Beijing
I recently spent a few days in Beijing, a city I hadn't visited since the beginning of 2008- a lifetime ago in laowai years. As always, a trip outside Kunming calls for a few observations.
- For the first time ever, I visited Beijing in decent weather. Normally my visits to the city coincide with either harsh winter or scorching summer temperatures, necessarily limiting my desire and capacity to explore the city on foot. On this occasion- barring one day of rain- the skies were blue and temperatures perfect. This made a big difference in forming my impression.
-The local food in Beijing is best avoided. As a Kunming-bred friend of mine says, Beijing restaurants to take all the flavors available around the country and replace them with heaping mounds of salt. I had a bowl of daoshaomian, a favorite noodle dish of mine, and nearly wept when I tasted it. Give me southwestern lajiao every day.
That being said, Beijing has an array of cuisine on offer befitting a great capital city. And the prices are reasonable, too. I had passable Mexican food with real guacamole and didn't have to pay through the nose to get it. One regret from not staying longer was being unable to sample all the fine food on offer.
- So how is Beijing in comparison to Shanghai? This, my friends, is a question that arouses fanatical opinion in China. As a person who has lived in neither city and a resident of the hinterland, I don't really have a dog in this fight. What struck me more was how similar the two were to one another, and how different both were to Kunming. I truly felt like Rip Van Winkle walking around, gaping with amazement at the dazzling array of, well, stuff there was to buy and see and do.
But alas I am not Switzerland; neutrality is not an option. And I must place my lot firmly in the Beijing camp. This isn't really a slight to Shanghai, which is a helluva city in its own right and one I look forward to seeing again. But Beijing has better retained its essential Chinese-ness in the process of its development than has its southern counterpart.
While in Beijing I stayed at a chain hotel in Shuangjing, a fairly non-descript neighborhood just off the third ring road. Within walking distance of my hotel was a Starbucks, a French bakery, and the other trappings of a major international city. Yet also nearby was an ordinary Chinese neighborhood with noodle houses, Sichuan fry-up dives, a few gritty looking bars, and the normal hum of daily life so common in China.
I didn't find this in Shanghai. Maybe I didn't look hard enough, but what I saw was a city eager to shed its Chinese-ness rather than embrace it. Of course, 'out with the old' is as Chinese a concept as face, chopsticks, and dragon boat races. But in the opinion of this humble correspondent Shanghai looks a little too much like a shanzhai Hong Kong*, with the exception of the magnificent architecture along the Bund that is truly one of Shanghai's great trademarks. It's difficult to imagine a hutong in Shanghai, for instance, being used for anything other than a German beer garden and Gucci outlet.
In writing this, I am trying to avoid the easy temptation of romanticizing pre-development China, a trait associated with spoiled rich-country writers the world over. Given where it was 30 years ago, contemporary Shanghai is a staggering, momentous tribute to China's economic miracle. But it feels so disconnected with the rest of the country that the effect is almost jarring. Beijing seems to possess a better mixture of quotidian Chinese life and the international sophistication the country has embraced.
- As much as I enjoyed my time in Beijing, it was good to get back home to Kunming. On the drive home my taxi got stuck in a traffic jam caused by two men who had parked their cars in the middle of the road and engaged in a furious fist fight. The short guy with the cap had a quick jab, but he was foiled by the tall guy's swift uppercut, though before long the boxing match descended into good old fashioned rolling-on-the-ground brawling. Ah- it's good to be home.
May 1st, 2010 - 06:51
“But Beijing has better retained its essential Chinese-ness in the process of its development than has its southern counterpart.” Shanghai has had a lot of foreign influence pre-PRC. I would argue that it has retained its essential character, but that character didn’t have as much Chinese-ness in it in the first place.