Man Man Zou

We spent a total of 8 full days in Beijing, the longest we’ve ever spent in one place in China. It was well worth our time since we were busy the whole time with full days of sightseeing.

After almost 4 months of visiting semi-famous sites, and paying high admission prices for disappointing places, I’ve become quite negative about tourist sites in China. So I was amazed that in Beijing, almost every place we visited was very fulfilling and more than worth it.

I’ll start with my very favorite place of all- The Forbidden City. For some reason, in Beijing it was called The Palace Museum, so on the day we visited, it took us a while to figure out that the Palace Museum was indeed the same as the Forbidden City. I kept saying, “I don’t want to go to some stupid museum, I want to go to the Forbidden City!”

We stayed at the Forbidden City all day, and I’ve never had such a good time in a “museum”. I’ve become obsessed with people photography on this trip, so I didn’t think I’d like it in the palace because most photos would just be of buildings and still life. But for some reason I went crazy in there, and took the most photos I’ve ever taken on one day in China. There were hundreds of buildings inside the palace, with long photogenic corridors between them. There were many areas where, along the corridors, I could stand and look down the long hall through many nestled doors.

After a few hours of walking around, we got quite cold from the wind chill. Just as I was thinking we needed a break, we walked around the corner of a palace building and what did we see? A Starbucks. Right smack in the center of the Forbidden City was a Starbucks. It seems like such a stupid thing to have, but actually it was a lifesaver. A Mochachino cost more than most of our meals in China, but it reset all of my tiredness and I was ready to go for many more hours. I think Mark, a museum freak, was quite surprised at how much I loved the Forbidden City because usually I don’t like places like that.

The day before we visited the Forbidden City we spent the day in Tiananmen Square, which is directly in front of the palace. It was in Tiananmen Square where I had the ultimate experience that I was hoping to have in China. It was on a busy weekend, and there were hundreds of people milling about in the huge, open square. We were standing around the famous Chairman Mao photo, when I saw a large, dirty van drive through the crowds and actually into the palace. Since I thought it was just a stupid tour group being ignorant to the rules, I didn’t think much of it. But about two minutes later, huge crowds suddenly started pouring out of the palace gates and into the square, followed by a bunch of soldiers pushing them all back. The soldiers were clearing out the palace area, and I didn’t know why. So we stood around for 10 minutes or so at the front lines of where all the soldiers were. Finally, the van drove out of the palace gates and stopped near our big crowd. The van was full of dirty, poor people, all holding signs out their windows and shouting things to all of us. It was a protest! So of course I pulled out my camera and started snapping away. One of the soldiers saw me and got angry and told me to stop. I pretended I couldn’t speak Chinese- that helped. All of the Chinese tourists knew they couldn’t take any photos, but I think they should have, just to stand up to the stupid no-photography rules. Actually, as a side note, people are not allowed to photograph the People’s Liberation Army, even though they’re everywhere around Beijing, especially near the palace and government buildings. While visiting the palace, and Tiananmen Square, I took tons of photos of them and was repeatedly asked not to, but I highly disagree with that rule, so I just kept on shooting. At the protest however, I just took a few shots and then stopped, since I figured tensions were high.

A few minutes later, the soldiers got most of the people out of the van and handcuffed them and took them away. I was furious about this, as I saw poor, dirty-faced old women get handcuffed and carted off. I saw the look of agony on the people’s faces, and I know the way things work in China- the fact that these people had to get so desperate to come to Beijing to make one last attempt to voice their opinion. I’m sure they knew that nothing good would come of their protest, but they likely had no other choice but to try. I was just about to take a photo of a woman being handcuffed and sent to a police van, but then a soldier spotted me and sent another soldier my way. So I just turned around and walked away from the whole scene.

It was a pretty depressing thing, but I’m glad I witnessed it- and at the Tiananmen Square of all places. It tells me that things really are still terrible in China. Protests are held all around the world, but in China they’re typically not tolerated. After witnessing the results of the small protest, it further deepened a strong feeling that I developed during my stay in China: China doesn’t deserve a break in the world- not when China doesn’t even give its own citizens a chance.

One reason China was awarded the 2008 Olympics was to give the country a break, sort of a chance to improve their worldwide status. I strongly disagree with this opportunity China has been given because during these four months, I saw little evidence of a country trying to evolve. With the Olympic games under three years away, they’re still doing things like hiding the fact that 100 tons of carcinogenic chemicals were heading down a river a couple of weeks ago- past many villages for more than a week before the public found out. And even on our last day in China, police staged their own mini Tiananmen massacre when they gunned down protesting peasants and farmers in Guangdong province, killing at least five of them, with 20 more ‘missing’. In my opinion, the only good thing about the Olympics is that it’s delaying any possibility of a cross-straights war- China wouldn’t dare fire on Taiwan before the Olympics.

Well I got that off my chest. Now more about Beijing.

I loved Beijing. The most surprising thing was the food. We haven’t exactly had the most wonderful time food-wise in China. However in Beijing, we had a hard time deciding where to go because of all the choices. And the nicest thing about that was that it was all Chinese food too. We had dumplings or xiaolongbao (similar to dumplings) from different places usually once a day. Dumplings are popular for breakfast. We also had Chinese food at a couple of vegetarian restaurants in town. We had some excellent fake fish that was made from potatoes. Potato skin makes a great substitute for fish skin. We searched a lot of places for vegetarian Peking duck, but didn’t find any until the last day and I wasn’t hungry enough to order it. Luckily for Mark, however, we did go to an excellent restaurant for some real Peking duck. Of course I didn’t eat any, but it smelled really good. At that same restaurant, called Xiao Wang (which translates to “Small Wang”), I had my two favorite Sichuan dishes: Maladofu (spicy tofu), and Yuxiongchiezi (sautéed eggplant). Mark threw up all night after his big Peking duck feast though. Poor Mark.

We also visited a famous part of the Great Wall of China. It was nice to see, but not super exciting. It was actually quite a workout walking along the wall. There were even chairlifts to take tourists up and down, but we didn’t take it. Ugly railings were installed all along the sides of the wall, making photo ops not as plentiful as I had imagined. But at least we saw the most popular section of the wall.

Three more major sites that we visited in Beijing were the Summer Palace- where the Imperial family used to live during the summer, the Temple of Heaven- a famous Ming-dynasty temple and park complex, and the Lama Temple- a Tibetan monastery. All three of those sites were large and interesting, but the disappointments were that the Summer Palace wasn’t nearly as interesting as the Forbidden Palace, the Temple of Heaven lacked the character of a real temple like what can be seen in Taiwan, and the Tibetan Lama Temple was just a joke compared to the Tibetan monasteries we saw on the other side of China.

I was really happy to be able to take in two tourist shows while we were in Beijing. We went to a Chinese acrobat show and I was amazed at the crazy things they could do. I think even Mark was impressed by their superhuman abilities. Another show we went to was a Chinese opera. I see Chinese opera on TV all the time in China but I didn’t see it nearly as often on TV in Taiwan. There were a lot of Chinese opera theatres in Beijing to choose from, but I chose the touristiest one. The reason for that was because they had English subtitles, and they allowed tourists to photograph the performers putting on their make-up before the show. It was an excellent opportunity to be able to photograph them, I’m so happy that we risked it and went to the touristy show. There were also many tour groups of whiteys there, which was a culture shock for me!

On our last day in Beijing, we walked around the hutong- Beijing’s special old town areas. There are several hutong around the city, and the hutong is what is causing a lot of controversy with the Olympics. It is said that the government is demolishing many of these neighborhoods to build new high-rise buildings. Though it’s a pity, I can understand why they are doing so. Beijing, though I love the city the way it is, is in real need of modernization. In most areas around the city, the small buildings are quite rundown and plain looking. I saw very few high-rise buildings, let alone anything that looked remotely modern. Compared to the traditional neighborhoods I enjoyed exploring in my old town of Yuanlin, Taiwan, the hutong areas of Beijing were nothing special. Still, I can see why people would like them to be a protected site, since Beijing will have very few traditional neighborhoods in the near future.

After the hutong, we were free for the rest of the day to go shopping. And shop we did! I loved to finally be set free on the streets to pick up a ton of tourist crap and junk I don’t need. We both refrained from buying things for most of this trip, so I think even Mark had a good time shopping. His first stop was the bookstore, for Chinese poetry written in English, and Chinese music CDs. We shopped until the late evening when everything closed, and even then we weren’t able to purchase everything we wanted.

The next morning we left our hotel at 5:30am for the airport, on our long way home to Canada. It was a big day, to say the least. We only got about three hours of sleep that night, and our day of plane travel was not pleasant. We flew from Beijing to Tokyo, had a 7 hour stopover, then Tokyo to New York, with a 0 minute chaotic stopover that involved us running through the airport at full speed. What happened was that we landed in New York later than expected. We were already getting pretty nervous about catching our next flight, then our pilot announced that our plane had to wait on the runway for 30 minutes until a gate opened up for us. All the planes from Boston had been diverted to New York because of snow, so the JFK airport was at its capacity. Finally a gate opened up for us, but when our plane tried to get in, it was too big and got stuck, so a tow truck had to pull our plane in. After all that delay, when we finally got off our plane it was already boarding time for our connecting flight. America has this wonderful rule that all passengers have to go through customs, uncheck their luggage and walk though inspection, only to recheck the luggage again 10 meters away. It’s a completely pointless rule that no other countries make passengers do, and I had to bite my lip to keep from blowing a spaz as my bag was the last to come off the plane. By the time we got our bags, it was time for our connecting plane to take off, but by a huge miracle, it was delayed. The miracle was due to the fact that our connecting plane was late at arriving from Canada. If it hadn’t been late, our plane would have taken off without us and we would have had to sleep in the airport.

After 30+ hours of sleepless flights, seeing Mt. Fuji, sparkling Manhattan, and the sun rise and set quite a few times from the plane, we finally landed in Toronto. We couldn’t believe our luck, that we had actually made it back. But then, when Mark’s bag failed to come off the plane, we just laughed at our twisted luck we had all day.

It’s nice to be back in Canada, and I’m thankful that I left China on a very good note.