Grit without Grace
Sep 25th, 2006 by Michael Max
Sifting through life in Beijing is a lot like panning for gold in an increasingly played out river bed. There are nuggets bright with value, but it requires shaking through a lot of worthless debris. Everything it seems has a grittier edge.
I’ve had cabbies that refuse to stop for my white face, and I’m growing to loathe those rides anyway. It’s always the same stupid conversation, “your Chinese is so good”, “where are you from?”, “do you like China?” Cab rides used to be a fine place to practice my wobbly Chinese. Now between the doubling of the fares in the past few years and less tolerance for wasting my breath in a city that is already dangerously short on oxygen, I prefer to avoid them if possible.
Beijing feels like a practiced whore with a painted smile and her hand in your wallet. Everywhere it’s an angle, a baited hook, a quick 100RMB to be turned. I remember in the past how I used to think “It’s their job to try to fleece me, and mine to make sure that doesn’t happen”. It used to feel like a game. Now it is a war of attrition. Perhaps it is part of the run up to the 2008 Olympics, when the world will descend on Beijing. Money signs gleam in everyone’s eyes. Or, perhaps it is that I no longer live here and no longer have to surrender to it.
Either way it is wearisome.
There are stretch limos here now. Those weren’t here 3 years ago when I called Beijing home. Peasants still sell vegetables from 3 wheeled carts under the massive bridges that funnel Beijing’s ever increasingly riot of cars. I’ve heard fewer of the yahoo “HELLO”, the one word of English that the thinking they are clever man-boys of Beijing love to yell.
Perhaps it is precisely because I don’t live here, that these aspects of Beijing are like the slightly raw dry tickle from the grit filled air in my throat. I’ve lost a certain immunity. I’ve an irritation that will not go away. There is a tolerance that comes from adapting that I no longer carry.
I am an outsider, and only too aware of it.