Beijing's Moment
A first-time traveler to China's capital discovers a city on the move. But not too fast for him to catch up.

By Ben Brazil
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, May 13, 2007

Beijing was growing on me.

At first, I couldn't see anything but the sprawl, the construction and the vicious, honking traffic that squeezed the slow streams of cyclists in the bike lanes. Then, gradually, I quit fixating on Beijing's immense proportions and began to notice its human details.

There was the man with the wispy Confucian beard engrossed in Chinese chess on a street corner. There was the food frying on street-side griddles and the impossibly long chains on the bicycle carts. Most important, though, there were the parks in the morning.

Beijingers -- especially, but not exclusively, retirees -- use the city's parks to sing, dance, exercise and generally be together. When I walked into Beihai Park shortly after dawn, I immediately passed about 20 people silently making the slow pivots of tai chi. Elsewhere, solitary individuals did comically serious deep knee bends by a fence.

It was a nice setting for a workout. Beihai Park centers on one of the peaceful, willow-lined lakes that dribble across central Beijing. To the south sits Zhongnanhai, the off-limits Communist Party compound. To the north lies Houhai, or the Back Lakes, which are surrounded by waterside restaurants and bars with too much neon. I'd had a good meal and a leisurely drink there, watching the wind ruffle the water.

But Beihai Park is about movement. I watched about 40 women flick fans and scarves in a sort of line dance, then walked on to discover a calligrapher brushing Chinese characters on the sidewalk in water. As the morning stretched on, old men waddled around with wire bird cages in hand. An expat had explained the rationale of "walking" a caged bird: The bird's exercise comes from gripping its swaying perch.

My favorites, though, were the singers. I have seen few things as nakedly joyful as a group of neighbors gathered in the slanting light of morning to sing their lungs out. Watching them, cynicism became impossible.

How can you not appreciate a city that, even for a moment, allows you to feel that way?

* * *

For much of my life, China was a hazy place of contradictory associations -- cute pandas and pro-democracy protests crushed with tanks. In recent years, though, reports of the country's economic boom and rising world clout made it clear that the future was being forged, at a frantic speed, in China.

Of course, it's not just China's growing importance that has put it on many travelers' itineraries. With such iconic attractions as the Great Wall and the Forbidden City -- and that's just in Beijing -- the country will be the world's most popular tourist destination by 2020, according to the World Tourism Organization. The fact that Beijing will host the 2008 Summer Olympics has merely drawn attention to the obvious: Right now, China is where the action is.

Fittingly, it was an item of business news that provided my excuse to book a 12-day trip to the Chinese capital. Earlier this year, United Airlines won the right to offer new service from Dulles International Airport to Beijing, giving Washington its first nonstop flight to China. The victory came at the expense of Continental, American and Northwest, which wanted to offer China service originating in Newark, Dallas and Detroit, respectively. China restricts inbound flights, so the U.S. Department of Transportation doles out new routes via an application process.

If you don't believe that United's victory was a big deal, you weren't at Dulles on March 28 for the inaugural flight. The boarding process featured a free buffet, Chinese-style drummers and a fluffy yellow dragon leading speech-making dignitaries down Concourse C.

Unfortunately, there's only so much glamour one can attach to 13 1/2 hours in economy. I read, had a Scotch, dozed and looked out the window until I finally saw it: Beijing, a 15-million-person megalopolis undergoing what has been called the most dramatic transformation in history.

Which is why it surprised me. I expected a futuristic world of glittering glass and kaleidoscopic light, the cutting edge of human endeavor. Instead, my first impressions were of a flat, dusty city filled with grim rows of identical, Soviet-style apartment blocks.

Construction cranes perched on the skyline like flocks of gargantuan, robotic flamingos, and the air was sepia-toned with smog and dust. Walking Beijing's expansive avenues, widened under Mao Zedong, I felt a heavy sense of anomie.

In part, the feeling came from the city's sheer size. Beijing municipality, which includes rural and urban areas, is bigger than Connecticut. The city's urban core and inner suburbs are about the size of New York's five boroughs, but with much more limited subway service.

Yet I quickly discovered that no city moves so quickly between massive and modest, between anonymous and intimate. On my first day, for example, I drifted south from the vast, gray expanse of Tiananmen Square into the narrow hutongs, or alleyways, of the Qianmen district.

Immediately, the traffic noise faded. Low, gray-walled courtyard homes lined lanes that were often too narrow for cars but dotted with decrepit bicycles. Through an open door, I glanced at a group of friends hunkered over a board game. Farther on, meat sizzled over small braziers, its aroma mixing with a less pleasant sewer smell. A cat crept over a rooftop.

Then, a few steps farther, this charmingly run-down neighborhood turned to rubble. While a few hutongs have protected status, scores are being leveled -- and their residents forced out -- to make room for high-rises.

It was tragic, but these demolitions helped me understand that my pre-arrival expectations were not entirely wrong. It was as if Beijing were plowing up a charming old garden and sowing high-rise seeds in its soil. And now those seeds were sprouting everywhere, in jagged, unfinished stalks of concrete and steel.

I decided I was less wrong than premature: The city I'd imagined was being created before my eyes.

* * *

Imagine throwing a party so big, so important, that you decided to remodel your entire house and school your kids in a new set of manners. Expand that philosophy to an entire city, and you've got Beijing's approach to the 2008 Olympics.

The Games are widely understood as Beijing's global coming-out party, and the city is preparing like a newlywed out to prove itself to a nit-picking in-law.

It's not just the yet-to-be-unveiled subway expansions or the surreal new sports venues, which include a stadium that resembles a steel bird's nest. It's also the odd attempts at social engineering, such as the campaign to discourage Beijingers' habitual, sinus-clearing spitting.

There's also the campaign against bizarre "Chinglish" mistranslations -- an "anus hospital" is now a "proctology hospital," to use an oft-cited example -- and a quixotic attempt to teach cabdrivers English. In my 12 days in Beijing, a single cabdriver told me "Good evening." The rest suffered, with varying degrees of patience, while I jabbed at maps and made incomprehensible attempts at basic Chinese.

For visitors, though, the most annoying part of Beijing's pre-Olympic frenzy is the restoration work affecting almost every major tourist attraction. Even Mao's Tiananmen Square mausoleum was shuttered, cheating me of a chance to see the pickled remains of the Great Helmsman.

The situation is not too grim, though, because Beijing has enough painted eaves, swirling dragons and outsize golden Buddhas to exhaust even the most earnest sightseer. The less dedicated might be content with just the Forbidden City, which extends over an area the size of 135 football fields.

Located just north of Tiananmen Square, the palace was home to the Ming and Qing imperial courts from the 15th to the early 20th century. Here, you'll find Beijing's architectural drama of vast vs. intimate reflected in gold gilt and red lacquer.

The complex's three great halls (one was closed) preside atop a spine of marble staircases and balustrades. Impressive, but I preferred the smaller residences and courtyards at the edges of the inner palace, where the audio guide told of court intrigue and murderous rivalries between concubines.

For a more religious vibe, I tried the Lama Temple. A Tibetan Buddhist complex, it hosted a handful of bowing worshipers cloaked in clouds of sweet-smelling incense. It was fabulous, but so were all of Beijing's temples, and I was starting to sleepwalk through them.

The Summer Palace woke me up.

An imperial retreat to the northwest of central Beijing, the palace's magnificent buildings get trumped by its enormous lake and relaxing gardens. As I walked a lakeside trail beneath graceful willows, Beijing seemed, for a moment, to pause for breath.

Then I left the palace gates, and the city was off again.

* * *

I have a theory that every country changes you in one specific way, making you a slightly different person while inside its borders.

Actually, I just made that up. I still need a decent explanation for how Beijing transformed me, a cheapskate and a hater of shopping malls, into someone who was untrustworthy with an ATM card. It wasn't just a few articles of clothing and a knockoff purse for my wife. I bought a piece of furniture. In China. No, delivery is not free.

At the genteel Chaowai Furniture Warehouse, I had fallen in love with the merchandise -- Ming- and Qing-era antiques and reproductions. Elsewhere, I became fascinated by the remarkably ruthless haggling.

Understand, first, that this sort of negotiation involves more than price. It is also about feigned camaraderie, implied debts and subtle emotional manipulation. If you don't feel like a heartless, exploitive, colonialist sleazeball after buying something, you can know one thing for sure: You have drastically, embarrassingly overpaid.

I'm exaggerating, but slightly. As proof, consider my experience at Xiushui Silk Market, six stories of clothing, jewelry and accessories, many of them name-brand knockoffs.

I was at the market near closing time when one of the many teenage saleswomen offered me a leather jacket for a ludicrous $750. Semi-interested, I countered with $6.

That was fine. My mistake came when, as I tried to walk away, four more saleswomen tugged at my arms. With playful bravado, I asked the young women if they really believed they could stop me, a 6-foot-3 man, from leaving the market. They said they could.

We were all laughing -- and I was gasping -- as the girls moved in for the kill. Two grabbed my wrists. One placed the jacket in a plastic bag and tied it to my forearm. The rest slapped my arms until they turned red.

"You are stingy!" yelled the original saleswoman. "You are stingy!" When I protested that she was the stingy one, another girl clamped her hand over my mouth and yelled, "No more talking!" I fought on, but eventually shut up and shelled out $18 for the jacket, hopeful I'd fought my way to a deal. The girls' gleeful smiles, unfortunately, suggested otherwise.

But there was one sort of purchase I never regretted: street food. At first, it's an adventure. You approach a street-side griddle, point at some fried thing and hope for the best.

But I have limits. At the tourist-packed Wangfujing Snack Street and nearby Donghuamen Night Market, conventional beef kebabs sit side by side with skewers of cicadas, starfish, sea horses and other instances of "nasty on a stick," as one Beijing expat put it.

After a visit, I asked an employee at my hostel about the sticks of small scorpions, which crawled blindly at the air while awaiting the griddle. He explained that, in traditional Chinese medicine, the poison from the scorpions counteracted the poison of illness.

Or something like that. I didn't believe him anyway.

This was the same guy who insisted that the grasshopper kebabs were good with salt.

* * *

Despite cultural differences, there are certain human universals. One is that gritty art districts will eventually attract pleasant cafes, chic boutiques and reputations for being overrun by yuppies and tourists.

This is the story of Dashanzi, also known as Factory 798, a place I absolutely loved.

Dozens of galleries, restaurants and trendy shops populate what at first appears to be a postindustrial nightmare, a warren of skinny smokestacks and hissing pipes that lies just off the highway to the airport.

Dashanzi's art was hit-and-miss -- some artists have apparently balked at the tourist influx and settled elsewhere -- but the atmosphere never faltered. A former electronics factory, Dashanzi has ceilings made of heavy concrete arcs that still bear Maoist slogans. Light pours in through slanting banks of windows.

The photography galleries pulled me in, and I found myself studying images of modern Beijing shot by an artist named Qiu Zhen. They showed the photographer holding hands with a mannequin bride -- its face blurred or hidden -- that represented Beijing itself.

"She" was a hazy place that was "hard to get hold of," according to the artist's statement. The city was "a place between reality and dream."

I particularly liked one photo that showed the couple holding hands on construction scaffolding, Beijing tumbling out below them. It seemed to capture the contradictory, kinetic spirit of this city of grimly communist architecture, magnificent palaces and men walking birds in cages. Even when it was winning me over, Beijing seemed a little beyond my grasp.

"I love this city," Qiu Zhen wrote, "but I also live in it with panic."

I knew exactly what he meant.

Ben Brazil last wrote for Travel on Chiapas, Mexico.