Summer in the City of To-morrow

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.

Just when you think you have tired of all translation mishaps and unintentional cross-cultural punning, China comes out with Pabst Blue Ribbon bottled water. You can't get very far without hearing a thirsty Beijing hipster shouting, "Heineken? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!"

Modeling the PBR is Peter Leykam, one of a gaggle of semi-pro anthropologists and academics with whom I'm forced to hang out this summer. Peter and I shared an independent study on Chinese consumerism while back in Santa Cruz. He is also my roommate for the summer.

On a side note, all bottled water in mainland China is referred to using the decidedly prolix term 矿泉水, or "mineral water", although I've been assured that most of it comes straight out of a (filtered?) tap at the bottling plant.

While they haven't achieved Tokyo-class congestion and intercommuter violence thus far, Lines 1, 2, and 13 of the Beijing subway are certifiable clusterfucks in their own right and stand only to get worse as Olympic tourists arrive and municipal street traffic restrictions tighten. I once spotted an attendant patrolling the platform with rubber gloves (viz., for mashing protruding riders into subway cars so the doors can shut), which is an ominous presence for subway passengers if there ever was one.

Halfway in frame is Dan Husman, recently-anointed PhD candidate from the Berkeley anthropology department. His research interests are wide-ranging and he's yet to settle on a focused dissertation topic, although his theories on why Chinese people are so sneaky seem an all-but-watertight foundation for tenure in greybeard Sinology and a lucrative publishing career.

While purchasing granola at a foreigner's supermarket, I stumbled upon a display of sun-stenciled peaches advertising the Beijing Games. The appearance of local fruit now seems to me like a pretty good qualitative measure of how deeply a particular branding concept has penetrated the mainstream. Let's just say that most people around Beijing are aware that there's an Olympics going on in town this summer.

As I got ready to take this picture, I was intercepted by not one but three roving staff who informed me that it was against store policy to take photos on the premises. Relative to their American counterparts, store staff in China are both far more numerous and far more nosy, which tempts the idea that they double as a kind of anti-shoplifting and/or anti-photography security force (and more on the city's security later). I took the picture anyway, and asked them if the peaches had been genetically-engineered with Olympics labels. For reasons related to my delivery and the yawning culture gap tragically in our midst, the joke went totally unlaughed-at.

Here we find further evidence that China is far and away the most postmodern place in the world. This particular topic probably deserves a whole summer's worth of essays in itself, so you can expect me to revisit this idea at least once.