Saturday, February 21, 2009

RIVER


Beijing is not a natural city. Nothing grows here but pale, dusty, silver trees, and even they only grow where they’re told to, where they’re put. The rest is all fake: the grass verges, the flowers by the road side, the parks with their fake waterfalls and fake old Chinese rocks. All watered and tidied and tended to by an army of civic gardeners. All on life support.

This place is man-made. A functional city, built to produce, to achieve everything as fast and as cheap as possible. Carved up into grids, dusty, a working city. But on the maps, you can see water, surrounding the city in thin strips. So we got on our bikes to have a look, to find the nature.

The river, when we find it, isn’t much different. It’s perfectly straight too: channelled between concrete banks. Planned, directed, quantified. Going from one place to the other as quickly as possible. It smells sour, like sea-water left behind when the tide goes out. The water is iced over. It sits still. Bricks and shoes and litter sit on the ice, like happy ducks.

On one side of the river is the new, lonely, commercial side of the city. A hundred glass towers, copied from Chicago, Hong Kong, Tokyo. All trying to be different from the next: brass, silver, or gold trim, engineered holes in the centre, funny hats on, soaring spires. All look exactly the same. There’s even one development called Soho (it's just a brand name, there are three others in the city, it doesn't help with the geography) where they’ve reduced Modern City Living to its simplest form: 16 identical geometric towers, made out of neat rows of smaller, identical boxes. Like graph paper with people living inside.

On the other side of the river is the old scruffy, communist China. A hundred old homes, shops, lean-to cafes, toilets. All one storey tall, made of brick, without charm or decoration. As simple as it’s possible for buildings to be. These buildings are half demolished, but their back walls still stand, the grubby insides on display. As ever, people are still living here, in the few buildings that are still intact. Men in blue hats and 20th century overalls walk along this bank. Women appear out of doorways to hang their washing above the river to dry.

Maybe the people in the tower blocks see this rubble, the guts of these old homes. Maybe they feel guilty, or nostalgic for the childhood they left behind, or disgusted, or ashamed. Maybe they close their curtains and concentrate on their super-high definition television.

We keep cycling. Suddenly these half-demolished buildings disappear behind tall, bright hoardings, advertising what’s going to replace them. It’s a Swiss retail village. A fucking Swiss village. Happy pastel-coloured rows of mock alpine cottages. A clock tower, even an Alpine church. All turned into shops. The panels show close-ups, details, perspective shots of the whole development, with the cold glass business towers in the background. They’ve even included a few pics of the real Swiss village that it’s all copied from, for reference. All populated with images of successful, happy Chinese people, in shorts sleeves and sunglasses, dresses and boots, clutching square, paper shopping bags from luxury European brands. Drinking takeaway coffees ‘on the go’.

People walk past the hoardings, real people. A man in a suit jacket eating barbequed meat off a skewer. A girl on a bike with a pink face mask on. An old, slow man in a boiler suit with a walking stick. They walk and cycle along the streets, against the background of this new village, unwitting users of this new lifestyle concept. They don’t look up, or stop, or take any notice of the would-be Swiss Village. They’re busy making a living. Getting by.

Further on down the river, there are old pipes and rickety railway bridges that you have to duck to get under. Dirty old factories with tall chimneys. A family of electricity pylons, suspending a hundred wires above the water, just out of reach. All this will probably still be here when the Swiss village opens. Just out of sight. Just off screen. Sometimes you couldn’t make China up.


















THINGS I HAVE SEEN IN BEIJING PART 2

NUMBER TWO: THE BILL

Two women fight in a restaurant over who is going to pay. This is a big issue in China. It’s all about face, see. At home you might say ‘I insist’ a couple of times, before having a recap on who paid last, how much money you’ve got, whether you’ve got a job, how the recession is likely to affect your industry, that sort of thing. But you can normally sort it out without violence. Here, it’s a matter of pride.

The women wear black and white striped jackets. It starts with one of them getting up, and walking towards the till at the back of the restaurant. This is a big restaurant, with a large main area and booths running down both sides. Perhaps 60 people are here, so it’s big enough for the staff to pretty much ignore you, and just fling chopsticks at you, or give you the menu three times, even when you’ve already ordered. This information is by-the-by. It’s just so you can imagine the din and the size and the conversations that are happening.

Anyway, she gets up to pay, and the other woman realizes what’s happening in the nick of time. She jumps up too, blocking her friend's path to the till. First woman puts her arm out to say, no, don’t be daft, I said I’d get this. Second woman keeps pushing, trying to get to the till first. First woman grabs her by the lapels of her jacket. Second woman gets her own hold, and starts pushing back. By this point they’re pretty much screaming at each other, and it looks almost inevitable that one of them will go flying over the table like in a Western, before the whole place erupts into a brou-ha-ha, a melee of flying fists and broken glasses. However, Woman Number Two clearly feels like she's made enough of a fuss now. She lets go of the first woman, calmly sits back down at the table, and finishes off her drinks. The first woman pays.

No one in the restaurant pays any attention to this at all. The table behind is a family gathering, where the dad’s evidently got too drunk. He turns his head to look at every member of the table, and his eyes seem to take a while to catch up. When he gets back to the start, he looks like he can't remember why he’s here or who he is. He looks at the drink that he's holding. He peers into the cup to try to remember what it is, and whether it's his. Yep. Definitely his. He keeps drinking.