Waking from the One Dream

Forget the “morning after” clichés that would logically follow the end of Beijing’s “coming out party” [may this mark the last time the phrase is written or uttered]. The past seven years have been no party – they’ve been China’s holy PR crusade. Expats have spent the better part of a decade witnessing frantic façade building, and experiencing all the inconvenience that entails. Let’s look at what Beijing’s gotten out of being ground zero of the Battle for a Glorious Olympics, besides all the intangible pride and honor, and what we may expect from a city that can finally exhale and pad around the living room in its underwear.

A Breather

Like warm days in Minsk, fresh air in Beijing is something you learn to live with very little of. Summers, especially, are gloomy seasons in Middlemarch, buildings just a block away veiled in hazy vapor. With a few semi-smoggy exceptions, Olympic days have been as fresh as anything Beijing has known since Kublai Khan was running the place.

The even-odd license plate game and factory closures that made this oxygen-fest possible will continue through the Paralympics, although many are of the opinion that the formula for fresh air should continue indefinitely. We’ve got three new subway lines and a slew of low-emission busses to help us about. Plus, the city remains flat as a pancake, giving sustainability-minded types cause to wonder why Beijing ever forsook its bicycle-as-chief-transport model. Realistically, idling at red lights in one’s “private car” remains a cherished image in China’s new world power dream. Gather ye deep breaths while ye may.

The Sound of Silence

Grousing about spitting is a hallmark of the China noob, but we’re all new to its absence here. Beijing’s throaty love call, heretofore as prevalent as the call of crickets on a muggy summer’s eve, has suddenly dwindled down to the frequency of an owl’s sporadic hooting. The barbarian obsession with queuing has seemed to take root, also. One can only conclude that politeness propaganda, the ads and banners, proved effective. Most likely, though, it’s a case of a dinner party host carefully avoiding four-letter words. Winter should bring its familiar growling and green-speckled sidewalks.

The absence of construction racket has been causing insomnia for millions who can no longer sleep without it. They can rest easy now; the backhoe nocturne, replete with slag crashing into dump trucks, revving diesel engines and the back-up soprano (“Diao Che! Qing zhu yi! Diao che!”) is slated to resume after the second half of intermission, the Special Olympics. Beijing is growing by three hundred to four hundred thousand permanent residents a year, and they’re not leaving with the Olympic Circus. That’s why we can look for the fall return of the migrant worker, flitting about in the scaffolding, nesting by the hundreds outside construction sites, and reminding us why we should never lack gratitude for our circumstances.

Black Market Power

Even sports-haters in Beijing had no recourse but to watch synchronized diving. It was either that or the Filipino version of cable – all the DVD stores were closed! Department stores still had their sanctioned, 27 RMB copies of Logans Run, and even over-forties are learning how to illegally download, but ogling rack after rack of movies you’ve seen before, shoulder to shoulder with other jaded expats, is as inextricably part of leisure time in China as elective plastic surgery is in Hollywood. Thankfully, a few are re-opening now, with proprietors speculating that the crackdown will be finished by the new year (Gregorian or Chinese new year unspecified).

Hopefully authorities will lighten up enough to allow the return of the sidewalk vendor as well. Without either the time or the money to visit Lhasa, many of us derive our only contact with Tibet from the ruddy sojourners selling faux silver bracelets on bridges. Roasted yams and ears of corn have also been sorely missed by those who appreciate their nutritional superiority and cost effectiveness versus other forms of fast food. Understanding the sidewalk fortune-tellers’ toothless Mandarin is a language-acquisition goal that may be reset, once the last bothersome sports tourist, make that honored foreign guest, has returned from whence he came.

Paper Chase

Stringent visa regulations and residency checks have had expats howling and wringing their hands since months before the torch was lit. Many split town, never to return, convinced that PSB officers doing passport spot checks was a sign of the expat apocalypse. Others married their long-term Chinese partners. Everyone has second-hand accounts of the friend’s friend who is informed that, due to irregularities in his record, he must be on tomorrow’s plane out of China.

The days when soul-crushing paperwork was exclusively a native Chinese burden, while foreigners scofflawed about, are gone. Logic dictates that the visa follies can’t go on much longer, although Kafka dictates that logic has nothing to do with bureaucracy. Still, tales of passport spot-checks are tapering off, and the fact that the closing ceremonies didn’t go off with too literal of a bang means that Olympic face can no longer be tarnished by wayward laowais. But those seeking the cowboy days of pre-WTO Beijing should have packed off for Vientanne or Ho Chi Minh City years ago.

White Elephants

So China lays out a billion RuMBas on a Water Cube for Phelps to splash around in and become the athlete most identified with the 2008 Games. Have any Americans even said “Thank you”? Oh, there are plans to make the National Aquatics Center a viable community center: water slides, wave pool, fitness club, but there have to be a few city planners looking at the place as though it were an empty bottle of overpriced XO.

Chickens may be coming home to roost at the Bird’s Nest, sooner than later. Stadiums generally make money only if they are home to a major sports team. The s-word and f-word in China right now refer to ‘soccer’ and ‘football’, so even if the tentative plans for Beijing’s Guo’an soccer club to play there come through, Beijing’s 3.2 billion yuan metaphor will take ages to break even. If city plans for the Olympic Green to transition into a massive entertainment-commercial venue don’t materialize, Beijingers can still be thankful for the Olympic Forest Park, 680 hectares and half a million trees’ worth of green lung.

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