Happiness Bananas
Beijing is a city with a very strong will. It likes to impose that will on you. If you have the cheek to walk out into it with a plan, it will take that as a challenge and proceed to thwart your plan in every way it can. But if you give in to it and agree to accept whatever it gives you, it becomes kind and opens its bag of tricks for you to marvel at. One day we set out on rented bikes to go and see the Summer Palace, on the outskirts of the city. It was supposed to be very pretty. I don’t know; we never got there.
The cycling was an odyssey of terror and fascination, but mostly terror.
Cycling in Beijing is like this. There are cycle paths, okay, and it’s mostly flat, okay, but there the easy part ends. You’re sharing the cycle paths with dozens of other cyclists going in both directions on both sides, swerving around you and stopping suddenly inches in front of you, and three-wheel carts muscling in across your path, carrying, say, a three-by-three-foot Polar Bear freezer. Or a black metal oven piled with just-cooked, crackling-skinned sweet potatoes. Or the wife and kids. Or a teetering stack of boxes labelled Happiness Bananas, or a dozen water coolers, or a bundle of aeroboard packing material three times as wide as the cart and four times as high... and sweet Jesus what are those pedestrians doing? Walking three abreast on the road, chatting happily! Ignoring your bell ringing like mad! Stepping off the curb in front of you with dreamy looks in their eyes! Standing in the cycle path, looking sleepily around them! Talking on their mobiles! And the other traffic. City buses pulling in in front of you, trolleybuses pincering in from the other side like the trash compactor on the Death Star or the shrinking metal room in The Pit and the Pendulum, trucks thundering by so fast you wobble in the slipstream, while the Beijingers are on the phone, on their bikes, with these crushing lumps of metal whizzing around them! And you’re a single moving thing in this chaotic system of randomly moving things, trying to look everywhere at once while staying afloat.
And the intersections. Oh mygod. They all look about a mile wide. You have to go out into the six-lane currents of traffic to wait at the bicycle line for the lights to change. If you’re lucky there’s forty locals there to give you moral support, but when it was just the two of us... eek. Then the lights change, and they shouldn’t have bothered because cars ignore them. You have to bully your way across a road so wide you can almost see the curvature of the earth between one side and the other, while cars and buses turn in front of you. You stop suddenly so as not to go into the side of a bus, can’t get going immediately and stand there spinning your pedal as headlights pen you in from three directions. If you survive that, the challenge of the level crossing still awaits you! It’s paved crazily with slabs of metal, canted up at the edges, stuck to the ground with blobs of tar. The slabs have gaps and trenches between them. Sixty other people are crossing at the same time, and you’re trying to pedal slowly enough to keep clear of the throng but not so slowly that your wheel gets stuck and you get hit by a speeding train! Oh, and watch out for that girl and her incoming cart transporting a dozen live chickens!
I can’t understand why we didn’t see at least one person die in a mess of crumpled flesh and metal. And indeed, why it wasn’t one of us.
On top of all that, Ivan’s bike seemed to be made of tinfoil. The brake block flew off, and he managed to retrieve it but then the chain started to come off if he so much as looked at it funny. Once, when he pulled in to sort the chain out, the pedal got stuck under the bike’s side panel, which was so thin you could bend it with your hand.
But from the bikes, at those moments when my attention wasn’t completely taken up by avoiding the objects hurtling at me, I could see all this city scrolling past. Everywhere I glanced was swarming with objects, script, animals, people. Especially people, more and more of them as the evening came, strolling hand-in-hand on the street and laughing as the Chinese national holiday began.
We swung round the Forbidden City surrounded by trucks and buses, then turned down a little path by Houhai Lake. We almost had to run over a phalanx of rickshaw touts, standing in the road shouting “Stop! Look! Long way! Long way!”, then found ourselves on a winding strip of willows and cosy bars by the lakeside, where we stopped for a drink and spent ages faffing about looking for a bank. After that there was a crazy intersection with more hurtling trucks where we managed not to die, a street market, the Level Crossing of Doom, and then a long dull road where we found a restaurant. In the restaurant no one spoke any English and there was no English on the menu. I found the word for ‘rice’ in the phrasebook - ‘mee-fun’ - pronounced it ‘mee-foon’ and made the waiter crack up, and Ivan said ‘Tsingtao’ with the Ts a bit wrong, but not so wrong that they didn’t know to bring us beer. The food I got from pointing wildly at the only (and blurred) picture on the menu was the most delicious thing I ate in China. Ginger chicken in a spicy caramelised sauce. I can still taste it now. Then the bill came and we picked up our jaws. 28 yuan, which is something like 2.30 sterling, for the lot. All our other dinners had cost three times that. The floor of the loo was awash in water. I washed my hands in Omo detergent and we were back on the road.
We’d come maybe three miles. There was another mile to go, at least, and it was starting to get dark. We went through another mad intersection, got on the wrong cycle path, took a wrong turn and got lost in a housing estate, dimly lit and full of strolling, laughing people. Coming out of it we had no idea which way we were facing and there was yet another major intersection ahead. It was dark in earnest and oncoming headlights dazzled us. It took literally seconds for us to agree to give up, turn around and go back to the lake. It was supposed to be the consolation prize for not making it to the Palace, a place we could rely on to have sofas and drinks, but it turned out to be the best evening we had in China.
Houhai Lake is surrounded by tiny bars, with sofas and tables set out on the street. After dark they all blaze with coloured lights and lanterns, streaking the lake water. On that night it was thronged with celebrating people, strolling, drinking, talking and floating on the lake itself in small boats. The lake water was dotted with flames - the people in the boats were lighting candles, placing each candle in a wax paper boat of its own and releasing it to bob on the water. Some boats had hanging lanterns, red, green and blue paper globes. Others had musicians, perched at one end playing stringed instruments. We sat under a huge willow tree full of lights, on a squashy red sofa in front of a bar called Ru Gosa, and watched Beijing go by. Inside the bar a huge video screen was showing a concert, some guy strumming his guitar and singing about love, love, forever love. (China only seems to have one genre of pop music - the power ballad.)
After a couple of drinks, watching the boats bob, we decided we’d hire one ourselves. So we paid our deposit at a jetty hung with its own lanterns and set out in a little blue-and-white electric craft, steering round islands, trying not to drown floating candles, whizzing under narrow bridges and taking silly blurred pictures of light. (Once I reduced Ivan to helpless laughter by singing the theme of an obscure TV show we’d seen some time in the 80s. It’s weird to think of the composer, whoever he was, sitting there making up this theme song, unaware that twenty-odd years later, two people who heard it as kids would be singing it in a boat on a lake in Beijing. And where is he now? He probably thinks everyone has forgotten it. Wouldn’t it be interesting if, when you made something - a story, a song, an idea, whatever - there was a way to track the times and places people read it or listened to it or talked about it, like tracking hits on a webpage?)
Back ashore we had snacks and more drinks at the Bouddha Bar, which looks out on a crossroads and a bridge, with more hordes of revellers going by. We talked about how no one in China seems to look at all subcultural, or alternative, or whatever. They all wear the clothes you see in the main-street shops. Was it that we didn’t recognise the subcultural signals, or that there weren’t any? Maybe no one wants to seem different. I didn’t know and I couldn’t ask because a language barrier bigger than the Wall was in my way.
At half past midnight everyone was leaving in taxis and we cycled home, slightly drunk. The air was cool and the streets were deserted, and there was nothing to fear.
The cycling was an odyssey of terror and fascination, but mostly terror.
Cycling in Beijing is like this. There are cycle paths, okay, and it’s mostly flat, okay, but there the easy part ends. You’re sharing the cycle paths with dozens of other cyclists going in both directions on both sides, swerving around you and stopping suddenly inches in front of you, and three-wheel carts muscling in across your path, carrying, say, a three-by-three-foot Polar Bear freezer. Or a black metal oven piled with just-cooked, crackling-skinned sweet potatoes. Or the wife and kids. Or a teetering stack of boxes labelled Happiness Bananas, or a dozen water coolers, or a bundle of aeroboard packing material three times as wide as the cart and four times as high... and sweet Jesus what are those pedestrians doing? Walking three abreast on the road, chatting happily! Ignoring your bell ringing like mad! Stepping off the curb in front of you with dreamy looks in their eyes! Standing in the cycle path, looking sleepily around them! Talking on their mobiles! And the other traffic. City buses pulling in in front of you, trolleybuses pincering in from the other side like the trash compactor on the Death Star or the shrinking metal room in The Pit and the Pendulum, trucks thundering by so fast you wobble in the slipstream, while the Beijingers are on the phone, on their bikes, with these crushing lumps of metal whizzing around them! And you’re a single moving thing in this chaotic system of randomly moving things, trying to look everywhere at once while staying afloat.
And the intersections. Oh mygod. They all look about a mile wide. You have to go out into the six-lane currents of traffic to wait at the bicycle line for the lights to change. If you’re lucky there’s forty locals there to give you moral support, but when it was just the two of us... eek. Then the lights change, and they shouldn’t have bothered because cars ignore them. You have to bully your way across a road so wide you can almost see the curvature of the earth between one side and the other, while cars and buses turn in front of you. You stop suddenly so as not to go into the side of a bus, can’t get going immediately and stand there spinning your pedal as headlights pen you in from three directions. If you survive that, the challenge of the level crossing still awaits you! It’s paved crazily with slabs of metal, canted up at the edges, stuck to the ground with blobs of tar. The slabs have gaps and trenches between them. Sixty other people are crossing at the same time, and you’re trying to pedal slowly enough to keep clear of the throng but not so slowly that your wheel gets stuck and you get hit by a speeding train! Oh, and watch out for that girl and her incoming cart transporting a dozen live chickens!
I can’t understand why we didn’t see at least one person die in a mess of crumpled flesh and metal. And indeed, why it wasn’t one of us.
On top of all that, Ivan’s bike seemed to be made of tinfoil. The brake block flew off, and he managed to retrieve it but then the chain started to come off if he so much as looked at it funny. Once, when he pulled in to sort the chain out, the pedal got stuck under the bike’s side panel, which was so thin you could bend it with your hand.
But from the bikes, at those moments when my attention wasn’t completely taken up by avoiding the objects hurtling at me, I could see all this city scrolling past. Everywhere I glanced was swarming with objects, script, animals, people. Especially people, more and more of them as the evening came, strolling hand-in-hand on the street and laughing as the Chinese national holiday began.
We swung round the Forbidden City surrounded by trucks and buses, then turned down a little path by Houhai Lake. We almost had to run over a phalanx of rickshaw touts, standing in the road shouting “Stop! Look! Long way! Long way!”, then found ourselves on a winding strip of willows and cosy bars by the lakeside, where we stopped for a drink and spent ages faffing about looking for a bank. After that there was a crazy intersection with more hurtling trucks where we managed not to die, a street market, the Level Crossing of Doom, and then a long dull road where we found a restaurant. In the restaurant no one spoke any English and there was no English on the menu. I found the word for ‘rice’ in the phrasebook - ‘mee-fun’ - pronounced it ‘mee-foon’ and made the waiter crack up, and Ivan said ‘Tsingtao’ with the Ts a bit wrong, but not so wrong that they didn’t know to bring us beer. The food I got from pointing wildly at the only (and blurred) picture on the menu was the most delicious thing I ate in China. Ginger chicken in a spicy caramelised sauce. I can still taste it now. Then the bill came and we picked up our jaws. 28 yuan, which is something like 2.30 sterling, for the lot. All our other dinners had cost three times that. The floor of the loo was awash in water. I washed my hands in Omo detergent and we were back on the road.
We’d come maybe three miles. There was another mile to go, at least, and it was starting to get dark. We went through another mad intersection, got on the wrong cycle path, took a wrong turn and got lost in a housing estate, dimly lit and full of strolling, laughing people. Coming out of it we had no idea which way we were facing and there was yet another major intersection ahead. It was dark in earnest and oncoming headlights dazzled us. It took literally seconds for us to agree to give up, turn around and go back to the lake. It was supposed to be the consolation prize for not making it to the Palace, a place we could rely on to have sofas and drinks, but it turned out to be the best evening we had in China.
Houhai Lake is surrounded by tiny bars, with sofas and tables set out on the street. After dark they all blaze with coloured lights and lanterns, streaking the lake water. On that night it was thronged with celebrating people, strolling, drinking, talking and floating on the lake itself in small boats. The lake water was dotted with flames - the people in the boats were lighting candles, placing each candle in a wax paper boat of its own and releasing it to bob on the water. Some boats had hanging lanterns, red, green and blue paper globes. Others had musicians, perched at one end playing stringed instruments. We sat under a huge willow tree full of lights, on a squashy red sofa in front of a bar called Ru Gosa, and watched Beijing go by. Inside the bar a huge video screen was showing a concert, some guy strumming his guitar and singing about love, love, forever love. (China only seems to have one genre of pop music - the power ballad.)
After a couple of drinks, watching the boats bob, we decided we’d hire one ourselves. So we paid our deposit at a jetty hung with its own lanterns and set out in a little blue-and-white electric craft, steering round islands, trying not to drown floating candles, whizzing under narrow bridges and taking silly blurred pictures of light. (Once I reduced Ivan to helpless laughter by singing the theme of an obscure TV show we’d seen some time in the 80s. It’s weird to think of the composer, whoever he was, sitting there making up this theme song, unaware that twenty-odd years later, two people who heard it as kids would be singing it in a boat on a lake in Beijing. And where is he now? He probably thinks everyone has forgotten it. Wouldn’t it be interesting if, when you made something - a story, a song, an idea, whatever - there was a way to track the times and places people read it or listened to it or talked about it, like tracking hits on a webpage?)
Back ashore we had snacks and more drinks at the Bouddha Bar, which looks out on a crossroads and a bridge, with more hordes of revellers going by. We talked about how no one in China seems to look at all subcultural, or alternative, or whatever. They all wear the clothes you see in the main-street shops. Was it that we didn’t recognise the subcultural signals, or that there weren’t any? Maybe no one wants to seem different. I didn’t know and I couldn’t ask because a language barrier bigger than the Wall was in my way.
At half past midnight everyone was leaving in taxis and we cycled home, slightly drunk. The air was cool and the streets were deserted, and there was nothing to fear.