The cliche about Chinese cities is that if you leave and come back, you’ll hardly recognize the place. That’s true in a sense: I find myself fixated on Beijing this weekend, my last in China for two months, and I can’t quite figure out why.

Almost a year ago, I arrived here after a 16-hour flight and not much more planning than that. Beijing hit me like one of its now-infamous sandstorms, and by the end of my first week in China, I was pondering a long train ride toward Europe, where at least there were two languages I could understand. But I stayed, and I’m back on my friend Lindsey’s couch, looking at the same landscape with new eyes.

In my mind, I pour into Beijing everything that constitutes a Chinese city, and to its credit, the place does not flinch from that role. Beijing is enormous and energetic, crowded and cultured, dirty and decaying and rebuilding at a pace that seems rightly called Olympic. The skyline from Lindsey’s apartment looks familiar, but I can’t quite fit it into the photos I took last August, sitting by the same window, dumbfounded by the monstrosity of it all.

Lindsey’s street looks much the same at first. It’s the particulars that are different. Most of the little noodle shops and restaurants have rusted chains slung across their doors, and the outdoor ovens that cooked some of my first Chinese meals are conspicuous in their absence. At least two storefronts have been gutted and replaced with cake shops—I keep seeing these same shops everywhere. They looked as trendy as they did empty on Friday afternoon.

Food was a priority at that point. I don’t know how a one-hour flight becomes an all-day affair. Somehow flying from Dalian (two hours delayed by fog), getting to Haidian District, picking up my Madagascar ticket in Chaoyang and returning to Lindsey’s neighborhood consumed a full workday without providing a lunch break. And “Let them eat cake” is not useful as economic policy or nutritional advice, so the renovations outside my weekend home weren’t welcome.

I settled for a stand on the corner, where a smiling woman offered cold noodles and meat-filled bread rolls, while a man hacked slabs of pork into fry-able chunks in back. I ordered a bit of everything (new city, new street food), and she filled a bowl big enough for me to wear as a helmet with leng mian, dousing it in vinegar and other unidentifiable sauces. “Spicy?” she asked me. I nodded. But it proved too much. The peppers made my nose run and bit back at into my tongue. The meat was good, though.

I sat on a shaded bench in front of the stand, across from a thin and wrinkled woman immersed in a heated discussion with herself.

I’m not sure who was winning the argument, since I could only hear one side and my Chinese still isn’t good enough to follow psychotic rants. She was determined, though. That much was obvious. She pressed each point with a gnarled finger and brushed away rebukes with an arthritic wave. At times she’d turn to me, either to bring me up to speed since I certainly couldn’t follow or to seek reinforcement. I’m not sure. I stuck with my noodles. Those I could understand.

Lindsey was asleep when I got back. Her roommate, Xiao Hong, was on the couch tuning a cherry red electric guitar, while his friend cleaned out an old pipe with a broken string. I sat by the window where I’d sat a year ago and wrote a few notes about the day. Other than a quick “nihao,” I was ignored.

Lindsey stumbled out of her room a bit later, rubbing sleep out of her eyes and looked at me.

“I hate Beijing,” she said. “I mean hi.”

This would become the theme of the weekend. Lindsey has lived here on and off since early 2004. She meant to come in 2003, but that was during the SARS days, and our university wouldn’t send students here to be poisoned by Chinese pneumonia, so she went to New Jersey instead. I’ve never quite figured that out. Once she did make it here, she grew attached enough to come back after graduation, and it’s been a strange match since. She’s taught English, polished copy at CCTV and freelanced for That’s Beijing. These days voice recording pays the bills.

Best I can tell, what she likes about living here, and what keeps her coming back, has nothing to do with the city. She loathes the traffic, the pollution, the way Chinese people treat each other, pretty much like most other expats I know. I’ve yet to meet anyone who says: “Wouldn’t it be great to spend a day on the Second Ring Road? We’ll just sit there, listening to the arrhythmic melody of car horns while sucking in exhaust fumes and marveling at what counts as blue in a Beijing sky. It’ll be awesome.”

A lot of this frustration comes out in the Muay Thai class she’s been taking for a few months. I tagged along on Friday night for a free lesson. I was curious to see just how out of shape I am after a year of not training in any martial art, or playing tennis, or pretty much not doing any sport of any kind, unless you count quiz night and darts at the Tin Whistle. Turns out those don’t do anything for your lung capacity, and I am really out of shape.

Big as Beijing is, Friday night was full of small-world moments. Friday night ended at a pricey bar full of expats, and within a minute of saying I live in Dalian, I heard someone call across the table, “Wait, do you know Vanessa W? And this guy Mike K?” Yeah, they’re good friends. I had lunch with Mike on Thursday. And one of Lindsey’s friends has an ex-girlfriend in the same Peace Corps group as my girlfriend. I’ve been assigned to collect intel.

None of this has deterred me from returning to Dalian in the fall, but spring could be a different story. Knowing Chinese, even a little, and not being shell shocked by everything that is China makes this feel like a place I could be, at least for a short while.

Comparing Beijing to Dalian is a useless exercise, like apples to Peking duck. The cities are on different planes, and what I like about one is not a matter of what the other does or doesn’t have, but more about what fits the mood I’m in now. This weekend, I’m glad to be in Beijing.

I asked Lindsey last night if she finds it weird that I’m enjoying Beijing.

“No,” she said, “because the city does have its charms. And besides, you don’t live here.”

Next post will be from Madagascar…

This entry was posted on Monday, July 9th, 2007 at 12:24 pm and is filed under roadside blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.