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

by Peter Hessler

  “I was watching on TV,” he said. “Everybody in the stands has the same color raincoat.”

  Somehow, despite hours of watching the coverage, I had missed that detail. I said that the coats were probably being sold at venues, but Wei Ziqi was shrewder. “You’re not allowed to use umbrellas, right?”

  This was true, because of security concerns.

  “Well, if they don’t let people use umbrellas,” he said, “then maybe they give out raincoats.”

  I didn’t quite understand the logic, but the following day, after we passed through security at the Shunyi Olympic Rowing-Canoeing Park, about twenty miles outside of Beijing, the first thing we saw was a woman handing out cheap plastic ponchos. It was like that at every event—the organizers knew their crowd. The Chinese love freebies, and there were always volunteers distributing something: plastic flags, cheap cardboard binoculars, fans with the McDonald’s logo. They gave out pamphlets that described the rules of various sports and told the audience how to behave. (At volleyball: “Applauding is welcome at appropriate times during the match. Booing and jeering is not allowed.”) Concessions were unbelievably cheap. They sold instant noodles, which Chinese like to eat dry, for thirty cents. A cold can of beer cost less than seventy-five cents. It was possible to show up at fencing at 10 A.M., spend four and a half bucks, and get a six-pack of Budweiser. But no Chinese person would ever do that. Few Chinese have spent much time at spectator sports, and there’s no tradition of drinking at the ballpark. Most people buying beer seemed to be foreigners.

  The Chinese were focused and they were intense. There was none of the looseness of the street; these people had paid for their tickets, and they knew the opportunity wouldn’t come again. They were often silent at the beginning of an event, almost on edge as they tried to figure out the action; it got loud later, especially after Chinese athletes appeared. At the preliminaries of men’s sabre, during the first hour, a fistfight broke out three rows ahead of Wei Jia and me. It was like a play within a play: in the background, Renzo Agresta of Brazil was slashing at Luigi Tarantino of Italy, and then two Chinese men stood up and started whaling on each other. They appeared to be middle class; one was accompanied by his child. In China, public disagreements are common, and typically they consist of a lot of shouting that goes nowhere. But at fencing there was no prelude and no encore, just ten seconds of flailing. By the time the ClimaLite showed up, nobody was talking, and the volunteer couldn’t figure out what had happened. The men simply sat down and shut up, terrified of getting kicked out. The most I learned from neighbors was that the dispute had started over sight lines.

  The woman next to me was named Wang Meng, and she was a graduate student in agriculture. She had received her ticket from a friend, who bought it online more than a year earlier. At face value, it cost $4.40; when I asked Wang if she would have resold it for $300, she shook her head. “This is my only chance to see something at the Olympics,” she said. She spent the first half hour talking in hushed tones with her neighbors, trying to figure out what it means when a fencer’s helmet lights up.

  In the past, I had disliked attending athletic events in China, because the nationalism can be so narrow-minded. Few people care about the sport itself; victory is all that matters, and there’s little joy in the experience. But at the Olympics I sensed something different. Cao Chunmei, Wei Jia’s mother, talked mostly about how the events made her feel. “It’s peaceful,” she said at synchronized diving, whereas wrestling made her nervous. She said the Bird’s Nest—Beijing National Stadium—was luan, “chaotic.” “That’s the way it should be,” she said. “A real nest is like that.” Her favorite was the National Aquatic Center, the Water Cube. When I commented that the patterned exterior resembled bubbles, she disagreed: “Those are too big to be bubbles.” She liked the place because it gave her a clean feeling.

  The brand-new rowing park in Shunyi also initially made her nervous, because she couldn’t swim and disliked boats. (When I asked Wei Ziqi if he could swim, he said, “A little.”) There was a brief rain burst and the family sat happily in their free ponchos. Rural people travel light—none of the Weis had brought anything with them, not even Wei Jia, who planned to stay with me in the city to see more of the Games. After the event, we said good-bye to his parents and got in a cab. I asked the driver to recommend a restaurant in Shunyi.

  “The Golden Million is good,” he said. Shunyi is about twenty miles outside Beijing, and it’s the kind of small city that’s common in the suburbs of sprawling Chinese municipalities. Many Shunyi residents are former peasants on their way to becoming something else, and local officials were proud to host rowing, canoeing, and kayaking. They had hung banners all around town that said “Culture is in Shunyi / The Olympics are in Shunyi.” In the city center, the Golden Million Restaurant’s mirrored entrance was decorated with 493 bottles of Old Matisse Scotch. At the center of the restaurant was an enormous tank filled with a dozen sharks, two soft-shelled turtles, and one woman dressed as a mermaid. In addition to a long mono-fin, she wore a bikini top, a face mask, and a nose clip. A sign said: “THE CAPITAL’S TOP MERMAID SHOW!” The tank was circular and the woman swam laps with the sharks and turtles. One advantage of traveling with Wei Jia was that he often came up with the questions that I was too stunned to ask.

  “Why is that lady in the water?” he said, looking concerned, when the waitress came to our table.

  “It’s a type of performance,” she said.

  “Why don’t the sharks bite her?”

  “Because they’re full,” she said, smiling reassuringly. “If you feed them, they don’t bite people.”

  Later Wei Ziqi told me that back at the rowing complex, after I got in the taxi with Wei Jia, the next cabbie had refused to take him and his wife. There was a long line of cars, but the drivers had been instructed to take foreigners only: Chinese spectators had to wait for the public bus. Wei Ziqi laughed when he told the story; he didn’t take it personally.

  In February of 2001, when Beijing was bidding to host the Games, I had accompanied the IOC inspection commission on its last tour of the capital. For more than three hours, our motorcade traveled through the city, visiting potential stadium sites; everywhere we went, the traffic lights turned green, as if by magic. (The day before, the Chinese had demonstrated how all signals could be changed by remote in the city’s traffic-control center.) Along the inspection route, the facades of hundreds of buildings had been freshly painted in bright colors. According to government statistics, workers had brushed up twenty-six million square meters, which meant that they had painted an area nearly half as big as Manhattan.

  At that time, even dissidents spoke out in favor of the bid, hoping that the Olympics would bring political change. That possibility was reportedly a factor in the IOC’s decision; many members believed that the 1988 Games, in Seoul, had helped to reform South Korea. “What the hell is the party going to do?” an American who had served as an IOC adviser told me, back in 2001. “It’s going to be really hard to have a Stalinist party and open the Olympic Games.” Liu Jingming, Beijing’s vice-mayor, told me that the organizers had considered but finally rejected the slogan “Great Wall, Great Olympics.” Seven years later, it was clear that the Communist Party could indeed open the Games, and the decision regarding the slogan seemed wise, given that there were now some five thousand farmers guarding the structure against foreigners.

  Ever since Deng Xiaoping, China had become steadily more receptive to the outside world, but there was still an element of fear and insecurity. The Olympics undoubtedly helped to promote openness, but the Games didn’t initiate a political transformation, just as they didn’t change the basic outlook of most people. Long ago, the Chinese had learned how to take big events in stride; this was how they survived Mao, and it was how they weathered disasters like the Sichuan earthquake. And such fortitude was evident throughout the Games, although you had to know where to look. You could see it in the calmness of the divers, the tou
ghness of the weight lifters, the discipline of the gymnasts. Most Chinese athletes come from poor rural areas where children are recruited into sports schools. Sancha was already too prosperous for that—no village kids in recent memory had attended a sports school, and Wei Ziqi told me that he wouldn’t allow his son to take such a route. But other places had fewer options, and parents were satisfied to have their children enter the well-structured bureaucracy of the sports system.

  The farmers had also left their mark on the facilities, at least indirectly. When I reread the promotional materials that BOCOG had given me at the time of the bid, the sketches of proposed arenas looked modest in comparison with what was eventually built. This was the opposite of the typical pattern—usually, an Olympic host city promises the moon and then scales back. In 2001, the Chinese government said that they would build six subway lines spanning 140 kilometers; they ended up with eight lines of 200 kilometers. The sketches of proposed arenas looked blocky and bland and utilitarian. There was no Bird’s Nest, no Water Cube, nothing of distinction. But since then the economy had boomed, driven by the continued migration of people from the countryside, who also provided the labor for the elaborate construction—this time it was more than just paint. In a sense, China had reached the perfect stage for hosting the Games: workers were still cheap, political accountability remained at a minimum, and the rising middle and upper classes could attend and take pride in the competition. They were the ones who responded most deeply to the Olympics—crowd energy came largely from the young and the affluent. In the stands, it was easy to forget that most Chinese are still country people.

  At events, I liked wandering the distant corners of the arenas. Often the worst seats had been given away: at men’s sabre, in the most remote section, a hundred and fifty Beijing Forestry Bureau workers sat with thunder sticks in hand, looking slightly dazed. At the preliminaries for Greco-Roman wrestling, there was a group of schoolchildren from Changping, a city outside Beijing. Their teacher stood up to make an announcement: the father of a competitor was sitting right behind them!

  The man was in the very last row. His name was Chang Aimei, and he was fifty-two but he looked at least a decade older. He had dark skin and sun-wrinkled eyes, and he carried a fieldworker’s white sweat towel. In his lap he clutched all of the day’s freebies: a Chinese flag, a flag with the Olympic mascot, an English guide to the Games. He also had a Chinese pamphlet with instructions on how to behave at Greco-Roman wrestling: “Spectators are encouraged to greatly applaud wrestlers who have demonstrated superior skills, or who have scored high points.”

  Chang Aimei’s son was named Chang Yongxiang, and moments earlier he had defeated the reigning world champion, a Bulgarian. Chang Aimei was calling his wife; like many people from the countryside, he shouted every time he handled a cell phone. “Eldest Son just competed!” he yelled. “He won! What? I said he won!”

  For the next hour, the phone rang repeatedly: relatives, friends, reporters from back home. The Changs came from Hanba, a village of fewer than three thousand people in Hebei Province. They farmed wheat and corn on three-quarters of an acre of land, and their annual income was less than six hundred dollars. In the 1980s, one of Chang Aimei’s nephews had been selected for a wrestling program, eventually becoming Chinese national champion. After that, Chang Aimei believed there were opportunities for his boy, who was naturally big. At the age of thirteen, the son left home to enter the county sports school, and then moved to the provincial level and the national team. He now wrestled in the seventy-four-kilogram weight division. I asked Chang Aimei why he sat in the last row.

  “The coaches don’t want him to know I’m here,” he said. “They don’t want anything to disrupt him, so they told me to sit in the back.”

  It was only the second time he had seen his son wrestle. Attending the Olympics had been a surprise; three days earlier, local officials had told him that they had some tickets and he could have one. The other tickets went to the village party secretary and the director of the county sports bureau, both of whom had moved down to better seats. Chang Aimei’s daughter waited outside the arena; she hadn’t been able to get a ticket.

  The cell phone rang again. “An American reporter is interviewing me!” he shouted. “Right now! American!”

  Two years ago, his son had competed at a meet in Colorado Springs. “He said you Americans are really nice,” Chang Aimei told me. “He said it’s very clean there, too.”

  It was early in the day and the athletes were working their way through the rounds. At the Olympics, Chinese men had never done better than a bronze in wrestling; nobody had ever made the finals. In Chang Yongxiang’s second match of the morning, he defeated a Peruvian to qualify for the semis. When it came time for his next competition, I made my way to the far corner of the arena. His father was still there, sitting alone.

  Chang Yongxiang was matched against a Belarusan named Aleh Mikhalovich. All morning the crowd had grown louder, and now they chanted: “China, go! China, go! China, go!” Almost immediately the Belarusan threw Chang out of the ring, scoring four points, and he won the first period. But then Chang seemed to gather himself. He was stocky, with thick thighs and a square jaw. He had bristly black hair, and after every clinch he shook his head like a bull. In the second period, he evened the match, and now the spectators were on their feet. The school group from Changping screamed and banged their thunder sticks.

  Behind them, Chang Aimei remained seated. His legs were crossed, as if he were relaxing after a day’s labor, and his belongings were neatly stacked on his lap: towel, flags, pamphlets. He had not moved a muscle since the match began. His eyes were fixed on the distant mat, and he said nothing. But I could hear him breathing—steady, steady, steady. In the third period the Belarusan took the initial point. Deeper now, deeper now. The match continued with Chang Yongxiang in the lower position; he escaped and scored a point. Inhale—almost a gasp. Another point, and then it was over, and the referee was raising Chang Yongxiang’s arm.

  Eventually, Chang lost to a Georgian, taking the silver medal. But on the day of the semifinal he left the ring triumphant, already the most successful Chinese Greco-Roman wrestler in history. The crowd roared—China, go! China, go! At the top of the arena, safely out of sight, Chang Aimei still looked relaxed. He was silent until he took out the cell phone. “Wei!” he shouted. “He just won again!”

  Car Town

  Every day, the Americans visited the auto manufacturer in Wuhu. There were twenty of them: engineers, company executives, market specialists, technical consultants. One lawyer. The auto manufacturer was called Chery, and it was a new company that had been booming over the past two years. On most mornings, the American engineers test-drove prototypes on a small track outside Chery’s final-assembly plant. The test track had signs in Chinese; the engineers spoke Detroit.

  “I’d give it a six.”

  “Pay attention to the clutch engagement.”

  “Do you remember the Versailles?”

  “Of course.”

  “What an embarrassing car.”

  “The only nine I’ve ever given was the idle on a Lincoln Marquis.”

  “Are you going to do a J-turn? ’Cause if you do, warn me.”

  The leader of the American team was Malcolm Bricklin, who had founded a company called Visionary Vehicles to partner with Chery. When I met him in Wuhu, he shook my hand and announced that they were going to become the first company to import Chinese-made cars to the United States. He said, “We’re making history, and I’m going to film it.” His son was the videographer. Jonathon Bricklin was in his twenties, and he followed his father everywhere he went, with the tape rolling.

  Malcolm Bricklin was sixty-six years old, and he had spent most of his life chasing breakthroughs in the automobile industry. In the late 1960s, he introduced Subaru to American consumers and made a small fortune. In the early 1970s, he spent much of that fortune founding an automobile manufacturer in New Brunswick, Canada. He
commissioned the design of a futuristic sports car with gull-wing doors, named it after himself, and promptly went bankrupt.

  In the 1980s, Bricklin brought the Yugo across the Atlantic. He declared personal bankruptcy not long after that. Later he tried to make electric bicycles in California, but Americans would never love bikes the way that they love cars.

  In 2002, he began searching for a way to get back into the auto business. He had the idea that he’d find another foreign manufacturer that was capable of exporting cars to the United States. He visited England, Serbia, Romania, Poland, and India. He stopped looking once he got to Wuhu.

  This was Visionary Vehicles’ second trip to the Chinese city, and they were staying at the Guoxin Hotel. Each morning, they ate breakfast in the executive lounge, and Malcolm Bricklin held forth about the past and the future. He was a tall man with white hair and striking gray-blue eyes, and his voice was deep and smooth. He never sat still. He claimed that in Wuhu he had stumbled upon the perfect car company. At breakfast he was usually joined by Tony Ciminera, the executive vice president of Visionary Vehicles, and Ronald E. Warnicke, who was the company’s lawyer. Warnicke was an old friend of Bricklin’s, and one of his specialties was bankruptcy law. In his garage, back in Arizona, he still had a Bricklin SV-1 with gull-wing doors.

  “People talk about the Yugo like it was some kind of big failure,” Bricklin said. “Tony’s job back then was to find the least expensive car in the world. That was when Yugoslavia was a Communist country—but a Communist country that was friendly to the West. We found a fifteen-year-old car that had never had to meet any regulations. It was basically a Fiat 128.”

  Tony Ciminera said, “We had to bring our own cases of toilet paper, our own fax toner. We had to bring unleaded gas for the cars.”

  Bricklin said, “Henry Kissinger was our consultant. Tony made five hundred and twenty-eight changes in the car in fourteen months, and in fourteen months the car was in dealers’ hands.”