Olympic handball's fun to watch if it's your first time, but is ultimately not a great sport, with apologies to the athletes and their fans. The pros: occasionally exciting passing plays; superb sportsmanship and camaraderie between players on opposing teams, and this despite a very physical style of play; and not least, rabid European-style fandom. And the cons: silly rules and penalties, reminiscent of the kind of improvised indoor sports one plays in gym class on a rainy day; defensive plays as uninteresting as the primary scoring mechanic, which FYI is throwing a small ball into a ridiculously large goal; extreme ease of scoring; the fact that the goalies really seem upset when people score on them, even though it happens about nine times out of every ten legitimate shot attempts they face; and a prioritizing of offense over defense that seems absurdly out of balance—imagine playing a game of chess in which all the pawns have been replaced with queens, and you will get something that approximates handball's awkward skew. Oh and let's not forget the presence of an arena announcer straight out of the Busch League, whose interjections over the PA about how Exciting the game is—"What an exciting game we've got!", "This game's gonna go down to the wire!", etc. etc.—are suspiciously reassuring and seem almost compensatory, as if they're a coded admission that the game's actual content isn't really all that exciting to begin with.
Ping pong is nominally an international sport, but its upper echelons are filled overwhelmingly with Chinese nationals and mercenary recruits of Chinese origin. Since there's a fixed amount of space on the Chinese national team, some of the lesser players gain expedited citizenship in other countries in order to compete in the Olympics. As a result, nations as diverse as Holland, Austria, the Domincan Republic, Singapore, the US, and Taiwan are represented by athletes born and trained in mainland China. The women's singles Round of 16 encompassed nine nations, but of the sixteen competitors in the bracket, at least eleven were direct exports from the mainland. The men's Round of 16 showed slightly more diversity, with China-born players composing only about half of the bracket.
Nationality, or more specifically who ought to represent a nation, is a pretty tricky concept and probably should be spared of any snap judgments and coarse generalizing. But there is clearly something fishy going on with the national composition of certain Olympic events, the most egregiously fishy of which is surely table tennis. The IOC's own definition of nationality appears to be something like naturalized citizenship. The open-endedness of this criteria is ostensibly in the spirit of national self-determination, but in an era of medal-count prestige wars and fame- or profit-seeking athletes with loose patriotic sensibilities, it produces such manifest absurdities as corn-fed midwesterners Chris Kaman and Becky Hammon playing for European national basketball squads and the unrestrained stockpiling of Chinese players in the international table tennis arms race.
Olympics tickets had originally been distributed to the public via a lottery system that was designed to keep prices low enough for spectators of modest means, but latecomers with cash to spare can buy access to events through the scalpers' markets that infest the respective vicinities of Olympic venues around the city. Emerging from the Beitucheng subway station at the foot of the Olympic Green, I found the sidewalks clogged by a bustling, multi-ethnic hobo colony of enterprising riffraff and their bargain-seeking clientele. Informal resale of Olympics tickets is strictly against the law, although the enforcement of this statute seems to stop at placing warning signs at regular intervals in scalper hotspots. As a kind of allegory of the overall gap between Chinese law's formal rigor and the milquetoast laxity of its implementation, scalpers tend to use these signs for shade, or as makeshift tables or lean-tos during their transactions.
The three most popular athletes in China are Liu Xiang (刘翔), Guo Jingjing (郭晶晶), and Yao Ming (姚明). Yao, of course, is familiar to anyone who's even remotely interested in the goings-on of American professional basketball, but his relatively middling marketing presence on TV ads and billboards around Beijing betrays his second- or third-rate status in the eyes of the Chinese public. For all of his laurels—first non-American ever taken first overall in the NBA draft, repeat All-Star, dark horse MVP candidate, exemplary ambassador of sport and international good-will—Yao lacks definitively the qualities that have enabled Liu and Guo to capture the imagination of 21st-century Chinese idolatry: speed, grace, good looks, and the claim that each is the best in the world at what he or she does.
Liu Xiang, a record-breaking hurdler who won a gold medal at Athens in 2004, may be the single most popular person in China. His actual achievements, amazing as they may be, actually seem pretty meager next to the adoration he receives. A year ago, a Hong Kong newspaper poll invited young women to consider which male notable they would like most to be the father of their child. Liu Xiang came in near the top, alongside the likes of Bill Gates and David Beckham. Needless to say, surveys of this kind are extremely dumb and vapid, but dumbness and vapidity do offer up their own kind of cultural barometer; after all, one has to wonder why Liu might be held in this sort of regard in the first place. What does Liu Xiang, handsome Olympic hurdler, represent to his countrymen?
While searching for places to watch the Olympics, I stumbled upon a shopping mall in the northeast corner of the city called 蓝色港湾, also known in English as Solana. Aside from the Chinese staff, there's nothing whatsoever about Solana to indicate that it's not actually some upscale Westfield development you'd find in over-built LA county exurbs like Irvine or Santa Clarita. The complex was built in a pseudo-opulent Vegas style, with covered walkways and patterned outdoor floor tile and projectile fountain shows, and you get end-to-end generic brand shopping, all Nike and Starbucks and Coldstone Creamery for a solid quarter mile. If there was ever a sign of the homogenized lifestyles of the globalized middle class, this has got to be it.
Friday night's opening ceremony was cause for a national holiday of sorts: nobody went to work except for restaurant and retail staff, cab drivers, and cops. This was officially sanctioned, but its very plausibility, i.e., the fact that it actually seemed like a sensible thing to do in the first place, is yet another indication of the psychic omnipresence of the Games. In the US, it'd be extremely hard to imagine this kind of improvised interruption of routine taking place. Really, the only American analog that comes to mind is 9/11.
With the first few days of the Games having gone so smoothly, it seems a little strange after the fact to mention a real specter of fear in the air immediately prior to the start of the opening ceremony. In the evening the city center had been emptied of most private-car street traffic, resulting in an eerie urban landscape of voided wide avenues, taxis, and countless numbers of police and other pseudomilitary-looking personnel and their vehicles. I'd heard of people declining tickets to the opening ceremony out of fear of a terrorist attack; friends of friends recommended this venue or that for watching the TV broadcast but themselves declined to leave home for the night.
Of course, the tension could also be attributed to the sheer weight of expectations. I'm guessing most people are familiar with the weirdly stark contrast between between what one anticipates and how one actually feels when the moment comes along. The former is at once the realm of wildly creative and unrealistically pleasant fantasy, on the one hand, and abject dread and anxiety, on the other. In some sense, the actual event of the Beijing Olympics can't come close to matching the intensity of the anticipation that preceded it. People have literally lived inside of those expectations, and they have done so for half a decade. Alongside whatever astonishment or pride resulted from Zhang Yimou's maximalist pyrotechnics must surely have been one giant, collective sigh of relief.
The Olympic torch has finally arrived in Beijing, after being hauled through an interminably controversy-laden circuit around the world. At nearly every leg, the torch was met with protests, counter-protests, media frenzy, brawls, and enterprising hecklers with fire-extinguishers. And if this wasn't enough, the torch barely missed passing through yet another earthquake in Sichuan province just before reaching the capital. All said, one probably ought to look some place other than the torch relay for auspicious signs for the summer Games.
Public security personnel around town sport a pretty wide spectrum of variously dorky headgear: berets, 8-point police hats, peaked caps, and bomb-squad hardhats all abound, and I saw at least two patrols of maroon-clad yokels stuffed sullenly into what appeared to be kaiser helmets, I shit you not. Beijing's own riff on the canon is the long-billed baseball cap, which is innocuous in concept but actually just silly enough to be vaguely intimidating when worn earnestly.
Funny hats aside, the true sartorial marker of street-level authority is the epaulet, worn by everyone from embassy guards in full military garb to mall security and parking attendants in t-shirts. The city seems ready to drown in epaulets. You find them in the subway stations and on the sidewalks. They fill the lobbies of hotels, drug stores, museums, and supermarkets. They signify that one ought to Stay On The Sidewalk or Get Off The Grass. Occasionally they direct you to check your bag in front, or to place your belongings in an X-ray scanner. Mostly, though, they sag upon the shoulders of listless young people who might or might not understand that the essence of their job is exactly to be seen standing around, wearing epaulets.
The intersection of the 3rd Ring Road and Gongti Beilu, very near my apartment in the outskirts of Sanlitun, joins in unholy union at least four lanes of traffic in each cardinal direction. I can confirm anecdotally that it is not nearly the most ideal venue for blasting And Justice For All... through one's earbuds, as is probably the case with any space where cars take precedence over trivialities such as human life. Note the high information-density traffic lights, which really take some getting used to.
Line 1 of the Beijing subway system runs east-west along the latitudinal center of the capital, connecting a regular murderer's row of the city's major landmarks, including Tiananmen Square, the newly-built National Theater, Wangfujing, and the World Trade Center. Only three years ago Line 1 was a mechanical intestine of Soviet charm and mildewed white tile, one populated with a motley horde of sweating passengers, incontinent toddlers, and ticket-vending trolls whose resemblance to humanity was occasionally striking. Nowadays, after what can be conservatively described as sweeping renovations, you will find the same spaces by and large pleasant, a relative change that's both amazing and downright credulity-straining.
Nonetheless the modern world might never rid itself of its cynics. My friends and I have thus far spent a dozen-plus subway trips around Beijing feeling almost impressed with the new subway system. Even as we relished the automated, swipe-operated turnstiles and gale-force A/C, we were griping more or less continuously about how dumb it was that some station exits have two escalators going up but none going down, or how transfer hallways contain inexplicable slight inclines or abrupt zig-zags of stairs, or the fact that the monitors on Line 13 list the absolute time gap between trains but for whatever reason don't actually tell you how long you have to wait until the next train, or how if one looks hard enough one might still find a flustered parent holding a defecating child aloft over the mouth of a platform wastebasket. On numerous occasions I observed that the Beijing subway system was not quite world-class. I once described the laminate surface of a particular set of columns as Puke Formica.
I was also not above cheap shots: when asked to guess the name of a tile texture that looked something like the sand filler found in high-use institutional ashtrays, I volunteered sky blue.
Some years ago I encountered the claim that New York is the only real city that America has. It was in something written by Joseph Heller, but I forget exactly what. Since then I've had this special affection for delirious screeds about what exactly constitutes a Real City, and based on that, what cities make the list. I agree, with Heller, that New York qualifies, but San Francisco and Los Angeles ultimately do not. I have never been to France, but from what I've read, I'm inclined to believe that Paris is a Real City. Asia is full of Real Cities: Tokyo and Osaka are exemplary, China has Shanghai at the very least, and even a neglected and seemingly second-tier burg like Taipei passes muster.
The Real City's a slippery construct. In the past, over the course of many rants, I have claimed that a Real City needs to speak many languages, it must be traversable by foot, it needs open spaces where complete strangers pass each other in proximity, it needs cheap ethnic food and well-patronized libraries and good mass transit and bohemias rising and decaying and a music scene with history. Now, this sort of play of arbitrary definitions and inanely nerdy categorizing is usually no better than food for lazy thoughts, very much a close cousin to conspiracy theory or classically ludicrous Internet kerfuffles like whether the USS Enterprise would win in a cross-dimensional dogfight against an Imperial Star Destroyer. In general, the exercise operates on a combination of pseudoscience, the highly selective application or liberal manufacture of fact, and pure farce. As such one can invent all kinds of criteria for what a Real City is, but the label in turn might only signify its criteria, i.e., it's no more than the sum of its parts. Which of course limits the whole conversation, then, to a geographical hipness war, viz., I Would Only Ever Live In A Real City or I Come From a Real City ergo My Shit Is Hot, etc. etc.
I'm still tempted to think that there is a worthy substrate to the idea of a Real City, something like the essential antipode to everything that's invariably lamentable and bad about cities, say squalor or loneliness or slums or violence. Maybe the Real City is about the spirit of public life that brings people of different ethnicities and classes to share the same everyday places, about the juxtaposing of different cultures and the creative stimulation that comes as a result. It might be about the things we feel that we lose when we move out to the suburbs, where we demand to own our own spaces and to dictate the disposition and mien of our neighbors.
From most angles, China tends to be a study in gigantism; whatever's experienced anywhere else, China has probably done it on a far larger scale. The architectural monuments are grander and more imposing, the factories and dams more massive, the geography more extreme, the population more numerous, the classical innovations more sophisticated and the atrocities more horrific, the pace of change, on the whole, harder and faster and more erratic. This is the marrow of most reflection on China through the ages, from Marco Polo and Coleridge singing hymns on the Mongols, to Qianlong wagging his cultural endowment in the faces of the British, to Fairbank or Wakemen or Spence clearing whole forests with their college primer texts, to any given 21st-century business periodical sizing up the new China market, spittle fresh on chin and with cartoon yuan-signs for pupils. As a general rule, reading about the place becomes a tour of one sweeping cliche to the next. But China's bigness, the sheer weight of its historical footfalls, is a narrative conceit that quickly becomes uninteresting, not so much for its lack of subtlety or its monotony, but rather from the difficulty of comprehending what truth it does in fact contain. Try, for example, to consider the actual significance of certain familiar statements, say a figure like one-point-three billion people, or the idea that everyday life has never changed more quickly for any society in human history. These are facts that seem to beg a kind of reverence or wonder, but they are large to the point of real absurdity. Superlatives at this scale are eerie; they seem to degenerate into meaningless abstractions. Something like the word astronomical seems apt in the directly metaphorical sense—you might as well be contemplating the distance between the stars.
Past midnight on a weekday, almost nothing happens in the arrival terminal of Beijing International. Since there's no crowd, you pass through customs right away; the guy doesn't even make you fill out the form where you check the box saying you've got nothing unusual to declare. All the convenience stores are closed and the currency exchange went cash-only hours ago. The only commotion comes from the other people coming off your flight, and an army of janitors scrubbing down the luggage conveyors. The janitors might outnumber the travelers, a fact that, as we'll later explore, is more than likely to do with the BEIJING OLYMPICS logo stenciled every few feet along into the staggered rubber slats of the conveyor belts.
You'll find more janitors standing at attention in the bathrooms, the weirdly immaculate cleanliness of which is pretty surreal when you're coming off of 24 solid hours of transit. You can see your face off the floor tiles and urinals. But there's a generically septic whiff in the air that somehow sticks around, in spite of the gleam of all the surfaces. I wonder if the janitors in the bathroom can smell it, after all the time they've spent in there.
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