We arrived in Beijing from Xi'an on a Sunday morning, and on Monday I had to get my fourth rabies shot, then I met up with the others and headed to Tiananmen Square to try to get a glimpse of Mao's carcass. Unfortunately, we got there just as they were closing the gates. We decided to come back at 2:00, when the sign said they'd open up again. We shopped a little and grabbed lunch, and then we all met up again only to find that the mausoleum wasn't opening at 2:00 after all. We told the guard that the sign said they were supposed to open at 2:00. He shrugged. So much for that. We tried to go to a museum, but it was closed. We tried to go to the Great Hall of the people, but we couldn't figure out how to get in. So basically we wandered around all day and didn't see anything but the hot sun shining off Tiananmen Square, but it was pretty cool just to hang out and people watch.
Then we went to a silk market and picked up some gifts. That night we walked around some more, and a bunch of little Chinese girls tried to sell us flowers. If we didn't buy them, they would just put a flower in our pocket. One of them wouldn't give up on Matt, and she chased him into a subway tunnel.
Tuesday decided to be gorgeous. The sky was actually blue, the haze lifted somewhat, the air felt fresher, it wasn't too hot or muggy, and Beijing didn't feel as oppressive as usual. I went with the others early to take a last stab at seeing Mao, and we found our way to the end of the long line. A Chinese woman who was following us around practicing her English showed us where to stow our bags across the street. I'd venture to say about ninety-nine percent of the people in line were Chinese.
While in line, I saw a little Chinese boy, no more than three years old, stark naked, marching along purposefully, and waving a little Chinese flag around. I laughed and took a picture. When we passed Mao in his little glass case, he looked like slightly melted wax.
Some of us went to the History of the Revolution Museum, but the displays were only in Chinese. It seemed like a pretty transparent way to try to keep Americans from nosing around their version of history.
I went off alone to try to see the rest of the things I wanted to see without the hassle of the big group. I went to the Great Hall of the People, and it was impressive, with many resplendent state rooms named after Chinese provinces, decorated with treasures, paintings, crystals, and silks from each province. The Great Hall auditorium's ceiling was imbedded with a giant red star and several small white lights.
I walked over to the famous Wangfujing Road because I thought it would be a nice place to buy some inexpensive gifts for people back home, but it was just a big commercial road lined with malls and an Outback Steakhouse. I took a side road into an area where they were selling cheap lunches out of stalls, and I sat down by a Canadian guy and talked to him for a while. He was kind of goofy, and he said he was getting married the next day to a Chinese girl. He'd had a job in Beijing for a couple of years. He told me of a place not too far away where there was a silk market where I could buy Chinese gifts, but after walking through the city for half an hour and asking directions a few times, I had to give up on it.
It was too late to hit Beihai park now, so I caught a cab to the Beijing Zoo, where I finally got to see the panders. They looked kind of dirty and bored. The big cat cages were just cell blocks, it was depressingly like visiting a prison. Some of the animals sat up straight, trying to preserve some dignity on the bare benches behind the bars, while others just lay down and sighed. When I visited the hippo, a kid was throwing rocks at it.
As I was leaving the zoo, I walked beside a soldier who was on leave with his young daughter, and we talked on the way out.
I caught a cab from there to Beijing University, "the Harvard of Chiner." On the way, the city looked so nice under the clear blue sky that I smiled, and I wanted to tell my cab driver how pretty I thought the day was. I said, "Beautiful day," and pointed around. He pointed to his ear and shrugged. I remembered that Meiguo, their word for America, means 'beautiful country,' so I said, "Mei," and pointed at the sky and the city. He looked at me like I was nuts. I didn't even know if I had the tone right, so I decided to look up the symbol and write it down. My Lonely Planet has a little dictionary in the back, but it didn't have 'beautiful' or 'day' listed. They did have Meiguo, so I wrote down the first character of that. Then I saw yesterday, tomorrow, today, etc., which all had a character in common, so I wrote that one down. I showed it to my cab driver, and finally he smiled and nodded and said, "Ah, dui, dui." (Chinese for "Uh... yeah, OK.") Then we settled back into a comfortable silence.
The campus was gorgeous. They had a big field of lotus flowers, colorful Chinese architecture, lots of shade trees, and some impressive modern-looking buildings. I stopped a random woman to ask her who one of the statues was supposed to be. She didn't know, but she did speak English, and she said she had nowhere to be, so she showed me around campus and helped me find things. I especially wanted to see the library where Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu and Cai Yuanpei held meetings and wrote revolutionary journals that helped form the Communist Party. I had no way of knowing if this new building was on the site of the old library, but it was amazing to stand so near to a piece of revolutionary history. We went to the gift shop and I bought a couple of Bei Da T-shirts.
My "guide" was a grad student from Taiwan who was just studying briefly in Beijing, so she got lost a lot, but at least she could read Chinese and ask for directions. She took me to the school cafeteria and got me some free food, and then we took pictures of each other in front of the lotus field before we said our good-byes.
I only had a little time left before I was supposed to meet up with Matt at 9:00 to go to the roller disco behind our hotel, and I had to find some last-minute gifts. My guide helped me tell a taxi driver to take me to a store. After an interminable and expensive drive (which, on an elevated highway, afforded me a gorgeous view of the sunset), we pulled up to a department store that was western and expensive, and thus useless. I told him that this wasn't quite right, and I wanted something "bu tai guila" (not too expensive) and not too far away. He grinned and nodded knowingly, and then, after another long and expensive cab ride, I walked into a place that mostly just sold household goods, fabric, toiletries, and garage-sale-looking clothes. Frustrated, I caught another long and expensive cab back to Wangfujing, where at least I knew there was something I could buy. I hurriedly picked up some gifts, and by then I pretty much knew what things were worth, and I was in the zone with my bargaining skills. I could usually get them down to 25% of the asking price easily.
I knew I was going to be late meeting Matt. I walked back to a main street to catch a cab. On the way I saw many people eating bunches of red-and-yellow balls on a stick, and I picked one up on the way. Usually when I was adventurous during my whole stay in China, something disastrous like a lima bean slushy or a bean-and-rice popsicle happened, but I thought I'd give it one more shot. The balls turned out to be tiny golf ball-sized apples impaled in a row and dipped in melted sugar, which formed a shiny clear coating. I bit into one, and the puckery-sour taste of the apples contrasted gorgeously with the pure sweet taste of the sugar coating, and it tasted like nature's Sweet Tart. Yummy.
I caught yet another long, expensive cab back to the hotel. By the way, when I say expensive, keep in mind I was used to the 7 kwai (85 cent) cab rides of Qingdao. These long rides through Beijing cost 25-40 kwai ($3-5). In Chinese terms, each one of these cab rides was enough to buy a nice shirt, 3 full banquet style dinners, 8 noodle lunches, or 80 honey loaves.
I met Matt at the hotel and apologized for not meeting him when I said I would. He said not to worry, and he was too tired to go anyway, so I went alone. Almost immediately, a young Chinese woman came up to me and started talking to me. I hadn't rollerskated in a long time, and I was pretty shaky at first, and she held my hand for about fifteen minutes. We talked until she had to leave. After that I skated around and watched the people around me. I guess they were mostly high school students, and the boys would spin around and extend their legs out behind them like ballerinas or ice skaters. In one couple, the girl wasn't very experienced, and every single time I came around the circle, there they were on the floor, the girl holding some injured part of her body while the boy consoled her. Then they'd be up again, then next time, there they were on the floor again. This happened about fifteen times, and I couldn't help but laugh.
The next morning we got up long before sunrise to drive out to the airport. We got there three hours early, like we always do when we're on Dr. Shen time. I wandered down to the waiting area and sat on a bench that had a good view of a Chinese TV. A figure passed in front of me and put his briefcase on a chair next to me. I glanced at him, and my mind flashed to something that seemed too absurd to register.
He looked at me, and that's when the warm, slightly nauseating feeling of recognition and cognitive dissonance washed over me. "You can take your sticker off," the man said. I had an airline sticker on my shirt that I'd forgotten about, but I didn't look down at it. "Mr. Thomas?" I said. "Remember me?"
"Sure I do," he said, the light of recognition just passing over his face. "From Vladivostok," I said, just to make sure that I wasn't insane. This was Thomas Wilbur, the guy Liz and I had had Christmas dinner with back in Vladivostok. What was he doing in Beijing? What was he doing randomly sitting next to me in Beijing?
I suspended my disbelief, he sat down next to me, and we talked for the hour or so until it was time to board our plane (we were on the same flight). His first piece of news was almost as hard to believe as his appearance. He said, "Remember that actress I knew out in Vladivostok, the main actress in town, who owns that Prestizh Pool Hall? Well, you know, her husband was shot by the mafia some years ago, and she remarried this guy Sergei, good friend of mine. The other day I get this letter from her, and it says, did you hear what happened to Sergei? Well, no, I hadn't heard about anything happening to Sergei, and I was worried. Then she said, 'He's the new governor.'" He looked at me impressively.
"Of the whole Krai?" I asked, astounded. "Yeah. It's like a fairy tale, ain't it? The actress and thegovernor." He smiled and shook his head.
I knew the other governor, Nazdratenko, was a corrupt jackass. He resigned a week after Putin blamed him for the crippling energy crises in the Far East. It's pretty well established that he embezzled a lot of the money coming in for basic energy supplies. Most likely he figured he would get away with it if he resigned quietly after he'd built up a big enough nest egg. When you're an apparatchik, it isn't hard to buy a pardon (right Clinton, Bush, Reagan...?).
I was glad to find him kicked out, and I felt cool to be two degrees of separation from the new guy. It's a powerful office--Primorye Krai, where Vladivostok is located, is a rich province, although the common people rarely saw any of the money.
"And he's a wealthy fishing industry magnate," continued Thomas, "so there shouldn't be any problem with him being corrupt, because he doesn't need the money."
I talked to a friend back at Stanford who is from Vladivostok, and he said that statement was absurd because "rich" and "corrupt" are synonymous in Russia.
Thomas went on to explain how he had written a white paper letter to the governor, his old buddy, regarding how to run his province. He said that Vladivostok could be the next frontier. All these middle-aged Americans with disposable incomes, they've already been everywhere, they're bored with it all. Now, the Russian Far East, there's an exotic place. And it's beautiful out there. If they just had some training, better service, more Western chain stores that people would recognize... why, it would be a bona fide tourist destination!
He said, "All those service industry people, if they just knew how to relate to people, understood the importance of serving the customer and keeping him, like they do in China, they'd do a lot better. And if it drains their energy, screw it, we're extroverts, we don't wanna sit in our hotel rooms all day! Go work in a factory if you're not a people person."
His vision, and I quote: "I want to be the guy who brings the first Starbucks into the Far East."
I was cringing inwardly the whole time, of course. "We" don't wanna sit in our hotel rooms all day? Who are "we" and why should we be telling Vladivostok how to be? The Vladivostok I experienced was a nice town, relatively unpolluted by boring chain stores and chirpy salespeople. Things in America are too convenient sometimes, almost to the point of being dehumanizing, and I like that there are still places where salespeople are rude, and they mean it, and you have to talk to and depend on real people to get things done. Maybe things don't always go perfectly, but at least it's interesting.
Then again, I get to live in convenient America most of the time, and these people don't. Maybe they want a little convenience and the dollars that tourism would bring in. But still, it seems a pity to soil yet another interesting place with the banal mask of name brands. What's next, a Starbucks in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to make it easier for rich Americans to view genuine, oil-coated wildlife? How genuine is anything if there's a Starbucks sitting in the middle of it? So often the upshot of tourism is to take interesting things and warp them into something mild and easily digestible, squeezing as much profit as they can while homogenizing the world a little more.
Thomas said he was already feeling the perks of knowing such a high official. Once he went into the governor's office to talk to his friend the governor, and while other schmucks had to go through a bunch of red tape to get in to see him, he was waved right in. He mentioned a time when he had offended me in Vladivostok, and he said, "Oh, you know, I was being my usual chauvinist self, and you were being your 'I'm a liberal student shithead'." That pretty much sums us up I guess.
We were talking about the mafia at one point, and he said he knew of a guy who was shot from three different angles at once, three bullets, right in front of Anatoly at the Prestizh. "I guess they wanted that guy dead."
He said the president of North Korea was taking the Trans-Siberian railroad to meet with President Putin, a journey his grandfather had made years back, or something like that. He said he had just bought a webdesign company in Vladivostok that designed web pages on commission for much cheaper than you can find in America. And since with the internet it doesn't matter where you get your web designing done, many people are looking overseas for cheap coding. He expected to streamline things a bit and turn a tidy profit in no time.
Talk turned back to China, and I asked him what he was doing in Beijing. I think he was only there in transit from another place in Russia, but he said he knew of a Mexican restaurant over by the American Embassy across from the silk market (the one I had been trying to find on Tuesday) called the Mexican Wave. He walked into the American embassy once and got invited to a BBQ, where he met a general who had been one of the guys who negotiated about getting the spy plane back. Another guy he met had a picture of a dude he knew--a guy who had been transfered from Moscow to Vladivostok years ago. This guy never met a stranger.
He said he had also been to Haerbin with his wife Natasha. Haerbin is right in the middle of Manchuria, and not too far from Vladivostok. He said it was a modern city, which surprised me. I had always thought of it as a frontier town, cold and dusty. He said there was an observation tower there with pictures of towers from all over the world, like the Eiffel Tower, the Pearl Tower, etc. Thomas said, "I turned to Natasha and said, 'No Space Needle? Sum Ting Wong.'" He laughed at his own joke and said, "Natasha laughed about that all weekend." I'm sure she did.
He stayed at the Holiday Inn in Haerbin, and there he met an Italian chef who would cook him anything he wanted, and the general manager of the place 'helped him out' in many ways. He also bought a 'cheap' mink coat for his wife. He named a price that sounded like a lot to me.
I have to admit that whatever else Mr. Thomas is, he's a fascinating character. This guy has elbowed his way into the Old Boy's Club, and he knows how to be in the right place at the right time. And he probably will have his Starbucks right in the middle of the town square of Vladivostok. Such is the face of one of globalization's biggest proponents.
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