July 10: Night at the opera

I skip to July 10, our last night in Beijing, bypassing for now our visit to the Great Wall and my walk with Jen in the Beijing night market. I skip ahead because this was the first totally satisfying and relaxed event of the tour: we were cool, we were not rushed, it was not crowded and the setting and show represented aesthetically remarkable aspects of Chinese culture -- even if this particular manifestation was designed primarily for the tourists. It was a revealing experience that illustrated the Chinese people's love of color, lights and pageantry.

On that evening the seven of us who signed up for the optional Beijing (or Peking) opera tour were taken to the Shaanxi Opera House for dinner and an shorter performance of Chinese opera. Only half of our group signed up for this event which I consider in retrospect one of the highlights of our tour. This kind of performance seems also not to be very popular with young Chinese people and may be a dying art form. Clearly, without government subsidy it would not exist.


According to the Shaanxi Opera web site the opera is "sponsored by the Shaanxi Provincial Government. [The] Shaanxi Grand Opera House is an entertainment center of Tang Palace Dance Show and dining theater opened to public in 1998. The opera house is elegantly decorated and has a first class stage and performers with 700 people seating capacity.[The] Tang Palace Show is performed by Shaanxi Dancing Troupe and created in 1980s. It was jointly designed by a group of scholars, artists specialized in Tang culture. We have given more than 24,000 performances to over 10 million visitors which is the largest scale in recent Chinese history."

Before the performance we went backstage and saw the singers/dancers being made up or, in the case of the men, making themselves up. Then we were served an elegant dinner before the show started. It was our great fortune to have a table front row center. I took many pictures. These three give a sense of the evening and its setting.


























  

July 8: Tienanmen Square

Today we visited Tienanmen Square, a little over twenty years after the massacre. The intermittent rain has cooled off Beijing to a tolerable level. The atmosphere is jovial. School has just let out in China and the numerous American tourists are overwhelmed by the more numerous Chinese tourists, especially young people on holiday. As we find out later in the trip, this generation seem to have no interest in politics. Uniformly the young dress in T-shirts with American pop references and love "our" music and the NBA.

I am there to take pictures of "them" and they want to take pictures of me. One young woman grabs me by the hand and puts her arm around me while her boyfriend or husband snaps a picture of us together. I may wind up framed on some family's living room wall. The young people in this picture are taking my photo as I take theirs.









It's not a totally happy picture. It may be that this generation of young Chinese people has traded its freedom to think for its freedom to consume -- at least among the growing affluent minority. But as an outside observer I don't know enough to judge how deep are the roots of this mindless consumerism. Some would claim, it could well be a necessary step in the direction of greater political awakening.


July 8 (cont.): The Forbidden City

From Tienanmen Square we move on to the Forbidden City. This is not a wonderful viewing or photographic opportunity!

The rain has picked up...and so have the crowds. Now it's a sea of colorful umbrellas all around us. Except that the light is so drained by the pollution that the colors are desaturated and the sky has a drab yellow cast. In Beijing, this time of year, there is no visible sun. There is no sky. There are no clouds. And there are no signs of birds. Beijing is a truly desolate city. In 1958 Chairman Mao decreed that all the birds in China should be killed because they consumed scarce grain resources. To this day the birds have not returned to Beijing.








Fortunately Jen and I had seen "The Last Emperor" as part of our preparation for this trip. In spite of the crowds and the drabness we could imagine the grandeur and loneliness of the Forbidden City.

It seems like everything in China is driven by population pressure. How could it be otherwise? A population that is approximately four times as large as that of the US is squeezed into a land mass that is only slightly larger than ours. In the hierarchy of needs, a concern for the environment is way down the scale. At the present time it consists mostly of lip service.

Forbidden Sky

And, moving along with our guide, somewhere along the way we stepped into a courtyard where people were making offerings of burning incense sticks to Buddha.




 

July 7: Welcome to Beijing

We land in Beijing in the early afternoon after a thirteen hour flight from San Francisco preceded by a seven hour flight from JFK. We left our home at 4:00 AM the previous day. We are exhausted and our bodies are wrecked from seating for nearly twenty-four hours on United Airline's incredibly narrow and uncomfortable seats. So much for the advice from the tour company literature which urges us to: "start our trip well rested." They, of course, have booked us on the cheapest and most inconvenient flights, guaranteeing that we arrive in Beijing totally exhausted.

Before landing we fill out a health questionnaire for the Chinese authorities focusing on any symptoms that might indicate "swine flu." On this form we must indicate our seat location on the plane and a number where we can be reached for the next ten days. We know the Chinese authorities are very serious about this and we also know that they have become totally and irrationally hysterical. Both Jen and I have taken a Tylenol a couple hours before, knowing from news reports that any sign of temperature will doom our trip from the start and will most likely land us in a very undesirable quarantine location. We shared our Tylenol with some passengers near us and hoped for the best.

Once the plane has landed we are asked to stay in our seat and are then treated to a surreal comical performance. Six white coated, surgical masked and goggled young Chinese men and women move rapidly down both aisles of our Boeing 777 and briefly and systematically point a metal rod to each of our foreheads. I dare not point back my bulky Nikon at these comical grandchildren of the Cultural Revolution for fear of calling attention to myself. Our fate depends on the good will of these post-pubescent clownish goons. I trade the pain of a missed photo opportunity for great relief at passing this first temperature test. But, at this point, my dislike for the Chinese authorities has made a quantum leap upward, along with my great disappointment with US State Department which is totally unable to guarantee the well being of US citizens traveling to China. As we step off the plane we pass by many more costumed figures who check over and collect our health forms ... so serious, not one faint smile passing their masked lips.

After an uneventful immigration check in and the retrieval of our luggage we meet our tour leader, a friendly guy who looks in his mid-thirties (but is actually 42), who introduces himself by his "English name:" Mark. As we step outside the airport our senses are assaulted: it's very hot, it's very humid and the smog is so thick that we can barely see the planes as they land. Welcome to Beijing.

We rode around in our tour bus from place to place in Beijing, always in air conditioned comfort. Although, as a sociologist, I know that the traffic does follow rules these were obviously not easy to observe and apparently many of the natives, newly licensed, were also unable to follow them. In the several hours of bus ride in Beijing and many more hours elsewhere we witnessed at least half a dozen accident and, I exaggerate not, hundreds of near misses. Many time one or more of our fellow passengers made a loud exclamation as a car swerved inches in front of our bus or a bicyclist nearly ran afoul of a truck. For some, anticipating tragedy seemed to have become part of the tourist experience. Driving in Beijing made driving in Palermo, Sicily look like a quiet Sunday drive in the county in 1950 USA. The statistics, if there are any, would indicate a very high death rate.

As I sorted through pictures to try to capture the essence of our little trip I came across "Pepsi Pagoda," taken in Xian, which I placed at the head of this blog. Here is another picture which symbolizes the turbulence of China as it leaps forward into the modern world. The fish are being fed little packets of food that can be bought for a a few Yuans near the pond at the Chengdu panda preserve. The gasping and grasping for "resources" caught my attention.








Although comparative statistics leave a lot to be desired, it's useful to bear in mind that Beijing has roughly more than four times the population density of New York City: 11,500 person per square kilometer vs. 2050. With another 6,000 car being registered every month (if the statistics quoted by our guide can be trusted) then air quality will not improve in the near future. (On line figures suggest that the actual number of new cars on the road in Beijing per month is closer to 16,000 with a government target of 8,000 likely to be implemented when the economy improves.)