Not Ready for Prime Time

My trepidation about visiting China began when I went to the consulate in San Francisco to apply for a visa.

I hadn’t planned to go to China at all this spring; in fact, the only reason that China came up as a possibility was that Air China is a Star Alliance partner with United Airlines and I was using my accumulated United miles to get to my main destination, the island of Bali, in Indonesia. When the United agent suggested routing my journey through Beijing, with a layover on the way home, I thought, Why not?

I drove up to the consulate on a rainy Wednesday in early February, only to find it closed for Chinese New Year. The following Tuesday, I drove up again and this time found the Consulate open for business. I walked past the handful of people protesting the government’s treatment of the Falun Gong group, stepped inside, took a number and an application and sat down to wait. When my number was called, shortly before the office closed for lunch, I headed to the appropriate window and slid my application over the transom.

“Do you have a letter from your employer?” the clerk asked, to my surprise. I had given my occupation as writer/teacher.
“No, I’m not employed right now. I work as a contract teacher, but I’m on sabbatical now,” I explained.
“What kind of writing do you do?”
“I write about travel and food,” I replied, and wrote the address of my website on the margin of the application.
The clerk called a supervisor over.
“Do you write about politics?” the other woman asked.
“No, nothing political,” I answered. She hadn’t defined what she meant by political and I decided that my pieces on the environment didn’t fall into the same sensitive category as, say, human rights or Tibet.
“There was a woman who said she wrote cookbooks, but she was arrested,” the supervisor said, giving the impression that the woman had lied. “You’re welcome to visit China as a guest but nothing political.”
By this time, I was wondering why I hadn’t given my occupation as artist or English teacher, which would also have been true, rather than writer. I came back the next day and picked up my visa, which the clerk affixed to my passport with no further adieu. Ironically, I had had no intention of writing anything political about China, or even of writing anything at all about China, but with the supervisor’s grilling and veiled threat, I had essentially been handed something to write about.

It was March 26 when I arrived at the newly opened Terminal 3 in Beijing for a three-hour layover on my way to Bali. I followed the signs for transit passengers and stopped at the immigration desk, behind which was a young woman. I was her only customer, but she looked around for help, as though she didn’t know what to do. Finally, she examined my passport and visa, stamped the visa and waved me through.
The airport terminal was enormous, obviously expensive, and virtually empty. There were a few shops selling handicrafts, or Olympic souvenirs, or the usual multinational duty-free perfume/cigarettes/alcohol. I found a restaurant serving Italian food; to my surprise, the banana split arrived before the pasta. There were gaggles of young, uniformed Chinese employees, but not nearly enough customers to keep them busy. Their command of English was minimal, like that of the Air China flight attendants. For example, on the flight, the two attendants in my vicinity were able to ask if I would like fruits with cheese, but neither could understand nor answer an expected follow-up question, “What kind of fruits?” ) I wondered if this was deliberate; it certainly would prevent the Chinese from answering any question the government might deem political.

Fast forward nearly three weeks. I was nervous about my return trip through Beijing. So nervous that I only booked the hotel a couple of nights before and had made no plans of what to do or see during my 40 hours there, beyond a tour of the Great Wall and the Forbidden City. I chose the hotel based on a description in a magazine, DestinAsian, which I found on Bali. The Emperor was described as a newly-opened boutique hotel whose rooftop bar offered a view of the Forbidden City (and indeed, this was one of the highlights of the hotel.) I had had mixed experiences at boutique hotels in the past, most recently in Cairo, but I’m a sucker for cool design (witness my loyalty to Apple Computers). My room at the Emperor was on the turquoise floor and the room was done entirely in white and turquoise, which happens to be my favorite color. Unfortunately the service was not quite up to the same level as the interior design. For example, when I arrived at the hotel at 1 in the morning, it took 30 minutes to check in, despite the fact that there were two clerks and I was their only arriving guest. Leading me to my room, one of the young clerks said, somewhat dejectedly, “I guess you don’t want to play the game.” Instead of room numbers, the hotel uses names of emperors and arriving guests apparently can make a game of finding the room whose name matches that on their key card. “No, I’m too tired to play a game,” I muttered.

The next morning, the staff apologized for the check-in delay. After a prodigious breakfast that included sliced fruits served on a mirror, I asked about getting a taxi to the Great Wall. “You don’t have enough time to see the wall today, I think. They’re repairing the causeway and it will take you more than one hour, maybe more than two hours, to get there. I think you should see the Forbidden City today. You will have to come back to see the Great Wall. Two days is not enough time to see all of the things to see in Beijing,” the young employee insisted. I acquiesced to his suggestion, but now I wish I had braved the traffic to see the Great Wall, even if it took two hours to get there, which, after all, is considerably shorter than the amount of time I spent flying to get to Beijing in the first place.

So off I went to the Forbidden City. As soon as I crossed the threshold of the North Gate, a young woman came up to me, offering a tour in English. She was a Beijing native and had a wealth of information at her fingertips. When I expressed an interest in learning more about the Empress Cixi, she tailored the tour, pointing out the places where Cixi had lived and ruled. At the end of a couple of hours, she introduced me to a friend of hers, a rickshaw driver, for a tour of the Hutongs, a nearby area of old, one-story houses built around courtyards.

Interestingly, these rickshaw drivers were far more willing to transport a foreigner than the taxi drivers who either wouldn’t stop at all or who had trouble following the bilingual map on the hotel’s business card. Indeed, whenever I stopped a local and asked for help with my bilingual map, at least half the time I could expect the person to wave their hand, dismissing me. Was their reaction because I was a foreigner or because they didn’t want to deal with the language barrier? Recalling the days, not that long ago, when Chinese who spoke to foreigners would be interrogated by the police, I wondered how the government could expect its cautious citizenry to suddenly be open and friendly to the foreign tourists in their midst. Maybe during the actual days of the Olympics, the situation will be different, but I was left with the feeling that Beijing, and her people, are not yet ready for prime time.