Different Strokes

(Lindsay)

At first I thought the music was piped throughout the grounds, but as we walked along the open-air Long Corridor of Beijing’s Summer Palace, the tune became louder and more distinct, a drum, definitely, a saxophone and an erhu, and many voices in unison. It was about 9:00 in the morning. Who practices at 9:00 on a Saturday morning? I asked Kelly, our guide. “Come see,” she said, and we left the corridor, ascended some granite stairs around a bend of bushes and there they were, hundreds of older men and women, holding music or clustered around music stands, singing. Not just singing, but joyously singing a folk tune about Beijing. Their enthusiasm was overflowing. Many threw their hands in the air in motion with the music, and one woman even danced, while clutching a piece of embroidered green cloth in each hand to emphasize the festive nature of the song. They all finished the first song with a flourish and began another, this time one about swallows. I asked Kelly if this was a holiday. No, it was not a holiday. Did they just sing on weekends? No. “They come here every day. They are retired. They just come here to sing.”

Can you imagine? China is no more perfect than the U.S.—it is smoggy and noisy, and, while men are not required to retire until they are 65, women must retire at 55—but there is a lot to love here. You won’t find what there is to love about China in a book or on the nightly news. You have to come here to put the pieces together, to gain some understanding of the human dimensions of China’s difficult history. On this day we had come to see the Summer Palace. Begun around 1122 by the emperor at that time, the buildings and grounds were expanded and reconfigured through successive dynasties to reach completion in 1885. They are vast and beautiful, and were all for the enjoyment of one person, the emperor or empress dowager, until 1949, when the entire complex was turned over to the people. How many slaved over those centuries to build the road from the Forbidden City, to dredge the pond to create the picturesque Kunming Lake, to build the many pavilions, to prune and sweep and make the beds and bear the water and bring the food all for one person? And when the injustice boiled over, how many millions perished in the Taiping Rebellion, the Communist Revolution, and how many starved thereafter? And yet, here they are, happy and healthy. Every Chinese family has more than a page or two in this saga, and you can hear their history in their voices.

“The Chinese people don’t swim,” Kelly said. Of course, this is a generalization, but Kelly went on to point out that China was never much of a seafaring nation. We were standing on the plaza between the Water Cube and the Bird’s Nest in the Olympic Village, built for the games of 2008. Neither is open to the public, but it was fun to stand there and imagine the thousands who came to the games seven years ago. In the distance was a tall building, shaped somewhat like a cluster of mushrooms, that wasn’t there at the time of the Olympics. Called the “Sight-seeing Building,” it is almost complete. Kelly did not know much about it other than that it is supposed to have a restaurant at the top. Makes me wonder what China expects to host in the future. Whatever it is, I hope it does come to pass. Some analysts suggest that the economy, which has been thriving, is slowing down, but you wouldn’t know it what with the buildings going up on every horizon.

There is a buzz of prosperity in the air, not just in Beijing, but in every city we’ve visited. On this day the 798 Art Factory was hopping. The “factory” is a series of old buildings housing galleries of contemporary art. While artists in China must be approved by the government, and works that are critical of the government are a no-no, we found one or two pieces that definitely had an edge.

But is there a strong undercurrent here thirsting for democracy? That night we had dinner with Emi, the woman we met in Shaxi, and her husband, Brent, a professor who operates the Education Abroad Program in Beijing for the University of California. “All they want is stability,” Brent said. “After all, look at what they’ve been through.”