Postcard: Beijing
By Austin Ramzy
The sound of the Olympic games for me has always been John Williams' Olympic Fanfare and Theme. But since this spring those strains have been replaced by the clack and crumble of workmen with pickaxes leveling a wall outside my window at dawn.
In 2007 I moved into a quiet hutong, a traditional narrow lane lined with courtyard houses, in eastern Beijing. Since April, the city's Olympic buzz has reached deafening proportions. In a period of months, my district, laid out 700 years ago during the Ming dynasty, saw lanes repaved, streetlights installed, sewage lines overhauled, roofs repaired, doors painted, windows replaced and rooms that had been haphazardly added onto old homes demolished and rebuilt in a traditional style. Piles of construction debris filled the streets; antique wooden eaves with hand-painted floral patterns were left out as scrap.
The hubbub produced no shortage of inconvenience for the two dozen families I share a courtyard with. The work went on for weeks; sewer repairs meant walking through a ditch to leave one's door; the dust was so heavy that a spring sandstorm came and left without our noticing. But the occasional grumbles could never sink the enthusiasm of my neighbors. I came home one day to find one perched precariously on his roof, sawing away. "For the Olympics," he said with a grin. At a party in February, I asked several neighbors their hopes for the coming year; the most popular response was for a successful Games. Clearly, fixing up our courtyard was key to that. "The work here isn't just good for us," says my neighbor Feng Huiming, who works at the local post office. "It's good for the world."
It is with that sense of purpose that Beijing has spent the past seven years transforming itself. The city added roughly 85 miles (about 140 km) of subway and rail lines and a huge airport terminal. Forty million pots of flowers and 22 million trees were planted. As many as 1.5 million people were forcibly relocated. Some, like the Yu family, who ran a snack shop north of the Forbidden City, hung on till the very end, wrapping their structure in flags and photos of Chinese leaders in hopes it might stop the wrecking ball. It didn't. Less than 48 hours after the store was demolished to make way for a park, the spot where it stood was a flower bed.
Other problems aren't as easily covered up. Beijing spent more than $17 billion to improve its environment, but days before the Games, the air is still a toxic haze. Even with new laws taking more than half the city's cars off the road, the addition of Olympic VIP lanes has left traffic nearly as bad as ever.
Some Beijingers have opted to leave town on what's jokingly called a biyuntao--"avoid Olympics package"--which rhymes with the Chinese word for condom. Others, including huge numbers of migrant workers, have been forced out. A group of builders from Sichuan who lived in our courtyard while refurbishing the neighborhood left recently, taking their coal cooking stove and pet kitten with them. A few blocks away, restaurant owner Liu Ruilin complains that some of his best customers are gone. "I thought the Olympics were going to be good for business," he says. "But lots of outsiders are leaving."
In the weeks preceding the Games, authorities have closed clubs and bars, blocked concerts and other public gatherings and put an increasing number of armed police on the streets. Some of my neighbors have even been recruited as volunteer public-security monitors. They sport red-and-white polo shirts bearing the logo of a Beijing beer company and sit by the street, watching for trouble.
That's the closest most of them will come to seeing the Olympics in person. "We have no access to tickets," says Feng. "And even if we did, we couldn't afford them." An Olympic slogan repeated on billboards throughout the city reads I PARTICIPATE; I CONTRIBUTE; I'M HAPPY. After months of participating and contributing, the people in this corner of the capital will have to be happy catching the Games, as the rest of the world does, at home on television.
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