Oracle Bones (46 page)

In
Peking
, published in 1920, Juliet Bredon had described the emperor’s annual journey to the Temple of Heaven. Eighty-one years later, our procession was almost as stately, and the ritual’s possible benefits were far more tangible. The Beijing bid committee had promised that if the city won the Games, it would spend twenty billion dollars on infrastructure and athletic facilities. A recent Gallup poll had shown that 94.9 percent of Beijing’s residents supported the bid, and for once, a Chinese statistic was probably accurate. Even dissidents had spoken out in favor of hosting the Olympics. In Hong Kong, Falun Gong practitioners had told the press that Beijing believers wouldn’t protest while the inspection commission was in town.

For three hours, we made our way through the city, looking at potential sites: soccer, softball, weight lifting, water polo, modern pentathlon. On the average, we spent five minutes at each place, where commission members asked one or two specific questions about details that didn’t yet exist. Will the pool for the modern pentathlon be at least 2.2 meters deep? Yes; it will be three meters. Can you walk from the water polo facility to the softball site? Certainly.

At the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the construction of an enormous new gymnasium was under way. Initially, the facility would be used for volleyball, but if Beijing hosted the 2008 Games it would be converted to weight lifting. We put on hard hats; an economist named Liu Lieli led the tour. With the other reporters, I scurried along, scavenging quotes.

“It looks like a beautiful butterfly or a lovely UFO,” Professor Liu said, as we were standing outside the facility. His spoken English was poor but he handled that phrase perfectly, lingering on the last word like a weightlifter with the bar raised above his head. Another official handed out pamphlets about the new gymnasium. One sentence read: “The BUAA Gymnasium just looks like either a beautiful butterfly or a lovely UFO flying over from sky.”

Inside, we stood on what would someday become a spectators’ gallery. Down below, two workers fiddled with a tarp on an expanse of packed dirt: the future competition platform. An Australian I.O.C. inspector named Bob Elphinston spoke up.

“Is that the warm-up area?” he asked, pointing to another pile of dirt. The other reporters and I surged forward, trying to see.

“
That’s
the warm-up area,” Liu said, pointing to a different pile of dirt.

Peering into the shadows, Elphinston said, “Do the athletes go straight from there onto the competing platform?”

Professor Liu smiled. If Beijing was awarded the 2008 Games, there was no question but that the weight lifters would proceed straight from the warm-up area onto the platform. Elphinston nodded, satisfied. Professor Liu addressed
the group. The new gymnasium, he said, would feature “intellectualized management systems.” He dropped the phrase and then gathered himself for a final clean-and-jerk. He said, “It looks like a beautiful butterfly or a lovely UFO.”

The last stop was the Millennium Monument. In the west of Beijing, the monument had been completed at the end of 1999, to celebrate both the glories of Chinese history and the coming of a new age. At the entrance, an eternal flame was accompanied by an inscription:

THE EVER-BURNING FLAME IN THE MIDDLE OF THE PLAZA
IS THE HOLY FIRE OF CHINA. IT ORIGINATED AT THE SITE
OF PEKING MAN AT ZHOUKOUDIAN, BEIJING, AND IS FED ON NATURAL GAS. THE FLAME IS A TOKEN OF THE UNCEASING
CREATIVITY OF CHINESE CIVILIZATION.

Behind the flame, a long walkway had been created out of hundreds of inscribed bronze plates. They formed a timeline; the first one was dated “Three Million Years Ago,” and it noted: “The ancient people in China begin to use fire.” After two and a half million years, things started to pick up: “People begin to have the characteristic of the yellow race.” Sixteen hundred
B.C
.: “The Shang dynasty capital is located at Zhengzhou in Henan.” Dynasties came and went: Zhou, Qin, Western Han. The British occupied Hong Kong in 1841; Sun Yat-sen became provisional president in 1912; the Japanese massacred 300,000 in 1937. People’s Republic, 1949. Reform and Opening, 1978. Finally, the timeline reached the year 2000, where history dissolved into random statistics:

Our nation’s scientists succeed in deciphering the genetic code of the number three human chromosome…. The Project to Separate the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties passes the national inspection. The National Statistics Bureau declares that for the first time the Gross National Product exceeds 1,000,000,000,000 American dollars. The Chinese national team wins twenty-eight gold medals at the Twenty-seventh Asian Games.

The I.O.C. inspectors moved past the timeline and into the monument itself, which was shaped like an enormous sundial. The foreigners watched an eight-minute promotional film that had been made by Zhang Yimou, China’s most famous feature film director. Modern scenes flashed by: airplanes, subways, automobiles. Computer-generated images showed proposed stadiums and new highways; clover-leaf exchanges circled around brilliant fields of green. Virtually nothing was recognizable as belonging to the city where I lived.

DRIVER YANG’S HOME
was a simple one-story courtyard. The place was unheated, apart from the coal-fired stove, and there was an outhouse near the gate. His wife prepared the hot pot while we drank tea in the main room. Driver Yang showed me photographs of his children, and he mentioned proudly that his daughter spoke good English.

I asked about the cabbie language lessons, and he handed me the Olympic-bid textbook. I leafed through the book, and he switched on the cassette player. A voice spoke in Special English:

• 1. Hello.
  
• 2. Good morning.
  
• 3. Good afternoon.
  

We sat down to dinner. Driver Yang gave me the seat of honor—in the countryside, that was the place with the clearest view of the television. Tonight, they showed a Chinese professional basketball game between the Beijing Aoshen team and the Shanghai Sharks. The Sharks had a twenty-year-old center named Yao Ming.

In the center of our table, burning alcohol heated a ring-shaped bronze cauldron filled with cooking oil. Once the fluid came to a boil, we dropped in pink rolls of mutton. Driver Yang said that the hot pot reminded him of the army. He had served from 1969 to 1973, in the border regions of Inner Mongolia. Soviet-controlled Mongolia was never far away; sometimes the situation had been tense.

“You wouldn’t believe how cold it is there,” he said. “It was all grassland, as far as the eye could see. The hardest part was when we had to camp outdoors. The local people used to take a whole sheep and put it on a spit. It wasn’t as good as this kind of hot pot, but at least it was better than the grain they had up there.”

The oil bubbled; rolls of mutton turned brown and rose to the surface. The room warmed up. Driver Yang and his wife ate happily, completely unphased by the burden of the foreign guest. In China, banquets with cadres were always awkward, and foreign affairs officials were inevitably the worst at handling outsiders. But the average Chinese made remarkable hosts, polite but informal. It was a simple truth—too simple to appear in something like the cabbie English book, which had included a section entitled “More Useful Expressions”:

• 33. The city’s traffic is getting better.
  
• 34. I’m attracted to Beijing’s scenery.
  
• 35. Pollution is a global problem.
  
• 36. I am proud of being a Chinese.
  

14

Sand

March 21, 2001

THE FIRST SIGN WAS ALWAYS THE WIND. AFTER THAT, THE SKY DARKENED
and then, if you happened to be outside, your eyes began to burn. Once you made it indoors, you could sometimes hear the particles rattling softly against the window panes. The loess blew in from the dry landscapes of northwestern China, as well as from both Mongolias, the Inner and the Outer, the places that seemed far away and abstract until you felt the grit against your face. Beijingers called them
shachenbao
, “storms of sand and dust.” At night, when a sandstorm was in progress, the particles reflected the glare of city lights and the sky glowed orange-pink, as if it were about to catch fire.

March was a risky month for camping, but I was too impatient to wait for April. On the map, I found a section of the Great Wall that I hadn’t seen before. After more than three hours of driving, the cabbie dropped me off; I told him not to worry about coming back to pick me up. For the past two months I had been desperate to escape the city.

The mountains were still winter-brown and empty; the farming season wouldn’t begin until April. It felt good to walk beneath a pack again. I followed a dirt road to a village called Xituogu, where I saw a mostly intact stretch of the Wall. A steep path led up to the structure. The wind picked up; the sky darkened. By the time I reached the first tower, I knew that I was stranded for the night.

The tower was more than four centuries old, made of brick and stone, and the design was simple: perfectly square, with a single enclosed room. The floor
was gray Ming dynasty brick. Along the walls, arched windows overlooked the valley. Below, the red-roofed village huddled against the road; northward, past the stone-walled orchards, the mountains rose steeply. Trails twisted up to high passes that had already been overtaken by the storm.

From the tower, I watched it come in. Clouds of brown hung low to the ground, like the tendrils of a living thing that crept into the valley. It moved in spurts, pulsing with the wind, consuming everything in its path: first the high trails, then the orchards, and finally the village. My eyes began to burn and I moved away from the window. For the rest of the night I stayed close to the floor.

Sleep was difficult. Periodically, I woke up thirsty, and then the howling wind kept me awake. I remembered scenes from the mapping of the underground city in Anyang. One archaeologist had told me that the city had been buried mostly by alluvial soil, moved by the river, but there were also windborne layers of loess that had accumulated over the centuries. Lying in my sleeping bag, I consoled myself with literary images. Loess was general all over China. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the fields of Anyang and the city of Beijing. Around two o’clock in the morning, I tied a shirt over my face, zipped up the bag, and finally slept for a couple of hours. Jagged dreams. The loess made a clipped sound as it struck the tower and all night it fell, upon all the living and the dead.

DAWN WAS BEAUTIFUL.
The storm might have been a bad dream, except for the film of dirt that shone red on the bricks in the morning sunshine. I ran a wet cloth over my face; the cotton darkened. My teeth crunched. When I shook my head, a soft sound pattered against the nylon of the sleeping bag. Sandruff.

I had planned to spend two nights along the Wall, but now I decided to return to Beijing before evening. I shook out the bag, packed everything up, and descended from the tower. At the valley floor I turned north. There was enough time for a short hike up into the hills.

One path led to an abandoned village. It stood at the edge of the steep slopes; the trees here were spindly and stunted. A pebbled creek lay as dry as a bone. Everything about this village was stony: stone fences, stone pathways, stone-walled houses. Most roofs were missing; originally they must have been made of wood. In the outskirts of Beijing, empty buildings weren’t uncommon. For years, people had been moving steadily down the hillsides, and sometimes they left their former homes standing—ghost towns of the new economy.

Trash had been piled in some of the buildings. Cigarettes, food wrappers: most of the brand names were unrecognizable. One house was full of animal droppings, but they were so old that the place simply smelled of dust. Another house was bigger than the others, and its roof was intact. Inside, the walls were covered with old newspapers; traditionally, that had been a common form of wallpaper in the countryside. I wandered through the empty house, reading headlines:

March 9, 1976

SOVIETS PUT FORWARD SECOND PROTEST
AGAINST THE U.S.

June 23, 1976

U.S. PREPARES TO SIGN A MILITARY ACCORD
WITH JAPAN AGAINST THE SOVIET UNION

All the papers dated to 1976, and they were from
Cankao Xiaoxi
, or “Reference News.” That was a Party newspaper that translated selected articles from overseas publications. In the past, it had been restricted to subscription only—it wasn’t sold at newsstands, and foreigners couldn’t buy it. Perhaps the abandoned house had once belonged to a Party secretary or some other local official. On one wall was an American cartoon that had been reprinted in the Chinese paper. The cartoonist’s sketch had been torn away, but the English punch line was still there:

“Excuse me, which way is the unemployment line?”
“You’re in it.”

I continued up the path to the last building in the village. A big millstone sat in front, scarred from years of grinding. Inside, the walls were papered with the
People’s Daily
. The headlines were eight years newer than those of the first house:

March 12, 1983

WE SHOULD DO MORE TO CREATE IMAGES OF
MODERNITY FOR THE PEOPLE

CHINA TO HOLD THE 1983 NATIONAL MEETING
FOR MACHINE TOOL PRODUCTS

April 14, 1983

EIGHT GRAIN-BASED PRODUCTS EXCEED
ONE BILLION POUNDS

Idly, I re-created the former hamlet in my mind: in 1976, the Party secretary refinishes his home. He covers the walls with the subscription-only newspaper—a subtle sign of the man’s privilege. That same year, after the house is completed, Chairman Mao dies. The reforms begin. Seven years later, the other residents are improving their homes, papering them with the headlines of the changing economy. Some peasants go to the city in the off-season, earning extra money through construction; farming becomes less appealing. By the 1990s, they are leaving for good. First the young, then the middle-aged. The last ones are the elderly, who still remember the color of local life: which officials had authority, which people had more land, which families had lived there the longest. All of those details steadily slip down the hillside, swallowed by the bigger village, the township, the county seat, the city, the nation. Finally, the elderly pass on, and then the tiny hamlet settles into silence.