Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (P.S.)

by Peter Hessler

  For China, 2008 had already been the most traumatic year since 1989, when the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred. In March there had been riots in Tibet, followed by a brutal crackdown by the authorities. Overseas, human-rights demonstrators disrupted the Olympic torch relay, leading to an angry nationalist backlash in China. In May, a powerful earthquake in Sichuan Province killed more than sixty thousand people. Recently, there had been a fatal attack on Chinese military police in Xinjiang, a region in the far west where much of the native Muslim population resents China’s rule. All these events had contributed to the stress of the Olympic year, but I didn’t understand the concern about the Great Wall. “They’re worried about foreigners, people who might want Tibet independence,” Wei Ziqi told me. “They don’t want them to go up to the Great Wall with a sign or something.”

  It was fear of a photo op—that somebody would unfurl a political banner and take a picture atop China’s most distinctive structure. The government also worried that a foreigner might hike in a remote area and get injured, creating bad press. For this, the authorities had mobilized more than five thousand people in the region, but labor is plentiful in rural China. And these volunteers were getting paid. That was another difference from the city, where patriotic students were willing to donate their time to the Motherland’s Olympic effort. Farmers were too practical for that; in addition to the free shirt, each rural volunteer received five hundred yuan a month, about seventy-three dollars. In Sancha, where the average resident earned about a thousand dollars per year, it was good money.

  For Wei Ziqi, though, the Olympics didn’t represent a windfall. He and his wife ran one of the few businesses in the village, a small restaurant and guesthouse, and now they missed the Chinese city dwellers who usually drove out on weekends. Since July 20, the government had restricted the use of private cars in an attempt to improve the capital’s notorious air pollution. The system was regulated through license-plate numbers: cars with plates ending in even digits could be used only on even-numbered days, and the odds were limited to odd days. This effectively ended overnight trips—if anybody drove to the village and stayed past midnight, he was stuck there for another twenty-four hours.

  I never heard Wei Ziqi complain about the Olympics; nor did he show any animosity toward the hordes of “Free Tibet” protestors who were supposedly threatening the Great Wall. For a middle- or upper-class Beijing resident, the reaction would have been more emotional—such people were proud of hosting the Games, and many Chinese had been upset about the disruptions of the torch relay. But rural folks knew the limits of what they could control, and there was a detachment from outside affairs, even those which affected the village. No adults in Sancha planned to attend any Olympic festivities. When I asked Wei Ziqi if he and his family would accompany me to some events, he said, “I don’t want to go.”

  “Why not?”

  “We’re not supposed to go into the city,” he said. “They don’t want a lot of people there right now.”

  I assured him that in fact spectators with tickets were welcome at the Games.

  “It’s not necessary,” he said. “We can watch it on television.”

  The night before the opening ceremonies, I joined him at the barricade with the other villagers. Wei Ziqi’s shift was 9 P.M. to 6 A.M. Only two cars passed through, both of them dropping off locals. Afterward, the vehicles turned around to hustle back to the city, because they had odd-numbered plates. It was like Cinderella—nobody wanted to be on the road when the clock struck midnight.

  One barricade volunteer was a middle-aged man named Gao Yongfu. “President Bush just arrived,” he announced, fiddling with a small radio. “He’s in Beijing now. Putin is coming, too.” He continued, “An American company has the rights for Olympics television. They have the rights for the whole world! Even if China wants to broadcast the Games, they have to go through that American company.”

  The third volunteer, a woman named Xue Jinlian, didn’t think that sounded right. “They can’t control what China broadcasts,” she said.

  “Yes, they can.”

  “I don’t think so. Not in China’s own country!” Xue was silent for a while. “Chinese people are naturally smart,” she finally said. “Their problem is they don’t have enough money. You look at America, and a lot of the top scientists are Chinese. There’s a lot of smart people here, but if there’s not enough money, they leave.”

  Village conversations had a way of veering off suddenly, like a hawk that catches some invisible air current, but inevitably they returned to settle on certain topics: food, weather, money. Gao brought us back to the weather—the air was heavy, but he said the government wouldn’t let it rain the following night. “They can make it rain somewhere else instead,” he said. “I don’t know how it works, but it uses high technology.”

  They were still discussing the weather a little before midnight, when I walked back to my house and went to bed. Later, I heard that the first car of August 8 had come through the barricade at around 2 A.M. The license plate ended with the number two—a Beijing motorist determined to make the most of his twenty-four hours. That same day, the government fired over a thousand silver iodide–laced rockets into the sky, ensuring perfect dryness for the opening ceremonies. At 5 A.M., jet lag woke me up and I wandered back down the road. Behind the barricade, Wei Ziqi dozed in the passenger seat of his car, and the morning light shone on the Jundu Mountains, and nothing about the peaceful scene suggested that this day was different from any other.

  Earlier that week, I had arrived on United Flight No. 889, San Francisco to Beijing. The airline was a sponsor of the U.S. Olympic team, and the gate in San Francisco had a pre-race feel: the solidarity of the starting line, that moment before the pack breaks into its inevitable divisions. The U.S. women’s softball team was there, as were the synchronized swimmers. The American track cyclists had gathered near the windows that overlooked the tarmac. Two athletes from Belize wore matching green-and-black tracksuits. There was a National Olympic Committee member from Venezuela, an elderly man who wore a brown bow tie and carried a cane. The television people were easy to pick out—tall blond women with BlackBerrys and burnished skin. Jim Gray, a prominent sports announcer who was covering the Olympics for NBC, strode up and down the terminal, avoiding eye contact with anybody who recognized him.

  Once boarding began, the solidarity dissolved. The TV folks vanished into first class and business class, along with the Venezuelan committee member. The pair from Belize sat quietly in economy. Most of the American athletes were in economy plus. The softball team sat along the left wing, and the cyclists and the synchronized swimmers took the right; if it wasn’t perfect ballast, it was close. “Everybody here at United would like to welcome all the athletes,” the pilot announced on the intercom, after takeoff. Later, he spoke again. “I want to pass on a message from the women’s softball team,” he said. “They want to say, ‘Good luck to the men in tights!’ ”

  There was no rejoinder from the cyclists. They wore white compression tights beneath their T-shirts and warm-ups, and periodically each athlete stood up and took a lap through the aisles, shaking out his legs. That was the United 889 velodrome: walk to the bathroom, turn at the exit row, duck past the softball mockery, and head back toward Belize. On one of these circuits, I interrupted Michael Friedman, who was scheduled to compete in men’s track cycling in two weeks. He was a friendly twenty-five-year-old with reddish hair and a barrel chest. “It’s for the blood clots,” he explained, when I asked about the compression tights and the pacing. “We’re not supposed to sit down for too long.”

  The flight took more than thirteen hours, and at Beijing airport’s Terminal 3 we were greeted by smiling volunteers in ClimaLite. There were also representatives from United Airlines, who distributed information sheets to all American athletes. Among other matters, they warned the Olympians about the volunteers:

  We ask that you stay with the group and our staff as we’ve experienced insta
nces where BOCOG volunteers (in blue uniform) with the intention to assist has directed part of our groups off on their own.

  Other bullet-point instructions had a slightly ominous tone:

  • Please note that Immigration officers normally will not provide an explanation when they take your passport and OIAC card away.

  The athletes had fallen silent, and they gathered in a tight cluster, like cattle on the open range before a storm. Four cyclists wore black face masks, which covered the nose and mouth, and had the sharp lines of armored visors. Michael Friedman said that the masks had been issued by the team, in case the pollution in Beijing was bad. “They told us we should do this,” he said. He looked a little sheepish; none of the athletes from other sports wore masks. But then they hadn’t used the compression tights, either. “I figure, no reason to take any risks,” Friedman told me with a shrug.

  The cyclists wore their masks through baggage claim and customs. At the exit, television cameras were waiting, and the images created a brief uproar after they appeared. Within a day, the athletes had issued an apology through the United States Olympic Committee. It read, in part, “Our decision was not intended to insult BOCOG or countless others who have put forth a tremendous amount of effort to improve the air quality in Beijing.” The day that I sat on the village barricade, the apology made the front-page headlines of the China Daily:

  TORCH TIME IN TOWN AS FEVER RISES

  PUTIN PRAISES PREPARATIONS

  US CYCLISTS SORRY FOR WEARING MASKS

  The men’s road-cycling final was the first day after the opening ceremonies, and it was one of the few events that didn’t require a ticket. The race began downtown, winding through the city before heading north to the Great Wall. Down the street from the Lama Temple, white metal barricades had been erected along the sidewalks. The ClimaLite crew was there, stationed at intervals of thirty feet, and there were also local volunteers in “Capital Public Order Worker” T-shirts. Plainclothes cops worked the crowd. In China, undercover officials have a distinct look: well-built men in their thirties or forties, dressed in button-down shirts, dark trousers, and cheap leather loafers. They almost always have crew cuts. They move in packs, and they linger and loiter; they have a tendency to stare. Their purpose is to intimidate as much as infiltrate: there’s no need for subtlety in a one-party state. At the cycling race, the plainclothes cops had been issued little Chinese flags as a halfhearted attempt at cover, but they didn’t wave them like everybody else. They held the flags beside their hips, like weapons at the ready.

  On the sidewalk, two men played the game of Chinese chess known as xiangqi. They sat on stools around a wooden board, and they paid no attention to the growing mob of people. If they noticed the plainclothes men, they made no sign—long ago Beijing residents had learned to take surveillance in stride. And this was the chess players’ turf: in the shade of a scholar tree, in front of the Badaling Leather Shoe Shop. Zhang Yonglin, one of the players, owned the shop. His opponent was a retired auto mechanic named Zhang Youzhi. The players were unrelated and locals referred to them as Little Zhang and Old Zhang. Forty minutes before start of the cycling race, a volunteer told them to leave.

  “Wait until we finish this game,” Old Zhang said.

  He carried a fan inscribed with gold calligraphy, and he gestured with it, a brief swipe that indicated that the game wouldn’t last long. The volunteer was lower caste—no ClimaLite—and she shrugged and left the men alone. A few minutes later, an official BOCOG volunteer walked over. “You need to move,” he said. “There’s going to be a bicycle race here.”

  “We know that,” Old Zhang said. “We’re just going to finish the game.”

  This time the flip of the fan was more dismissive. The young volunteer seemed reluctant to challenge this elderly man, and so the game continued. By now, seven people had gathered to watch, and one of them told me that Old Zhang was the best player in the neighborhood. In China, chess is a sport: the Chinese Xiangqi Association is administered by the All-China Sports Federation, just like the Chinese Cycling Association and the Chinese Basketball Association. The federation also handles bridge, go, darts, and the Chinese Tug-of-War Association. If this seems a muddled view of athletics, then it helps to think of the All-China Sports Federation as being concerned with competitive pastimes, broadly speaking. Beneath this umbrella organization, some associations exist with the primary goal of competing with foreigners at the Olympics. This is why the Chinese excel at obscure sports, and why so many of their 2008 gold medals would be gained in events that average citizens almost never encounter: archery (one gold), sailing (one), shooting (five), weight lifting (eight). They won a gold in canoeing, a form of water transport as Chinese as the tomahawk. It’s a triumph of bureaucracy, and it shouldn’t surprise anybody. If a nation can organize 1.7 million volunteers, from Tiananmen Square to the Great Wall, all of them outfitted according to subtle distinctions of class and status, then surely it should be possible to find and train one woman capable of winning the RS:X windsurfing gold. (Her name is Yin Jian.)

  But like the concept of bureaucracy, chess had a presence in China long before medal counts. And Chinese chess truly feels like a sport, and so does chess-watching. It even has set positions. There’s always at least one observer who gives advice before a move is made. Another onlooker waits until the move is finished before he offers his comments. This is the pairs event for spectators—the coach and the critic—and you would expect it to drive players to violence. But all aggression is directed at the board. Near the Lama Temple, Old Zhang and Little Zhang slammed the wooden pieces as hard as they could with every move.

  Thwack!

  “I’m giving your horse something to eat!”

  Thwack!

  “I need a gate! I need a gate!”

  “Right, right! That’s the right move!”

  Thwack!

  “I’m giving it to you cheap!”

  With twenty-four minutes left until the cycling, and after the players had been asked to leave on three separate occasions, Little Zhang finally conceded the match. He did this Beijing style: he dumped the pieces on the ground and howled, “Old Zhang plays black!” Then they immediately began another game. By now, they had an audience of fifteen people, including four security volunteers in uniform. Periodically, a plainclothes man wandered over, flag at the hip, to watch for a few minutes.

  As Old Zhang played, he used his fan like a master. He folded it when thinking, and after a move he always unfurled it with a flourish. Near the end of the game, when it became clear that he had left himself vulnerable, the fan began to move jerkily, as if in irritation; but still the old man said nothing. At last, he conceded with a smile. There were fewer than ten minutes left when the men finally put away the board.

  Now the crowd pressed toward the barricades, and for a long time the road was empty. “They’re coming!” somebody finally said.

  “Cars are coming!”

  “They’re all Volkswagens,” somebody else observed. The advance vehicles were black VW sedans with tinted windows. Then came a police motorcycle and police car, followed by a truck with a big platform that swiveled like a gun.

  “That’s the television camera!”

  Two lead cyclists whizzed past, a Chilean and a Bolivian. Half a minute later the entire pack went by so fast that the crowd could hardly react. Nobody had any idea who was in front; the uniforms weren’t printed in Chinese; the cyclists’ faces were a blur. For an instant, there was stunned silence, and then everybody saw the long line of support cars and cheered.

  “Why do they have the bikes on top?”

  “That’s for fixing them.”

  “Each one has a flag—look!”

  “Those aren’t Volkswagens, though.”

  “They’re Skodas, I think.”

  “Skodas, definitely.”

  “There’s an ambulance!”

  They gave the last-place ambulance a good sendoff. For a few minutes, the street was empty,
and then it was as if another race began. The leader was a battered bicycle cart carrying scraps of wood. A normal bike followed, then a Honda taxi. A truck full of bottled water. A parade of odd-numbered plates: 1, 7, 5, 9. The crowd dispersed; volunteers dismantled barricades; Old Zhang shuffled off to lunch. “It was OK,” he said, referring to the bicycle race. Earlier, he had showed me his fan’s calligraphy, which consisted of a poem titled “Do Not Get Angry.”

  “It reminds me to stay calm when playing chess,” he said. The opening verses read:

  Life is just like a play, and we are here only because of destiny

  It’s not easy to be together until we’re old, so why not cherish it?

  When I told Wei Jia I had an extra ticket to the fencing competition, he asked me which kind. Wei Jia was Wei Ziqi’s eleven-year-old son, a native of rural Sancha. “There’s peijian, zhongjian, and huajian,” he said matter-of-factly—sabre, épée, and foil. “The swords have different sizes and shapes.”

  Like all elementary school children in the greater Beijing region, Wei Jia had been issued a textbook called The Primary School Olympic Reader. It began in Olympia (“The grass is green and the flowers fragrant”), descended to cartoons of naked Greeks wrestling, and continued to Baron de Coubertin. One section featured the Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi; another was devoted to John Akhwari, a Tanzanian marathoner who, in 1968, showed great sportsmanship in finishing last. The chapter about Liu Xiang, China’s great hurdler, made you wish the book had been issued with some wood to knock:

  Liu Xiang is healthy, and while training and racing he rarely gets injured, which is hard for an athlete.

  It was partly Wei Jia’s interest that persuaded his father to accept my offer to attend some events. The first one was rowing, and Wei Ziqi called the night before with a question about raincoats. “Do they give them out free?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Why would they do that?”