Smog, Scorpions, and Shoving
A delicious, black lung tour of China
China. There are three kinds of people. Those who yearn to go to China, those who don’t yearn to go to China, and those who don’t give a rat’s patooky about China. If you, like me, are in the first category, welcome. If you are in the second or third category, maybe I can hold your attention with a a promise to include arch and deeply insightful observations of a place that I know almost nothing about, some moderately helpful travelogue, accounts of culinary derring-do that will include the ingestion of poisonous bugs and other exoskeletal creatures, and at least a few photos. Let’s begin, shall we?
I should begin by noting that Beijing is now one of my favorite cities anywhere. Between the food, the culture, and the otherness of it all, it is a place that you simply shouldn’t miss if you’re into all that sort of stuff.
Like all great cities, Beijing is not without its challenges, however. As we taxied down the runway after landing in Beijing, we could barely see the terminal through the smog. It was worse than the worst day in Los Angeles in the 1980’s. In those days, I lived in the flats of Hollywood and would look to the hills, a mile or so away, and see only murk. That murk was much better than this. This is bad.
Then it was off to the hotel, an oasis-ish bubble of high Chinese style. There was a boutique that seemed to sell men’s clothing that only had purple in it. I half expected to see Nicely Nicely from Guys and Dolls wander in. It had a genuine Olympic swimming pool, and a smashing breakfast buffet that included sufficient weird Chinese stuff that makes me happy — salty, black eggs, and different kinds of rice porridge, noodles, and dumplings. It also had eggs and cereal and other boring western stuff, but oh my goodness, why would you fly halfway across the world to eat your usual breakfast? There was even an American chef with his name stitched in his apron. And, since this is China, even the lobby had air quality challenges — a cigar bar and a haze of cigarette smoke for a chaser.
Looking out the window gives you serious pause. The air was so bad it was hard to believe anyone could step out the door without falling down dead. But there, outside the window of our conference meeting room, was a small gathering of people who were playing a version of hacky sack with what appeared to be an oversized badminton birdie, every deep breath bringing them closer to black lung or some other respiratory apocalypse. And they were smiling and having fun. Don’t they know?
I took to monitoring the city’s air quality by the hour, using a feed set up by the US Embassy on Twitter and relayed by another website in China because Twitter is blocked inside the country. So is Facebook, You Tube, Vimeo, and seemingly any other website that can report on real-time happenings in the country. Within the country, social media micro blog sites like Weibo are transforming how people communicate. Welcome to modern China.
This basically means that the air quality is unhealthful for rocks and cockroaches. My colleagues and I kept wondering how on earth people can put up with such an unhealthy environment? But humans are resilient and it doesn’t take long to realize how resilient the Chinese are.
Wednesday night brought the threat of rain and with it the promise of better air. Sure enough, I woke on Thursday with the shushing of cars in the wet streets and I dutifully checked back on my air quality website, but it was still pretty unhealthful. I was planning to go for a run, but the possibilities for that were looking dim. Then sometime that mid-morning, poof! The air quality index went from 200 to 30 and I was off.
Running through unfamiliar busy city streets falls somewhat short of perfect exercise, but it does give you a view of a place that you usually don’t get. I ran downtown around the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, through shopping districts and side neighborhoods. It’s a fascinating cosmopolitan city, with thousands of years of history, some of which has been sufficiently preserved, like the Forbidden City, and some of which I saw in the act of being demolished.
For the rest of our time in Beijing, the weather held and it was dazzling. The air was as clean as the best day in San Francisco, with a fresh breeze keeping the temperature in the 60s. In fact, for one brief, shining moment, the air quality in Beijing was better than the air quality in San Francisco. I checked. People say that they can spend a week in Beijing without seeing their shadow, or the sky, or even the sun. But at least for a couple of days, the Bejingers were gifted with a dazzling treat. People were in the parks exercising, strolling, dancing, and generally thanking their lucky stars that they could see across the street.
And the food, oh the food. On our second night in town, one of our colleagues made a reservation at a restaurant called DaLi Courtyard, which serves food from Yunnan province, (not to be confused with Hunan province). We arranged cabs, and we were off. (You want to get a cab in Beijing? Make sure you have your address written on a piece of paper in Chinese. A little map to go with it doesn’t hurt either. I have enjoyed studying the driver as he contemplates the address, running it through his mind, and then mentally locks on to the destination and off you go. Also, cabs in Beijing are CHEAP. Two or three bucks gets you just about anywhere.)
Our cabbie deposited us on a street full of hip boutiques. East meets Soho. A side street off this road led to another tiny alley at the end of which was a door with a little sign. Beijing still has a bunch of these little alleyway enclaves, called hutongs, and they remind you in some places of a down-market Venice without the canals, or a village in Peru without the alpacas and yummy guinea pigs (well, maybe without the alpacas).
Later in our trip we rented bicycles and got a little lost in a few hutongs that hadn’t been spiffed up by the Ministry of Perfunctory Nods to the Charming Past. Just imagine how the locals took in the sight of a dozen foreigners, the only ones in all of Beijing with bike helmets, careering through town on mountain bikes.
Sometimes, we found ourselves in a face off — us taking pictures of them taking pictures of us. As for these hutongs we stumbled upon, they were gritty and basic, but I suspect some residents dread the day when they’re moved off to a high-rise out past the fifth ring road.
Before I get to my little rhapsody about DaLi, I will first disgust you all by relating my brief but delicious experience with scorpion and cicada on a stick from a food stall in an upscale hutong. Yes, I know, many of you might find scorpion and cicada a bit off-putting, but I’m here to tell you that it was quite yummy. It is true that I am a slightly more hirsute version of the guy from Bizarre Foods, and that I’ll eat anything. Sheep’s head in Marrakesh, grasscutter rat in Ghana, guinea pig in Peru, stuff like that. But this scorpion was really tasty. And the cicada wasn’t bad either.
DaLi was full of foreigners and Chinese people with hip glasses and good shoes. It could have been Soho, in fact. I’d wager that if you opened a DaLi in Williamsburg or Park Slope you’d have to hire someone to count the money. There’s no menu here. They just ask if you have food allergies and it’s off to the races. It’s a flat fifteen bucks or so per person. We had quick-fried heads-on shrimp with deep fried lime leaves. There were all kinds of little salads with fiery chilies, and a stir-fried duck thing that made me weep. There was a beef thing with little Sichuan peppers that turned your face numb. The food kept coming, as did the beer, and I wanted to live, oh how I wanted to live! In a krillion years you would never find this place without a guide. You could only stumble upon it if you were tragically, hopelessly lost. Actually, now you can just plug DaLi Courtyard into your iPhone and you will eventually find it. But now you know, so go.
Another night, we went to what the guidebooks say is the best Peking Duck restaurant in Beijing — a place called Da Dong. It’s quite a production. Behind a huge glass wall, the kitchen puts on its ducky show. The puffed up precooked ducks hang on hooks and chefs use long steel rods to lovingly place them into this massive wood stove. The thing about Peking duck is that they somehow seal the duck, inflate it with a bike pump, and hang it to dry for a day or so, which makes the skin really crispy. After an hour in the furnace (and they’re cooked to order so be prepared to be thoroughly soused by the time your duck makes it to the table), the ducks are retrieved, placed on a big metal tray, and dispatched to the dining room. The best thing about it was that when the duck is ready, a chef brings it to the table on that pan and proceeds to carve it with the care a moyel might offer — meticulously excising every edible bit from the carcass (I’m not really liking the analogy here, but let’s just play out the string). Anyway, this little duck yielded a ton of meat, and it was very good, but my boss’s wife makes better. Swear to god. What do I know? Well, I know what I know.
And then there was the Baihe Vegetarian Restaurant, which specializes in fake meat. This sounds truly awful. If you’re a vegetarian because you object to the killing of animals, I’m not sure that pretending to eat animals doesn’t qualify as perverted. If you’re a carnivore, (and oh, boy, am I a carnivore) well, why not just eat the real thing? So, one would imagine that this place would only be ideally suited to people who are vegetarians for some kind of health-related reason — a slim section of the demographic, I suspect. Screw it — this place was amazing. Some of the fake meat dishes actually tasted BETTER than meat. There was a “mutton” skewer that had this silky, unctuous layer of “fat” between the “meat” — it was some kind of mushroom in there. We had a shredded Sichuan beef mirage that made me want to storm the kitchen and uncover the scandal of the fake meat place serving real meat. And then there was the deep fried coconut milk — not fake meat, obviously, but almost Feran Adria-like in its chemistry and improbableness. From time to time, when my mind is quiet, I drift off to the Baihe and the fried coconut milk. I swear, the Chinese could make the keyboard I’m typing on taste good.
After the conference I was attended was over, we had a weekend off before heading out to Inner Mongolia, so we were able to see a bit of the city. On Saturday, we went to the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. The Forbidden City reminded me of the many temple complexes I’ve seen in Japan — every courtyard, carving, and rock placement has meaning and a story to go with it.
Of course, the Forbidden City is where film The Last Emperor takes place, and our guide Julia (yes, she called herself “Julia,” although I doubt that’s what her pals call her) used it as a convenient framework for taking us through the complex.
She was a trip, with a very dry sense of humor and a fluid delivery. She’d say things like, “here’s where the last emperor, you know, the movie kid, lived with his eunuchs.” We made our way through the massive temple complex with what seemed like half of China — this is just as popular tourist destination for the locals, and by locals I mean 1.3 billion Chinese people. There was a fair amount of pushing and shoving.
For example, when we visited the Summer Palace, a massive complex of temples and other buildings, it started to seem that people were pushing and shoving just to keep in practice. Here’s where the Olympic pushing and shoving team trains.
You must be prepared for a certain amount of hand to hand combat in Beijing. In a city of twenty million or so people, the only way to achieve locomotion of any sort is to shoot for the void in front of you. If a space in the crowd opens up, go for it, baby, and don’t feel bad. If you hang back in your polite western way, you will die of old age attempting to take a picture of the last emperor’s, you know the movie kid’s, knapsack or tiddlywinks set.
The same is true for traffic. It’s not anarchic like Nairobi, where any flat surface like a sidewalk or the oncoming lane is fair game, but it’s a bit like bumper cars. We had cab drivers thrust us into fast closing gaps time and again and the expected metal and glass explosion just never came. Amazing.
As I said, the Forbidden City is enormous. The complex is surrounded by a moat, which took fourteen years to dig. The dirt was piled up at one end and a pagoda was stuck on top, and it’s several hundred feet high. Tiananmen Square is a big expanse of concrete, like the Zocalo in Mexico City, in the middle of which is the last resting place of Chairman Mao. A gigantic likeness of the Chairman smiles down on you from the entrance to the Forbidden City.
He is an officially beloved guy here. “Julia” made you think that the average person on the street was rather less impressed with him. She did a very nice job of letting you read between the lines, but she was also pretty candid about things when asked directly. “Here’s where the guy stood,” she told us, when referring to the iconic image from 1989.
We wandered about, with ten or so thousand of our closest friends. Everyone seemed impressed, except perhaps, for this guard in the “movie kid’s” apartment.
Later, we made it out to the Mutianyu section of Great Wall one afternoon, about an hour’s drive from downtown Beijing. This is one of those places, like Machu Picchu, that you just have to see. Even though the throngs of tourists will make you crazy, and the walk up to the entrance forces you though a narrow passage of tourist stalls hawking the cheesiest crap foisted upon you by relentless, incessant crap-foisters, and even though the chances of being there on a clear day (we were amazingly lucky) is low, the Great Wall is astonishing. It’s just a marvel, snaking through the mountains, in various forms, for something like 5,500 miles. In some spots it’s just made of earth, in some spots it’s a trench of some kind, but here it’s the Great Wall in all its ostentatious, cliché grandeur. With big turrets and battlements and stone for miles and miles, you just can’t stop taking pictures and gaping in amazement.
We made it all the way out to Inner Mongolia, about seven hundred miles from Beijing, for some business site visits. Along the way, we stopped along a lesser part of the Great Wall, which was really just a pile of mud, but which apparently did its job of keeping the grazing nomads’ herds out of the agriculture. It was quite a contrast.
That’s about it, kiddies. It was a fabulous trip full of discoveries. Among them were the wondrous interpretations of the English language. I fault no one, since the fact that people make the effort to try to make it easy for the English-speaking tourist makes things infinitely better. Nevertheless, it can be fun.
Thanks for reading, folks. Hope you’ve enjoyed.
