It is amazing how a few years can completely change a city. The last time I was in Beijing was just a few months prior to the Olympic Games. Then, Beijing was already hurtling towards megapolis status, with massive skyscrapers and construction projects that would make The Big Apple green with envy. Environmental issues still scar the progress report-book, and the Chinese sky is often hazy with pollutants.
Fast forward to November 2011, and Beijing seems to have calmed down in terms of its building frenzy. The roads are wide and although traffic is still bad during peak hours, driving is a lot more orderly. The Beijing Capital International Airport looks all glistening and new, titanic in comparison to its former self, and not unlike the modern high tech airports in Hong Kong and Singapore. The immigration process has been streamlined and is relatively painless, and security guards no longer wait by customs to grab your luggage receipts or wave you over for impromptu spot checks.
Driving along the highway into the centre of the city, it is amazing how Beijing has embraced the building boom. Buildings of various shapes, colours and design have mushroomed over the last few years. The disused TV station tower which caught fire a few years ago stands in stark contrast to the other high rises. A hotel is designed to look like a comet hit it in the middle. Art deco buildings only created a few years ago. Shiny silver and glass make a postmodern statement in the capital’s skyline. So much for resisting the evils of rampant capitalism.
Wangfujing Avenue, the most famous shopping street, is a paean to consumer culture – lined on both sides with mega malls of all descriptions and high-end luxury brand names emblazoned on every free square patch. LV, Prada, Hermes, Ferragamo, you name it, you’ll see it. Space is not limited to the expensive, as the other well known consumable icons are well-represented too: McDonalds is everywhere, along with a host of other fast food and high street chains.
Yet, although Beijing has had a high tech facelift, it appears that much of this is only skin deep. You can take the peasant out of the village but you can’t take the village out of the peasant. Old traditions and habits die hard. There is nothing so disturbing as walking alongside a beautiful girl, dressed to the nines in Jimmy Choos and Christian Dior, only to suddenly hear her clear her throat roughly and loudly, before hearing the only too familiar sound of expectoration and sticky liquid hitting the pavement.
Throat oysters are still common, unfortunately. They are as ubiquitous in Beijing as dog poo in Paris. The prevalence of smokers is another major annoyance for me. While I am all for smokers having the freedom to maim their own lungs, it annoys me that I have to sit in a heated cab in the winter with a driver who has no qualms about adding colour to the atmosphere with cigarette smoke. Or, try eating when everyone around is drinking and puffing nicotine-laden smoke into your face.
This filthy habit also means smelling stinky clothes while being sardined in the crowded subway trains. Add to this the questionable hygiene standards of many of the locals (clothes which haven’t been washed for days; people who think it is unnecessary to wash at least once a day; pungent halitosis), and you begin to question your own upbringing.
So, on to the food. Chinese cuisine has had quite an impact the world over, mainly thanks to the migratory Chinese who set up restaurants in their Chinatown enclaves. While the chow mein revolution has engendered familiarity with Western taste buds, much of the food available overseas is of the Southern Chinese (particularly Guangdong) variety. An untrained food connoisseur might find Northern chinese cuisine a little harder to get used to. Historically, there was less produce up north, and with long cold winters, food had to be hardy and simple. Most of the food, then, is quite basic, and not very nice. The standards of preparation are not Michelin-starred either. I have found the food to be very greasy, bland, and unexciting. Granted, the quality of food has improved tremendously since four years ago. Also, there has been a proliferation of eateries around the city, and there is more choice than ever before in terms of food types.
The best cuisines would be the ones from outside of Beijing – the food from other provinces. Often, the restaurants would be opened by natives from those provinces who keep true to the way food is traditionally prepared. On this particular occasion, I was fortunate enough to be invited to dinner in a Shanxi restaurant.
My hosts, in their efforts to be generous and hospitable, ordered too much food. However, as is wont in China, it is considered better to have more than not enough. The dishes were all spectacularly displayed as you can see from the photographs. The speciality dish of the day was donkey. I was reliably informed of an old Chinese proverb: “The best meat in heaven is that of a dragon’s; the best meat on earth is that of a donkey’s.”
The donkey meat was surprisingly tender and well-seasoned, quite unlike the bland taste of horse meat which I had in Kazakhstan. The Chinese like to make a grand display of food whenever they are hosting someone. They make it a point to over order, so that a lot of food goes to waste. It does not take long for the table to become cluttered with massive plates of food, with the familiar cry of “Zhi ba!” (Eat!)
Out on the Wangfujing Night Food Street, rows of stalls selling skewered (but still moving) blue scorpions and seahorses (!) await your custom. These delicacies (including bugs and worms) are dipped into a batter and deepfried on the spot to guarantee freshness.
This is why they say that the Chinese only live to eat, rather than the other way round. Beijing may be a bustling, modern city but its people remain concerned with the first two rungs of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, even though, for the lucky wealthy, the fourth rung seems to be ringing true.