Imagethief

I recently wrote about attending a temple fair and going to see the ice lanterns of Longqingxia over the Spring Festival holiday. I didn’t have time to go into what those events reveal about life in and around Beijing, so I’d like to revisit the topic. Plus, there are now photos of both events in the Feb 05 image gallery.

The thing that stood out about the temple fair was the crowd. People were out in force for little more than an endless repetition of the same eight or ten food and souvenir stalls, and a carnival that featured a morbid selection of live animals as prizes. It was genuinely lively.

The temple fair wasn’t the only sociable scene in Beijing over the holiday. One day, Olivia, my friend Ham and I went for a stroll through the lakes inside the second ring road. We walked over the frozen Qianhai and Houhai, where dozens of people were out playing on the ice. Families and groups of friends had come out and were skating, or pushing their children on crude sleds or simply wrestling, sliding and falling over amidst gales of laughter. One man was schussing across the lake at high speed on rudimentary skis fashioned from foot-long pieces of plywood. He was great guns in a straight line, but not much for turning. Like the temple fair, it was a very sociable scene.

Similarly, during the heaviest snowfall of the year, Olivia, Hans, Ginger and I went for a walk through Chaoyang Park, which also had a Spring Festival event. Again, families and groups of friends were out playing together. We started a snowball fight amongst ourselves and soon had two Chinese families and a random group of young men involved in a messy but good-humored duel.

Beijing seems, at heart, a sociable city. People enjoy going out and interacting with each other. And they seem willing to socialize, even with strangers (at least western strangers), under pretty inclement conditions. Heaven knows, the city has more restaurants per unit area than anywhere else I’ve ever been, and tables are far more likely to have eight or ten people than the two or four that would be common in the US.

Part of this is probably just a result of the city’s size. With fourteen million people and growing, you’re simply going to bump into folks. But I think it also shows what the entertainment options are. In a town that has little in the way of movie theaters, not much live entertainment (unless you count karaoke), and lots of television channels showing variations of the same variety shows and period dramas, going out and socializing with people seems like the best option.

In the country that invented the concept of guan xi, this makes a certain amount of sense. Personal relationships and family relationships are important in China, and that expresses itself in the social nature of the city. It was something I noticed upon first experiencing the summer-evening family life in the courtyard of Hua Qing Jia Yuan, the apartment I used to live in.

It is also one of the most appealing things about Beijing, a city that doesn’t have much going for it in the way of physical beauty or natural comforts. I’ll give the Chinese this: they love a party and entertain themselves under almost any conditions.

Now, onto the Chinese sense of beauty.

To draw a sweeping generalization, it’s wonky. The Chinese seem to have an infatuation with gaudiness that would have made Liberace swoon.

Now, this isn’t expressed everywhere, only in particular places. There is, for instance, no restaurant or KTV lounge so modest, humble or pedestrian that it doesn’t rate an immense, multicolored neon sign that commands one entire side of the building it occupies, plus, as often as not, two extra floors worth of scaffolding. “Famous Gold Phoenix Mountain Home Style Food!” Yeah, I bet it’s home style. Still, perhaps florid names like that are a notch up from the optimistically named “Dog King”, a restaurant I recently noticed in Chaoyangmen Wai. Dog King appears to style itself after the famous “Duck King” Peking duck chain, with just a slight change in menu emphasis.

Red and gold are auspicious colors in China, and you needn’t be a cultural anthropologist to notice that pretty quickly. A combination of blazing signworks, garish and over-lit interior and kitsch-costumed waiters and waitresses are all symptoms of major restaurants in Beijing, especially the state-owned ones on the official tour-bus rounds. There is, of course, no relationship between garish sign works and food quality. Certainly tour busses are a guarantee of mediocrity. The best dumplings I have located in Beijing are served in a microscopic, hole-in-the wall restaurant east of Qianhai accurately, if unglamorously, named “Dumpling Shop”. No neon.

This Chinese sense of auspicious beauty was also evident both in the Ditan temple fair that Olivia and I visited, and in the bespangled valley of Longqingxia where we went to look at the ice sculptures. The temple fair was lined with stalls selling spring festival buntings and noise-makers, all of which were made of red and gold foil. When the breeze picked up all the fluttering metal made the place look like something C3PO would hallucinate if robots could drop acid. And it is nearly impossible to do justice to the tacky majesty of Longqingxia in words. Imagine turning the artist Christo loose on the domed city from the 1970s science fiction movie Logan’s Run and you start to come close. I have posted some photographs taken by my friend, Hans Utz, that show a few particularly splendid scenes. In a country with chronic power shortages, Longqinxia ought to result in some stiff custodial sentences.

This infatuation with riots of color and complexity isn’t new to the Chinese. All you have to do is look at China’s tradition of rococo classical architecture and design to see that the potential has always been lurking under the surface, waiting for the twin inventions of electric lighting and mylar laminates to set it free.

But in a city like Beijing, which might otherwise be a sea of soul-numbing, grey drabness, who is to say that a little tack isn’t a good thing. Certainly, on a cold, Beijing winter night, amongst the dark and drafty streets, a gaudy, bright Beijing restaurant awash in noisy diners can look warm and welcoming. Even Dog King.