In the tourist office at the Beijing airport I asked for a map of the city, then headed to the ATM. Big signs warned you to: “Make sure no one is watching you put your pin number in. Look first for suspicious looking people.” I made my way to the taxi stand where an English man filled me in on the taxi do’s and don’ts. “Get the taxi only from the taxi stand. Other taxis will charge you double. Make sure the driver knows where you’re going. Very few speak English.” He waved his hands around as he spoke. “The drivers are crazy and there are no seat belts because they cover them with seat covers. Good luck.”
I got into the taxi. The driver navigated through intense traffic. We passed an endless line of tall skyscrapers, some old and decrepit, some shiny and new. Since I grew up in New York the taxi driver’s lack of using blinkers, chaotic horn blowing (used as a Morse code between drivers) and swerving in and out of lanes didn’t phase me too much. But the sheer volume of the cars did. Also, the taxi driver spent the whole trip hawking and then blowing snot through his nose into his hand, then wiped the mess on his pants leg. I tried not to listen, or watch, but I found the process fascinating after being in Japan where you didn’t even blow your nose in public because it was too impolite.
My forty minute ride into the city cost less than $10. Before the taxi was allowed to drive off the doorman at the hotel, who saw me hesitate to take my change from the driver’s snotty hands, checked to be sure I’d been given the correct change. The woman at the front desk of the hotel suggested I change any hundred yuan notes I had. “So you can pay the exact amount when you buy anything in the city. That way you won’t need change, which might be counterfeit. It’s a big problem here. Welcome to China.”
I’d been warned about the many scams in Beijing. People pretending to study English asked you to join them for a drink at a bar where you were presented with a pot of tea, or a drink, that was not on the menu. The cost was anywhere from $20 to $100. Another scam was where you were approached by young people who told you they were art students. They asked if you would you like to come to their studio to see their art. Once there you were shown a wall of work done by “students” that were actually mass produced and sold in similar studios throughout the city. The work was reasonably priced and many people were happy to buy the artwork done by a starving student. The last scam I heard about was not so innocent. Guys stood around tourist areas with a piece of paper with pictures of watches on it. If you showed any interest in seeing what they had to sell they lead you to a “shop.” Once there they blocked your way out until you bought something, or even worse, robbed you.
My room, in the four star Park Plaza Hotel was behind the Ferrari dealership and next to a Starbucks. I had three days on my own in Beijing until my China tour began. I forced myself to leave the comfortable room and go back into the craziness of the city. I walked a few blocks past the Porsche and Rolls Royce dealerships and the Armani, Gucci and Bally store fronts. When I went to cross the street at the main intersection it became clear I was no longer in Japan.
I waited on the sidewalk along with a large group of people. When the pedestrian crossing signal turned green I stepped off the curb, but only got a few feet when cars, taxis, and busses roared at me wanting to make a right hand turn on red, from every lane. Bicycles and mopeds disregarded the red light and went straight into the oncoming traffic and pedestrians. None of the vehicles slowed down. Instead they honked their horns angrily if anyone got in their way. It was the most death defying crosswalk I’d ever been in.
When I reached the other side of the street I hit a chaotic wall of energy. The pedestrian shopping area, packed with people, was like Times Square on New Year’s Eve one minute before the ball dropped. Disoriented, the tsunami wave of people carried me into the chaos. Music blasted from every store front. Flashing lights beckoned me inside. Cigarette smoke filled the air. Battery operated stuffed wobbling animals blocked the sidewalks. Nike billboards surrounded me along with thousands of Chinese people who pushed, spit, jostled, shoved, stared, yelled into their cell phones, tried to sell me watches, and pulled at me to get me into their restaurants and stores.
“Hey lady you want an apple? How about a banana?”
“Watch cheap, for you. Rolex. Timex. Real.”
“New shirt. This way.”
“Best food. Come eat.”
I wanted to eat, but I wasn’t sure whee I could and couldn’t eat in order to stay healthy. The smells from the food stalls enticed me, but they didn’t look sanitary. The McDonald’s and KFC were packed, but I wouldn’t ever eat there. Later I found out I’d been on the busiest and most expensive shopping street in Beijing, Wanfujing Dajie, where 600,000 shoppers a day pushed to buy world famous brands in shops and boutiques, especially the coveted Gucci bags. A city of contrasts, the separation between those who had and those who didn’t clearly defined. One block off the ritzy shopping area the local people eking out a living, with an average income of about 1000 yuan a month – about $140. If they were lucky.
I headed back to the hotel, but first I had to get back across the main intersection. An American couple saw me hesitate at the corner. “The trick is not to make eye contact with the driver. Usually they will give way then,” said the woman who taught English in Beijing for seven years. “The other trick is to always cross with the crowd. Try to stay in the middle of the crowd for extra protection. Pedestrians have no right of way here.”
“And watch out for pickpockets,” added her husband. “And don’t eat the street food, or you’ll get sick.”
The crossing started out fine. Then the crowd of people dispersed and I was left to fend for myself. I couldn’t help make eye contact with the drivers and nearly got hit once and almost had my toes crushed twice when a taxi and then a bus swerved too close to me. There was no tingling of bicycle bells, only horns honking and electric mopeds silently coming at me, like I was the main target in a bizarre Chinese video game.
Back in my room I ate a granola bar for dinner, brushed my teeth with tap water instead of boiled water and worried I’d get sick. I went to bed and allowed self pity to consume me. I hated this part of travel. These were the times I wondered why I couldn’t be satisfied with a simple life. I longed to be back in the sanity of Japan, sitting at Taeko’s dinner table eating one of her delicious dinners, engaged in stimulating conversation.
After a good night’s rest my attitude changed. I left the hotel by 6:30 AM to walk the streets of Beijing before they became too crowded. My destination was the fifty-seven acre Jingshan Park. A former Imperial garden, once part of the Forbidden City, it opened as a public park in 1928.
I walked in the brisk, clear morning with hardly any traffic noise, or people. It took a while to find the park. I wanted to have breakfast, but there was no place to eat. In a small shop I bought a bag of preserved plums, then entered the park. From that moment I lost track of the outside world. Music swirled around me as people danced with flags, fans, swords or ribbons; played shuttlecock (badminton), cards and musical instruments; sang karaoke and opera; practiced tai chi, qigong and kungfu, and ballroom dancing.
Groups formed in different sections of the park. I joined in a qigong movement class with about two hundred people, mostly elderly women, spread throughout the trees and clearings. As one person yelled out the instructions we pounded our arms and legs, clapped our hands, leaned from side to side, made sounds to massage our organs, breathed deeply, moved our arms up and down the front of our body, all to control and manipulate our qi energy. The 3,000 year old science of qigong opened your energy channels (meridians that were each connected to a major organ) to improve health and promote healing of whatever ailed you. Parks in China were considered landscaped art and were meant to balance the yin and yang by including several elements like plants, rocks, water and pavilions. Jingshan Park had them all.
Later I joined in a dance session, moving and swaying my body to Chinese music. Later still I was pulled into a group of people who danced with a ball balanced and thrown between two paddles. They made the movement look effortless and beautiful. After twenty minutes of chasing my ball I gave up. I climbed the hill made from the earth excavated to build the nearby canals and moat around the Forbidden City, to one of the five pavilions along the ridge of the hill; the Pavilion of Ten Thousand Spring Seasons. At the top, one-hundred and forty-five feet high, the yellow glazed tiled roofs of the Forbidden City spread before me, past the sky scrapers and clogged roads below me. The contrast between the old and new Beijing couldn’t have been clearer.
The people in the park were friendly. My experience there the complete opposite of the night before in the shopping area. I liked this part of the Chinese culture where people came together each morning to form a community based on movement and music, or to sit and talk together while they rolled medicine balls in their palms, instead of staying isolated in their apartments. After four hours I pushed myself out of the park so I could find some food. As I left I stopped at a bathroom where I waited in a long line along with a dozen Chinese women. When it was my turn I started towards the opened stall. To my great surprise I was pushed violently against the wall by an old Chinese woman, who then made a bee line for the empty stall.
Stunned, but not hurt, I looked at the shocked expressions on the women behind me in line. When the next stall opened four of them rushed up to escort me to the stall. While I was inside I heard them yell at the old woman as she left.
The hutongs, the old neighborhoods of Beijing, were spread throughout the city. Some were commercial, others touristy. In the great Beijing cleanup most of these hutongs had been torn down and replaced by huge concrete blocks. The hutongs I found that day gave me a glimpse of life as it must’ve been in the past; rows of tenement housing, laundry hung on lines, men on stools played checkers and cards, women squatted cutting vegetables, groups of men talked with cigarettes dangling from their mouths, small shops and restaurants of all kinds.
I tried to head back to the hotel, but each old alleyway in the hutong took me up in its grasp and wouldn’t let me go. I found a tiny shop selling a pancake stuffed with something like creamed spinach. I handed over my 1 yuan notes, worth about 20 cents, bit into the steamy hot dough and groaned with pleasure. No meal ever tasted so good. I went back for seconds, then thirds, then had a sesame ball for desert.
The next two days I went to Jingshan Park early each morning. In the afternoons I wandered around the city. I didn’t realize how lucky I’d been with the blue skies and warm temperatures, until I woke up on the fourth day, looked out the hotel window, but could barely see the skyline through the thick yellow haze. The notorious Beijing pollution had returned.
I stayed in my room until late afternoon when I had to change hotels for the start of my nine day China tour with Intrepid Travel. As I checked out I mentioned the air quality to the woman at the front desk. “You’re lucky you’re here this week. It gets much worse when the heating systems, fueled by coal, are turned on next week.”
As I stepped outside in the murky air I coughed, my eyes burned and my head ached. That night I met the tour leader Michael, and the eight other travelers I’d spend the next nine days with. We went out to dinner. As we walked from the bus to the restaurant the night had an eerie feel to it, with the smog as thick as smoke, like being in the middle of a forest fire.
“This is amazing,” I said to Michael. “On a scale of one to ten, how bad is this.”
“About a five.”
“So the pollution can get twice as bad as it is today?”
“Yes. And there are sand storms in the spring that blow dust everywhere.”
“How do people live here?”
“They stay inside as much as they can.”
“I read breathing the air in Beijing is equivalent to smoking dozens of cigarettes a day.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
Beijing had electric buses, a spotless subway system, trains and the government subsidized the purchase of electric scooters. There were non-smoking laws in public places, but in a country with 300 million smokers – one third of the world’s smokers, these laws hadn’t gone over so well.
When I spoke with Cradoc I told him I’d found out Beijing used cloud seeding, a form of weather modification, before the 2008 summer Olympics to force it to rain to clean the pollution out of the air. They also used it February, 2009, to artificially induce snowfall in Beijing after four months of drought. “I met the man who discovered silver iodide could be used for cloud seeding,” Cradoc said. “It was the author Kurt Vonnegut’s older brother, Dr. Bernard Vonnegut. In the 1980’s I was doing a photo assignment for the New York newspaper, Newsday, on scientists who were sitting on top of a mountain studying lightening. Bernard Vonnegut was one of those scientists. He told me his cloud seeding discovery was the thing he was most sorry about in his life. If he could do it over again he wouldn’t have let anyone know about his discovery, because it tends to create droughts and other problems with weather patterns.”
With a population of over 22 million people, and 5 million cars, with 2,000 new cars on the road each day, Beijing had its work cut out for it. In August there was a nine day traffic jam caused by construction on the Beijing-Tibet highway. Vehicles moved an average of a third of a mile a day. The massive gridlock was unusual, but even on the best of days thousands of trucks, transporting coal from Mongolia, clogged the main thoroughfares into Beijing. China was racing to build new roads to ease congestion, creating even more construction dust and more pollution.
The worst pollution was caused by coal fired power plants and factory boilers. A few weeks after I was in Beijing the United States Embassy’s official air rating quality system called the air in Beijing “Crazy Bad.” The particulate matter count was so far off the index meter, twenty times higher than the World Health Organization guidelines.
In 2007, there was a media story of fake jiaoze (pork-filled buns). A journalist reported that a Beijing street vendor was shredding cardboard boxes and using them as part of the bun filling (60% soaked cardboard, 40% fatty pork). The story was a sensation, spreading to foreign media and embarrassing China. A few days later the authorities intervened and reported that the journalist had lied, and would be punished (he was sentenced to one year in jail and a fine of $132). So which was the real fake: the bun, the journalist’s story, or the government’s correction? In a society where respect for the truth was severely diminished, where authorities embellished, or erased, undesirable information, it was hard to know.
