What This Is

I suppose what this is, is sentimentality.  The east third ring road in Beijing is about as sexy as it sounds.  Driving up home now after a training that had me all the way down near Guanghua Lu.  In 1998 I used to commute down to this neighborhood where Motorola had its then, brand new office tower.  Only one or two of the landmark buildings that now define the street were in place then.  And I’ve seen it torn down and built up, lot by lot, ever since that time.  What was there then wasn’t particularly beautiful, but that’s not important to feel sentimental about something that is gone. 

I can recall reading a biography of the nineteenth century American painter and stain glass maker, blessed certainly with one of history’s most beautiful names: John La Farge.  This tale written in the late nineteenth century bemoans the wholesale destruction of New York’s defining architecture, which I find all but impossible to visualize, the housing of the 1840s.  The author states matter of fact-ly that as everyone knows, the houses of the “forties” were stately and all that’s come since then in Gotham is an aberration.  Really?  I tend to walk around in hushed reverence considering the buildings that stand from the 1890s or indeed the 1920s.  Someone will no doubt look back at what stood on this road in the end of the last century and assert convincingly that this was the time when the east third ring road was really primal and characteristic of the China that was all still yet to be. 

There’s the place where ‘CD Café’ used to be.  It wasn’t exactly Royal Roost or CBGBs, but I saw Cui Jian play there and David Sanchez, when he came through town.  In the time it takes me to write out the next sentence, we’re passing by the place where ‘Baochi Lianxi’ used to be.  I can remember seeing Tang Chao play there and talking about drummers with their drummer.  The ten thousand locations in your Beijing memory have all been upgraded to irrelevance.  We’re two buildings built up and torn down now, from where that club used to be.  It was never beautiful, but it, like the city, was more interesting in gestation than it is now that yet another office tower has risen to the canopy. 

This might be a fifty-year-old's epiphany.  The cities you knew aren’t just fading as they change, by now, they’re gone.  The New York of the seventies is gone like a period I never lived through.  It’s seems as distant as New York in the nineteen forties, or indeed the eighteen forties.  Sentimental then, about something that never seemed to merit much reverence, until I found it gone. 

All fifty year-olds think this way.  All fifty year-olds are beginning to truly grapple with the fact that the world, the city they know, the people who are driving things are rather fundamentally different.  They city’s they knew haven’t changed, they’ve slipped, utterly from what they were. What New York was thirty years ago, hasn’t changed as much structurally as Beijing structurally, but that memory of what the city was is just as far away.  Just as completely beyond reach.  

Not that this area out here was ever a pedestrian.  Rather it was in gestation and the creature coming looked interesting.  Now that its here, I’m not sure.