A SOJOURN IN BEIJING: EPISODE 5
My in-law’s apartment is centrally-located within walking distance of anything you might desire for a good life: massages, restaurants, hair salons, markets, massages.
Did I say massages?
The apartment building was built especially for the Russian “brothers” who arrived in the 1950s to offer Chairman Mao economic advice on how to keep pace with those scheming white devils from America.
Today, a bustling neighborhood has grown up around it.
It lies in the southern half of the city, a half-mile south of Beijing’s main east-west thoroughfare, the Avenue of Heavenly Peace, where the leaders stage their grand military parades.
It’s also within walking distance of Tiananmen Square, where atrocities against student protestors occurred in 1989 that most Chinese people know little or nothing about, because they were never reported in the government-run press.
For most Chinese, Tiananmen Square remains a civic attraction, a vast public space that sprawls south from the gates of the Forbidden City. I don’t think America has anything that compares with its scope and size.
The square is where Mao himself lies in state and you can file past his waxen body that still lies in state. I mean, if you wanted to. And millions of Chinese people do so each year. My in-laws, when they were a bit younger, used to take evening strolls there from their apartment.
Whether they too looked in on The Chairman, I don’t know; I didn’t ask.
One morning, I decided to venture out by myself. My wife was helping her mother prepare a special lunch for visiting relatives, so I walked to the nearest intersection and face a choice to go left or right.
Left would take me toward Heavenly Peace, though some hipster, millennial-dominated blocks. Right led to areas dominated by older, blue-collar residents.
I turned right, of course. (My politics may be left, but my decisions are always right.)
As cities go, Beijing is extremely walkable. There is one caveat: You need the oversized eyes of the common house fly to see in all directions, because the energy on any public street consists of barely-controlled chaos.
For one thing, drivers do not care if they run you over. It’s might-makes-right here, even in cases where pedestrians have the green light and the so-called right-of-way, because there is no right of way.
Most walkers are resigned to this fact, so they pause and let the behemoths pass, as you would any oversized schoolyard bully.
The sidewalks here teem with foot traffic. In the neighborhoods I walked through, there were old men and women perched on stoops, sunning themselves on the glorious mid-November morning. There were grandfathers walking their infant grandchildren, cooing into their ears and women pulling carts, out for a morning of food shopping.
Yet you still have to be hyper-aware, especially in the busy rush hour, for the dreaded scooters. These vehicles are more dangerous than the cars, because at least they stay on the roadways. The scooters can turn up anywhere: They careen down sidewalks, coming from behind, beeping for you to move aside only at the last minute.
And many are electric, so you cannot hear them approach.
Many Beijing main streets have separate side lanes for pedal bicycles and scooters and this is perhaps the most dangerous realm of all. You are off the relative safety of the sidewalk, taking a plunge, as it were, in-croc infested waters where the predators feed. The scooters will run lights as if they didn’t exist.
They have no conscience.
I have traversed cities in which lurk the cousins of these street assassins. In Manila and Saigon, the tuk-tuks run amok. In Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur, any fool with a few bucks can buy a motorcycle.
But Beijing fools you, its modernizing streets lull you into a feeling of safety — at least when you’re on the sidewalk. And then, when you least expect it, the scooters are upon you.
That’s the thing about assassins; you never hear them coming.
The old neighborhoods of this city are a people-watcher’s paradise. The sidewalks teem with entrepreneurial enterprise. The merchants are most often people from the nearby countryside, who appear in the capital before dawn to sell their wares.
The earlier you get here, the better sidewalk spot you can claim. I’ve seen two merchants nearly come to blows over a choice just outside a popular outdoor dining space. The competition is fierce.
My favorites are the sellers whose paltry wares keep them out of fray for the good spots; These people take what they can get. They lay out their goods on blankets and then stand aside to watch passersby, often chain-smoking cigarettes.
One man had four combs there for display; that’s it.
Another woman was selling what the Chinese call “ugly tangerines,” which, come to think of it, isn’t a bad description of the person presently taking up space in the White House Oval Office.
But by far my favorite sight were the gorgeous Communist propaganda posters that lined the streets along walls outside apartment buildings. Most peddled a state of mind and included bucolic images of Chinese people living the good, mostly rural, life, with a million variations of the phrase: “Beautiful People. Beautiful China.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off them. They were exquisite street art.
I walked down one row of poster/paintings, each one more stunning than the one before it, lost in the reverie of someone inside a museum taking in a favorite exhibit.
But I knew I had to be careful. I had to watch my back.
I was on the streets of Beijing.
Assassins lurked.
TOMORROW: The Last Breath