So there we were, the first morning of our first day in the strangest, most alien place we had ever been in our lives - Beijing on a monday morning, in late 2002, standing on the doorstep of the Harmony Hotel, ravenous. What could possibly go wrong, after 28 hours on every airline in the Eastern hemisphere? And what does one see when one first arrives in Beijing? Last night had been all long flowing roads, strangely oriental-themed high-rises, and a dark alley full of scattered piles of rubbish and stray cats. So what did we see now, in the mid-morning sun?
These fragments of memory are still quite clear to me, because they were my first daylit experiences of somewhere completely new to me. I stood at the front of the hotel, a narrow road in front of me, surrounded by the busy noises of a morning at work in Beijing - the sound of construction work, a few hawkers desultorily selling their wares, many small vehicles moving around, and somewhere off to my left the distant sound of a steady stream of traffic, which we were to later discover was the same road we had come down last night - the taxi driver had dropped us literally metres away from our hotel, but we couldn't see it and walked the wrong way, so came to it by a loop. The sounds of the morning were industrious but not particularly loud, though occasionally punctuated by sharp announcements on a loudspeaker, because across our narrow road was the municipal headquarters of the China Post Office, a carpark full of green delivery trucks and a massive banner in Mandarin and English, proclaiming the intention of China Post to "Boldly march forward to a future of cooperation and joy" or somesuch (these banners were common throughout China). Busy postmen ran about, a security guard frowned at us, and all was peaceful energy. To our right was the alley we had come down last night, now completely free of rubbish and cats. The air was already suffused with that Asian city smell, somewhere between exotic cooking, sewage and strange building materials. And very soon the exotic cooking smell became overwhelming, because to our right was a little collection of restaurants we were to soon come to know very well.
Here we stood then: starving, tired, confused, armed with a phrasebook, some cameras, and a single 3 month night school course in mandarin between us. All that stood between us and some kind of delicious Chinese breakfast was a massive cultural gap, a completely inscrutable language, and a total lack of any knowledge about what Chinese people eat. This is the stuff that (small) adventures are made of. So, best foot forward! We marched up to the nearest restaurant, which didn't look very closed, and thence inside to what from now on, dear reader, you should assume will be the tableau that will greet us a further 83 times while in this vast, sprawling nation, unless we tell you otherwise:
These fragments of memory are still quite clear to me, because they were my first daylit experiences of somewhere completely new to me. I stood at the front of the hotel, a narrow road in front of me, surrounded by the busy noises of a morning at work in Beijing - the sound of construction work, a few hawkers desultorily selling their wares, many small vehicles moving around, and somewhere off to my left the distant sound of a steady stream of traffic, which we were to later discover was the same road we had come down last night - the taxi driver had dropped us literally metres away from our hotel, but we couldn't see it and walked the wrong way, so came to it by a loop. The sounds of the morning were industrious but not particularly loud, though occasionally punctuated by sharp announcements on a loudspeaker, because across our narrow road was the municipal headquarters of the China Post Office, a carpark full of green delivery trucks and a massive banner in Mandarin and English, proclaiming the intention of China Post to "Boldly march forward to a future of cooperation and joy" or somesuch (these banners were common throughout China). Busy postmen ran about, a security guard frowned at us, and all was peaceful energy. To our right was the alley we had come down last night, now completely free of rubbish and cats. The air was already suffused with that Asian city smell, somewhere between exotic cooking, sewage and strange building materials. And very soon the exotic cooking smell became overwhelming, because to our right was a little collection of restaurants we were to soon come to know very well.
Here we stood then: starving, tired, confused, armed with a phrasebook, some cameras, and a single 3 month night school course in mandarin between us. All that stood between us and some kind of delicious Chinese breakfast was a massive cultural gap, a completely inscrutable language, and a total lack of any knowledge about what Chinese people eat. This is the stuff that (small) adventures are made of. So, best foot forward! We marched up to the nearest restaurant, which didn't look very closed, and thence inside to what from now on, dear reader, you should assume will be the tableau that will greet us a further 83 times while in this vast, sprawling nation, unless we tell you otherwise:
- a tiled floor, clean but grimed with ancient scuff marks and dirt
- cheap vinyl tables, covered in a plastic or paper table cloth, perhaps patterned with gingham or some other cheap surface, and surrounded with cheap vinyl or metal chairs
- on each table a selection of sauce bottles and a bowl of raw garlic (peeled in the fancier places)
- a counter at one end, in front of which stood 3 bored girls (in chinese dresses if it was a tourist spot, or uniforms if it was a fancier place)
- above the counter, a picture of Mao
- next to the counter, or on the wall somewhere, a calendar
- next to the counter, an open door leading into the kitchen, possibly also with a serving window
- an awesome smell of great food
That's it - The Chinese Restaurant, circa 2002. If they had names we could neither see them nor read them; if they had some special advertising point to separate them from the one next door, we couldn't read it. This restaurant, it turned out, had a window facing out from the kitchen to the outside world, from which they sold very good (I'm told) cheap local versions of egg mcmuffins. When we entered there was only one bored girl at the counter, because the other two were stuffing dumplings (bao tzu? I think they're called, in Japanese "gyoza") ready for the lunch crowd. The bored girl perked up when she saw us and gestured for us to sit, then stared at us like we were some kind of new cooking challenge. After a moment she asked us if we wanted an English menu, and all our dreams came true.
An English menu - don't get used to it. Where we're going, this stuff ain't happening. But we are outside the Harmony Hotel, and in the harmonious neighbourhood of this fantastic place, the restaurants share between them a single scrappy piece of paper with all their main dishes typed in perfect english, and at the bottom a few choice phrases you can point to if you need to : "Not very spicy please," or "I am allergic to peanuts," and, shock! against all expectations! "I'm vegetarian." Our helpful restaurant even had the pingyin (roman character) Mandarin pronunciation, so after months of being told I would not be able to get vegan food in China, here I was on my first morning in the country reading how to order vegetarian food.
It's a credit to the exotic nature of a first day in China that I can still remember what we ordered: braised egg and tomato, and fried rice with egg and spring onion. Signature Northern Chinese dishes, completely delicious and thoroughly commendable. If ever you're in the neighbourhood of the Harmony Hotel, I strongly advise trying either of the two restaurants facing onto the street that leads to the central Beijing railway station, just across from the Post Office. They rock!
And now it behooves me to mention the nature of Chinese service, which I experienced again in Shanghai in 2004 and again at Shanghai Pudong airport, and on China Eastern Air, in 2009, and which doesn't seem to have changed. Mainland Chinese service is energetic, ditzy, simultaneously polite but strangely transgressive, charming, and simultaneously brusque but shy. I can perhaps explain this with some fragments of Chinese experiences in 2002 and 2009:
- On the airline in 2009, I asked for bread. The woman who served me the bread nodded enthusiastically and rushed away to one end of the plane. I thought she'd disappeared forever but she reappeared 2 minutes later over my left shoulder, and tossed some warmed bread onto my plate in a way that I can only say was simultaneously extremely focussed yet strangely impolite. And then she was gone without a word! Only to return from the opposite end of the plane moments later, with butter that she shyly and politely placed on my tray, along with a great beaming smile. Figure that out.
- As soon as we sat down, the bored girl would be demanding our order, as if we already knew what the restaurant could serve us. They would be most confused when asked to wait, as if deliberation were some bourgeouis plot, but they would always wait attentively by their counter
- The staff would make almost anything for us, and giggle while they did it
- Sometimes the staff would be awesomely polite when they showed you into the restaurant and took your order; but while you were eating they would be lounging on a counter smoking, or playing practical jokes on each other outside
- Food would never come in order, but there would always be too much and it would always be delivered cheerfully with a smile, even if it was being slapped down on top of something else in a very haphazard way
- There was often a part of the menu that was in Mandarin only...
Our guide - whose task it is the Sergeant's to introduce - told us that no-one in China is allowed to starve, it's something of a national paranoia of theirs, and so there was always an abundance of food. I don't know if this is true out in the wilds of Qinghai but I certainly never saw anything except an abundance of food on sale in China. And, at least in the North, such great food it was! And very fitting indeed that our introduction to China should have been so simple and harmonious, at that most essential of Chinese social spots - the cheap vinyl dinner table! We'll be seeing a lot more of that...
So for the rest of our first day in Beijing, we walked around, and watched the mundanities of city life that make up the extraordinary moments of a first day in a new country. We walked out to the main road, where the taxi driver had abandoned us the night before, and found a lane of the road devoted to bicycles, riding 10 abreast in a flowing river. There was construction everywhere, and we wandered into the hutong area, where the old houses of Beijing squat in dusty square compounds around a central garden. We found a pair of old men playing Chinese chess on a makeshift table outside one of the hutongs, and wandered through a couple of malls that looked for all the world like something straight from the Australian suburbs. In one of these a friendly woman took us from her stamp shop on a winding walk through the mall to a bookshop, leaving her wares unattended, and helped us buy an english language map. Then we returned to the hotel, and a meal of steaming noodles, dumplings, spicy eggplant and tofu, so much food that we couldn't eat it. Crushed into a busy restaurant, we handed our uneaten noodles to the guys at the table next to us, and they returned our favour in cigarettes we couldn't smoke. So it was that our first day ended in the same harmonious fashion it started and we staggered, drunk on cheap Chinese beer and stuffed with cheap Beijing food, back to the Harmony hotel, our first day of exploration successful and pleasurable.
Beijing! City of open dusty streets, scorpions on sticks, smelly hutongs and cheerful, jokey people ... our first experience of China.
- Sir S
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