After nine years in Singapore I have relocated to Beijing for at least two years, perhaps more. While I was doing my language course I began discussions with the Beijing office of a big, global PR firm. They offered me a job and I took it.
I had wanted to spend some time outside of Singapore for at about four years, but stay in the region. Singapore is a wonderful city to live in, and it is more my home than anyplace in the US now. But it is also small, relatively sleepy and, in many ways, provincial. I’d had the metropolitan itch for some time, and a scan of the list of Asian metropolises yielded only three real candidates: Hong Kong, Shanghai or Beijing. Given my mandarin language study, Beijing came up tops.
So, after two melancholy weeks packing up my lovely little house in Singapore, selling things, and preparing to ship the rest, here I am; resident rather than student.
I do not live in a lovely little house in Beijing. I live in an enormous, soulless hypercondo called, “Blue Castle”. It is neither blue nor a castle, but given that Beijing has produced apartment complexes with such tasty names as “Wonderful Digital Jungle” and “American Rock” and the priceless “Boning Garden” (source: That’s Beijing Insider’s Guide to Beijing 2004-2005), I count myself lucky. It’s comfortable, modern and conveniently located.
This development is different in many ways from the relatively earthy, local and charming Hua Qing Jia Yuan development in Wudaokou, where I lived over the summer. This is an “international” apartment building, which means several things. First, my rent is high and charged in US dollars. Second, I have CNN, BBC, HBO, Cinemax, Star Movies, Discovery Channel and, for good measure, NHK. No more CCTV international for my English language television. Third, my neighbors are every nationality but Chinese.
It also suffers from a syndrome that I like to call, “looked good on the model”, which victimizes many modern buildings the world over. This is where a feature that looks spectacular on the architect’s drawings or model or 3D animation turns out to be phenomenal cock up in real life. Our apartment’s contribution to this dismal history is the enormous, shallow, glass-bottomed pool in the courtyard. Wedged between a series of completely acceptable stone fountains in the lawn and another trendy “water feature” at the base of my block, the pool’s acrylic bottom looks down into the underground parking lot.
There are three problems. First, the parking lot is ghastly looking, and the tops of duct work, support beams and lights are all festooned with grime. Second, Beijing is dusty, and that dust collects anywhere that the wind cannot reach, including at the bottom of silly, decorative water features. In the clear, bottom-lit water, the fine dust forms an unpleasant, brown sludge that spreads out inexorably from the corners of the pool. Third, at night the bright light blasting up from the parking lot through the pond lot destroys your night vision, causing you, inevitably, to miss the step at the end of the path and careen into a heap with your groceries in plain sight of the giggling security guards. If the creeping sludge at least helped to attenuate the light I might not mind it so much.
But I didn’t choose Blue Castle for its innovative water features. I chose it because it is one subway stop away from my office in the slick China World Trade Center. But the tradeoff is that my short commute isn’t much of a break from expatriate insulation. But, unlike some apartment buildings I looked at, Blue Castle rises from a neighborhood that is recognizably Beijing. Donkey carts still sell fruit out front, from time to time. No fewer than four Chengdu Xiaochi restaurants, Beijing’s omnipresent greasy lunch-counters, litter the nearby intersection. Every day an impromptu street market springs up outside the entrance to the subway station. You can buy nice looking fruit, steamed corn, roasted sweet potatoes, live baby quails and turtles, books (Bill Clinton’s autobiography and the banned An Investigation of the Chinese Peasantry are currently popular), DVDs, and other daily essentials. You can also fence your stolen mobile phones or have your fortune told. If you’re fencing stolen mobile phones, your fortune may be bad.
Judging from the furious amount of construction happening nearby, the remaining local charm may not last long. The area is a post-apocalyptic wasteland of half-completed buildings and more construction cranes than I ever thought possible. This is the eastern edge of Beijing’s expanding central business district, and an immense condominium and an even more immense office complex are being built on two neighboring lots. Construction goes on day and night. Thank heavens for double paned windows.
The creeping gentrification of my neighborhood is partially made up for by my colleagues, who are mostly Chinese. They tend to speak Mandarin to each other in the office, which provides plenty of listening opportunities for me, although I am self conscious about speaking to them (I shouldn’t be). Often I am the only foreigner in meetings, and they take careful pains to speak English to each other. In brainstorms this slows them down and cramp their creativity, and I have to ask them to speak Mandarin to each other and simply catch me up every five minutes or so.
The net effect of all this is that I feel more isolated from Beijing life than while I was while I was studying. I have to make an effort to stay connected to the actual Beijing, and avoid wearing a circle between my apartment, my office and local expat supermarket. It’d be a shame to finally live here and end up less connected than I was as a visitor.
But it’s still exciting to be here. Since 1997 Singapore has drifted in and out of an economic malaise that has stifled the sense of energy that it had when I first arrived. Beijing still has that “anything is possible” feel, and seems to set to keep it as long as China’s economic miracle doesn’t implode. Perhaps I am just chasing bubbles, but it is autumn, the nicest time of year in Beijing, and, for the moment, everything still seems possible.