Not Much

One more entry about the passing of old Beijing.  Or the passing of nineties Beijing, because Old Beijing has already passed a hundred times before.  In another time, if you needed a backpack, as I do today, you could go to the Ya Show clothing market near San Li Tun, and head down to the basement and there’d be one or two guys from Anhui with a range of standard knock-off backpacks up on the wall.  You’d look for a while and ignore everything he said in broken English and then suddenly asking him where in Anhui he was from.  He’d wonder how on earth you knew he was from Anhui and wouldn't mention that it was just a guess, as eighty-five percent of everyone selling anything in Ya Show was from Anhui. 

I used to work across the street and it was very easy to grab things when you needed last minute things for Christmas or presents before you headed back to the U.S.  And it was particularly useful for things like new backpacks.  I’d been using one that I grabbed at a client sales kick off years ago.  But one and then another zipper broke recently, irreparably when the family and I were in Lombok.  Traveling this weekend to the U.S. I’d need a new bag. 

I looked on line.  Was Ya Show even open any more?  The web suggested it was.  But everyone complained that it aint what it used to be.  I got my contact lenses at the San Li Tun Lens Crafters, I got my iPhone charging chord at Apple store and then went to see what was left at Ya Show. 

Not much.  Approaching from the east, every storefront, including the place I used to get my cheap iPhone fixes at, were shuttered.  There is now a Burger King in front that is open.  But that’s about it.  I looked as if the entirety of the place was going through a gigantic remodelling.  What will emerge will almost certainly be . . . a modern mall of no certain distinction.  Which Beijing doesn’t need any more of. 

Like most of San Li Tun, the gritty, cheap ad hoc quality of what it used to be, perhaps like Camden Town, perhaps like Avenue A, has been gentrified.  In China there are also developers involved but one feels the hand of the city authorities more strongly suggesting that Beijing is no longer a “cheap” place.  Beijing no longer has “cheap” things or gritty locales.  What's cool will be sanctioned as so by the city and therefore necessarily uncool.  And steadily the city becomes ever more wealthy, clean and undistinguished. 

Friday, 01/26/18