Sunday, November 28, 2010

Old Beijing Bus Stop

Old Beijing Bus Stop

Bikes are rigged with flat beds carrying bricks and produce.  A red blanket on the sidewalk  lies under some tired, wilted vegetables.  A few extra kuai for these greens are worth the time and effort.  Did they fall off the flat bed?  These are entrepreneurs.  A man has cages with birds.  Men are always in charge of the birds.  It is tradition.  Another is selling goldfish in plastic cups and hamsters in shoe boxes.  The lady with the handicapped girl is in the same place every day popping popcorn for sale alongside trinkets and hair bands.  This corner on the way to my bus stop hasn't yet been modernized.  It is busy with Chinese.  A fruit and separate (legitimate)vegetable shop are etched into the side of a building.  Meat is stacked in bloody slabs on the other side of a window which opens when someone wants to buy.  Right beside that is window which yields Chinese pastries that look and smell nauseatingly sweet.  There is always movement on this corner.  Steam comes out of the local restaurant before 7 AM where some are already slurping noodles. I'll even tell you there is a door to a sex shop and a massage parlor where later in the day skinny girls will sit in a window of their own.  This is the old Beijing.  A small side street lets out numbers of Chinese onto this corner. They are coming from a  tiny village that is tucked out of sight, somehow hidden, but right next to, the luxury high rise where I live.

This corner scared me at first.  With the garbage which never gets cleaned up in spite of the man with sticks who is sweeping,  the overwhelming bombardment of indecipherable and undesirable smells, the adult spit and the excrement which could be from animal or child,  I can't help but hold my breath as I walk through, every day.  Every day it is the same and yet every day I find something new.  Chinese toddlers don't wear diapers but have slits in their pants.  It is said that during the Cultural Revolution when there was little food, these arrangements would result in little boys losing their units when dogs would ravenously come for what had been excreted.  Mao's presence is still here.  Around the trees there is dirt, not grass.  Grass was too bourgeois, so Mao had it ripped from the Beijing ground.

I pass the same old, limping man who takes his daily exercise with great patience and care.  Short, determined grey-haired women walk together pounding on their arms.  Grandparents hold infants.  Before 7 AM, the employees at the gas station are lined up and standing at attention ready for the start of their shift  The manager is conducting the ritual to ensure company loyalty.  He shouts a series of calls which they respond to in unison.  A reminder of their collective purpose and a demonstration of their dedication to their jobs.  There is a lot going on in the morning.  It's okay to wear pajamas out and about.  This is the Beijing that is disappearing because of people like me who can afford expensive apartments.

I must admit, when I thought about Asia before coming here, this is what I feared it would look like.  I guess, though, I had pictured snakes and dead monkeys hanging from buildings along with the laundry.   And I must confess that I probably involuntarily gasp everyday I walk by, trying to protect my feet from the occasionally flying snot.  Crossing the street can be dangerous as it is not just traffic that needs to be timed right, but there are schools of scooters and bikes which have to be maneuvered through as well.  It becomes almost impossible to get across when they perhaps have decided to go the other way on the wrong side of the street.

It's a seven to ten minute walk from my building to the bus stop depending on what I might encounter or need to avoid on a given day.  Yet what I can't understand is why I don't mind it as much as I thought I would.  Those Chinese have let the white woman walk right through the dance of their day.  They never look sideways at me.  When I got brave enough to buy vegetables there, I walked away with a bagful for what was the equivalent of 2 dollars of Mao money.  They didn't overcharge me and they gave me back all my change.  For the vegetables I got,  I would have been happy to pay five times as much.  No, I don't mind it as much as I thought I would.  In fact, I am a little apprehensive of  the inevitable,  that it may happen sooner than they or I am ready.  It is only a matter of time before these shops and that village are destroyed to make way for the new Beijing, the Beijing that is the capital of the soon-to-be biggest economy in the world.  I find myself wanting to walk right through there, because one day this corner will look like my side of the street.   It could happen any day.  And if I'll miss all this mess, how will it be for limping man,  popcorn woman or man sweeping with sticks?  

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