On an empty and hungry stomach, I headed out to meet Hunter. I assumed we would get breakfast together, but I was wrong. It was raining again today. Deep clouds roofed Beijing and darkened the streets, protecting them from most all the cheeriness the sun would have brought. Hunter and I pushed our way onto the crowded subway, he maintaining a steady conversation all the while. Today I felt I was better able to decipher his thick Beijing accent and catch the words that flew out of his mouth like they really needed to be somewhere immediately, or perhaps he was just laying it on a bit thinner and speaking more slowly out of pity.
We got off the subway with hoards of others, and were swept up the stairs and into the main entrance way where several entrepreneurs were slinging umbrellas. I bought one before we surfaced in the middle of Tiananmen Square, pausing only briefly before going in the (now not) Forbidden City, or Imperial Palace.
The palace is massive, and the architecture and scale of the place push you back in time. Still, when you get past the structures, or rather inside them (as far as they let you), the most conspicuous thing is how empty they are. Hunter commented on what I already knew, "All the relics were moved to Taipei." Moved was a kind of polite euphemism though, as most Chinese are of the opinion they were stolen and just stashed in Taipei.
In some ways this is kind of neat. That China holds the house and Taiwan holds the furniture, while frequently the basis of some political tensions, also serves as a unifying force and a reminder of a not disparate but rather a shared history. I did not feel like voicing this opinion to Hunter, though, and just nodded my head when he asked if I had been to the Palace Museum in Taipei where the ancient pieces are held.
We went to the Temple of Heaven where for the first time since my arrival in Beijing the clouds cleared. The break in the overcast sky was somewhat monumental for me: I had been unable to shake the feeling the Beijing was a dark, dreary place. What I did not realize is that this sentiment was mostly if not entirely attributable to the weather. I had been so caught up trying to understand what people were saying to me, and understanding where I was, and deciding what I should be doing, and all the while not feeling very happy about the whole situation, that I had failed to realize my world had been turned on its head. I had come from sunny, hot Tainan to cold, cloudy Beijing, and while on the surface the two environments were largely similar, I felt there was something hiding just below, something sucking the life out of the city I found myself in.
Turns out it was just cloudy. (I realized it is probably fortunate I am returning to Seattle during the summer months.)
Like jumping from hot springs into a cold pool, we left antiquity for the bustling, modern shopping district, where I ran into the first McDonald's I spotted to buy a chocolate fudge sundae. Despite the cold weather it made me feel much more at ease. I could be in any city in the world, but America could still be found in the friendly neighborhood McDonald's. This desire for the familiar took me by surprise. I was having difficulty reconciling the fact that even after two and a half days I was still not able to settle into my surroundings, surroundings that I imagined would have been less than foreign to me after a year and a half in Taiwan. Perhaps it was precisely this very unconscious expectation that I would be able to sweep into Beijing like I owned the place, and that expectation's ultimate betrayal, that led me to buy that chocolate sundae.
Hunter capped off the day by taking me to a famous tea house, 老舍茶館. Diplomats of all flavors visit here, and it has been established as a kind of Beijing landmark. The tea is not really worth mentioning, though the entertainment was somewhat fun. I think the place is famous, and the tickets were as expensive as they were, simply because fame becomes a kind of self-reinforcing fiction after a certain amount of time, and observance and recognition of it likewise become obligatory. Fortunately, a few days later, the Great Wall would not lead me to have similar feelings.
During our visit to the tea house Hunter explained to me that Obama had not been too good to China since his inauguration, what with meeting the Dalai Lama and all. In the same breath he told me how great Wen Jiao Bao is. I did not argue, but smiled. I do not know much about Wen Jiao Bao, and from the Chinese point of view Obama probably had not been doing anyone any favors by meeting with the Dalai Lama. But, this kind of national pride was increasingly taking form for me, and I was increasingly intrigued by it. It seemed not to be a tempered pride, a pride saddled with any kind of burden, but rather a young, springy pride, anxious to leap into the future. Just for this reason I also found it overly confident, and misinformed.
On the other hand, the contrast to my own admitted lack of exuberance toward my own country was somewhat humiliating. Earlier in the day Hunter had asked me what America's national anthem was and after long thought and amazement at my lack of knowledge (or caring) I began humming "America the Beautiful," only to be corrected by him. Still, I told myself knowledge of one's national anthem is not necessarily indicative of one's grasp on reality.
