Caochangdi Urban Art Village

I spoke way too soon about all those nice days.  I knew they would go away eventually, but yesterday, quite suddenly, I looked outside and couldn’t see most of the city.  The air has been horrendous this weekend.  And by horrendous, I mean the US Embassy is giving “hazardous” readings every hour, which is as high as their air quality scale goes.

It was nice while it lasted, I guess?

On a more positive note, I went to Caochangdi last weekend.  It’s somewhere I’ve been wanting to go for a while, since I came across it doing research for a paper last year.

It definitely did not disappoint, and it prompted a lot of questions and ideas I have around urbanization, community development, and displacement in Chinese cities.

But first, my first impressions:

This is the first thing I saw in the neighborhood called the Caochangdi International Art Village.  Caochangdi is considered an urban village, which is the government’s politically correct term for a slum.

I knew that before I went. but still, I was surprised by what I saw.  I was expecting something more along the lines of 798 since CCD now has a pretty big international reputation.

Apparently I was on the wrong side of CCD, although interestingly the front gate, which is labelled “Caochangdi International Art Village” takes you straight into the “urban village” part of the neighborhood.

If you turn right and keep walking, though, you end up in the area with all the art galleries.

Which is not that easy to find, if you ask me, because the galleries are mainly in these walled complexes that say very little on the outside, and then only on one wall.  The buildings, I think, were designed by Ai Weiwei, and are very oppressive.  I like them, but they have a strange atmosphere.  On the one hand, it’s a comfortable, unadorned space, but on the other it feels devoid of life and the lively rush of most art districts.

Once you enter through one of the little entryways, you end up in a maze of brick walls with almost no signs except for the occasional name of a gallery in silver letters creeping up the upper corner of a building.

The galleries are fantastic, though.  The spaces are all furnished neatly and with beautiful things, but the materials used in the building are raw, with a lot of cement and wood.  It gives the spaces an intimate feel, like you’re being allowed into an artist’s studio or home.  The closeness of the buildings reinforces this, cloistering you in whichever gallery you visit.  Everything is very quiet.

The art was also fantastic.  My favorite artists I saw were Chen Haiyan and Xie Xiaoze.  Especially Chen Haiyan – there was a small documentary about her process in Ink Studio that was really interesting.  She uses traditional calligraphy brushes to paint her subjects (usually her dreams) and then carves out the paintings to use in screenprinting.

Above, people are setting up a pavilion for Beijing Design Week, which is currently going on.  Except for them, I saw very few people and felt like I was wandering around an abandoned city.

Even the outside streets, populated by similar forbidding brick buildings, were mostly empty.  Maybe it’s not usually like that?

Whereas in 798, the graffiti is large and elaborate, covering every surface in massive illustrations and little doodles, in CCD all the graffiti was done in black and most of it was painted over in the usual gray that cities use when erasing the mark of street artists.

The neighborhood the art galleries were in was strange (along with everything else, pretty much.)

I found CCD sort of hard to navigated because it’s made of these giant complexes.  When you’re between complexes, like in the picture above, you’re surrounded by giant walls and trees with very little indication that you’re in what should be a nexus of culture and creativity.

To access that nexus you have to enter the complexes.  The gallery side of the neighborhood, then, is the opposite of the urban village side, where the spaces are narrow but cluttered, and where activities like commerce and eating are conducted completely in the open.

It did look like some of the other galleries were more populated, but I didn’t go into them since the bus ride back was pretty long.  I did poke around a lot of mysterious gated buildings that had no label indicating what they were and high walls hiding them from the street.

All in all, CCD is a very strange place, and although I want to go back to the galleries soon (probably this week for BJDW), it was unsettling.

Partially because there were internationally renowned galleries, a lot of which have locations abroad, next to an urban village, which is slowly being eaten up to build more galleries.  Of course, the people who live in the village are probably making considerable money illegally renting land to artists, which is usual practice in urban villages.  Still, the community is slowly being displaced as CCD gains more international attention.

 

What I find most interesting about this neighborhood is actually the government’s role in its development.  At first, I was happy to see the government (any government) taking an interesting in and encouraging the development of the local art scene.  CCD was slated for demolition a few years ago, but thanks to community advocacy, demolition was averted.  Now, it seems that CCD has the government’s blessing and has been sanctioned as one of the official “art districts” like 798.

In some ways, this is a good thing, since the arts always need all the support they can get, and a lot of the artists in CCD aren’t exactly friendly to the government but still have space to work and exhibit art.

However, I was just reading an article by Ren Xuefei (whose I work I really love) called “Artistic Urbanization: Creative Industries and Creative Control in Beijing”, which made the argument that the Beijing government was creating sanctioned art districts out of organically developed artist neighborhoods in order to institutionalize and control the production of culture.  The government exerts control through a combination of state-owned real estate firms who buy and develop land on the peripheries of the city, GONGOs (government organized non-governmental organizations (yes, really)), and village committees (the lowest body of political actors) who work together to create a monitored space for artists where the government can keep an eye on their work and shut it down if it gets too critical.

Essentially what happens, then, is that the government encourages the creation of these spaces but not the development of an artistic community, which naturally needs freedom to prosper.  (Also, who’s ever heard of state-sanctioned art?  Or rather, state-sanctioned art that’s interesting?  Exactly no one.)

The question the article poses, and one that often came up in my Chinese politics last year, is, can a community that relies on free speech thrive in a government-sanctioned space?  In my class we talked about this question in relation to Internet censorship, but it’s extremely relevant when talking about artistic communities as well.

A lot of contemporary art in China (by artists like Xie Xiaoze and Ai Weiwei in fact) is very critical of the government (and actually this is the reason some argue China has no contemporary art, since contemporary art is ostensibly free of ideology), like Huang Rui‘s 拆那 piece, which criticized the kind of rural-to-urban development that allows places like CCD to exist.

So can state-sanctioned art spaces become true artistic communities, or will they remain vehicles for “cultural production” that is in line with the government?  I’m inclined to say no, especially considering the nature of contemporary art in China, but this is something to think and read more about, if not develop into some kind of project, if possible.

 

For further reading, I highly recommend anything by Ren Xuefei, who has written on a lot of really interesting topics like architecture and nationalism, green architecture as “spectacle”, and the effects of transnational architecture on Chinese cities, as well as the article discussed above.

Panjiayuan and the Restaurant Wasteland

Everything smells like paint lately.  I walk out into the hallway and smell paint.  I smell paint all the way down in the elevator and in my room when I open the window.  In architecture class, in the building on the campus in the country that is forever under construction, I smell paint.

Constant headache.  You can imagine.

I guess autumn means renovations?  Who knows.

And kind of on the subject of renovations: my friend and I went to Panjiayuan this weekend.  Panjiayuan is a semi-outdoor “antique” market (a lot of things are knock-offs) that’s long been in the same place.  However, I heard through the architecture grapevine that it’s going to be rebuilt, to the disappointment of anyone with a modicum of taste.

Although actually i saw the schematic by the people who won the first round of competition and it looks amazing, so perhaps things will turn out all right.

 

Unlike the newer Beijing “markets”, Panjiayuan is one floor and everything stays pretty low to the ground.  There’s plenty of airspace above you when you walk, so even though the stalls are close together and the goods are jumble-packed, the market feels very open.

 

Something I really love is that you can stop and look at things or take pictures and no one will try to jump you to sell things.  Obviously the vendors try to convince you to buy things, but in, say, the Silk Market, they’ll yell at you as you walk by and then glom on to you like little capitalist barnacles trying to make a sale.

 

Things are more relaxed in Panjiayuan.  I also like what they sell there.

 

Knock-offs though they may be, everything for sale is really beautiful.  My friend and I were admiring this set of pottery that was glazed with purples and reds and blues and had abstract-looking mountainscapes painted on.  

 

Then, on the south edge are books.  The selection is seriously random, ranging from old-looking, traditionally bound texts, to posters of Mao (so many posters of Mao), various Chinese books, and English photobooks,to travel guides to places that are not in China.

 

We came towards the end of the day, so people were getting ready to leave, packing everything onto motorized rickshaws and filling the small aisles with old newspaper to wrap the ceramics.

 

The day we went was gorgeous, also, with a bright blue sky and warm sunlight spilling into the market towards sunset.

 

While the market was wonderful, the surrounding area… not so much.

I’m not exactly sure what neighborhood Panjiayuan is in, but for some reason there are no restaurants.  My friend and I wandered up and down various streets looking for food and didn’t even see a single cart selling roasted corn or jiānbĭng or whatever.

 

We ended up walking down this little alley which was not easy to get to at all, since the area between the sidewalk and the storefronts was completely fenced off.

 

All the signs said “noodle” on them somewhere (except for the one on that fur place and a framing store (??)), but the actual places were either mad sketchy or closed.

We kept searching.

Eventually we found a single restaurant that was actually a legit restaurant where people split lots of food that came in real bowls and pans (as opposed to the plastic-wrapped ones you get at street stalls that have disposable spoons).

 

And it was delicious, too!  I guess you could say it was worth the searching… but we were so hungry at that point and that’s the longest I’ve had to look for food in this country since I got here.

Now we know it’s there, though, so I’ll be prepared when I go back to Panjiayuan soon and often.  I loved it, and also I promised my girlfriend Mao paraphernalia…

Beijing’s Spectacular Architecture

(Get ready for pictures of the same two buildings for the most part.  Sorry.)

Architecture in China is an interesting thing.  On the one hand you’ve got the traditional architecture that everyone associates with Asia at large characterized by temples and imperial palaces, exemplified in the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace.  In the same vein, you have the traditional courtyard-style residences called hutong.

On the other hand…

You’ve got contemporary Beijing architecture.  Note that it’s not contemporary Chinese architecture.  That’s something entirely different.  That’s Wang Shu’s work in Ningbo and Hangzhou, Yung Ho Chang’s buildings, Ai Weiwei’s structures in Caochangdi.

But far and away the most popular architecture in Beijing right now is the spectacular kind.  The kind that gives people a reason to come here and gives tourists something to pose in front of.  These are buildings that put Beijing on a global, exclusive map of cities recognizable by landmark structures similar to New York, Chicago, Paris, or London.

It’s totally understandable that a country would want its capital to look “modern”, of course.  If you can’t tell already, though, I have a problem with this kind of spectacular architecture that stems from the accepted definition of modern.

Modern very often means western in China.  The fanciest gated communities often have names like Fontainebleau or Chateau something-or-other.  Similarly, when it comes time to commission a new building–say, a center for the arts–the government holds contests where architects compete to build whatever it is.  Architects from China and abroad are welcome, but the government goes out of its way to reach out to foreigners while neglecting the considerable pool of domestic talent.  As a result and because of the conflation of modern and western:

A French architect designs the National Center for the Performing Arts in China.

And a Dutch architect designs the China Central Television headquarters.

Of course, not every national landmark has to be designed by someone from the country.  How much of our capitol’s architecture is Roman?  How many of our sculptures French?  (Answer: most.  Sculpture had a very late start in America.  Now you know.)

The reason, however, that many of America’s early iconic sculptures are by French sculptors is that, for a long time, no one knew where the quarries were located and there weren’t enough patrons of sculpture to have a thriving business.  Thus, French sculptors were more experienced and skilled than Americans.

This isn’t true for Chinese architects.  Wang Shu, for example (my favorite architect, along with Jeanne Gang of Chicago), won the 2012 Pritzker and has designed many really beautiful buildings across China.  And I definitely do not believe that Tsinghua’s much-lauded architecture department hasn’t produced good architects.  (In fact, I know that’s not true because I went to a lecture this week by the guy who had a hand in designing this.)

(Also, there’s what I consider this obvious fact: Chinese architects are never going to become internationally renowned if their own country prefers foreign-designed buildings.  How discouraging.)

But it’s not that I have a vendetta against foreigners practicing architecture in China.  It’s actually fantastic that they’re welcome to have a hand in designing Chinese cities since many of the cities are being built essentially from scratch in just a handful of decades, which is very exciting from an urban planning/cutting-edge-of-architecture perspective.

The problem I have is the complete destruction and disowning of any kind of Chinese architectural identity in favor of a “modern” (read: western) one that is more about flare than function.

It’s one thing to seek out these “brand new icons”, which is a totally fair thing to want for a growing city (especially the capital of a country).  But who are these icons being built for?  Who do they serve?  Or do they serve a purpose at all?

For one thing, look at how well the CCTV HQ fits in to the surrounding environment:

Not.

On the other side of the fence surrounding the building is a neighborhood like this.

And obviously you’re going to have pretty disparate neighborhoods bordering each other anywhere and I don’t have an easy solution to that.

However, these are the neighborhoods that get razed to build CCTVs and performing arts centers, etc.

The city is under perpetual construction, shielded from the street by walls with inspiring posters that talk about building a new and better city for average-looking peasant types.  But who is the new city really for?

For example:

Through the gap in the building there’s another building pictured, also by Rem Koolhaas.  In my architecture lecture, I learned something about this building.  When the CCTV HQ was being built, they set off a ton of fireworks to celebrate some holiday or something.  The building still wasn’t finished, but the fireworks seemed so impressive next to the CCTV.  Naturally, the other building in the picture caught fire.  Now, that building still hasn’t opened because it was so badly damaged.  However, it can’t be taken down because it acts as a counterweight to the CCTV.  Without it, the CCTV (which leans slightly) may or may not fall over.

How’s that for functionality?

In the same lecture, the professor mentioned that very few people actually work in the CCTV HQ.  Most of the staff still work in the old building on the other side of the city.

So again, who are these buildings actually for?

What benefits, if any, do they bring to the community?  Is it possible to take pride in architectural landmarks like these when many of them don’t work very well, are left mostly empty, and/or are built by foreigners, anyway?

Personally I like these areas better.

These community-oriented areas that are hotbeds of micro-entrepreneurship.  Are they perfect?  Of course not.  Can they sustain the rapidly urbanizing population as it increases?  I kind of doubt it.  But the spectacularization of architecture certainly isn’t going to create a better city either.

What it is going to do is pepper Beijing with a bunch of fairly non-functional, sort of impressive looking buildings that draw people to them for as long as it takes to focus a camera and take a picture, and then people will lose interest and leave and there will just be these massive buildings sitting in the middle of neighborhoods… not doing much.

And obviously I’m not Chinese so the “nationalist” argument isn’t mine to make.  However.  It makes me uneasy to think of a Chinese city whose landmarks and cherished sights are designed by foreigners who have been (often rightfully) accused of treating China as a playground for the weirder architectural ideas they couldn’t get approved at home.

None of this is to say that I have a very good alternative for urban planning in China.  I have some vague theories that have been put down in research paper form, and that’s about it.  But I do know that I strongly object to spectacle buildings and buildings that place high-concept design before function and community service.  A crucial element of contemporary architecture in China that is sorely lacking is the consideration of people when drawing up plans.

Yes, these buildings in the pictures look pretty cool.  But whose buildings are they?  What are they for?  I don’t have the answers, but I strongly suspect Chinese architects do, if only they would be given a chance to build their own cities.

 

 

For further reading about this idea of architecture as spectacle, I recommend anything by Ren Xuefei, who was a great source of material when I was writing a paper on this subject.  The third link there gets into the relationship between spectacles, architecture, and the environment (which was actually my focus as well, kind of), but I don’t have time to talk about all of that, I’m afraid.)

Also, some of the books in the Recommended Reading section of this blog deal with this topic, since it is nearest and dearest to my heart.

The Tsinghua Campus

It’s only the second day of school and I’ve already managed to get into quite an odd situation.  I went to a class today that was all lecture with no mention of the course by a professor not listed on the class schedule, but in the right room at the right time…  And we don’t meet again until next Tuesday, so I won’t figure out what’s going on until then.

But that’s a weird story for another day, so let’s move on.  I’ve been biking around campus a lot, getting a feel for the place and admiring the architecture and the former imperial gardens.

 

So far, the lotus pond above is one of my favorite places.  At the pond is a statue of the poet Xie Hun, who was a contemporary of Lu Xun.  Tsinghua’s name actually comes from a poem by Xie Hun, hence the statue.

 

Some of the greener features of campus include a mostly-stagnant canal that nonetheless manages to look impressive and lovely.  It also has a bike path running down both sides.

 

Which is where I met one of the campus cats, 酸奶 （suānnăi, or yogurt).

 

There are also little parks along the canal with sculptures and benches and such.

 

And roses everywhere!  Roses grow like dandelions here and all over Beijing.  Tsinghua also has a full-blown rose garden that looks color-coded and very neatly manicured.

 

In some places, nature has even reclaimed its space.

 

But of course, my primary concern is always architecture,

 

Tsinghua does not disappoint.  Above is one of the dorms in a line of identical buildings.  I’m 100% not a fan of the superblock style of architecture that is one of many sad holdovers from the period of Soviet influence, but something about the geometric precision and the repeating patterns really gets to me.

 

This is the building where most of my classes are.

 

The architecture department is working on a… thing of some kind that involves building these cool-looking structures alongside the department headquarters.

 

On Tuesday I’ll take pictures of the interior of their building because wow.  It’s perfect.  There are pieces of projects everywhere, mock-ups, schematics, people drawing, plans for things, building materials, and construction-in-progress everywhere.  Also all the stairs have been spray-painted with messy geometric shapes.  Why?  Who knows.  Architecture is art, you know, and art schools are the same in any country to some extent.

 

There are still many buildings I need to take pictures of, including the new theater and the (sadly useless) environment department building.  (In lecture today, I learned that barely 1/5 of the solar panels on the outside are functional and that the self-regulating system keeps the dean’s office a nice cool 37 degrees Celsius all summer.)

So of course it goes without saying that the architecture is my favorite part of the campus.  Even more so than the jiānbĭng.

 

But I also love how bike-friendly it is.  In fact, if you don’t have a bike, good luck getting anywhere in a timely fashion.  Campus is that big.  And forget driving.

 

At Tsinghua, we believe in the hegemony of the bicycle, not the automobile!  Obviously for convenience and not out of protest against cars, but still, it makes me happy.

Soon I’ll have pictures of the other buildings, the little neighborhoods, and the interior of the architecture department.  But up next, a trip to Wangfujing.

The Gulou Area

A few nights ago I went to a movie at Dada in the Gulou area near the Drum Bell Tower north of the Forbidden City.  It looked like a nice area so a few of us trekked back out there this weekend on a particularly lovely and pollution-free day.

 

We spent most of the time walking down Gulou Dongdajie and stopping into the little shops and hutongs along the way.

 

On the scale of trendy neighborhoods with Sanlitun at the top and Haidian somewhere in the lower tier, Gulou seems solidly in the middle.  It doesn’t have designer brands or skyscrapers, but it’s got a lot of little shops like you would find in Chelsea or the Lower East Side in Manhattan.

 

And coffee!  We go out for coffee in the morning a lot, but nothing comes quite close enough to the good stuff you can get at home.  Except for the place above.  26 yuan is kind of steep for a latte, but it was the best coffee I’ve had in weeks.

 

We ended up going down this one network of alleyways that was filled with small food stands (and other things I guess, but I really only look at food…) selling Chinese, Tibetan, American, and Mexican (churros!) food.

 

There were people blowing up molasses into the shape of different animals, people selling the same headbands everywhere (new trend?), and boutique clothing.

 

What was most interesting, I thought, was the the juxtaposition of old and new, which is, to me, the general theme of Beijing.  I saw a Starbucks, for example, inside a traditional-looking building (either very recently restored or straight-up fake, which is entirely possible since there was a short-lived architectural movement in Beijing somewhat recently of constructing buildings in ancient styles to make the city look more “Chinese”).

 

So as a result, sometimes you have new shops in old-looking buildings.

 

I find that architectural movement kind of disappointing since it closes the door on the development of a contemporary Chinese architectural style and instead recycles the same images over and over.  But I do like these neighborhoods better than the ones dominated by skyscrapers designed by foreigners who often treat Chinese cities like playgrounds.

In any case, I love the Gulou area and plan on going back very often.  Loveliness aside, it’s the only place I’ve seen Crazy Fries, and I want to get on that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Apartment in Haidian

The Chinese subways stop running very early.

Think: 11 pm.

Now you know.

More importantly, now I know.  I found out the hard way when I went to a movie at this bar last night (The Hole, by Tsai Ming-Liang, part of Dada’s Monday movie screenings).  It took just a short cab ride back, but still… I’m disappointed.  Hopefully when the subway system expands it will start running later.

(The view from the kitchen.)

In other news, we’ve been in Beijing for a week, and in this apartment for a few days.  We’re settling in well, I think.

My roommates and I have been visiting different cafes every day working our way from our apartment to Tsinghua’s campus.  

We even found one on campus hidden away in the residential area.

I’ve also been to the same jiānbiĭng place three days in a row showing it to various people in our group.

The people who work there recognize me and one of my roommates now…

 

(Megan enjoying a jiānbĭng)

But before I get sidetracked by the food…

We’re in a really nice apartment very close to campus in a neighborhood called Haidian.  Haidian is in the way northeast of Beijing.

For some reason, cities in China tend to cluster types of land use together, so all the universities will be in one place, all the government buildings in another, all the industry in another still, and then neighborhoods that are solely residential.  Our part of the city is in the university cluster.

By now, Beijing has grown up a little more organically, so clustered land use isn’t a huge problem, but it’s still not a healthy mindset to be in when planning a city.  If you have entirely residential areas, for example, people are going to have to commute, sometimes a long way, to get to work or school or to go out at night.

Similarly, you wouldn’t have a very exciting social life if you lived on campus and didn’t leave your neighborhood because most of the nightlife in Beijing seems to happen in Chaoyang, which is across the city.

But enough about urban planning…

So we live in the university cluster in a building compound surrounded by local people with a few foreigners mixed in.  Everyone’s bikes are locked up outside…

Everyone bikes here.

Including me, on my little Tsinghua Flying Pigeon.

The apartment really is nice, although there are some interesting differences.  I don’t have a picture, but in one of the bathrooms there’s a typical Chinese shower that has a water tank and showerhead attached to the wall right where the toilet and sink are.  It takes finesse to take a shower without soaking everything in the bathroom in the process…

The other main difference is the kitchen.

There’s no oven!  There’s a wok, a frying pan, a microwave, a stove… and that’s it.  Which is fine, I guess, because if you’re cooking Chinese food the only thing you should need is a wok and a frying pan, but forget about baking.  Luckily (maybe?) we live around a ton of bakeries.

Luckily we’re here in 2013 and not 1983 because a) we’d be staying in dorms, and b) if we did have our own accommodations you can bet there would be no kitchen at all.  A lot of homes were built without kitchens because you were expected to eat in the communal dining hall with everyone else.  Cooking for yourself was actually forbidden for a long time during the Mao era.

So… progress!

And with that, I’ll leave you with a picture of where I go to school and sign off!

Beijing 798 Art Zone

It’s slowly starting to sink in that this is really happening.  When we were driving out of Beijing to Jinshanling we were on the highway at night in a pretty remote place where, if you looked out the window, you would see nothing but the silhouettes of rolling hills, flashes of lightning, and the occasional scattering of lights indicating a small town.  That’s when it hit me that I had been reading about this for such a long time, and now I was living it.  I don’t know why it was that moment in particular–maybe the crazy weather making everything more dramatic, maybe the music I was listening to…

Along similar lines, I’ve been reading about the Beijing 798 Art Zone for such a long time, and now I’ve finally been there.  (And will probably be going there many, many, many more times.)

Like many artistic neighborhoods, 798 started out pretty janky.  It was built in the ’50s as an industrial compound by the Chinese government working with the USSR and East Germany.  By the ’90s, Chinese avant-garde artists in search of a place to live had settled there, along with many German artists.*

(Today, some of the original industrial/Bauhaus buildings have been replaced by more modern ones.)

The district was slated for demolition in the early 2000s because of its good location made all the more attractive by the real estate craze in Beijing.  Amazingly, a lobby of artists, architects, and other community members (notably Li Xiangqun, a Tsinghua University professor) was successful in preserving 798.

Now the area is more gentrified–such is the way of art districts.  But I enjoyed it tremendously, and was happy to see a cafe culture flourishing in the district.

There are a lot of really interesting galleries there that I intend to check out, and 798 is also a great place to buy art cheaply.

We found so many beautiful handmade things from paintings to fans to clothes to ceramics that weren’t nearly as expensive as they would have been in Chelsea.

There’s also sculpture everywhere, a few buskers, super fashionable people, and graffiti on every surface, all of which I love.

You can read more about the history and current state of 798 in Beijing 798 Now, 798: Inside China’s Art Zone, 798: A Photographic Journal.  For more on some of the artists you have worked there, Hans Ulricht Obrist, a curator and big name in Chinese contemporary art, compiled a book of interviews with many of the artists.

I also just ran across the trailer for this documentary that looks pretty good.

And of course, if you’re in Beijing, be sure to check the place out.

*There’s a good documentary about the German side (although it includes a lot about Chinese artists as well) called Beijing 798: The Chinese Avant-Garde.

Big + Little Victories

Being in China still feels like a vacation since I’m still in orientation.  We ride busses everywhere in a great gaggle of American students with two adults looking out for us.  We’re staying in a fancy hotel on the outskirts of the city.

(a blue sky day!)

Still, we’re often let loose and left to fend for ourselves, which is where the little victories come in.

I had a Chinese tutor for a few months this past year, but for the most part, I’m self-taught with a combination of DIY Mandarin books and an epic ton of Chinese movies.

So when I manage to do something entirely in Mandarin with minimal gesturing, I feel awesome.  For example, we stopped briefly at the 798 Art Zone yesterday and there were a ton of little shops selling something in white jars covered with paper that you poked a straw through.  I managed to ask what it was, understand the answer (yoghurt), inquire about the price, and then buy one.  And on top of that, it was seriously delicious.  I’ve also managed to order a latte in Chinese, because my tutor taught me all the important coffee words that a textbook would never include.

As for the big victories…

We climbed the Great Wall today at sunrise.  If you look in the far distance of the photograph, there are little squares on top of the hills.  We hiked to one of those.  Possibly the second or third.

There were a lot of extremely vertical parts where clumps of us stopped to rest for a bit.  Really, I label hiking the Great Wall a big victory, but the wall completely dominated us, without question.  The bottoms of my feet still hurt, and its been fifteen hours.

We went from newly restored sections like the one above to the more rundown parts where the watchtowers were mostly rubble and the wall itself had no barrier around the edge and grass growing between all the rocks.

In America, we refer to the Great Wall as just that: a great wall, spanning all of China.  We imagine it to be this massive fortification, the biggest public works project in the history of ever.

In fact, the wall wasn’t built from scratch.  During the Qin dynasty, Emperor Qin Shi Huang Di unified many smaller walls that already existed.  (Our tour guide explained that Qin is for the dynasty name and Shi Huang Di actually means unifier, because Qin Shi Huang was the first ruler to unite China under his dynasty.)

 

A lot of the wall has been reduced to rubble and wasn’t made of much to begin with.*  Where we went, Jinshanling (literally Golden Mountain Ridge), is one of the more famous parts, and therefore in pretty good shape for most of the way.

If you’re looking to hike the Great Wall, I would highly recommend this part because it’s less crowded than the more popular Badaling.  Jinshanling is about 2 1/2 hours out of Beijing as well, so the stars are absolutely incredible.

At this point in the wall (maybe across the whole thing after unification) there were sentries posted at every single gap, and the wall is bent in strategic places to protect the people standing guard there.

Parts of the wall were low enough that you could climb over them and walk around on the actual mountain the wall was built on.

 

At this point, a few of us climbed over and joined them, which prompted the people up there to take pictures of us.  Particularly when this happened:

 

Which I’m sure does wonders for cross-cultural exchange and informal diplomacy.  I also had my ukulele with me, which was a target of interest for many people.

What I loved best about the Great Wall** though was not the (mythical) idea that it spans all of China in a strong, unified way, but that people have been walking these walls for hundreds and hundreds of years: soldiers, for whom the wall was built; Mongolians, for whom the wall was built to keep out; and tourists, for whom the wall is maintained.

That’s true of China as a whole, though.  Thousands of years of history has been taking place on these grounds, sometimes in these buildings, and this country will probably see thousands of more years and look just as different then as it does now when compared to ancient China.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next time, I’ll be writing about the 798 Art Zone and moving into the apartment (which is where I’m writing this from right now!)

*There’s a lot of information about the dilapidated western parts of the Great Wall in Peter Hessler’s Country Driving, which is Hessler’s book on roadtripping China following the Great Wall.

**For really comprehensive information about the Great Wall, see David Spindler‘s work.

Arrival!

Arrival!

I’m supposed to be packing for an overnight trip to the Great Wall, but instead I video-called my friend and now I’m sorting through pictures and videos and listening to Faye Wong.

Today was packed with walking, walking, walking…

Walking Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, up a mountain (a park of some kind?), around a hutong, and to a famous Peking duck restaurant.

So far, it feels like a vacation.  Since we’re a big group touring different sites, it doesn’t yet feel like we’re living here yet, so I don’t feel like I have any substantial impressions yet.

I do have substantial impressions of the duck.  Wow.  I am in food paradise right now, and i haven’t even had any knife-shaved noodles yet.

When I found out we were starting the day with Tiananmen Square, I was actually disappointed.  I consider the square mainly an example of bad urban planning and a relic of the unnecessarily heavy influence of Soviet architecture on Beijing.  Similarly, I wasn’t expecting to be terribly impressed with the Forbidden City because I’m not really a monument person.  (This makes me sound very negative; I’m not, I promise.)

But…

…it’s very difficult not to be impressed by something like this, if only because of its sheer longevity.

It’s less the scale that impressed me (highly inefficient land use…) so much as the details.  The artistry down to such little corners and crannies is incredible.

We also hiked to the top of a massive hill (it was a mountain, really) that had a spectacular view of the be-smogged, misty city.

A few of us chilled so hard we didn’t notice that most of the group had left until someone came and got us…

This is something I’ve noticed about China so far, though.  Everyone lounges.  Yes, the dash across roads (or drive aggressively at pedestrians), fight through “lines”, and bike everywhere, but there are also chairs all over the place.  Armchairs, kitchen table chairs, benches, and ledges that always have people sitting on them, lounging indefinitely.  It’s very difficult not to get into the mood.

In any case, after we descended the mountain, we took a ricksahw tour of one of the few remaining hutong.

A hutong is a traditional, courtyard-style residence that houses multiple families.  There aren’t many left because the government has been plowing them down and constructing expensive high-rises in their steads.  Generally the only warning a family has that their home is going to be raised is the appearance, overnight, of the character 拆，which means “destroy”, painted on the wall of their building,

Ofte the compensation for hutong residents is abysmal, forcing people to move out into the isolated suburbs where there are inadequate services and the commute into the city is hellishly long.

There are, however, a few remaining hutong, particularly ones considered historically important.  The one we visited was highly valued for some reason, and so is likely safe for a while. I did see that ubiquitous character, though:

To be honest, the highlight of the tour was not seeing this type of neighborhood I’ve been studying for a while in my research on urban planning.  That was really great, too, of course, because I am a major proponent of courtyard-style homes, which are necessarily self-sufficient bubbles and foster really strong communities.

But the real highlight was my first conversation in China, in Chinese, with a Chinese person.

It wasn’t much.  But our rickshaw driver didn’t speak English, and neither did the person I paired up with for the ride, so halfway through, after thinking “Okay, I’ll say something when we pass that red house… our that cart… or those kids… or the bikes…” for a good while, I leaned forward and asked,

“你 叫 什么？“ （What’s your name?)

To which he replied, Zhou, and then asked me something I didn’t understand.  I explained,

“我的中文不好“ （My Chinese is not good), and he laughed.  But we connected on some level, however, basic, and I felt extremely accomplished.

I didn’t include this in my goals, which I should have, but I’m going to really try and put myself out there.

I’ve heard so often that you just need to go up to people and jabber at them in Chinglish, and you will improve eventually.  Also, I’ve heard people say that they regret not being chattier and trying to meet new people, so I hope to avoid that.

We will see, once I’ve moved into the apartment and gotten settled.  I realized tonight that I can look at the events pages on all the Beijing websites I follow and then… go to these things.  It’s amazing.  So I’ll go to concerts, gatherings, dances, whatever, and we’ll see how I do on the “putting yourself out there” front.

Until then, I very much need to get to sleep to wake up early for a cooking class and then a trip out to the Great Wall.