From The Land Of The Cherokee

Frank's Back.

He'll Be Posting Soon.

ICYATBL's Requiem

Filth and Hot Dogs

As many of you know, I've been in Beijing for the last two-plus months, witnessing the historic, frantic run-up to this year's Olympic Games. (If you didn't know I was that guy, now you do.) It's been a fantastic personal experience, which I'll tell you all about offline, but it's also been a challenging intellectual experience, raising some questions about culture and modernity. I don't know what they are--this isn't an essay, just a kind of exploration. Feel free to join in.

(For background to what I'm about to try to discuss, do yourself a favour and read Geoffrey York's honest blog post on the changing face of Beijing here. He oversells the bleakness of the current situation but even in the short time I've been here I think I agree the city is going in the direction he's identified.)

One of the guys on the trip with me was in Vietnam a few years ago, and he complains occasionally that China is "too Western": they've got buildings, and ads for cars, and Snickers bars in the 7-11s, and other sins against exoticism--in other words, he prefers the "authenticity" of Vietnam's poverty. I find this pretty crass, as a privileged citizen of a G8 nation; the notion that one point three billion people should eschew running water so some Canadian guy can feel like he went somewhere cool on vacation is absurd. It may be possible to build a modernity which is not Western, and it may be that I'm the ignorant one for associating Snickers (or, more accurately, swept streets) with the West. But this is the heart of the issue. Consider the following.

York is right--the city of Beijing is being sanitized. I've seen it happening all around me, especially in the past month. The focus of the city is climbing, away from the street and toward the sky. Usually, cities change horizontally, as neighbourhoods gentrify or become saturated or hip--but Beijing is changing vertically, from bottom to top. The government's eye is on the new skyline--which includes office buildings as well as Olympic ones--characterized by bizarre, foreign-designed, geometric behemoths which, lacking a genuine downtown, roam the landscape like weird beasts from some architecturally incoherent void. In order to create the impression they want, for the Olympics and, I believe, for a modern China, they've had to sweep the streets and get people looking up instead of down. The changing Beijing is the shift from living messy on the ground to being proud of what stands crisp in steel and glass in the sky, whether or not it has anything to do with daily life--and whether or not this is a good thing is a question much of the world will have to address in the near future, as increasing wealth allows for the reduction of quaint poverty and construction of weird buildings.

The "dirty" Beijing is, for a privileged teen, sloughing off neuroticism like a cocoon, exciting: breakfast is homemade rice congee, soy milk and egg pancakes from breakfast carts attached to the back of a tricycle or pork buns steamed on old paint cans (one purveyor last year found himself embroiled in scandal because his filling was found to be more paper than pig); restaurants operate late into the night, raucous old men throw cards on on bridge tables set out on sidewalks, drunk off unbelievably cheap 110-plus proof liquor distilled from grain and reportedly containing unhealthy levels of non-ethanols, playing chess or poker, mutton chuanr roasting over improvised barbecues--and so on. And this is old stuff--the traditions of street vending, public congregation, and acceptable drunkenness in China are old. And, sadly, this seems to be going away. Restaurants are being told to move the tables inside or apply for costly permits; breakfast ladies are being sent home.

But then again, there's another part of the "dirty" Beijing which is just dirty: public toilets smell so bad their smell transcends the smells of human waste and becomes a kind of cathartic, ammonia clean; pimps hawk their wares outside karaoke bars; old men and women shuffle along listlessly, toothlessly, fishing through garbage cans to collect plastic bottles they can recycle for just over a cent each; and they're all gone now, swept away to the suburbs or worse, but had he come earlier, all kinds of deformed, exotic beggars would have been available for my friend's gleeful perusal.

So there's this fascinating conundrum, for those of us who are prone to think about this kind of thing: how much can we, from outside the Beijing world (and rest assured, I am too), support this sanitization? What is Chinese and what is Western; what is culture and what is poverty? How should we see it? Sweeping up the pimps, the filth, the poor health and safety standards--that's not obliterating culture; it's just good housekeeping, isn't it? Had Toronto won the Olympics this year, we'd demand that it shave and put on a tie too. (It just doesn't have the authoritarian clout to do the job as effectively.) On the other hand, the old guys at sidewalk restaurants, the 24-hour community culture, the diversity and joy of street food--the cities I've lived in in North America could stand to learn from the Chinese (or Brazilian, or whatever) example. It's a better way to live, I think, than to have everything packaged and sterilized. (That might just be sentimental fetishism, of course. You tell me.)

The trouble seems to be that the Olympic planners don't know what they have. This will seem condescending and colonial, but bear with me: they don't feel the loneliness of empty Toronto streets after dark, when everyone's safely nestled in restaurants, bars, or movie theatres. They don't know that it's nicer to have a favourite congee lady who sells you breakfast every morning and will let you run up a little tab if your change isn't right than to stuff an Egg McMuffin into your mouth on the way to work. More importantly, I think that whereas my vision of a modern city can tolerate sidewalk cafes, the Chinese one is sleek, futuristic, and totally free of debris. It's natural that for their Olympic debut, the government is trying to turn Beijing into the most impressive city it can be--but in an ironic twist, the modernity they're going for is their take on our vision of the future.

It's their right to sterilize their city if they want to, of course. The fact that it'll disappoint American tourists is of no consequence at all, and neither is my taste a good prescription for a 5000-year-old civilization. (Never mind who "they" are, I'm pretending a unified Chinese decision.) But does it have to be that way? The essential question that's been bothering me is: can the developing world carve out a different kind of development, one that is modern, clean, safe, rich, and still not Western? If not, is that because it's been pulled into the Euro-American development "wake", so that it can't help but follow what's already been done, victims of chronology? Or is our very idea of what's Western totally conflated with modernity, in what amounts to the colossal arrogance of the global ruling class, such that the whole question is a tautology? I have to believe that man has, or once had the potential for, more creative power than that. There are other modernities; you can imagine techno-longhouses, super-agrarian communes, and holo-agoras, if you try. (I don't mean to imply that materialism is the exclusive pedigree of the West--I'm just saying the first thing they teach you in economics is to realize that there are more ways to allocate productive capacity than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.)

I do hope that the Beijing I've come to appreciate is being closed for repairs and not cancelled outright; that logistical, not ideological, motives have driven the knee-jerk return to central control. This century has seen a lot of backtracking, revisionism, reinvention, and plain destruction of tradition for the Chinese people. Not that it's any of my business, and not that dirty Beijing is a paradise--but I wish the government would think twice before they demolish it completely. I think the new Beijing is a sad, fake, and ultimately ill-advised one: no one who comes to the Olympics next month will be impressed.

Do any brothers or sisters have a take? I'm all ears.

From Whence We Came

We're all tired, overworked, busy, chinese, arborist mountain men, sleeping on a train to godknowswhere, or cleaning up after children (and some i forgot), yet something has remained solid amongst our faithful - the oncoming urgency of our glorious reunion.
We forget it is soon - at some point, frank, icgyatbl, myself, the kid, a special appearance from terry, fiver, and the others whom i dont remember to mention, just to keep it exciting, are going to be back marauding our fair country once again.

Let freedom ring, and the countdown begin.

Echoes from the Town of the Bird's Nest

Bernice says:

good morning!

icantgiveyouanythingbutlove says:

heh

icantgiveyouanythingbutlove says:

thanks

icantgiveyouanythingbutlove says:

they just put wireless interweb in my hotel, so i'm celebrating with a newspaper poo

Bernice says:

oh thats awesome

Bernice says:

so youre pooing right now?

Bernice says:

thats kinda weird

icantgiveyouanythingbutlove says:

a little.

Bernice says:

even being on the phone while pooing is odd

Bernice says:

this is a whole new level.

icantgiveyouanythingbutlove says:

the phone thing is totally normal in china

icantgiveyouanythingbutlove says:

people just pop the squat and yell into their cell phones

icantgiveyouanythingbutlove says:

everywhere

Bernice says:

this whole conversation is going on the blog.

icantgiveyouanythingbutlove says:

oh nice