23 December 2005
Vanishing Beijing
Then at the beginning of December there came an unexpected request to take the Beijing and Shanghai sections of DK China and update and expand them into a new two-city title, and to do it very swiftly. I was rather disinterestedly mulling this over when the phone rang with an offer to write a story on Beijing nightlife for a Toronto business magazine with a very good word rate by Canadian standards. I could have written that story without leaving home, but it struck me that there was a certain synergy here, and when DK threw in an air ticket, I got moving. Ten days later I was on a plane to Beijing.
As I said to a friend in an email once I knew I was going: I'm feeling rather disconnected from Beijing. It's as if it's grown up and left home or something. Never writes, never calls.
The Peninsula Palace kindly sent a car to fetch me from the airport, and from leaving the airport the rate of change over the last three years became immediately apparant, beginning with a traffic jam on the Airport Expressway on an early Saturday evening, continuing with the complete disappearance of entire and once familiar blocks, and ending with an arrival at the hotel long before it was expected because a completely new road had been smashed through to join with Jinyu Hutong.
Temperatures were sub-zero, with a refrigerating wind from the north turning skies bright blue, and exposed facial skin bright red. Nevertheless all day every day was spent on foot updating sights, shopping, and entertainment, and creating new walking routes, or checking on the viability of others. The first day was typical: the flower market inside the northeast corner of Tian Tan was gone, the Yuting Bird and Flower Market opposite the south entrance had also gone, the Duyichu shaomai restaurant, and much more. There are always days like this with guide books, where effort leads to accuracy, but not to useful material: in this case it just led to material that should be cut--a loss of space rather than space filled.
Rush hour is now an all-day event, and having to get to dozens of scattered destinations in just a few days proved difficult, and was managed on very little sleep and a great deal of shoe leather.
An unexpected bonus was that several friends from quite separate backgrounds were in town. Firstly I had dinner at Jing with GXL, a native Beijinger who had just arrived in England in 1985 when she began to teach Mandarin privately to my then girlfriend and myself. I haven't seen or heard from her for at least 15 years, and never seen her on home territory. I also caught up with SA who had moved up from Hong Kong, with GF who had moved back from Singapore, and with the JC who had worked with me on the demented Frommer's China and Frommer's Beijing books (three enjoyably drunken nights incorporating an excellent evening re-reviewing one of my favourite Beijing restaurants). AF had also returned to Beijing, and dropped in to complain about all kinds of things for 20 minutes, and to make it clear she was more interested in seing JC than me. Then she said one quite intriguing thing, and quickly vanished before she could be asked to elaborate. In short she hasn't changed in the two years or so since I last saw her, and I really wondered why I bothered. There was also an excellent evening with GXL and her Swedish husband MS, another Sinologist, at a fifty-year-old Shanxi restaurant I really should have known about before.
For the whole week there was a continuous sense of revival of contact and complete detachment from the city.
This is actually written on the flight back from Shanghai via San Francisco, and I've twice fallen asleep at the keyboard. So more of this later.
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