Memories of Those Misadventures in the Middle Kingdom

BEIJING, China — I have been visiting this teeming city of 22 million inhabitants for three decades now, often lingering for months because once here I find it hard to leave. 

I’ve worked as a journalist but have mostly returned for personal reasons — to visit my in-laws in their first-floor apartment a short bicycle ride from Tiananmen Square.

Each time I arrive, I am floored by the delightful foreignness of this place and its cuisine, including the simmering hot-pots laden with vegetables and spices I cannot pronounce. My favorite meal is hunks of lamb smothered in cumin and served on a stick, a delicacy from Xinjiang, the country’s far-northwestern Muslim region, along with pickled cabbage, oven-baked Beijing bread and luo ba pi, sliced radish skins drenched in vinegar, all washed down by a few mugs of local draught beer.

I marvel at this capital city’s ancient dynastic history and an architecture that features gorgeous red lanterns and temples adorned by clay-tiled roof lines that swirl in the graceful arcs of cursive handwriting, embellished by colorful dragons and gargoyles. 

But I am mostly drawn here by the people themselves. Every now and then, amid the bustle of such a sprawling metropolis, an earnest stranger will catch my eye with a simple smile, a way to breach the linguistic wall that surrounds and isolates this alluring culture half a world away from my own. 

I have come to Beijing at the height of summer’s heat, when the old women flutter exotic fans and their husbands roll up their T-shirts to expose bulging bellies in a form of air-conditioning and personal style. I have come in winter when the frigid Gobi Desert winds invade the capital city like Mongols from the north, packing a bitter lash that bites at exposed skin and sends you scurrying for heat and cover.

In 1995, during my first trip here, China was less open to the outside world. I found a sequestered culture where endless brigades of bicycles peddled alongside the city’s wide thoroughfares. The skies were less smoggy then, when you could hear the symphony of clanking bells that signaled the bikes’ approach. Fewer people owned cars, mostly the wealthy and chauffeured government officials. 

These days there are so many vehicles, dominated by elite western brands, that the government restricts their entry to even-odd days. And still the avenues and freeways are choked with traffic and exhaust that often turns the skies into a dirty grey veil. 

Now the pedal bikes have been replaced by silent scooters, condescendingly known as dian liuzi, (dee-enn loo-zeh) or electric donkeys, that cruise along road shoulders like lurking assassins, the operators’ faces obscured by helmets and visors. 

They are China’s Amazon delivery drivers, who service the nation’s internet-driven addiction to fast, personal deliveries. Need a few more beers delivered to your pad? Maybe a last-minute order of chicken feet? Your dedicated dian liuzi is on his way. He’ll be there in minutes.

But in their haste the damned donkeys do not obey traffic signals. Their payloads strapped to their back fenders, they drive the wrong way on the shoulders of one-way roads, wading through crowds of unsuspecting pedestrians. 

Nothing stops them.

As they pass, I sometimes call out their name as a challenge to obey the rules.

Dian Liuzi!

Walkers must be constantly vigilant. Eyes in the back of your head would certainly help. One unannounced move could bring a bone-crushing collision from behind. My wife counsels me to ignore them, insisting that there is an inherent synchronicity to the street flow here that lessens the likelihood of such mishaps.

Still, I glance warily over my shoulder whenever I step off the curb or cross an intersection, even when favored by the traffic light. It is one of the many unspoken nuances of life in Beijing that I have never been able to decipher.

I first arrived in China carrying a clamshell phone, one soon replaced by a Blackberry and later by a succession of iPhones. But no matter what developing Western technology I brought along, Beijing always seemed to be one step ahead.

One night I sat inside a van driven by Gong-Gong, a close friend of my brother-in-law’s, en route to some boozy drinkathon, where I joined a tableful of cronies warbling in Beijing’s thick local accent over shots of beer and bi jou, a sweet high-proof grain alcohol.

In the van, Gong-Gong took my new phone and made a motion to toss it out the window. It was that useless, his gesture suggested. Smartphones were just smarter in Beijing.

Since then, China’s technology’s march has not lost a step.

Graceful Qing Dynasty architecture now competes with futuristic buildings with impossible gravity-defying angles, a Blade-Runner kind of cool that portends the future of international skylines

Today, I’ve had restaurant meals delivered to my table by humming robots, a cousin of the security-bots that roll through banks and airports. In Beijing, personal-finance apps rule the day. While the sole domain of the newest generation in the U.S., even grandmothers here use their phone app to buy coffee and groceries, pay for parking or order a cab.

The days of manually flagging down one of the city’s fleet of green-and-yellow cabs is long gone. Taxis no longer stop for random pedestrians; they’re all on call from a more sophisticated customer with a payment app. Without one, unfortunately, (and that means you’re a foreigner) you’re forced to walk.

And contend with the dian liuzi.

But China’s technology parade moves in a military goose step. The nation today is dominated by Orwellian security cameras that monitor and observe from street corners, public parks, just about everywhere you can imagine. You can’t do anything here without being watched by the government. 

In Beijing, it seems, it will always be 1984.

With my towering gait, round eyes and big nose, I have remained a curiosity here.

It’s certainly not as marked as when I first arrived. I once stood on a Shanghai street corner, exhausted from an all-night train journey from Beijing, when I turned to see a man lingering by my side. Literally half my size, he gaped up at me like an Oklahoma cowboy in Lower Manhattan.

Sleep-deprived and irritated, I wanted to know what the heck he was gawking at. My wife translated the question, as well as his answer.

“I just want to look at you,” he responded innocently.

Days later in Suzhou, a town famous for its woven silk, I was shopping for scarves in a downtown street market when I turned to discover that I had drawn a crowd of curious local onlookers. One man grabbed a scarf from my hands and ran it through his own fingers, as though to test the quality of a product that had drawn the eye of a foreigner.

Back in the early days, I couldn’t walk on any street without being converged upon by diminutive women peddling their wares, usually cheap plastic tourist knockoffs. With my wife walking ahead, they’d surround me in a sort of urban ambush, shoving merchandise in my face.

Such attention forced me to jokingly concoct my first intelligible Mandarin sentence.

“Bu dong. Bu yao. Bu hao. Mei you qian!”

Don’t understand. Don’t want. No good. Don’t have any money.

That usually stopped them in their tracks.

Today, with nearly one million foreigners living among China’s 1.4 billion people, I attract less attention, especially in cosmopolitan Beijing. Many young men now tower over me.

But out in the hinterlands, I still draw looks.

On a recent excursion to southwestern China, I went a week without seeing another foreigner.

Just smiling Chinese faces.

I have often joked that there are not enough hands in China to properly probe all the tense muscles and achy crooks of my sagging, aging body.

I’ve been massaged by both men and women, applying both a light touch and Herculean pressure, by blind masseuses, others who marveled at my hairy body and even a lonely young woman in an isolated province who had fallen hopelessly in love with a Japanese anime character.

I’ve had a lithe young woman walk on my back and others who painfully jammed their thumbs into my feet to hint at the health of corresponding organs. Inside steam rooms, like the cowardly lion visiting the City of Oz, I’ve had dead skin scrubbed clean by men wearing sandals and white towels. 

China has often brought out the hedonist in me.

For years, before music entered the cloud, I wandered Beijing for knockoff compact discs that would cost a dollar each. The first time, in the late 1990s, a young man I passed on the street opened a trench coat to let me glimpse a few discs. He then led me to a nearby hotel room where he laid his wares out on the bed. 

I felt like a war lord buying the latest line of illicit weapons.

Eventually, stores popped featuring hundreds of discs and my musical tastes were influenced by choices I made there. No longer required to shell out $20 per CD, I took chances on bands I never would have discovered back in the states.

And then technology moved on. The stores, and the CDs were gone.

Poof.

No country stands still in time. Especially not China.

Over the years, I have experienced the deaths of family and friends, including Gong-Gong. I have seen one relative make and then lose a personal fortune. I now have a 12-year-old nephew I call xiao houzi, or little monkey, who is so fleet of foot he threatens to break his school record for the 50-meter dash and who lusts for American brands like Apple and Nike.

Vast Tiananmen Square, the site of the 1989 student rebellion, where a single brave individual famously took his stand before a line of military tanks, no longer holds as much allure. I’ve seen enough of the waxy shrunken body of China’s Great Helmsman, Chairman Mao, for decades preserved under plexiglass. As China’s government tightens it grips on personal freedoms here, the energy of that student revolution now seems like a distant dream.

These days, due to a lingering economic downturn many here blame of the trade war with the U.S., China has fallen on harder times. Unemployment is rampant, prices are up, the cost of food and rent are skyrocketing.

For sojourners like me, Beijing is no longer such a bargain. But higher restaurant bills are a small price to pay for the privilege of exploring a culture that few Americans will ever experience, many still choosing to believe the narrow-minded fables of China’s supposed terrible food and secretive, inscrutable people.

My infantile Mandarin remains a stupid pet trick. But translation apps allow me to have direct conversations with my mother-in-law. Gone are the old days when I relied on my wife as my translator, those frustrating times when I felt the iron-curtain of censorship.

Often, she would downright refuse to translate my words.

“You need to ask better quality questions,” she’d say.

And so, app in hand, I return each year to this modernizing Asian nation, watching it expand and contract, always feeling a little more at home here.

For every Porsche or Range Rover, I can spot a hard-working peasant peddling an ancient cart through traffic, his payload towering three times his height.

This Middle Kingdom still keeps a foot in two disparate centuries.