Welcome to Beijing.
It’s hard to believe that Mandarin is a language at all. It is so absurdly foreign, so screechingly unnatural that I marvel that anybody can communicate with it. It is also tonal and bone china-delicate, and our attempts to enunciate a hotel address to an open-shirted, big-bellied cab driver must have looked piteous. ‘Chaoyang?’ we ask, referring to the district name. The cabbie looks as if I’ve asked him for a slow waltz. ‘Chaoyang?’ we repeat louder. Cabbie’s frown deepens and his eyes cast around for a compatriot. After half a dozen more attempts he asks; ‘Chaoyang?’, ever so slightly hardening the ‘ch’ and turning the second ‘a’ into a ‘u’; a tiny linguistic nuance which I suppose would mean the difference between Baker Street and Barnstable.
Chaoyang comprises a great chunk of the city’s east. It’s sliced through by some enormous roads like the Jianguomen Dajie, flanked by glassy offices and forever busy, like the city’s vena cava. Night draws in and the gigantic blocks throb with neon in the blackness, like creatures of the deep. Our hotel sits at the beginning of a small hutong (or alleyway) which is a welcome dose of grubby, knackered character. There is a strip-lit convenience shop so tiny and chock-full of stuff it looks like a small cave. A cart of fruit is propped against a wall streaked with lurid rust-red stains. When we head out in the evening, a clutch of locals chat and drink and prod slivers of poultry over sputtering grills. Its a quiet, desperately fragile scene played out between the gargantuan hotels. Booming cities have precious little patience with those who just happen to be subsisting on prime land. A new shopping plaza has just opened a few hundred yards away, selling the sort of fare that a hutong Beijinger couldn’t afford after a lifetime of sweat-sodden graft. It’s eye-poppingly distasteful.
The Chinese stare irresistibly. On the subway to Tiananmen Square, you get a sense that Westerners are a rare commodity here and nobody really knows how to react to them. Some gawp, slack-jawed, like trout, others look like they’ve just smelt a fart, yet others look authentically afraid. Nobody, but nobody, smiles. It’s a mighty shock. I could understand a few looks if we were in some soggy village miles away from anything, but this is the sodding capital. Tiananmen Square itself is vast and bland, ringed with unprepossessing civic buildings and bathed in sodium. It’s odd how empty spaces are so commonly tourist hotspots. It’s odder that Chinese tourists take such smiley photographs here, as troops of slim, youthful soldiers goose-step the pavements. On the walk home, we discover that Beijing is not a walkable city. What looks on a map like a ten-minute saunter is, in fact, an hour’s slog. Collapse into bed, in our underground room.
