Downtime finally. A few hours between meetings. Had a walk through town up from the
concentration of buildings around “The Place” with the football field sized,
overhead media display that already looks old a few years after it was opened
as jaw-droppingly new. Nearby is the
post-modern, post-post-Cambrian Parkview complex, which is LEED certified and
populated with confrontational modern art.
I walked north trying my best to avoid and go between one giant mall
after another. How many SoHo’s are there
in Beijing at this point? There is one
at Chaoyangmenwai well worth avoiding. They all seem to do the same thing, selling
out choice office real estate while the ground floor stores are sold to odd,
well funded, poorly conceptualized stores and restaurants that are jumbled
together with little rhyme or reason to the highest bidder, who usually moves
after six months of giving it a go.
I worked at the San Li Tun SoHo for a year. (We also packed up and left.) On the ground floor was a clothing store that
closed and made way for an elite Chinese medicine salon with a green bar and
green bar stools upon which day after day three or four bored young ladies in
long winter coats and velvet qipaos spun
around and around, catering to no one, sitting beneath the founders’ unconvincing
portrait. By fall they’d come to the
conclusion that this was a bad place and a silly way to sell ginseng and moved
on. Now someone sells high-end
scooters. Stillborn malls, one and all.
Eventually I made my way on to the Dongdaqiao Byway, which
snaked itself between the neighboring towers.
I had an epiphany doing this that a certain Beijing, was
disappearing. Not the old Beijing of the
imperial city, but the buildings rolled out during the eighties, here in the
city that lay beyond the Second Ring Road, the former city walls. This brick build-out of five story brick
apartment blocks, with and ramshackle one story constructions beside them
filled out the space between the second ring road and the third and quickly
aged, as all things do in Beijing. And
this was what Beijing looked like when I arrived in the early nineties. Stores and enterprise were still
comparatively sparse compared to Shanghai.
Ugly buildings, of twenty stories or more with vaguely Chinese roofs
were then thrown up above the five story apartment buildings, along the ring
roads and across Jianguomen.
And it never occurred to me that I would somehow miss that
Beijing. Plotsing along Dongdaqiao,
which snakes past a small local hospital and with a turn that must have been
there for centuries, brings you passed an imposing ground level waste
processing facility where a dozen people have dragged bags of bottles and cans
to redeem and on around through a small market and a man selling sweet potatoes
to an older lady from an refashioned oil drum stove, it occurred to me that
this was a certain Beijing. And that now
it was becoming rare.
I recall reading an account of the late nineteenth century
artist, who revolutionized stain glass, as per his famous “Battle Window” in
the Harvard main cafeteria, and bore what is nearly the coolest name imaginable
for any person: John Le Farge. I think
at the time I was intrigued about Le Farge trip to Tokyo and Tahiti with the
author, historian and descendent of two U.S. Presidents, Henry Adams, where they bonded after the tragic suicide of the latter’s wife Clover. But in this book there is an interesting
description of Manhattan, wherein the author at the time in 1890s is describing
the tragic build out of housing that occurred in the 1870s, which ruined
everything and resulted in the loss of so many beautiful buildings from the
first half of the century. These days it
is difficult to imagine that a New York City building form the 1870s wouldn’t
be evocative and worth preserving. At
the time, they were monstrous. So much
of the architecture in Beijing, that I never liked anyway, becomes precious
suddenly, as it gradually disappears.
And of course, moving along through the alley there was a
soundtrack, so I could 昂首阔步[1], and feel cool. I suppose Cui Jian
might have been most suitable for such an earthy stroll through the nineties
Beijing alleys of my mind, but instead my random mix kept landing on some old
Rocksteady from Jamaica. A familiar tune
recorded much early that I assumed “It’s Alright” by Bob Marley and the Wailers
from 1970 or so, recorded with Lee Scratch Perry. Like so many tunes from that era it’s dusted
off, slowed down and then familiar to the world by the classic Wailers albums
from a few years later as “Night Shift”.
This is later the song he adapted to describe his time driving a forklift around
a warehouse in New Jersey, after he decided to emigrate from Jamaica and trade
in his career as a pop star to become a U.S. factory worker. Fortunately, he later changed his mind. “It’s alright” seemed appropriate cutting
between the strange epochs of this unfinished city.
[1] ángshǒukuòbù: striding forward with head high (idiom); to
walk with spirited and vigorous step / to strut
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