Summer in the City of To-morrow

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 typical sales pitch is to brandish one's wares with the front facing outward, so that the clientele can immediately discern what events and times are being offered. Occasionally the name of the event will be uttered with a hopeful upward lilt: ping pong? track and field? If the clientele demonstrate interest, they are then presented with a ludicrously high initial price, at which point bargaining is supposed to commence.

How one settles on, or even defines, the fair market price for a ticket is a potentially migraine-inducing problem. Prices are extremely time-sensitive and subject to the absurd heights and depths of bubble-type speculation, especially if one is interested in tickets for same-day events. Add to this such factors as the competition among scalpers, the asymmetry of market information between buyers and sellers, the high likelihood of suckers and neophytes among the clientele, the huge variance present among buyers' tastes and financial resources, and each ticket's seemingly insignificant but still morally compelling face value. The microeconomics and game theoretics of this situation are enormously complex and dicey; econ grad students looking for dissertation material beyond some boilerplate on the mechanics of eBay auctions need look no further than the exterior of Beitucheng station's Exit C1 around noon on a sunny day.

It turns out that one stratagem for buying Olympics tickets is to have an obviously foreign (i.e., white) person in your party wait around in the subway exit tunnel, right alongside the horde of scalping agents looking to harvest tickets at a cut rate. If you are lucky, some equally foreign-looking passerby, probably exasperated by local scalpers, will accost you and ask if you're interested in buying his spare tickets. Then you can offer a decent price, say face value plus a token overhead for good-will purposes. In this manner we were able to score tickets for Round 2 men's and women's ping-pong singles for 300RMB per head, an unexpectedly rich bounty at a relatively negligible cost.

The efficiency of this type of transaction hinges on ethnic and linguistic familiarity, friendly small-talk, and at least an apparent lack of profit motive; what Chinese merchants seem not to have grasped (or perhaps, on balance, have not really needed to grasp) is that their ragged, opportunistic English vocabulary and hard-sell bargaining tactics tend to alienate some of the softer foreigners with whom they're trying to do business.

Dan and me had originally planned on scalping tickets to that afternoon's women's basketball semifinal, but with our ping pong coup safely in hand, we headed off to Hooters to watch the CCTV broadcast instead. When my roommate Peter first emailed me about the apartment we'd rented in Beijing, I told him that I was cool with it, so long as it was within walking distance of Hooters. Of course at the time I was joking and had no idea that Beijing even had a Hooters, let alone that it was in fact within walking distance of our apartment.

Hooters has since gone from an object of ironic derision to one of our preferred venues for watching Olympic sports. Each time we're at Hooters and the waitresses commence their regularly-scheduled dance routine, my friends and I look at one another with a kind of what-are-we-doing-here smirk, but the fact that we've gone there at least a half dozen times since the start of the Games belies whatever sarcastic cover we try to erect around ourselves. It's true that Hooters has plenty to dislike. Invariably it provokes a kind of puritan shame or self-revulsion that is itself a little embarrassing; as a patron one feels simultaneously like a pervert and a prude. In Asia, there is the additionally repellent presence of Asshole Foreigners, whose unselfconscious colonial jock flirtations with the waitresses are relentlessly cringe-inducing and also serve as a concrete reminder that you yourself are also an asshole for being there in the first place. But the fact of the matter is that Beijing's Hooters is mostly smoke-free and has excellent televisions with high visibility throughout the premises; one might even say that it is relaxing, in a kind of suburban and stultifying way. Thus its high compatibility with passive sports spectatorship. What's more is that any chivalrous male shame we happen to feel is ultimately traceable to a more fundamental appreciation of the objective physical charms of the service, who despite their ridiculous uniforms and ostensible lack of intellectual vigor are extremely fun to stare at, rank, classify, score on a ten-point scale, or otherwise say quintessentially Assholish things about.

The Olympic ping pong tournament was held off the central Olympic grounds at the Beijing University Gymnasium, which was either built new or wholly renovated for the Olympics. The Beijing Games have if nothing else neatly-prepared facilities and vast armies of blue-shirted BOCOG volunteers to staff them. It's been said that the authorities had offered all non-resident university students studying in Beijing the choice of volunteering for the Olympics or leaving the city for the summer. This has the one-stone-two-birds effect of enlisting the participation of educated and energetic young people while discouraging the exercise of that education and energy in potentially disruptive undertakings. Nonetheless it's not altogether clear why an ultimatum was necessary, since there seems to be no shortage of enthusiasm for the Games among young people, and moreover it's tough to imagine a student-organized protest of meaningful scale occurring in today's urban China. Those days seem, for any number of ideological and institutional reasons, to have long since passed.

Security at Olympic venues matches or surpasses the strictness US airport pre-board checks, although it doesn't quite arouse the latter's sense of urgency and general panic. I suspect this is because there's something about transit on a schedule that's primally annoying or terrifying, whereas the prospect of watching live sports for four hours seems appealing or even kind of therapeutic. Anyway, before you get into an Olympic venue, you're given a full-body wand scan plus the occasional grope, and you have to demonstrate that your digital camera actually takes pictures (presumably to prove that it's not a camera-shaped block of C4 or some such shit) and that your eye drops can safely be dripped into your eyes (ditto, sorta).

Then they tell you to get rid of all food and drink that you've brought with you. This particular scheme's contribution to the overall safety of the event is pretty dubious; its true purpose seems rather to funnel guests to the concession stands supplied by official Olympic caterers. The half-assed wretchedness of venue food service might be one Beijing unpleasantry that's actually been understated by the international media. Stadiumgoers wait in long lines for bun-less wieners on a stick; the less patient settle for plastic-wrapped bricks of unadorned white bread and half-pint cartons of watery yogurt packaged with a minuscule folding spoon. But the pinnacle culinary atrocity might be the "crispy noodles" snack, which is nothing more than uncooked instant ramen pre-mixed with its spice packet. The crispy noodles furnish the eater with an awesome fifty-seven percent of the daily recommended allowance of sodium, and are almost certainly a product of the kind of freshman-dorm mating of ingenuity and sloth that begat KFC's Famous Bowl (now known infamously as "a failure pile in a sadness bowl") or Taco Bell's double-decker (in Dan's shrewd rendering, "a taco taco").