A Day In Beijing

A couple of years ago, I was on a layover in Beijing, surely one of the least interesting places on Earth. I had arrived late the night before, reaching the hotel at about 11:30 pm, just in time to avoid any possibility of a meal in a restaurant, either in the hotel or locally. My body clock was still four hours slow on Beijing time, and I was hungry, so I settled for Singapore Noodles, room service style. I don’t know about you, but if eating alone is one of the saddest things on earth, (apart from breakfast, which in my opinion should be eaten in silence, with a broadsheet newspaper, hot toast, strong marmalade and stronger coffee), then eating alone in a dimly lit, ageing hotel room has to be almost pre-suicidal. The dish of noodles was delivered in the time-honoured fashion here: by an unsmiling androgynous youth with thick glasses, a ubiquitous haircut, drainpipe trousers and that air of total indifference that the Chinese carry off so well. He was so nice that I told him to fuck off. (Well I didn’t, but I wanted to. Instead I signed the chit and gave him fifteen Yuan. He turned his back on me and fucked off.)

The noodles were all I had expected them to be: rubbish. Two prawns, sitting forlornly on a heap of slithery udon noodles, instead of the thin rice noodles I was expecting, the kind that look like the contents of a fisherman’s bait bucket on the end of Clacton pier, seasoned with something salty from a jar and vegetable trimmings of indeterminate provenance. After forcing it down, I messed around a bit with social media, the news, and sloped off to bed for an uneasy sleep.

In the morning, after a breakfast of sorts, (no broadsheet and only lame marmalade), I concocted a plan to spend some of the day out. Christmas day being just around the corner, I decided to go to a place called Sanlitun, for a bit of last minute shopping. This had been recommended by someone on a Facebook group, as being good for shopping and eating, and confirmed by at least one of my crew members, and they being Chinese, I believed them. Often, I will take public transport in cities, but this time in the interest of expediency, I asked the concierge to get me a taxi. The young lady at the desk duly invited me to take a seat while she arranged for one. She was obviously in a jocular mood, (not that you’d know it from the deadpan face), because instead of calling a regular cab company, she instead called the Halitosis Express Cab Company of Beijing. The cab didn’t have any such markings externally but inside there was no mistaking it; the sort of sickly bronchial smell of a TB ward. True enough the nice driver unselfishly shared with me the loose contents of his lungs, at regular intervals. Coughing and spitting, perhaps along with smoking, are the national pastimes of the Chinese. They seem to be obsessed with hacking up the less welcome parts of their respiratory system, maybe because of the ever-present pollution in their cities, and Beijing is a clear front runner in that competition.

At every unimpeded cough from his crackly chest, I sank deeper into the corner of the seat, thinking of those surgical masks that so many Asians wear in public and for which I now had a most alarming understanding and wholly rational desire. We crawled our way through the Saturday traffic. Drivers in Beijing will quickly make you realise that if you are from a “Western” culture, the driving that you are used to decrying as “outrageous, selfish, damned inconsiderate!” is, in fact nothing short of wonderful. Here, they drive without the slightest regard for any other road user, vehicular or pedestrian. They will run you over as quick as look at you. Traffic signals are merely advisory at best and a red light might as well be a sign saying “go for it, take your chance, no one cares anyway”. Eventually we arrived at Sanlitun. This was obvious because suddenly the driver was gesticulating for me to get out. I gladly handed over the cash and leapt from the cab, breathing in a lungful of fresh polluted air, which was a welcome change from the incubating pathogens inside.

I looked around me and instantly regretted leaving the hotel. Sanlitun is a modern, bland, ill-conceived shopping complex containing all the usual suspects: Apple, Michael Kors, Louis Vuitton etc. The whole range of overpriced high street crap you can’t really afford but you’re going to buy anyway, because those clever bastards in marketing have made their brands irresistible. It consists of a collection of ugly blocks about two stories high loosely connected by a pedestrian walkway. Seriously, that’s about as interesting a description as I can come up with. The strangest thing though is the people: almost exclusively Chinese, of course, they were queuing up to take photos of each other, or selfies, against the backdrop of the shop fronts. In one place they were being photographed against a yellow wall. Dotted around were what I can only imagine were amateur photographers. They carried SLRs with enormous telephoto lenses, and aimed them at unsuspecting shoppers, from a great distance, presumably looking for their next great character shot of a passing celebrity. One of them was pointing his lens directly at me. I stopped and stared right back and he immediately lowered the camera. Just for a laugh, I went right up to him and asked what he was going to do with the photo. Quickly he showed me the screen and cycled through his last few shots – nothing of me.

I walked off, not sure whether to be offended at not being photogenic enough or glad I wasn’t going to appear in his portfolio as: “weird ang mo lost in Sanlitun”. (“Ang mo” is the Chinese vernacular for dumb Westerner). Becoming increasingly unimpressed at the bland familiarity of the place I made for a branch of Starbucks, in search of a bland, familiar, cup of crap expensive coffee. Without even opening the door I could see five thousand people in the queue. OK, maybe an exaggeration, but if you’ve ever attempted to buy coffee from Starbucks, on a Saturday, you get my drift. I gave up and with a loud sigh that nobody heard, trudged off to the nearest metro station and made my way back to the hotel.

The tube journey wasn’t too bad. At first I had difficulty working out the route; the young robot behind the ticket counter watched me struggle with the signage for a bit, obviously got bored and attracted my attention by waving his arms and pointing in the correct direction. The tube in Beijing is nothing if not efficient. After a two-minute wait, it pulled up, disgorged about three million passengers, gobbled up another two million, me included, and sped off. This was a bit like the Halitosis Express Cab Company, except that an unfortunate whiff of body odour mingled confusingly with the bad breath. I stuck my head under my own armpit, the logic being that my own BO had to be better than that of my two million fellow travellers. It was.

After leaving the metro, instead of going straight to the hotel, I amused myself for an hour by visiting a nearby Carrefour supermarket. It’s a sad indictment of a city when the most interesting thing within a one-hour radius of your hotel is a supermarket, but this is the thing about Beijing. Chinese governments of the past have systematically erased the vast majority of the city’s old historic districts in order to make way for ugly, soulless developments of tower blocks and awful shopping centres like Sanlitun. They seem to have an almost pathological hatred of their architectural heritage as well as a myopic disregard for the wonders of nature. Of course there are still some treasured archaeological finds that have been preserved for the nation, like the terracotta army at Xian and the Forbidden Palace in Beijing, but overall, they have wilfully disregarded many important examples of their heritage and simply bulldozed them. Perhaps the people are a perfect parody of the cities they live in – functional, uninteresting, bland and uninspiring.

The supermarket managed to be simultaneously fascinating and repellent. I am convinced that the Chinese will eat anything, particularly if it originates in some dark cavity of an animal, preferably a rare or endangered one. There were trays of unidentifiable objects that could have been intestines, or pituitary glands or testicles swimming in a suspicious concoction that may have been brine, or vinegar, or hydraulic fluid. There were chicken’s feet, to which I am led to understand the Chinese are sinfully devoted since they contain high levels of collagen, and it is their devoutly held belief that eating animals, especially their most revolting parts, will bestow upon them some quality which the human body does not possess. Shame they have it wrong about the collagen, apparently: eating it is about as effective in skin anti-ageing as warming your bum in front of the fire to ease a migraine. I’m sure they’d catch the last two sharks in the entirety of Earth’s oceans, cut off their dorsal fins, and toss the poor beasts back into the sea, just to make their beloved soup. Their disdain for animals is all the more difficult to understand when you consider that they actually saved from extinction, against all odds, the panda. A more pointless cause it is hard to imagine; here is a bear that has a digestive system wholly dependant on one type of food, avoids sex like a puritan and routinely abandons its hyper dependant offspring to the elements and an untimely death. If any creature could be said to have given up on life, it’s the panda. Yet in spite of their heroic efforts to save this unworthy critter, they are quite happy to see every last tiger destroyed for their penises, or spleens and presumably every rhino for their horn, to make their dubious medicine. I wandered ruefully, bought some chocolate, which wasn’t half bad actually, a bit of rice wine for cooking, and a big bottle of sesame oil. On the way back to the hotel I flung my chicken feet into a hedge, from where they were promptly snapped up by a passing tramp. (I made that up by the way, there was no tramp).

Having gorged myself on so many cultural nuggets I was a bit tired and in any case it was time to get some rest before our departure, which couldn’t come fast enough for me. Early the next morning, just as the sun was rising, we fired up the jet, taxied out and after a bit of delay, so that air traffic control could slot as many Chinese carriers in front of us as possible, launched into the acrid fug, and as we broke through the inversion into clean air, I turned my back on Beijing, and fucked off.