Arriving in Beijing on the National Holiday

Flying over Mongolia @ 35,857 feet:

Rugged snows beneath us, we wake cramped and cheerful in a wordless timeless stillness. We spent the previous day in the Schiphol airport outside Amsterdam, with its art museum and casino and massage and oxygen bars and wonderful chairs. Now we are above rocky lands in a white haze. Such orderly faces my fellow Chinese passengers seem to have-- completed, rooted. Below the Great Wall snakes over sheer mountain passes, nearly at the gates of the great metropolis.  Hello, China.

Seating at Schiphol Airport

Shortly after arrival at our home for the next ten days (we are exchanging our Paris apt for a gated expat community where diplomats live), we have a stiff coffee and look for a taxi for Tiananmen Square. The taxi drivers lined up by the huge stone lions guarding the Beijing Riviera are bulky darkish men, intimidating suitors till we climb in. Once we are sharing the same space the driver becomes jokey, gesticulating his exasperations. The immense Beijing sky is still and clear--the State has cleared the pollution for the holiday, by cloud seeding and closing factories. The trees are gorgeous and abundant: willows drooping and others like puffs of green like upturned parasols. Bright landscaping lines the roads and highways, with cheerful hardy flowers. We near Tiananmen Square in standstill traffic. Migratory hordes of people pass us slowly like all of humanity marching over our ruined empire. It is the national holiday, and all of the country has descended patriotically upon Beijing, in particular on Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City.

The People's Square

We, it turned out, were the novelty, among Mongolians and Tibetans and peoples of the North and the far reaches of Yunnan Province and everywhere in the Middle Kingdom.

We reach Tiananmen Square at a forced crawl through tides of humans, crossing the street under a bridge where young military boys in khaki green beaked hats like the Russians, narrow waists cinched in white belts, laden with black leather covered hardware, standd like mannikins. They are immobile except for rhythmically swiveling their heads, deliberate and slow as machines, to scan the crowd with stern eyes, human x-rays. Later, one such boy standing alone on a box in the Square would become the object of family photo shoots, until tall, bearded Jacques approached him to be in a picture. The boy fiddled with his radio and out of nowhere an older soldier appeared to scold us all off. Then the Chinese crowd noticed Jacques and lined up to have their pictures taken with him.

Jacques and the soldier

At length we leave behind the huge hot concrete of Tiananmen with Chinese from all over the countryside, brown and weathered, bright kerchiefs speaking Russian, men of thin bristled chins and wise tough faces, kids coiffed or scraggly in cheap imitation designer clothes, old people in classical dress. The entire huge continent has been squeezed onto the largest public square in the world.

We hope to find relief in Zongchen gardens, which is also overrun, and the keepers of order are bulky brown men in sunglasses and suits with shaved heads, that finger beads and talk on cell phones. The gardens comprise remnants of rambling elegance with hidden spaces, weathered pavilions, glass windows papered up, where everyone is photographing their family. An exhibit, incomprehensible to us, has paintings of Hu and Mao and Chao En-lai.

Zhongchen Garden

Then, sleep-deprived and disoriented, we collapse by the closed metro as the vast tide of China's population sucks past us. One dandyish man with a bouffant hairdo turns to me and says, "YOU want to kill ME?" Of the many thousands of people we have seen, perhaps 3 have been Caucasian.

We find a side street of great charm, traditional wavy roofs on low buildings, all humanity streaming towards us from the Forbidden City. A pretty young woman notes our confusion and starts a seductive conversation with me. She compares me to a Tang poet, whereas she is a student of classical painting and wants us to see the special work of her school. "Look at the birds I painted, like two lovers, like you too." We don't bite, mainly because Jacques has just read about the "art student" scam, our first classical scam of several outlined in the Lonely Planet guidebook. 

Later another young attractive male "painter" stops us, but all we want is a taxi home. The huge blocks of Beijing are filled with street food and rickshaw drivers, dubious-looking storefronts--no restaurants in sight.  A few gargantuan blocks later neon lights flash from international fashion emporiums. All is commotion and thick traffic. Blocks are now lined with food vendors, frying, grilling, people munching starfish on sticks.  We try some noodles but the sauces are spiced with meat, and I am a lifelong vegetarian.  People stand three thick, eating, slurping, while other people dig through the garbage beneath them.  Vendors call out to us and promise vegetables, but it looks and smells like a circus for carnivores. 

Rickshaw drivers practically push us onto their seats but we get off after a block and refuse to pay. The taxi stands are filled with lounging drivers, the largest and most aggressive of whom, at each stand, approaches Jacques with his price.  These taxis don't use meters, and they demand 200 yuan to take us back home, whereas we paid 70 coming--Jacques can't stomach that. Their English is limited, but when Jacques, an inveterate bargainer, counterproposes, they flick their beefy hands and say "Go."  Finally Jacques offers a gentler looking driver 100 yuan and we get in, holding our breaths till the lions of the Beijing Riviera rear up in the dark.  Then, while Jacques hunts down groceries, I get lost circling alone through the labyrinthine gated complex, where children play in the streets like 1960's America.

We are in a vast world here, where past and future collide incoherently.