It's cold but it's cool

I leave Beijing in 11 hours. Following the advice of a good friend I've taken my last few days here slowly, letting my obligatory last-minute holiday shopping, sight-seeing, and city slumming unfold at a pace that has allowed me to re-experience the small minutiae of Chinese life and culture that I long ago began to take for granted and will soon begin to miss the most.

It took me a few days to get a feel for Beijing. I practically experienced as much culture shock coming here from Yunnan as I did stepping of the plane in Kunming. Here I've seen modernized (and modernizing) China, a sprawling metropolis in the process of stepping up to the world limelight in preparation for 8/8/08. I didn't know much about Beijing besides Tiananmen Square, where I saw Mao's paternal, satisfied grill surveying the small troop of overt and covert police guarding the Chinese flag and breaking up any and every public "demonstration," including my friend's short-lived performance with a yo-yo he'd bought at the Summer Palace. In the middle of the Square I saw Mao again, here a waxy (likely wax) body interred in a massive mausoleum filled with silent tourists and businessmen visiting the spot for good luck. Mao's omnipresence was only matched--exceeded even--by that of the "Specially Licensed Olympic Commodity Merchandiser". Beside the countdown ticking away in a government building opposite the Great Hall of the People I of course encountered an endless stream of hustlers grinding to get mascot keychains and "official" t-shirts into my hands and foreigner funds out of my wallet. I wonder if Mao had a grave that wasn't guarded by two armed military personnel around the clock whether he would turn in it.

My first impressions of Beijing were not positive. All I saw was a giant, thoroughly polluted and ostensibly cultureless mass lacking the charm (and killer street food) of Kunming, which had begun to feel like my home base between my sporadic trips to farmland and frontier. After I got my feet on the ground and my head in the right place (i.e. into a winter hat) I made an effort to get to know this city for what it is. I visited the 798 arts district and for the first time saw a large, international contemporary art scene in China, splitting my time between a noise record shop called Sugar Jar and Galleria Continua, where I saw an interesting Anish Kapoor exhibit. I did some excellent hikes on the Great Wall, which allowed me to cross a World Wonder off the list and scope some spectacularly ruined, decrepit, and unpopulated sections of the planet's largest man-made structure. The most fun I've had here has been at the indoor markets, however, where all the Mandarin I've managed to learn in my short time here has culminated in an expert admixture of humor, flirtation, and pure will power aimed toward the end of garnering my last-day pickups at the "enlightened foreigner" discount.

And I am a foreigner. I've spent many hours in dimly lit internet bars writing posts like this, emailing you all, planning my future, pining for the familiarity and comfort of home. I distinctly remember each time leaving the wangba with the sun a little lower in the sky and thinking how leveling the internet is, allowing me to follow certain patterns of life that are my rote at home and that I can more or less maintain anywhere in this increasingly interconnected planet. Then I get yelled at by a 90-year-old woman furiously trying to sell me a steamed bun and a bootleg Adidas backpack, or led by the hand by a concerned onlooker who knows I'm lost and swears by the Buddha that it's much too far to walk back to my dorm on my own, or taken to dinner by the family of a friend of a friend I made on the basketball court, and I realize I could only be in China. Then I realize this is what I'll miss the most.