It has taken a full day of recuperation to manage to write this diary entry, and even then I am not sure that this is how the Romans’ wrote forty – amazingly I have managed to write 40,000 words about my new life here in China and starting the agency here since January 25th, 2006.
Taking stock of 2006, I think that I have matured and I realize that China, like age, changes all the time. I got a call to say that our pseudo landlord, who has been charging RMB1500 to issue us a receipt for empty space, now wants RMB500 in case the AIC calls to check if we have really been in the office – a cheeky piece of blackmail and I decided to call their bluff. If the AIC is indeed checking companies who registered in new grade A offices and finds that we were not there at all, or worse still if this landlord elects to snitch on us, then I would rather pay the fine than promote extortion; either way it has put a renewed emphasis on the need to leave Jian Wai SOHO which feels as though it has served its purpose.
One of the main issues that we had this week was that the office was failing to serve its function as a communications hub, disconnected as we all were by the Taiwan earthquake. The quake just to the south of China apparently ruptured 6 submarine cables and we could not access foreign websites, telephony was poor, and I felt marooned. I think that we now need an expression, perhaps ‘terminal tension’, to describe the anxiety of being disconnected from the Internet. We used to run businesses without the Internet as recently as 1995, but now without it, China felt extremely isolated. The issue was compounded by the English language daily not being printed over New Year – the Chinese offices are open on the Saturday and Sunday but closed Monday through Wednesday- which meant I nearly missed the main news of the day.
‘There will be more trouble,’ commented the taxi driver, as he handed me the Chinese tabloid newspaper with a photo of Saddam Hussein, noose around the neck minutes before he was hanged. I was heading out for a Japanese dinner and this taxi driver in a Korean car wanted to discuss the situation in Iraq. It was somehow a burning issue for this Beijing person that this tyrant thousands of miles away was on the black and white cover of his thin paper. Apparently the Chinese Government commented that ‘Iraqi affairs should be determined by Iraqi people,’ but the hanging was a topic in the Chinese and Hong Kong press. I had not seen the photograph before and struggled to find the words in English let alone Chinese as we sped down the snow covered street, mercifully finding the lantern sign posted restaurant before I could find my words.
New Years eve, the western one, is adopted in China but not celebrated in the same way, bringing a calendar change but not a symbolic one. ‘Xin nian kuai le’ (new year happy), said the Chinese waitress dressed in a Kimono bearing warm sake. New Years eve was spent first in this Japanese restaurant with a group of western friends and then we went to a glamorous bar called Lan, designed by Philip Stark. Resplendent in baroque style seating, chandeliers, ceiling high mirrors, and marble and glass tables we were served gin martinis by the staff who as the evening proceeded, lost track of the orders and the bills. Beijing places are becoming very sophisticated but the people in them have yet to arrive at the same point in time. New Years Eve is essentially a western affair, but the bar had a number of Chinese and Middle Eastern people joining in and we chimed in the stroke of midnight with RMB1,100 per bottle champagne and a sense that 2007, the pre- Olympic year would be a prosperous one.
On the first day of 2007 I went for a walk around Chaoyang Lu. There is a 5 hectare park called Tuan Jie Hu which was first cleared from being a kiln factory in 1958 by the locals. For some reason it wasn’t opened to the public for 20 years, but now houses kids' amusements and during this cold spell, has people on dining room chairs with metal runners skating on the large pond. I ducked out of the park heading south towards the central business district and saw a crowd of people. In the shadows of some of the fanciest buildings in Beijing was a street market, with fresh fruit, vegetables, tailoring, a coffin size tank stuffed with upside down fish, and a seated man studiously scraping the rind from a pigs hoof. Two streets and ten minutes later I was back on Chaoyang Lu as if I had never left it, the park and the street market like the insides of a pocket on the suit of Beijing. When ever I grow tired or frustrated, I find myself experiencing real life in China, one that makes this another worldly and wonderful new year.
Xin nian kuai le
