Day 4: Alice Baumgarten ’10 YC
Beijing, Saturday, May 19
At the domestic departures terminal in the Beijing Capital International Airport, a middle-aged Chinese man in a business suit taps my shoulder and forms a rectangle with his hands, moving his index finger up and down. “Picture?” he asks, pointing to the slim woman behind him. She smiles, her hands pressed against the fabric of her pink dress, her hair parted with cartographic exactness. As she saddles up beside me, her companion snaps a few shots and then gives me a thumbs up. “Pretty hair,” the woman says. Where foreigners are rare, I remember being told, even my hair, the dirtiest shade of dirty blond, would be an object of fascination.
But the delegation is in the capital of China, hundreds of miles away from the countryside, where the locals will point at Westerners and shout laowai – foreigner. What makes my hair so out of the ordinary? In Beijing, McDonald’s golden arches pop out of every spare meter of space, and Colonel Sanders, the bespectacled frontman of Kentucky Fried Chicken, beams from the advertisements plastered across the city. What seems like the poster-city for globalization, however, is in fact the intersection of old and new, East and West.
The iconic symbol of China’s antiquity is the Great Wall, a megastructure that weaves from the countryside around Beijing to the southern edge of Inner Mongolia. A few hours before my encounter in the airport, our tour buses roll into Badaling — a town with one of the best preserved sections of the wall. According to legend, our tour guide explains, the beautiful Meng Jiang Nu married a man who was drafted into a work gang and sent to Northern China. For months, Meng Jiang Nu heard nothing from her husband. Wracked with worry, she sewed a quilted suit and took to the roads. Journeying northward for months upon months, she arrived at the wall only to find that her husband was already dead. Falling on her knees, she wept until her tears melted away the stones of the wall.
Nearly five thousand years later, the northern boundary of the Qin Dynasty is no longer desolate: It is populated by vendors selling baseball caps and overpriced batteries to the thousands of tourists who enter Badaling each day. Globalization, it seems, is wrecking the same havoc as Meng Jiang Nu’s tears. The town looks like any other, with masses of people and a Starbucks on the main road. Smacked beside the Great Wall is a billboard that reads: “One World, One Dream.” Advertising the 2008 Olympics, the sign marks the contrast between this fortification, built by one empire to repel another, and the sweeping Olympic stadium, host to every citizen of every nationality in the world. Centered in Beijing, the leaders of China stand like circus performers in the middle of a balancing act – unable to escape the past, but anxious about the future: They stand on the cutting edge.
