Beijing 2018 | The Cult of the Son

It started out as another bad feng shui travel day in Beijing.

The December morning temperatures had descended into the low 20s. Cold northwest winds blew in from the Gobi Desert.

My wife and I stood on a street corner near her parents’ apartment. We had an appointment to discuss a possible translation job with a local poet and art curator. We were running late or we would have taken the subway.

We had no choice but to hail a cab.

I moved to the nearby sidewalk, out of view, in case the driver didn’t want to stop for a foreigner. My wife waited alone for many minutes, the frigid wind blowing in her face.

Then a middle-aged man with a bald head suddenly stepped in front of her, putting his hand up to hail a cab. He’d seen her standing there but apparently decided that his time was more precious than hers.

It was a simple Beijing rule of the street: I’m bigger than you, therefore more powerful, so I take precedence.

Not on my watch.

I walked over from the sidewalk and stood a few steps in front of him. Then I signaled to an approaching taxi, which immediately pulled over.

“Hey!” the man yelled at me,

I turned and he was in my grille.

Communication wasn’t much of an issue here, even though neither of us spoke the other’s language.

As he stepped into my face, I gave no quarter, but motioned with my hands: He had cut in front of a woman much smaller than him, and now I, someone equal to his size, was stepping in front of him.

It was that simple.

What part of that didn’t he understand?

Ever the pacifist, my wife rushed between us to break up any fight. She told him that we were there first, but if he was in such a hurry, the cab was his.

He got in. As the taxi pulled out into traffic, she said: “What a total jerk that guy was. He saw me standing there.”

She let out a breath of disgust.

“Beijing men!”

In authoritarian China, the male reigns supreme, a legacy from a culture that practices the Cult of the Son.

Sons are still much prized over daughters here. And coddled male children often grow up to become domineering chauvinists as adults.

In a culture that has lasted 5,000 years, relatively few women have risen to positions of power: The Empress Dowager Cixi, who ruled in the middle 1800s, was one of a small handful of female rulers.

A century later, Chairman Mao’s girlfriend rose in political stature to become one of the dreaded Gang of Four during the Cultural Revolution, until she was arrested and tried.

But for most of China’s history, while women have held sway in the privacy of the home, men have publicly stepped to the front of the line.

Many male drivers will their way in front of you in traffic and then blow their horns when you don’t let them in. Talk about Type-A personalities.

Government officials are the worst; a privileged class of men who follow no rules here other than their own, and whose arrogance knows no bounds.

The Cult of the Son is most prevalent in China’s agrarian countryside. Years ago, as a foreign correspondent working here, I did a story about an activist who pursued equal rights in some of China’s most-backward quadrants. She told me the story of a young rural girl whose given name translated to “Isn’t it a pity I wasn’t born a son?”

After the jerk took our taxi, we walked for another half hour without any luck. Finally, I spotted a cab parked up the road and ran to snag it. As I opened the front passenger door, the driver made a motion of using a telephone, but I wasn’t sure what he meant.

My wife caught up and we hopped into the back seat. Just then, a woman approached from an adjacent hotel. It was apparently her cab — she’d called it — that’s what the driver had been trying to tell me.

But here’s the difference between men and women here: Instead of pushing past us with an air of entitlement, she repeatedly apologized for taking a cab that was rightfully hers.

Then she rolled down the back-passenger window and asked where we were going: If it was in the same direction, she offered to share the cab.

It wasn’t.

The Taxi Gods were apparently not pleased with us that day.

We eventually caught another cab, whose route took us along the Boulevard of Heavenly Peace, past Beijing’s mammoth Tiananmen Square, a place that has become — at least for many in the west — a symbol of China’s thuggish male behavior.

In 1989, the Chinese government called in the military to quell a peaceful student sit-in. More than 10,000 people were killed and many others went missing as the tanks rolled into the square.

Amid the fray, a photographer for a U.S. television station was beaten by the government goon-squad, as several uniformed bullies pummeled him with clubs, putting him into the hospital. When we met 20 years later in a San Francisco café, he still could not sit for more than 20 minutes at a time.

The savagery of the beatdown had caused permanent damage to his spinal cord. Now he was teaching journalism at UC Berkeley and, while all was not forgiven, he regularly took groups of students back to China.

Many years ago, I had my own run-in with male chauvinism here. I was walking near the Beijing train station with my wife and her young female cousin, when we passed a group of off-duty taxi drivers in the parking lot. One said something to my wife and the men around him cackled and high-fived.

My wife was fuming. When we reached the street, she turned to me: “Those jerks just insulted me (the taxi driver’s comments were lude and sexual) and now you need to go back and defend my honor!”

Me?

“What if he has a gun?

“There aren’t guns in China,” she said. “And it’s a serious crime to attack foreigners.”

Wait, you mean I don’t have to worry about getting shot? And my white face will protect me from a gang beatdown?

Sign me up.

We marched back toward the group; I got in the defender’s face and he immediately backed down, apologizing profusely. But then, as the crowd around us grew in size, the dynamics took a turn for the worse.

People began shouting. I told my wife we best make our escape. As we walked away, to save face, she turned to the crowd and said, “Don’t you know who I am?”

That morning, we made our appointment with the artist. Later, the Travel Gods finally smiled on us.

On the subway, we made our connections easily.

We got home in record time, without a taxi-stealing Beijing male street thug in sight.