A Writer's Life (67 page)

As I sat in the café reading newspapers, which often included
USA Today
and the dailies from Hong Kong, I was eavesdropping on the English-speaking people gathered at the surrounding tables. Staying at my hotel were dozens of Americans who were here on business (I had exchanged amenities with some of them in the elevator, receiving, in turn, their business cards—Motorola, Whirlpool Corp., Delphi Automotive Systems, RR Donnelley & Sons, Caterpillar, Inc.); and while it was not always possible to hear clearly above the crowd noise in the café and the piped-in music (Broadway hits, golden oldies, 1970s rock 'n' roll), it did seem to me that the loudest voices in the room belonged to American engineers and contractors who, while dining and usually drinking bottles of Tsingtao beer, expressed their displeasure at having to deal with the Party bureaucrats who regulated the city's building industry. “We don't even have clearances yet, and they're sending their inspectors over to check out our cement mixers and cranes,” declared a burly red-haired man in his mid-thirties who wore a tight-fitting tan jacket and a loosely knotted necktie. As his companions nodded in agreement, he went on: “
And
they're sticking us with the same miserable foreman and crew we had last time.”

Across from me, seated alone and eating a shrimp salad while talking on a cell phone, was a slender, carefully coiffed blonde in her forties who was wearing a pink linen suit and was becoming increasingly upset by what she was hearing. “Look, Max,” she shouted at one point, “you don't seem to realize I'm sticking my neck out here. We're already in for three million, and we need another million.… What do you
mean
, “that's difficult”?… You told me last week you could swing it.… Yes you
did
, Max. You said we had our friend in Seattle with us.… Now you're saying we
don't
?… Well, so we have a real emergency here,” she said, and, before clicking off, added, “Bottom line, Max, you
lied
to me.”

In the latter part of the afternoon, after the local schools had closed for the day, I would often see groups of Chinese teenagers, wearing baggy jeans and T-shirts and with their spiky brightly tinged hair glossed with gel, making their way through the lobby and heading downstairs in the direction of Starbucks and an Internet center; and on weekends many young Chinese married couples would come to the café for lunch, accompanied by their young children. More often than not, these children were unruly. They crawled under tables, ran through the lobby, and screamed mightily when pursued and reclaimed by their parents. I supposed that they represented what I had been reading about—the “spoiled” and emerging masses of youngsters currently being reared without siblings in the homes of relatively affluent mothers and fathers who were part of China's burgeoning middle class.

The one-child policy, initiated in 1979, had been presented as a protective measure against famine. Although more than 22 percent of the world's population resided in China, it accounted for only 7 percent of the world's arable land. And so in the hope of preventing an oversized and underfed society, the government decided that couples should restrict themselves to only one offspring (except for parents who were employed in farming, or who had previously produced a disabled child, or were members of ethnic minorities dwelling in rural areas). But while the government would estimate that 330 million births had been avoided between the years 1979 and 1999, it nevertheless believed that the current population of 1.3 billion was about 100 million more than desirable, and the most negative by-product of the one-child policy was the countless number of females being aborted, or otherwise disposed of, by parents guided by the traditional belief that they would be assisted more substantially during their elderly years by a son than a daughter.

There were now 120 boys born for every 100 girls in China, according to data released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. All the children
I had observed running wildly around my hotel were male—the youngest majority within a pampered generation coming of age within the People's Republic. “These are the ‘little emperors,' ” a Beijing-based reporter wrote in
USA Today
, adding that they were “the most visible result of China's sometimes brutal effort to brake runaway population growth.” The article quoted a Chinese professor of psychology as saying, “They are the VIP in the family … they just consider themselves and don't think about others.”

In a memo to myself, I noted: “If the U.S. government thinks that it's having a tough time dealing with the Chinese policy makers now, just
wait
until these ‘Little Emperors' take over.”

A few hundred feet beyond the China World Hotel's circular driveway was Chang'an Boulevard, the principal thoroughfare in Beijing. There were eight lanes for motor vehicles, flanking roads for bicyclists, and a wide tree-lined promenade on which I regularly strolled during the middle of the afternoons and early evenings, mingling with multitudes of Asians who in most cases seemed to look right through me—the Cantonese word for white people is
gweilo
(“ghosts”)—but occasionally my path was blocked by street hustlers wanting to sell me compact discs, newly released American films, software, and other items that I assumed were in the category of pirated merchandise.

One afternoon, I felt my jacket being gently tugged from behind, and, after pausing and turning around, I faced a smiling boy of about ten who proceeded to point his fingers insistently down toward where I was standing. As I waited in confusion, he quickly removed a rag and a plastic tube from his pocket and squirted cream upon my shoes before kneeling to give me a shine. After he had finished, and I could not decide what to offer him in Chinese currency, I dangled a dollar in front of him, which he snapped out of my hand, then bowed his head slightly and disappeared into the crowd.

“This kid knows how to create his own market,” I wrote on a hotel memo pad I carried. “The ‘Little Emperors' might learn a thing or two from him.”

Although much of Chang'an Boulevard was characterized by office towers and residential high rises, there still existed many smaller buildings with storefronts occupied by grocers, clothiers, jewelers, cobblers, appliance salesmen, travel agents, and the proprietors of tablecloth restaurants as well as fast-food enterprises. McDonald's was about to launch its fifty-eighth site in the city. There was outdoor cooking, too, done by sidewalk chefs whose sizzling pans and steaming cauldrons rested upon metal stands or were spread out within plastic-windowed boxcars
that measured approximately five-by-five feet and were clamped atop the rear wheels of tricycles.

I had, of course, read many stories about China's ever-increasing number of automobile owners, and there was ample evidence of a motorized society in the backed-up traffic that marked Chang'an Boulevard during rush hours; but the city's bicyclists and tricyclists continued to embody a large and unrelenting presence—millions of people pedaling to work every morning, and each evening returning home along the magnolia-lined roadway. There were no reflectors on any of the bikes, and so the nighttime riders were mainly noticeable as red specks of light flickering from the burning ends of the cigarettes they held between their teeth. Why did the cyclists lack reflectors? I could as easily have asked, Why did most of the Mercede-Benz vehicles that I saw in Beijing have missing hood ornaments? If I were to hazard a guess, I would respond in both instances with a single word:
pílferage
. But in any case, millions of people moved ahead every night and day by means new and old along parallel lines leading toward the twenty-first century. It had just been announced that Beijing's newest commercial complex, the Oriental Plaza—which would open within a year and consist of eight chrome blue glass office towers, a luxury hotel, and a convention center—would also have an indoor parking facility to accommodate eighteen hundred automobiles and twelve thousand bicycles.

A few blocks west of the Oriental Plaza on Chang'an Boulevard was the moated and Mao-muraled gateway leading into the ancient imperial palace and its walled environs, an area frequently referred to as the Forbidden City. It is so called because during most of the five hundred years that dynastic figures had enthroned themselves at this unnumbered address, starting with the Ming in 1406 and ending with the Qing in 1911, the preserve was off-limits to people not of the imperial court, except those being summoned for execution, or those who were employed as the emperor's concubines and eunuchs—the latter being, according to my guidebook, “not just castrated but also dismembered.”

To the south of the Forbidden City, on the other side of Chang'an Boulevard, was Tiananmen Square, a vast stone plaza of about one hundred acres, which was said to be capable of accommodating 1 million standees. It seemed to me that at least fifty hard-surfaced soccer fields could be marked off here. I made my estimate as I paused along the grainy gray sidewalk that rimmed the northern edge of the square's white stone sward. The square had been repaved recently to smooth the parade route for the troops that had participated in the Communist Party's fiftieth-anniversary ceremony on October 1. With the aid of my illustrated guidebook
and the data it provided, I was able to familiarize myself with the monuments erected within the square, and the two buildings that bordered its east and west sides.

To the west was the Great Hall of the People, a starkly grand structure that was listed as being one thousand feet long and having a main auditorium with a seating capacity of ten thousand. The building had been designed and constructed during the 1950s in architectural tribute to Stalinistic Russia, a style that influenced most of China's state buildings until there arose Sino-Soviet disagreements in the 1960s over the future course of international communism—quarrels that prompted the Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev to remove his engineers and consultants from large Soviet-assisted projects in China and to terminate foreign aid.

On the eastern side of the square, almost as large as the Great Hall and basically its architectural twin, was the Museum of Chinese History. Within its display cases and along its walls were relics, artifacts, scrolls, enamelware, metalwork, ivory, embroidery, and paintings that were said to represent the evolution of the revolution—the rise of Chinese people from a primitive society to a slave society, to a feudal society, to a colonial society, and finally to a society that, in the quoted words of Chairman Mao, “stood up.”

On the southern side of Tiananmen Square, behind a granite obelisk, was Mao's mausoleum. It was completed in 1977, a year after his death, and contained his body in a crystal sarcophagus. “Join the enormous queue of Chinese sightseers,” said my guidebook, “but don't expect more than a quick glimpse of the body as you file past the sarcophagus. At certain times of the year the body requires maintenance and is not on view.” From my distant vantage point of the mausoleum's staircase, I could see no sign of anyone entering or leaving, although elsewhere in the square there were hundreds of people, or maybe thousands, walking around—couples holding hands, toddlers with balloons, gray-haired men and women, some using canes and wearing Mao jackets—and also dozens of other elderly people, all of them men, busily engaged in flying colorful kites, often assisted by boys young enough to be grandchildren. It was a sunny, windy autumn day. The gold-starred red flag of China was waving briskly atop a steel pole set in a granite foundation. “If you get up early you can watch the flag-raising ceremony at sunrise, performed by a troop of PLA [People's Liberation Army] soldiers drilled to march at precisely 108 paces per minute.… The same ceremony in reverse gets performed at sunset, but you can hardly see the soldiers for the throngs gathered to watch.”

I saw no such gatherings now because it was midafternoon, and
although I could imagine few sights more welcoming to a newly arrived stranger in a foreign city than the sight of soaring and swooping kites, I was nevertheless hesitant about entering Tiananmen Square and becoming part of the crowd. Mixed in with everyone, no matter where I looked, were the blue-uniformed police officers. Some patrolled in pairs; others gathered in small groups near the flagpole and obelisk, talking among themselves while surveying their surroundings. At any moment I half-expected to see them spring into action, pursuing and arresting individuals affiliated with the outlawed Falun Gong, a Chinese group that during the past summer had begun to express its unhappiness with the regime by staging surprise vigils in various parts of the capital, including in its most public space, the square.

I had never heard of the Falun Gong until I started reading about it in China. The
International Herald Tribune
had published several articles about it, some appearing on page one, describing it as a spiritual movement comprising “hordes of ordinary people seeking health and happiness” through meditation and ritualistic exercises evoking “elements of Buddhism, Taoism and traditional
qigong
exercises that are said to harness cosmic forces in the body” and even “supernatural powers.” It was estimated that the Falun Gong had 10 million members in China and a growing number in foreign countries. Its founder and leader, Li Hongzhi, currently lived in the borough of Queens, New York, having left China in 1998. He and his aides maintained contact with their followers via E-mail and cellular telephone.

Unlike the student-led protests of ten years ago, in 1989, the Falun Gong was made up mostly of middle-aged or elderly Chinese citizens—retired schoolteachers, phased-out factory workers, clerks, hairdressers, civil servants, bureaucrats, and others who were not benefitting from China's economic reforms and who expected, at the very least, to be allowed to seek their own sense of spiritual contentment and salubrity through meditating and practicing their exercises in public places in accord with the prescriptions of the Falun Gong. On April 25, 1999, without a word of warning to government authorities, ten thousand adherents of the Falun Gong assembled in various parts of central Beijing in an appeal for official recognition. Not only was their request denied but the government would label them an “evil” and “disastrous cult”; and, between the spring and autumn of 1999, approximately three thousand of the Falun Gong were arrested.