Beijing

The Political and the Personal

She says she enjoys reading about my childhood.

Beijing.

When I think about Beijing, I think about how the nouveaux riches in their Mercedes and the plebeians in their 三轮车 fight side by side on the roads, in the smoggy cacophony, struggling to their destinations.

I think about my peers and their parents, who cease to see their aiyis and drivers as real people, until one day, they hear that their classmate’s mother was murdered on the way home from the bank by their family’s aiyi and driver.

I think about the never-ending struggle between art and politics. Beijing is a political city—always has been, always will be. It was founded for the express purpose of being the capital. Its name, 北京, bei jing, literally means northern capital. Politics is Beijing’s soul. Wherever politics goes, art follows, as it is through expression that brings change.

Think about Tiananmen—did you know that it was rockstar Cui Jian who provided the anthem to the movement? And decades later, Rolling Stone China would put his face on the cover, only have their entire operation shut down immediately by the government. I know, I was there after the lights went out, the computers seized, the editors gone. And years later, Ai Weiwei would be put under house arrest and from that day on, he was no longer just a contemporary artist, but an international political icon.

That Beijing tension, between the political and the personal.

Beijing is sitting outside the Legendale having brunch alone, removed from the conversation, as auntie (to non-Chinese: this means family friend) holds court at another table. Democratic unrest in Hong Kong—unacceptable. We’ll have to fly down tomorrow. In her thirties, she started an internet company and then took it public through an SOE. But more importantly, she married into the red aristocracy—more precisely, the military. It’s unclear to me when all of these things happened, and if her success came from her forceful personality or from making the right political marriage.

I think about my classmate whose family was rumored to head the mafia. He was from a prominent port city, and whenever you asked him what his family did, he would say, import/export. His family had seven houses scattered around Asia, and I had never seen such beautiful houses before. He skipped our graduation, allegedly because of a death and a family dispute. We found out through the papers.

We reconnected one summer in Hong Kong, and he told me that his parents had been living at the Peninsula for well over a year now. There had been some political trouble, and they were “roughing it.” Well, at least the Peninsula serves the best afternoon tea in the world… We talked about what we wanted to do after school. I talked about my startup. What did he want to do? Law school and then run for office. Politics is in my blood—it’s in the family, he said.

How Beijing.

Undoubtedly, you’ll tell me that the stories above are very Chinese. And they are Chinese. But they aren’t divorced from your white American life.

Replace the new money with New York and the politics with Washington and how much of it is really that different? Are we destined for crony capitalism and a faux meritocracy forever? Does history never repeat itself, only rhyme? The one percent against the ninety-nine percent; the ninety-nine percent against the one percent.

Although our politicians would have us believe that China is evil and the root of all of our problems, the two rival nations are more similar than one would first think, with cultures of consumption, vast inequality, class stratification, and a new generation of lost youth (八零后, 九零后).

The more I live in China, the more it starts to look like America. The more I live in America, the more it starts to look like China.