Well, not really in Tiananmen Square, but more on this later.
I had a free Saturday, with no plans and no companions. My roommate, James, was on a school trip to Shanxi. My friend Sam was bogged down with work. I was on my own.
This was just my second Saturday in Beijng, and I had an urge to get out of Haidian and see something different. Last week James and I went to Xidan. This week I decided to head for the centre of it all and see Tiananmen and maybe the Forbidden City. It was naked tourism, but, what the hell.
Having been introduced to the subway by Wuning I decided that this would be the best way to get downtown. There are three subway stops in the immediate vicinity of Tiananmen, so, despite a couple of train switches, it’s quite convenient. I felt a rush of familiar warmth as the ticket seller hurled my ticket and change at me just as she’d done to Wuning the previous week. It was like coming home to an unloved but familiar relative. About an hour later I exited the Tiananmen West station.
The first sight that greeted me was the new national theater currently under construction. It looks like god dropped his salad bowl and it landed upside down in Beijing. This thing is positively enormous. Singaporeans, the Esplanade has nothing on this. Both Esplanade theaters could fit inside it, with room left over for the Boom Boom Room. Designed by possibly discredited French Architect Paul Andreu (creator of the amazing collapsing terminal at Paris’ Charles De Gaulle Airport), the National Theater is truly a shimmering oddity plonked incongruously beside Tiananmen’s concrete, Stalinist grandeur. If Hollywood ever makes Men in Black III, I strongly suggest that the location scout give it the once over. (The National Theater is also a total boondoggle according to the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/15/international/asia/15oper.html.)
But maybe it’s good. Most of the architecture surrounding Tiananmen is anything but progressive. Other than the Forbidden City, on the north side of the square, the surrounding buildings are clearly designed to evoke a sense of relentless bureaucratic permanence. The four main structures are the completely dehumanized Great Hall of the People (which sits between Tiananmen and the National Theater), the Museum of the Revolution, Mao’s mausoleum (very popular, I’m told) and the Monument to the People’s Heroes, which projects from the centre of the square like a concrete rocket ship, that, if we are lucky, may someday take off, fly over the Great Hall of the People, and pop the National Theater. Even the Forbidden City doesn’t escape modern touches. The Great Helmsman’s enormous portrait sits above the main entrance, from where it serenely scrutinizes the entire square.
Nevertheless, the overall effect is impressive, as it’s designed to be. When discussing how many people can occupy the square, the number batted around is one million. That seems like a lot to me, but it gives an idea of the size of the space.
And it is crowded. People come out with their kids. Men (not generally kids) fly kites. Chinese tourists wander around with their digital cameras. 100% of them take pictures of their friends posing in front of Mao’s portrait. In the US, you take a picture with Mickey Mouse. In China, you take a picture with Mao. A provincial looking gentleman (use your imagination) asked if his friend could take a picture of him and me together. I’m sure the photograph of him and me will go on the mantel right next to the photograph of him and Mao’s portrait.
I had an escort for my walk around Tiananmen Square. The moment I emerged from the subway stop, a young woman sprang from nowhere and engaged me in passable English. My hustle detectors went off, but I chatted with her anyway. As we strolled in front of the museum she explained that she was an art student and their school was having an exhibition (sale?) at the national museum. Would I like to come take a look? Well, I said, I really wanted to take a walk around Tiananmen, but she could come along.
And she did. Lixia followed me around Tiananmen for an hour talking to me in Chinese and English and explaining various things about the local surroundings. I asked her some delicately obnoxious questions about corralling foreigners, but she fielded everything gamely and in good spirits.
I had to admire the investment of labor, so, my stroll through the square complete, I allowed myself to be ushered into the “exhibition.” A cup of tea appeared in my hands and I was lead through two rooms of art ranging from some extremely cheesy nudes through some quite good shanshui landscapes and other traditional styles. Naturally, almost everything was for sale. The ol’ hustle radar wasn’t wrong. But I made the most of it by speaking Chinese to everyone in sight except for the two other dazed foreigners. After a half-hour of conversation in which I expanded my art vocabulary a bit, I did the only thing I could in such a situation. I caved in and bought a small scroll. I considered it a tuition investment.
I had been on my feet a couple of hours and was beginning to get hungry, so Lixia told me where I could find a row of noodle joints. I walked to the south side of Tiananmen Square, past the Qianmen subway station and found an alley lined with small shops and grubby looking restaurants. Although within two blocks of Tiananmen, there was not a tourist in sight. Perfect. I had a five yuan bowl of noodles (complementary tea) in a dingy but hospitable hole-in-the-wall while the staff lunching at the table next to me passed a few sotto voce remarks about the solitary lao wai who put a lot of chili in his noodles.
Recharged I walked back past the square to the Forbidden City. I was only canvassed by “art students” two more times. I told them that Lixia had beaten them to it. On the way I felt the effects of my lunchtime tea. A sign pointed to a public bathroom next to the museum.
What to do? I had heard ghastly stories about Chinese public toilets. Smelly. Toxic. Obscene. Don’t wear your nice shoes. I was gripped by anxiety. Should I go? Hold it? Look for an isolated corner? Commit bladder-rupturing suicide like Tycho Brahe? I decided I had to confront my Chinese public toilet anxiety once and for all. After pacing nervously for a few minutes I descended the ramp (good lord, it’s so bad it has to be underground!).
It was the nicest public toilet I’ve ever been in. I don’t know what the pillbox-like public toilet by the Wudaokou subway stop is like inside, but the one at the Museum of the Revolution is magnificent. It was spotless, modern and gleaming. There were an abundance of stalls and urinals. All of the stalls were labeled: Squat toilet, sitting toilet, and (for the piss shy) a few urinals in stalls as an extra courtesy. A small kiosk by the entrance sold smokes, batteries and film.
I guess if you’re going to put a public toilet by the one place that every tourist in Beijing is guaranteed to visit, you put a little effort into it. Nevertheless, I learned a valuable lesson about prejudice. I still carry my own toilet paper everywhere I go, though.
It was too late in the day to make a go of exploring the actual Palace Museum (the politically correct name for the Forbidden City) but I poked around the park surrounding the Worker’s Cultural Palace on the eastern flank of the Forbidden City. This way for wonderful view of deer shaped cypress! yelped one particularly breathless sign. Who could resist? Certainly not the sucker who bought a thirty dollar scroll. Perhaps I lack the eye but it looked like, well, a cypress tree to me. But the park was quiet and pleasant. From there went through a small entrance that lead into the courtyard between the Forbidden City’s Tiananmen Gate and the Meridian Gate, beyond which you have to pay to enter. The crowd here was enormous, as you would expect at the tourist nexus of all of China. The only comparable thing I’ve seen in Asia is Angkor Wat in Cambodia.
On my way back out to Dongchang’an, the wide boulevard that separates Tiananmen Square from the Forbidden City, I noticed the enormous, brass studs on the huge red doors that lead into the forbidden city. Many of the people entering the Forbidden City are struck by the compulsion to fondle the knobs. Indeed, the line at hand height is worn to a conspicuously smooth glow, although many people reach out to touch the ones above their heads. As tactile and appealing as the knobs appear, I am not sure why they do it. Local visitors to Angkor Wat also often run their hands over the friezes depicting Hindu legend that ring the temple, with the depressing result that the friezes are now disintegrating. Every monument seems to have the spot where people like to reach out and make contact.
On the subway on the way back to Wudaokou an uncle gave me a glance and, counter to stereotype, politely gestured at an empty seat. “No need. I’m getting off at the next station,” I said in Chinese. He gave me a mildly surprised look as he sat down. “You understand Chinese?” he asked. “Just a little,” I said. He asked the question that everyone, inevitably, asks next: “Where are you from?” As always, I told him.