I’ve said it to more than a few people since being back but it still amazes me. Chinese New Year’s in China itself isn’t the well-organized and police-escorted parade it is in most places outside of the mother country. Yes, it is still a celebration of spring and renewal, but most of all it is a chance to enjoy sanctioned explosions with your neighbors. The Chinese invented fireworks, of course, and they sure as hell act like it, setting them off as naturally as a terrified bystander running for cover.
I have never seen a fireworks display like the one we witnessed in Beijing. In fact, ‘display’ is the wrong word but the most accurate term we Americans can ascribe to a bunch of fireworks going off once. We are all used to gathering in groups and looking up at usually one, or a few, designated locations in the sky where we see intermittent bursts of color and noise while sighing alongside a loved one. Everyone “oohs” and “aahs” while holding red Solo cups filled with Michelob. In China, I thought our tiny corner of Beijing was under attack.
What really made the Chinese New Year more worthwhile was our tiny corner of Beijing. Our unwieldy group of nine people, flown in from various points stateside, converged on a tiny member of the Super 8 hotel chain. Our hotel was tucked inside a hutong. While every Chinese city contains some hutong, Beijing is renowned for their version of the dense, ancient network of alleyways where hundreds of thousands, even millions, of Chinese still live. Simple one-block stretches of hutong are usually filled with dozens of small stores and vendors selling anything you can think of. Street food, though, is really where the hutong earns its rep. All day and late into the night the enticing smells of small charcoal grills and skewered buns or shrimp waft their way out of the hutong and onto the main drags they branch off from.
We were nowhere near any of the large tourist hotels, many of them only recently erected. Ditto for most chain stores and chotchke shops. Essentially, we were locals. Jazz, Easle’s girlfriend who could not be with us, was a travel agent and had pulled the necessary strings — a very Chinese thing to do — and gotten us a great deal on a room for nine nights. Due to some of the worst winter weather the country has ever experienced in its interior, we were pretty much stranded in the capital for that long stretch.
Nine nights anywhere and faces start to become familiar. It’s also ample time for relationships, on some level, to be established. Just around the corner from the ‘8’, was a tiny spec of a restaurant. There wasn’t a door, just long, clear plastic strips that were annoying to walk through and which presented a new etiquette dilemma: Is it considered polite to hold the strips back for the person behind you?
At most there were about four tables and the place was run by a very hospitable and gracious family. The mother was a lean, dynamic woman who took orders, worked the register and bossed everyone else around. She was somewhat attractive in her aggressive way and I know that at least Riggs and I were thinking PG-13 thoughts. Her niece was a shy, fifteen-year old girl with rosy red cheeks who seemed to jump right off the pages of a manga comic. She was a sweetheart who always took our orders in a very tame, yet high voice and always with a smile. We rarely saw the father as he was usually in the kitchen doing all the cooking.
Oh, and then there was Tommy. He was the only son — a very Chinese thing to be — and he spent his days happily running around the restaurant with his toys and whining to his mother. Seeing his performance everyday was always a gentle reminder that kids are the same everywhere, at every age and in any language. It also seemed that, on his wilder days, his mother was quietly grateful for China’s one child policy.
Our days in Beijing would usually start off at that nameless, loveable hole-in-the-wall restaurant where we would usually feast on countless plates of steamed dumplings. Filled with either spinach or meat, or both, we would liberally dip them into angry black pools of soy sauce and red pepper mash. Some breakfast meals would consist of steaming bowls of homemade noodles in a pork broth. During the frigid and very dry Beijing winters, nothing was more soothing and replenishing than those noodles and I took the opportunity to order them whenever I could.
We also ended most evenings at the restaurant, sucking down oversized bottles of Tsing-Tao beer for the hilarious ransom of about thirty cents each. Always interesting how the cheapest, skunkiest beer there is doesn’t quite taste so bad when buying an entire round is less than the cost of buying a single beer in the States would be. In fact, every beer that passed my lips on the entire trip, regardless of brand, tasted just like the bottle before it. They kept bringing out more bottles of the stuff as fast as we could empty them.
All of this frequent eating and drinking led, naturally, to a rapport with the family who ran that little kitchen. We would wave to them as we walked past their window every morning and they would wave back. They would smile as our large group ordered enough food (even as a “snack”) to clothe Tommy till his fifteenth birthday. If we saw one of the family members milling about the hutong, Easle would say something in Mandarin and we would all reflexively smile at them as if we agreed.
On the eve of New Year’s, myself and most of the males in our group, made our usual twenty meter trip from the ‘8’ to the restaurant for several beers and food we weren’t really hungry for. With the two females in the group always crashing early, it was a chance to pepper our conversations with more profanity and genitalia than normal. Amongst the dumplings, Easle introduced us all to a bottle of hard liquor — emphasis on hard — called baijiu which tasted like really cheap, abrasive brandy. Baijiu is supposed to be for special occasions but trying to swallow the stuff made me wonder what the Chinese drank when they were depressed.
At about 11:30pm, the mother of the house came to our table to tell us in decent English that we should step outside the restaurant as they are about to set off fireworks. We quickly backed away from the baijiu and exited through the plastic strips in to the cold night air. The cramped hutong was even more so as all the residents came out of their dwellings and began to light fireworks of various shapes, sizes and colors. Within roughly five minutes of being outside, the sky was ablaze and we were surrounded by loud shooting sounds. My group and I were stunned. It was like standing next to the launching pad right before the space shuttle took off. I motioned to Jeff and he went back to the ‘8’ to fetch the fireworks we had bought and his video camera. He was back in no time and we quickly ripped open the red tissue paper so we could join in the quickly escalating fun.
The explosions igniting around us, I couldn’t help but think of how the environment I was in would be considered dangerous in the States. For starters, dozens of people were crowded into an alley not ten meters wide and firing off flaming projectiles in each other’s general direction. Secondly, there was a point when I was standing around, holding a Roman candle-like firework and looking frantically for a match. I then felt a slight tug at the end of the candle. It was little Tommy with a big grin and a bigger lighter who lit the candle and then ran off screaming with excitement. My mind flashed with the imagined horror of American parents watching their kids run around the neighborhood, casually flicking Zippos.
Jeff sat capturing all of the mayhem with the deftness of a Spielberg as we all walked over to the main street the hutong branched off of. The wide avenue was an apocalyptic movie with few people milling around and firework debris completely covering the asphalt. Streetlights glowed through the heavy mixture of night fog and smoke. But for the occasional cop car or ambulance, traffic was nonexistent. The scene was eerie and unsettlingly quiet. With each explosion we heard in the distance and not-so-distance, singed paper would waft slowly to the ground like feathers.
We hurried back to the front of the restaurant, laughing and screaming with awe. The scene was even more frantic. Nobody had noticed we had left because they were too busy focusing on two Chinese guys wheeling out a huge, rusty cauldron-shaped object. Jeff focused the camera on the crowd and I turned Cef, Riggs, Welled and Easle with a more than puzzled look. That look slowly morphed into the thought of needing to find cover when I saw a baby-sized bundle being lowered into the cauldron. A man then ran up to it and lit a fuse.
It was a long five seconds before the dull pop of the bundle being blasted upwards; a full ten before the most thunderous explosion heard that night. The many-colored lights lit the faces of the hutong residents like bright paint. The faces of unhinged joy and excitement were in stark contrast to those beneath the fireworks I’m used to seeing. It could have been the baijiu talking but to me, it wasn’t just holiday cheer displayed on their faces. There was something else; a raging optimism for the future or a guarded uncertainty. I’m not sure which.
The next day we gathered at the restaurant for our final morning meal before the group was to leave Beijing and splinter. We said our goodbyes to the dumplings, to the noodles, to the rickety old feedbag. We said goodbye to the tragically misspelled wall menu, particularly the ‘chicker’ and the ‘prok.’ We said goodbye to the family with hugs and posed pictures. We also took the liberty of giving their son an English name. Tommy, not sensing that our limited, yet significant relationship with his family was ending just went about playing his handheld video game. When his mother asked us what the symbolism of ‘Tommy’ meant, Riggs and I just looked at each other blankly.
Speaking only for myself, it was a slightly sad thought that more than likely I was never going to see that incredibly hospitable family ever again. For someone who travels so much you’d think I’d be used to that feeling by now but it still stings every now and then. I also knew that alleyway celebrations like those I witnessed wouldn’t last forever either. Hutong in Beijing and other Chinese cities are disappearing rapidly as the demands for high-rises and better infrastructure prevail. For a people mired in abject poverty for most of the last century, no one can blame them for wanting to finally embrace modernity; no matter how mixed the blessing.
The opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was, by all accounts, stunning. After having seen what an ancient culture, a proud people — and an authoritarian government — can do firsthand the enormity and precision of the show really wasn’t suprising to me. What did make me pause was the fireworks display at the end. Apparently there was a lot of truth to the reports that the visuals of the fireworks were doctored a little for television. The explosions were also timed and arranged to go off in various patterns around the general area.
Everyone who was in the “bird’s nest” stadium, I’m sure, was amazed at the meticulously coordinated spectacle they witnessed. There was no spontaneity, debris or exploding cauldrons. Perhaps it was the opening ceremony that visually thrust China from beneath the “third world” label and into the ranks of the world’s most advanced countries. Their power, culture and timeless contributions were proudly on display. Fireworks, too.
