogs along the wall in places, running downhill to win a few
steps on the uphills; I snap pictures.
Railings are a recent addition.
Okay, we all hear the stories (it's one of only two manmade structures visible
from space, etc) and we've seen the pictures, but it is hard to appreciate what
a stupendous work of imagination and engineering this is until you finally stand
on it.
Snaking
over the hills.
My
guide, Clara, not quite ready for her closeup.
We
climb up to the highest guardpost, called Hero's outlook. It is a hot,
sunny day with bright blue skies, white clouds, a good breeze, and the
absolutely deafening noise of cicadas. I've never heard such loud bugs
before. A little boy next to me has caught one, a big fat greenish cicada,
and is pinching it between his fingers, like a little toy buzzer. That is
one seriously annoyed bug, and yow, is it noisy. I gaze over the wall
and recall Richard Nixon's memorable words when he stood in the same spot:
"This truly is a Great Wall." Duh.
View
along the northern side (facing northwest-ish).
To be fair, most people are rightly stupefied. I was. Like an anaconda
uncoiled over bumpy ground, the wall crawls up and down over the eerie
mountains, vanishing over the horizon. Monumental and absolutely
mindblowing.
From here, I peek through the crenellations and arrow slots over the endless
northern plains. Not hard to imagine armies welling, Mongolian horsemen
charging. The wall was built to keep minority tribes out — Mongols,
Mandarins, etc — and the troops had a simple method for telegraphing
warnings. If an enemy army of 500 was approaching, one big bonfire was lit
at the guardpost. If 1000, two big bonfires. And so on.
Hundreds of thousands of laborers built the thing; just the thought of quarrying
and schlepping 60 million tons of stone boggles the mind.
Hero's
guardpost.
The wall runs some 2000 miles (we know of one fellow who mountain
biked the whole thing). Actually, it's a mistake to think of it as
"the" wall; there are many walls, and a new stretch was discovered (by
satellite) in 1997. After hiking around for awhile, we satisfy ourselves
that the thing has done its job well, so we grab the cable car down, avoid the
"I climbed The Great Wall" tee shirts, and head back for Beijing.
On the way, we stop at a big cloisonné workshop.
Cloisonné is a pottery method a bit like making stained glass, wherein
threadlike wires are laid down on the vessel and enamel is painted in the
openings. The process is incredibly laborious, with a multitude of firing
and polishing, wiring and painting, but the results are spectacular. And
on display here are thousands of cloisonné pieces. One wonders where on
earth it all goes. This "Friendship Store" is full of knicknacks
-- tiny carved jade animals, two of the biggest vases I've ever seen (over 12'
high), a huge bronze tub carved with turtles, crystal balls of every size up to
about two feet across, tons of pottery (they don't call it china for nothing) --
all kinds of bizarre and wonderful craftsy things.
We leave the factory and head into the city for lunch at a hole in the wall.
Translated, its name means: Water Boiling Fish. And
that is what we have.
Our driver, Mr. Lee (who speaks only Mandarin) and Clara sit on the other side
of the booth. Clara orders a small lunch. First some potatoes and a
salad arrive. The salad is big chunks of cut fruit and vegetables (apples,
tomatoes, cucumbers, pineapple) with a sort of pinkish berryish yoghurt sauce.
Refreshing. A plate full of potatoes, which are cut into tiny strips like
spaghetti and steamed lightly. Crunchy and with a little garlic: really
great. Some green beans with spices and salty crumbs of pork (I think).
And then comes a very large bowl, still boiling, the top completely covered in
deep red/brown chili peppers. It's a spectacular looking thing. The
waitress arrives to scoop out the layer of nuclear peppers, revealing the
fish. Hence the name of this joint. The fish is delicious, very hot
and spicy, and there are crunchy black peppercorns, bean sprouts, and a few
other things floating in it. When my nose starts running I switch back to
the cool yoghurt salad. A perfect ying-yang. We are all drinking
cokes to wash it down. Funny, I always liked the taste of coke with dim
sum and pot stickers. Turns out the Chinese do, too. These dishes
have been debugged for thousands of years. What an outstanding, healthy
meal.
Fortified, we head on into Beijing for the Forbidden
City. This is a truly imposing series of great halls and wide plazas,
built for imperial events, audiences, and so on over the last 500 years. I
carry an audio tour, charmingly narrated by Roger Moore. It's terrific.
Hanging
out.
I
am, as far as I can tell, the only big ugly white guy in the place, and this
amuses the Chinese no end. People flock to pose next to me for their
pictures, which is a little bizarre.
"Quick
kids! Stand next to that laowai!"
An
amputee hobbles over, begging for money.
South
of the south gate (and a bit north of Tiananmen Square).
Fishing
around I find a few small bills (yuan). Apparently they are just about
worthless (less than a penny), so he refuses to accept them. Being turned
down by a beggar is a new experience for me. He's persistent, so I fish
out the only other money I have: a colorful 5-pound note from Ireland (neither
the hotel nor the airport would change my Irish money). He marvels over
the thing, and seems to be deciding it's useless, but then his sister/business
manager comes over for a closer look. Soon a rather large crowd gathers,
maybe thirty people pressed around me, all angling for a peek at this mysterious
money.
Bowling my way out of the throng, I continue into the city. The tour goes
from south to north, through all the major buildings. This place is
monumental, on a scale recalling Angkor Wat, though very very different in feel.
The plazas are wide open and treeless (easier to see ambushers).
On the plazas,
no bushes = no ambushes.
One
of the more striking relics is a huge ramp down a royal staircase at the Hall of
Perfect Harmony:
Royal
staircase. Huge marble slab.
It's
made from an immense 250-ton single slab of marble. On it are carved
mountains, dragons, and various sacred symbols. The impressive thing is
the way they got it here: it was transported by a crew of 20,000 laborers one
winter, who dug a special road for the purpose, pouring water on it to make
sheets of ice. They slid the stone over the ice road to get it to Beijing.
Golden Lioness, tickling (or feeding)
her baby.
Massive
bronze lion, with his paw on the world.
It is about a mile from the south gate (near Tiananmen Square, the largest
public square in the world) to the north end, and Roger Moore's narration is
smart, savvy and fun. (Make note: invent GPS-triggered audio tours of the
world; when are those louts at the Media Lab going to do this?)
A
tree for lovers: two trees become one.
Hard to miss the stories of royal pastimes in times past: the emperor maintained
a troupe of wives, consorts, and concubines, maybe 50
favorites within the palace, and a thousand in the larger compound. Their
names were kept on jade slabs maintained by the eunuchs. According to
ancient Chinese wisdom, sex with young girls prolonged the life of the emperor,
a habit apparently shared by Mao. (Paraphrasing from my guides). After a
hard day of empire building, the emperor would pick a name off the jade tablet
and a eunuch would scurry off to find the lucky lady. Stripped naked
(weaponless), bathed, perfumed, then gift-wrapped in yellow silk, the young
girl, crippled with bound feet, climbed onto the eunuch and was piggybacked and
placed at the feet of the emperor. The eunuch recorded the date and time
in the event of a little emperor nine months later.
A
big open plaza needs a big incense burner.
The eunuchs themselves were an odd lot to say the
least. Mostly poor men who sought a better life, they received the
Imperial Bris at the Eunuch Clinic nearby, just outside the walls. The
method was simple a chair with a hole in the seat, and a chop-chop with a very
sharp knife. Ouch. I am not sure if this involved the frank and
beans, or just the beans. More than just the twig and berries were cut
short: apparently half of them died from the operation.
Mutilation of any sort meant the person would be denied entry into the next life
(sound familiar? Deuteronomy: "no man with his stones crushed
or his member cut off shall be admitted into the house of the Lord").
To prepare for that eventuality, most eunuchs carried their missing bits in a
little pouch tied to their belt at all times. T'sai Lun was a eunuch here,
and indeed, here is where he invented papermaking a very long time ago. I recall
reading that a big stable of elephants was kept nearby, and that concubines used
(I am not making this up) elephant poop for shampoo.
Extra sheen, rich body, they said. Whew. Well, no doubt by 2500A.D.
our Prell will be like dung in a world where genetic engineering and nanobots
will deliver far more spectacular results.
Looking back through the gates into the
Forbidden City.
Looking
along the wall at the north gate.
Back at the hotel, looking out my window I see the Lufthansa Shopping
Market, which is a Chinese version of a mall -- no walls between stores, just
five sprawling floors of departments. In that respect shopping is a little
like eating. You only get one little plate, and pick and choose from the
many dishes, tossing it all together.
In a way, this sums up the power of China for me. It's a melting pot, like
the US, and people are not shy about mixing up ideas. I wander into a
beautiful gallery of carved stone things, and pick out a couple trinkets.
The fellow there tosses some bubble wrap on the floor, slices a chunk off with a
razor (gouging the floor, too), wraps it up and I'm good to go. You can
tell this is a country of hackers, destined to roar into the computer
future. Walking down a dirty alleyway in the middle of nowhere, I see a
hovel with a grungy sign for acupuncture out front: it has a web address.
I pick up some beautiful little books of brush painting (a few dollars each),
and a brush painting kit (about $15). Throw in some pandas and a little
cloisonne bowl. My hosts give me spectacular gifts --- a dazzling tea set,
and an amazing carved jade ball. I don't know what they call this thing,
but the ball is about the size of a baseball, carved in an elaborate filigree
and with finger-sized holes inside. Within is another jade ball that spins
freely. And then another one. I count seven layers at least, and
cannot imagine how long it took to whittle this contraption.
 
 
 
I
mail a few goodies to friends, wondering how long they will take. Judging
from how long it takes to get them out of the hotel the answer is: indefinite.
There's a comical scene as the concierge cannot really manage to mail a package,
the post office and banks are closed, the hotel won't give a credit card
advance, all my cash is in Irish pounds which they can't convert, and the ATM
machines don't work yet unless you're Chinese. Meanwhile, the valet loses
my sport jacket, the maid has nicked my cufflinks, the lock to my room is
disabled, and things are beginning to come just a bit unglued. With icy
calm and a frosty stare that shrivels the assistant manager, I wait as the staff
scurries around to bring things together.
Piling into the cab, I can't help musing on what I might have done had I had
time to get past the standard things. For future reference, Alvin
Fu recommends:
OK, so maybe you've been to Beijing before and you've been to all these
places. How about playing hockey with the Canadian Ambassador? Or skating
around in an underground bomb shelter whose tunnels have been iced over?
Make sure you get a good dose of Chinese food. Try to avoid Japanese food
unless you're at a top-notch hotel and paying top dollar. You should sample
the Xinjiang-style dishes (very popular with westerners). There are also
the emperor-style banquets, where you dine like the emperors of China once did.
Then if you get really bored, there are places where you can shoot off artillery
rounds and anti-tank rockets for a nominal fee. If you're the
moneygrubbing type, check out the Xiushui Market close to the US Embassy - it
has knockoffs of everything from Polo shirts to North Face jackets to the latest
classical CDs, and some interesting kinckacks as well. And every once in a
while you can play bridge in the Great Hall of the People.
If you want to meet some people, I can direct you to MIT graduates, startup
types (my friend with the biotech startup is currently in Beijing),
stewardesses, local Chinese businessmen, expat managers, trade show organizers,
and what have you. There is a thriving night life in the Sanlitun district with
lots of bars and discos catering expressly to big-nosed hairy "laowai"
like you. Unfortunately, the police have chosen this past month to crack
down on prostitution, so things aren't quite as fun as they could be...
Personally my tastes would be to get out into the country
and see more of its vastness and diversity. My two days
were pretty tame, scratching the tiniest tip of an iceberg, but one gets a sense
of the awesome mix and scale that is China.
Mike
A
schoolgirl waiting to enter the Forbidden City.
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