Beijing
There are some things I am enjoying about Beijing. The Bookworm, where I had my event, is one of them. Every city would be lucky to have at least one. It's a cafe / bar / lounge / event venue / lending library / bookshop, run by Alex Pearson, an extremely smart, funny, pleasant person to spend some time with. You can also get a really good salad there - a rarity in Asia.
The event itself was well attended, maybe 45 or so people. At the end they asked a lot of questions, mostly to do with prostitution; about which it seems I am assumed to be some sort of expert, or at least willing to talk honestly about from a male perspective. One shy young Chinese woman in a lot of frilly pink wanted to know why I wrote The Living Room of the Dead, then she wanted to know if I'd been influenced by writers like Kafka. I could only guess that she hadn't read the book, but she was so charming and ernest that I answered her quite seriously. Later, after the event, she came up to me and wanted to know if I liked writing strong moral messages into my books. I told her no, but that I hoped my books would stimulate people to think for themselves about a variety of issues, including moral ones. I asked if she liked reading books with strong moral messages. She said "no." I then teased her a little, asking if she liked books with "immoral messages," to which she giggled, turned tail and ran out of the room. Hmmmm.
The day after the event was spent at the Summer Palace, which was largely closed for rennovation - no doubt for the Olympics year in 2008. They do need to do more than simply renovate though. The feeble efforts at informing visitors about the places they are seeing, are just not enough, especially when for the most part all you can look at is the exterior of buildings. Even if you were let into the interior, most of the historical artifacts are long gone.
After that we walked around in a slightly less bombed out looking hutong. Maybe it was that it was the middle of a weekday, but the old neighborhood was far from lively. Like nearly everything else in Beijing it was drab, colorless, desultory. We did walk alongside a small lake where there are a great many bars and pubs. At night it might be festive. We'll try to go back on the weekend. We ascended to the top of the old Drum Tower - sort of a huge, municipal clock from which the time was announced by drums. From it there were views over all the city. There isn't much point. It only drove home what an ugly and uninspiring place Beijing is.
Yesterday we had a car and driver take us on a three hour drive to Jinshanling, up in the mountains, from where we hiked on the Great Wall for ten kilometers to Simatai. This, if you are physically capable of doing it, is something I can unresevedly recommend. Although it might be nicer in the mid to late spring or the fall when there is some color in the landscape. Some of the wall that you walk on has not been restored and it is remarkable to know that you're walking on something massive that was built anywhere from 450 to, for a short while, nearly 2000 years ago. The hike takes you up some extremely steep portions of the wall and down others, as it snakes along ridges above deep gorges, through 33 watchtowers.
As you leave Jinshanling you first run a gauntlet of vendors. Their shrill greeting of "Hello t-shirt!" is quite familiar to any foreigner who walks around nearly anywhere in China. (In nightmarkets that have a lot of food stalls you will hear the variant: "Hello dumpling!" which I don't think is meant as either a term of affection or a comment on the shape of many foreign tourists.) As you pass through the welcoming committee, a tag team duo will attach themselves to you. Even if you make it clear that you want to walk alone, they will be nearby - either in front or behind - as you walk. Every so often, as you pause to catch your breath, they will come up and in tortured English tell you small facts that you are very likely to have already read in the most abbreviated guidebook, or can read for yourself on the poorly written signs along the way: "Ming Dynasty, 450 year. Mongolia north, China south, brick, 33 guard tower..."
The good ones don't try to sell you anything until you've reached the halfway point -where the torturous path turns, mostly, downhill. Then it's out with the photo book, the scrolled photograph, the postcards and finally, the t-shirt - in just that order of descending profit margin for them. If you say no, you don't want to buy, much less carry any of that crap, even politely, out comes the hard luck story. They're simple, poor farmers. The crops are terrible. All they can do every day is come to the Great Wall and sell to tourists or their families will go hungry and their children won't go to school. They won't leave you alone. They won't take no for an answer. If you speak to them in some language other than English, they don't care, they either speak enough of it too to sell you something, or they are pretty good with sign language. Finally, wanting to be left alone, you have to buy something to make them go away. (If you simply give them the money and tell them to scram, it is extremely insulting, even though that's, in essence, what it's all about.)
A word of advice: buy something from one of them right away. Overpay a little for it and tell them the money is for the both of them. Then tell them to go away and they will. Buy something light though, it's a hard hike. You don't want the book. You don't even want the postcards. The t-shirt or the rolled up photo aren't so bad. You can also use what you've bought to ward off the vendors from the town you're walking to who meet you at the halfway point and threaten to accompany you the rest of the way.
Yet again, it's the Communist worker's paradise in action. Villages have all been told that they have to fend for themselves. They have to provide for their own health care and education and sanitation and pretty much everything else. They are not given very much money from the central government to do any of this. So, instead of getting together to find reasonable ways to raise money, they in turn tell their residents to fend for themselves. So, when you leave Jinshanling you pay a 30 yuan (about US$3.75) fee to start the hike; and you're pestered by Jinshanling vendors. At the halfway point you must pay - or turn back - the 40 yuan (US$5) fee to Simatai; and get pestered by the Simatai vendors. Then you get to a suspension bridge not far from Simatai and you must pay five yuan to cross it.
None of this is a lot of money - although it would be to a typical Chinese tourist. The question is, why can't the two towns get together and charge one higher fee to make the hike, and organize the vendor gauntlets at either end leaving tourists alone in the middle, and find a way to share revenue to the benefit of everyone in the villages? I guess that might reek too much of socialism, or just plain common sense; or maybe it doesn't provide enough opportunity for graft. I also suspect, among other things, that the central government finds ways to discourage cooperation between villages - that might give them a chance at a little power of their own.
Communism was a really dumb idea. The sad thing is that for a great many Chinese people, especially those who don't live in the big, fast developing cities, they haven't come up with a better one yet.
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Monday, March 20, 2006
Administrative Malaise
Beijing
Of course this isn't going to be fair. Opinions don't have to be fair. We arrived in Beijing at 6:58am today having taken the train from Shanghai.
We were sorry to leave Shanghai. We walked a great deal on our last day there, much of it along Suzhou Creek which is very interesting and may, if the urban planners have their way, become very attractive. We ate the very finest xiao long bau, juicy pork dumplings, that we have ever had the privilege of eating. At a mere five yuan (about 62 cents U.S.) for eight perfect dumplings, we couldn't help ourselves and went through three servings and just barely managed to stop ourselves from a fourth.
We must have covered five or six miles and nearly every block had something that stopped us, at least for a little while, to photograph or gawk or admire or ask about.
Then the train was great. Modern, comfortable, fast, quiet for a train - everything that Amtrak in America isn't. We enjoyed ourselves and slept reasonably well.
Entering Beijing, all was bleak. The apartment buildings and slums we passed looked run down and very used up. A lot of areas, pretty much all the old ones we passed, looked like they'd been saturation bombed. The people we could see walking through the dense haze and dust were hunched over and colorless. As we got into the center of the city, the big buildings, even the new ones, looked no better than one might expect of mid-1960s Soviet architecture.
The boulevards are broad with overly long blocks, lined with uninspired and uninspiring buildings and the occasional monument that it's hard to imagine anyone really takes all that seriously anymore. The crowds of people everywhere - in a country where people are not usually known for common courtesy - seem to aspire to even greater depths of spitting on the street, belching in your face, pushing and shoving while cutting in lines.
The Forbidden City was forbidding indeed. Jam packed with tour groups, the scene of a great deal of noisy and dusty restoration work and ill-served by the feeble attempts of the signage - brought to you by American Express - to explain the significance of the place, much less such matters of interest as daily life or anything else that took place when it was something more than a tourist site.
Tiananmen Square is, as advertised, enormous. It used to be bigger until they stuck the Mao-soleum (as it is sometimes called) in the middle of it. It is utterly barren, carpeted in a good plush inch or two of dust and manages to feel - if a place can be said to express such a thing - arrogant. It is also lousy with cops - and, reportedly, plainclothes cops. They're ready to pounce on anyone who might dare raise even a minor stink in public about the oppressive government here.
On the way to the Forbidden City and the Square we walked down Wangfujing Dajie, a huge pedestrian (in both senses of the word) shopping street. Until relatively recently it had been the site of an old, renown hutong - a traditional neighborhood. Now it reminds me of the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, California - only a lot wider and with fewer and less interesting shops.
For dinner we did manage to find our way to a truly superb, small, family-run roast duck restaurant called Li Qun. It was down a meandering route through narrow alleys running through an actual, remaining hutong. Not for long though. About a third of the small shops and houses looked as if they'd been totaled in an artillery barrage; two-thirds had suffered some sort of damage. It is an area over which Beijing's rapacious developers are greedily licking their chops.
Despite China's near constant nagging reminders about its great and glorious past, there seems to be very little real sentiment in favor of preserving the remnants of it. There are some sites, such as the Forbidden City, that cannot be levelled to make way for a shopping mall. But I would guess that within the next five years there will be expensive boutiques lining the courtyards of the Forbidden City. It is already reported that Starbucks has breached the City gates. Although I must admit that we didn't see it ourselves.
So, so far Beijing has not made a good impression. Not even close. We have been told that there are a lot of good, avant garde art galleries here, and a wide variety of interesting cultural events to be viewed. We'll see. Meanwhile our feet hurt, and in the service of not much gain.
Of course this isn't going to be fair. Opinions don't have to be fair. We arrived in Beijing at 6:58am today having taken the train from Shanghai.
We were sorry to leave Shanghai. We walked a great deal on our last day there, much of it along Suzhou Creek which is very interesting and may, if the urban planners have their way, become very attractive. We ate the very finest xiao long bau, juicy pork dumplings, that we have ever had the privilege of eating. At a mere five yuan (about 62 cents U.S.) for eight perfect dumplings, we couldn't help ourselves and went through three servings and just barely managed to stop ourselves from a fourth.
We must have covered five or six miles and nearly every block had something that stopped us, at least for a little while, to photograph or gawk or admire or ask about.
Then the train was great. Modern, comfortable, fast, quiet for a train - everything that Amtrak in America isn't. We enjoyed ourselves and slept reasonably well.
Entering Beijing, all was bleak. The apartment buildings and slums we passed looked run down and very used up. A lot of areas, pretty much all the old ones we passed, looked like they'd been saturation bombed. The people we could see walking through the dense haze and dust were hunched over and colorless. As we got into the center of the city, the big buildings, even the new ones, looked no better than one might expect of mid-1960s Soviet architecture.
The boulevards are broad with overly long blocks, lined with uninspired and uninspiring buildings and the occasional monument that it's hard to imagine anyone really takes all that seriously anymore. The crowds of people everywhere - in a country where people are not usually known for common courtesy - seem to aspire to even greater depths of spitting on the street, belching in your face, pushing and shoving while cutting in lines.
The Forbidden City was forbidding indeed. Jam packed with tour groups, the scene of a great deal of noisy and dusty restoration work and ill-served by the feeble attempts of the signage - brought to you by American Express - to explain the significance of the place, much less such matters of interest as daily life or anything else that took place when it was something more than a tourist site.
Tiananmen Square is, as advertised, enormous. It used to be bigger until they stuck the Mao-soleum (as it is sometimes called) in the middle of it. It is utterly barren, carpeted in a good plush inch or two of dust and manages to feel - if a place can be said to express such a thing - arrogant. It is also lousy with cops - and, reportedly, plainclothes cops. They're ready to pounce on anyone who might dare raise even a minor stink in public about the oppressive government here.
On the way to the Forbidden City and the Square we walked down Wangfujing Dajie, a huge pedestrian (in both senses of the word) shopping street. Until relatively recently it had been the site of an old, renown hutong - a traditional neighborhood. Now it reminds me of the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, California - only a lot wider and with fewer and less interesting shops.
For dinner we did manage to find our way to a truly superb, small, family-run roast duck restaurant called Li Qun. It was down a meandering route through narrow alleys running through an actual, remaining hutong. Not for long though. About a third of the small shops and houses looked as if they'd been totaled in an artillery barrage; two-thirds had suffered some sort of damage. It is an area over which Beijing's rapacious developers are greedily licking their chops.
Despite China's near constant nagging reminders about its great and glorious past, there seems to be very little real sentiment in favor of preserving the remnants of it. There are some sites, such as the Forbidden City, that cannot be levelled to make way for a shopping mall. But I would guess that within the next five years there will be expensive boutiques lining the courtyards of the Forbidden City. It is already reported that Starbucks has breached the City gates. Although I must admit that we didn't see it ourselves.
So, so far Beijing has not made a good impression. Not even close. We have been told that there are a lot of good, avant garde art galleries here, and a wide variety of interesting cultural events to be viewed. We'll see. Meanwhile our feet hurt, and in the service of not much gain.
Thursday, March 16, 2006
An Astounding Place - The Planet's a Goner
Shanghai
Another day of wonder and delight in Shanghai. Eva couldn't get through to Bank of America in the U.S. to report her stolen ATM card so we decided to go to their office in Pudong - the new part of the city across the river - to see what we could do. An espresso was required to kick start the day so we went to a gleaming new huge Starbucks. It tasted just like it does in the U.S., which is, I guess, the point. We found our way to the Shanghai Stock Exchange building - a vertical hollow square - and the BofA people there could not have been more friendly and helpful.
Mission accomplished, we went to lunch. We went to the Grand Hyatt - the world's tallest hotel. It occupies floors 54 to 87 of the Jin Mao Tower - a beautiful building that looks like sort of a modern update on the Chrysler Building in New York. First we admired the 30-story indoor atrium. (I've got great photos of a lot of this stuff but unfortunately it seems that they are going to have to wait for my return to the U.S. to make it onto the website.) Then we went to the hotel's Shanghai restaurant on the 86th floor for lunch. The haze outside prevented us from seeing much. The wild vegetables with tofu were fantastic, everything else was sort of typical hotel food - perfectly cooked but kind of dull. A relatively light lunch cost us about as much as we'd spent on all our meals put together up until that point.
After lunch we descended and looked across the street at the beginning stages of construction of what will be the world's tallest building - 150 or 170 or 210 floors or something like that. The pictures look like it will be a slender, graceful, angled tower with a huge hole in the top to let the wind through so that it doesn't sway too much. I'm looking forward to going up into it one of these days - after it's been successully in place for at least a few years first.
Off to the Pearl Orient TV Tower - the monster spire with red bubbles built into it at various stages. It's something else that can only be described in superlatives - although variations on the word "ugly" are certainly among them. In the basement is a Shanghai history museum that is very well done. It has some of the best dioramas and small scale complete shops, buildings and neighborhoods that we've ever seen. A number of the dioramas come complete with moving, talking holograms of people at work, play or simply hanging around the house and arguing with each other. It does a good job of portraying the history and daily life of Shanghai from around the mid-1800s to just before the revolution in 1949. I want to see how they portray their history since 1949, but we're not sure which museum to go to for that.
We had a much better dinner than lunch, for about a quarter the price - Yang's Kitchen, if you should ever be in Shanghai. Then we strolled around a neighborhood that had a small Chinese-Moslem night market and was also a red light district. There were a whole lot of small barber shops, complete with revolving red and white poles, staffed by a number of young women wearing a lot of makeup. They weren't there to cut hair. We stopped in front of a restaurant that was selling baked goods. Among other things they were selling bagels. That's not what they called them, but that's exactly what they were. Really good and fresh ones too.
Another fascinating, fun day in a city that I am increasingly enamored of. We're even toying with the idea of living here for at least a year or two.
So, what's the problem?
The planet is sunk. Literally. Goodbye Seychelles and Mauritius. Hurry up and build that sea wall Manhattan. There's no stopping this kind of development in time. It won't happen. No one can reasonably ask them to stop it, or even cut back. Maybe if the U.S. got serious itself and said: okay, we're going to cut back on our waste and pollution and lifestyle; we're willing to accept a lower standard of living; maybe then we could convince China and India and other developing countries to slow down. Although I doubt even then they'd listen to us. But we are not going to do that and we have no solid ground to stand on to ask anyone else to do that and global warming is the real deal.
Much of what is making Shanghai one of, if not the most exciting places in the world today is causing long term problems for the planet. That's true in every single big city. And it's not going to get better. It's going to get worse. And it's going to get a lot worse - fast. You think last year's hurricanes were bad? Just wait. The tsunami's got nothing on a rising ocean.
The only hope is for some sort of sci-fi technological miracle and there is at best a very slim chance of that. We are not at all likely to invent our way out of this one, or to be able to finance the invention in time on a world wide level if we do.
So, I'm learning to love this place and to fear what it means. Then again, I live in Los Angeles, a place with much the same longterm implications.
Ah well, it's time to shower and hit the streets again. To enjoy this place while I can.
Another day of wonder and delight in Shanghai. Eva couldn't get through to Bank of America in the U.S. to report her stolen ATM card so we decided to go to their office in Pudong - the new part of the city across the river - to see what we could do. An espresso was required to kick start the day so we went to a gleaming new huge Starbucks. It tasted just like it does in the U.S., which is, I guess, the point. We found our way to the Shanghai Stock Exchange building - a vertical hollow square - and the BofA people there could not have been more friendly and helpful.
Mission accomplished, we went to lunch. We went to the Grand Hyatt - the world's tallest hotel. It occupies floors 54 to 87 of the Jin Mao Tower - a beautiful building that looks like sort of a modern update on the Chrysler Building in New York. First we admired the 30-story indoor atrium. (I've got great photos of a lot of this stuff but unfortunately it seems that they are going to have to wait for my return to the U.S. to make it onto the website.) Then we went to the hotel's Shanghai restaurant on the 86th floor for lunch. The haze outside prevented us from seeing much. The wild vegetables with tofu were fantastic, everything else was sort of typical hotel food - perfectly cooked but kind of dull. A relatively light lunch cost us about as much as we'd spent on all our meals put together up until that point.
After lunch we descended and looked across the street at the beginning stages of construction of what will be the world's tallest building - 150 or 170 or 210 floors or something like that. The pictures look like it will be a slender, graceful, angled tower with a huge hole in the top to let the wind through so that it doesn't sway too much. I'm looking forward to going up into it one of these days - after it's been successully in place for at least a few years first.
Off to the Pearl Orient TV Tower - the monster spire with red bubbles built into it at various stages. It's something else that can only be described in superlatives - although variations on the word "ugly" are certainly among them. In the basement is a Shanghai history museum that is very well done. It has some of the best dioramas and small scale complete shops, buildings and neighborhoods that we've ever seen. A number of the dioramas come complete with moving, talking holograms of people at work, play or simply hanging around the house and arguing with each other. It does a good job of portraying the history and daily life of Shanghai from around the mid-1800s to just before the revolution in 1949. I want to see how they portray their history since 1949, but we're not sure which museum to go to for that.
We had a much better dinner than lunch, for about a quarter the price - Yang's Kitchen, if you should ever be in Shanghai. Then we strolled around a neighborhood that had a small Chinese-Moslem night market and was also a red light district. There were a whole lot of small barber shops, complete with revolving red and white poles, staffed by a number of young women wearing a lot of makeup. They weren't there to cut hair. We stopped in front of a restaurant that was selling baked goods. Among other things they were selling bagels. That's not what they called them, but that's exactly what they were. Really good and fresh ones too.
Another fascinating, fun day in a city that I am increasingly enamored of. We're even toying with the idea of living here for at least a year or two.
So, what's the problem?
The planet is sunk. Literally. Goodbye Seychelles and Mauritius. Hurry up and build that sea wall Manhattan. There's no stopping this kind of development in time. It won't happen. No one can reasonably ask them to stop it, or even cut back. Maybe if the U.S. got serious itself and said: okay, we're going to cut back on our waste and pollution and lifestyle; we're willing to accept a lower standard of living; maybe then we could convince China and India and other developing countries to slow down. Although I doubt even then they'd listen to us. But we are not going to do that and we have no solid ground to stand on to ask anyone else to do that and global warming is the real deal.
Much of what is making Shanghai one of, if not the most exciting places in the world today is causing long term problems for the planet. That's true in every single big city. And it's not going to get better. It's going to get worse. And it's going to get a lot worse - fast. You think last year's hurricanes were bad? Just wait. The tsunami's got nothing on a rising ocean.
The only hope is for some sort of sci-fi technological miracle and there is at best a very slim chance of that. We are not at all likely to invent our way out of this one, or to be able to finance the invention in time on a world wide level if we do.
So, I'm learning to love this place and to fear what it means. Then again, I live in Los Angeles, a place with much the same longterm implications.
Ah well, it's time to shower and hit the streets again. To enjoy this place while I can.
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