My 2008 Beijing Olympic Moments, I: Seeing Olympic Basketball

I have to say that I've always been pretty indifferent to the Olympic Games. I can't remember the last time I watched the Olympics on TV, but I do remember that I spent the 1996 Olympic Games doing a 150 mile north-south backpacking trek along Sierra Nevada Mountain Range's crest. I started that trip at Pine Creek Pass and then hiked down the John Muir Trail to Mount Whitney. This journey had been my longest hike ever up to then, and by the time I left America for China in the summer of 2005, I'd hiked some 1,500 miles in these magnificent mountains and bagged over a dozen peaks there.

I think this activity was truly in line with the Olympic spirit, certainly more so than being a lazy couch potato staring at the games on the god-awful boob tube (I absolutely loath television and strongly feel that it has been a complete national disaster). It's bad enough putting up with all the touchie-feelie athlete profiles and the incessant jingoistic cheerleading from the sportscasters, but even worse is enduring countless inane appeals to buy light beer, SUVs and pickup trucks. I haven't the slightest intention of every purchasing any one of those products! (Regarding the cheerleading, I have to say that my friends who watched the Chinese TV coverage of the 2008 games told me that the jingoism there far exceeded anything they had previously seen on Western TV networks.)

So prior before the Olympic games began, I seriously considered fleeing the capital. In particular, I feared that Beijing would be flooded with foreign "tourons"--this is a slang term for "tourist" + "moron". However, an opportunity to earn some extra money arose in late July at the language center where I teach part-time on weekends, so I decided to stay in town. And my fears about all the "tourons" turned out to be exaggerated.

To be sure, there were plenty of tourists in the city, but not as many as I had feared. The subway, buses, and restaurants were certainly crowded, but not much more crowded than they normally are during the usual peak summer tourist season. A few people told me that cabs were a lot harder to get, but I hardly ever use them to get about, save for getting a ride home at 1 am after an evening at Houhai's East Shore Jazz Club.

Moreover, much to my surprise, I actually wound up seeing two Olympic basketball games. I got this opportunity thanks to one of my very best expat friends here in Beijing, an Irishman named Diarmuid O'Brien. We got to know each other through an extraordinary coincidence, namely his older sister and my younger sister are next door neighbors back in my home town of Fresno, CA. It really is a small world after all!!

Diarmuid is an attorney and works at a major international law firm, Squires, Sanders & Dempsey. One of his co-workers is married to a high-level GE executive in China. Since GE was a major Olympic sponsor--the Chinese word for sponsor is 赞助商 (the first two characters are "zan" and "zhu," both of which are falling tones, while the third one is a flat tone "shang")--this lady got lots of free tickets to different Olympic events from her husband. Naturally, she passed on more than a few them to Diarmuid.

One of these tickets was for the August 16th evening basketball games between Germany and China and the US and Spain. So when Diarmuid called me a few days before these matches and asked me if I wanted to go with him to see them, I naturally said, "sure!"

I must confess here that I've never been a really big basketball fan. In fact, my feelings about the game echo the hilarious comment made by Woody Alllen's second wife in "Annie Hall:" "What's so interesting about ten pituitary glands trying to shoot a ball through a hoop?"

That said, I knew this would be my first and certainly last chance to see an Olympic sports event. I also figured that my China saga would be incomplete if I didn't see at least a bit of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games while living in the capital. And basketball is hugely popular in the Middle Kingdom, so watching this game would be another way of getting in touch with the contemporary Chinese zeitgeist. Finally, I thought to myself, "You won't get another opportunity in your life to see in person Yao Ming, Lebron James, and Kobie Bryant play basketball."

In any event, I am very happy to have gone and will be forever extremely grateful to Diarmuid for having giving me this opportunity. To start with, the facility at Wukousong is absolutely beautiful and first-rate. Since we arrived just as the Chinese National Anthem started, there wasn't any time to take pictures outside the facility, plus it was too dark anyway (fortunately, it didn't take long to get through the security check). The photo at the top of this post is a shot of the arena taken at the end of August. That was about as close as I could get to the facility on that day to shoot the picture.

I did, of course, shoot some photos while watching the two matches. Alas, my camera doesn't have a zoom lens, so the players, who were lined up during the Spanish National Anthem prior to the second match, naturally look very small in the photo below. I include the picture because readers who look real hard at it will notice that there are still some unfilled seats on the opposite side of the arena, both to the left and right of the big dispaly screen hanging from the ceiling.

Like our seats, which were located right above the press section, those still empty seats had been purchased by corporate sponsors. While the Beijing Olympics were in general a stunning organizational success, many Chinese people, including those who are my friends here, complained about all the seats that were reserved for these sponsors. They noted that many of them remained empty during events, as lots of the corporate guests just went to the pre-game parties and skipped watching the actual events. And one of my former students, who did volunteer work at this event--more on that in a later post--informed me that the scalpers, or 黄牛 (rising tone "huang" and "niu," or literally "yellow cow"), were charging 8,000 RMB for tickets. That's well above what most people in Beijig earn in a month.

As for the games, the China vs. Germany match, which was the first one played, was hands-down the best of the two. That was not because the teams played all that well. For example, the Germans made some steals, but converted hardly any of them into baskets. It was the better of the two because the game was close. China struggled to win by five or six points and actually trailed by a point or two at the half; I think the final score was the low sixties for China and the high fifties for Germany.

Unlike the later championship rematch between the two teams, where US had a bit of fight on its hands, the second game was a complete blowout. The American "dream" or "redeem" team was clearly in a league of its own, being faster, more aggressive, and better shooters than any of the other teams. The US led by 20 points at the half, and the Spanish team simply folded and threw in the towel during the second half. The final score wsa something like 120 to 80 (the score in the other game might have been the low sixties for China, the high fifties for Germany).

Diarmuid and I left the game a bit early to beat the crowds heading out to the subway and trying to get taxis. We hopped into a cab and topped off and very satisfying evening by having a few beers at Paddy O'Sheas, an Irish bar in Dongzhimen not far from where I live. This Olympic moment was definitely another great experience and terrific chapter in my ongoing China adventure. I'll be doing another post about watching the para-olympic games in the not too distant future.

That was then (before the Olympic Games), this was now (after the Olympic Games)

I took this photograph shortly before the Olympic Games opened. I shot it from a bridge over the Second Ring Road, not far from where I live in Dongzhimen, close to the Dongzhimen Subway Station. As you can see, the street lights all are festooned with Olympic banners. Since this was a weekend and the odd-even driving rules had been instituted, the traffic on the ring road was very light. The picture below was shot earlier this month. It's a stretch of the Second Ring Road bit south of the photo above near the Dongsishitiao Subway Station. Since the games are over, all the banners gone.

The white office tower in the photo below is the Poly Group building. One of Beijing's nicest theaters, the Poly Theater, is across the street. I had the good fortune to get free tickets for a show there put on by the China National Disabled People's Performance Art Troupe during the Beijing Para-Olympics (more on that in a future post).

Most of the construction in these photographs is of very recent vintage, not even a decade old. New high rises and office towers have sprouted up all along this stretch of the Second Ring Road. For example, construction work on the white building in the top photo started in 2005. At least that's what one of my former Beijing International Studies University (BISU) students, a young lady from Shandong Province, once told me. "Shan" and "dong" are both flat tones and the characters are 山东 (these characters mean "East of the Mountain;" 山 is "mountain," while 东 is east.

This student, whose photo is below, informed me that when she first arrived in Beijing three years ago, construction work on that box-like white high rise had just gotten underway. She has really helped this laowai deal with the practical problems expats face while living in Beijing, ranging from assisting me deposit my rent money into my landlord's bank account at China Merchants Bank to translating during a recent visit to Tongren Eye Hospital (my optometry-related Mandarin is very weak!). Since this young woman is very clever and hard working, I expect her to go far and be one among many examples of upward social mobility as China's economy continues its rapid development.

More on how the Chinese view dragons

I mentioned in my last post that Chinese people see dragons as benevolent and magical creatures who bring good luck. I forgot to provide two illustrations of this mindset. The first is that a common given male name is "dragon." For example, the Chinese name of the famous Hong Kong action filmstar, Jackie Chan, is 成龙. The first character is a rising tone Cheng, which is a common Chinese family name--in China, the family name comes before the given name--while the second character, of course, is dragon, or a rising tone "long." The second illustration is a four word set idiomatic expression. The Chinese call these phrases 成语: the second character is a falling/rising tone "yu", and appears as the second character in the Mandarin words for most foreign languages, like German (德语, the first character is a rising tone "de"), French (法语, the first character is a falling/rising tone "fa"), etc. This "chengyu" is 望子成龙, or "may all your children become dragons". The first character is a falling tone "wang," the second is a fall/rising tone "zi", and you already know what the third and fourth characters are.

Play Ball! (Dragons)

An earlier post about Beihai Park mentioned another and better known highlight of its north end, namely the Nine Dragon Screen. The Chinese name for it is 九龙壁; the first character, a falling/rising tone "jiu," is the word for "nine", the second character, a rising tone "long," is the word for "dragon," and the third character, a falling tone "bi," means cliff. Fellow film buffs will know that the Chinese name for the Hong Kong director John Woo's latest action extravaganza, based on the post Han Dyanasty "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" story, 赤壁, has the character "bi". This is because 壁 means "cliff" as well as "screen", and the film's English title is "Red Cliff". The first character, a fourth tone "chi", is one the three characters for "red" in Mandarin; the other two are 红 (rising tone "hong") and 丹 (falling tone "dan"). I'll say more about this film in another post.

As one can guess from its name, the Nine Dragon Screen depicts ... nine dragons. The screen is 25.78 meters long, 6.65 meters tall, and 1.42 meters thick. The surface is made out of colored, glazed enamel tiles. In addition to being an outstanding example of this kind of art, the screen is unique for having designs on both its font and back sides.

One might ask, "Why have nine dragons? Why not 10 or 6?" The answer to this question is that, as is the case in most things built in China, the screen's design, along with the numbers associated with this design, have symbolic meaning. In this case, the number "nine" was seen as the emperor's number. And in Taoist philosophy, odd numbers are male numbers--hence they go with any kind of male entity or symbol, like the emperor--while even numbers are female numbers. Of course, the latter can also be lucky or fortunate: the number "eight" is a case in point. Thus the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games began eight minutes after eight o'clock on the eighth day of the eighth month of the year, which itself is the eighth year of new century. The Chinese don't have names for months, but instead just put the number of the month in front of character for month, "月," which is a falling tone "yue". The number eight is 八, or a flat tone "ba", so August is 八月, or literally "eight month." No wonder the games were, from an organizational standpoint, a smashing success!

Another significant number are the claws on the dragons' paws. If you look closely at the top photograph, you'll notice that there are five claws. The five claws symbolized the emperor's power. Hence these five-clawed dragons only adorn imperial buildings and garments. This kind of dragon can also be seen in the nine dragon screen that stands in front of the palace built by the 13th son of Hongwu, an early Ming Dynasty Emperor (both "Ming" and "Chao" are rising tones, and the characters are 明朝; "Hong" is a rising tone, "Wu" is a falling/rising tone, and the characters are 洪武). This palace is located at Datong (da is a falling tone, tong a rising tone, and the characters are 大同) in Shanxi Province. Shan and xi are both flat tones, the characters are 山西, and they literally mean "west of the mountain".

Perhaps the most notable feature of these dragons is their playful demenaor. Looking closely at the top photo, you'll see a ball shaped object between the two dragons. That's a pearl ball and the Chinese friend mentioned in my last blog post, Lu Hong Yan, informed me, during an earlier visit to Beihai Park, that dragons play with each other by passing pearl balls back and forth from their mouths.

This depiction of dragons is, of course, very different from the Western view of these mythical creatures. Chinese dragons are not evil, fire-breathing monsters spreading death and destruction. As one of my best Chinese friends from my first year in the Middle Kingdom, a lovely woman from Inner Mongolia named 杨蕾 (rising tone Yang and flat tone Lei), once told me, dragons here are seen as magical and benevolent creatures. In particular, they are believed to be the bearers of good fortune, bringing rainfall to increase crop harvests and warding off evil spirits. So there's no figure comparable to St. George the Dragon Slayer in old Chinese literature!
The top photo shows just one end of the Nine Dragon Screen. Another photo, showing the entire screen, is posted below.

More on the Qing Dynasty Qian Long Emperor; or, apres moi l'deluge chinois

Maybe another word or two is in order about the Qian Long (乾隆) Emperor; for those interested, the Chinese word for "emperor" is Huang (rising tone) Di (falling tone) (皇帝). To start with, I've provided a painting of the emperor (see the picture above). As mentioned in the previous blog post, Qian Long reigned for nearly six during the 18th Century.

Despite this long reign, he wasn't the longest ruling monarch in China's history. That honor goes to one of the first Qing Dynasty Emperors, Kang Xi (both characters, 康 and 熙, are a flat tone), who was also Qian Long's grandfather. He reigned from 1661 through 1722. Qian Long revered his grandfather, so during the 60th year of his reign, as his tenure as emperor approached that of Kangxi's with respect to its length, he abdicated the throne. Qian Long did this to honor the memory of grandfather. I suppose it also gave the now retired emperor a lot more time to do painting and calligraphy in his art studio at present-day Beihai Park's north end.

Most historians regard the Kang Xi Emperor as one of feudal China's greatest rulers (his painting is the one below the text). In particular, he was immensely curious and had an insatiable thirst for knowledge about all kinds of things, especially science and mathematics (unlike a certain American President!). Kang Xi also governed moderately and refrained from imposing heavy taxes on the peasantry. China prospered and expanded during Kang Xi's reign and these good times, along with the emperor's political acumen, helped reconcile most Han Chinese people to alien Manchu rule. The Qing, or "pure" dynasty, of course, arose in Northeast China (Zhong [flat tone] Guo [rising tone] Dong [flat tone] Bei [falling/rising tone]; 中国东北). Before the 18th century, this region's population was made up almost entirely of the Manchu--Man (falling/ rising) Zu (rising) Ren (rising) (满族人) in Mandarin--ethnic minority.

Alas, while Qian Long wasn't a terrible emperor and certainly looks good compared to his successors, he most surely failed to measure up to his beloved grandfather. Compared to Kang Xi, he was a fairly indolent individual. And while China remained outwardly strong during this period, the seeds of its 19th Century decline were sown during Qian Long's reign. In particular, the Middle Kingdom's enforced insularity was coming back to haunt it. Thus when Lord Macartney's British delegation were granted an audience with the emperor during their 1794-1796 visit to the Middle Kingdom, Qian Long brusquely told them to piss off, famously insisting that China had nothing to learn from the West.

However, this period of underlying economic and social decline did produce one of the Middle-Kingdom's best known literary masterpieces, Dream of Red Chambers (also known as Story of the Stone), written by Cao (rising tone) Xue (falling/rising tone) Qin (rising tone) (曹雪芹). My very good and extremely literate Chinese friend, Flora Lu (or in Chinese Lu [falling tone] Hong [rising tone] Yan [falling tone]; 路红艳), informs me that the second title derives from Cao's insistence, made early on in the novel, that the story was written in stone.

Both of the novel's English names are literal translations from the Mandarin titles. The second Mandarin name of the novel is consists of a rising tone Shi, a rising tone Tou, and a falling tone Ji (石头记). The characters 石 and 头 together mean "stone," while the character 记 means to mark down or remember and thus appears in the Mandarin word for journalist, 记者. The second character in this word, the falling/rising zhe, is a suffix that is used, like the character 师 (a flat tone shi), to denote a role or job; hence an environmentalist is a 环保者. The first character, a falling "haun" appears in the Chinese character combination for "environment," while the second character, a falling/rising bao, means to protect or guarantee. The novel's more commonly used title in Mandarin is Hong (rising tone) Lou (rising tone) Meng (falling tone) (红楼梦). This literally means "Dream of Red Chambers," although the Mandarin word order is completely different from the English word order: translated word for word it reads, "Red Floor/Chamber Dream." One of the things us Laowai learning Chinese have to get used is that the word order in Mandarin sentences and phrases is often the complete reverse of the English word order for sentences and phrases!

I haven't read this novel, but know a bit about its story from books and other written material about China (I'll do a post soon about the Chinese literature I've read since coming here). According to this material, the novel is all about how Confucian morality and ideals went awry during the Qian Long era. The characters are mainly high government officials and members of wealthy families, principally merchants. Their lecherous behavior and petty bickering leads them, one after another, to hang themselves, plunge headfirst into wells, or swallow golden thread.

The novel's main male characters, 宝玉, or a falling/rising tone Bao and a falling tone Yu--the second character means "jade"--wishes to escape all this and marry his childhood sweetheart. The "Red Mansions" he dreams of represent a longed for better place, free of rottenness and corruption. However, his family has other plans and tricks him into an arranged marriage to a girl from a wealthier and more influential family by using a wedding veil to conceal the other bride's identity. Bao then goes stark raving mad. Certainly not a cheery story, but all my Chinese friends tell me I must read the novel to understand Chinese culture. Perhaps in five years my Mandarin will be at the point where I can read it in the original language!

Last but not least, in thinking about the Qian Long Emperor's reign, I was struck by the parallels between it and the long reign of King Louis XV, the unfortunate Louis XVI's predecessor, who famously declared, "Apre moi, l'deluge" ("After me, the deluge"). The Qian Long Emperor could well have said, "After me, the Chinese deluge/China's deluge", as following his reign, the deluge did come in the form of the two Opium Wars, Taiping Rebellion, Sino-Japanese War, and Boxer Revolt and other disasters.

Fortunately, these bad Qian Long and feudal Chinese legacies have been largely redressed and their slate wiped clean by the Middle Kingdom's recent and rapid rebirth. At the same time, visitors to Beijing can still enjoy the good fruits of Qian Long's rule, particularly his patronage of the arts, while visiting Beihai Park.

The Qing Dynasty (清朝) Qian Long (乾隆) Emperor worked here

Most visitors to Beihai Park mainly stroll around the lake and visit the island located at its south end. The latter has a small hill and one passes through a number of temples before reaching the Tibetan Buddhist-style Stupa at the top (on a clear day, you have a swell view of Beijing from this vantage point).

However, my favorite part of Beihai Park is its north end. This part of the park not only has the famous Nine Dragon Screen--I'll talk about this sight in another post--but a number of attractive temples, pavilions, small ponds, rockeries, and halls.

The latter includes a hall built by the Qing Dynasty Qian Long (both names are a rising tone) Emperor. Qian Long reigned for 61 years during the 18th Century, from 1735 to 1796. He not only was a generous patron of the arts, but was himself an artist. So whenever Qian Long tired of his official duties in the Forbidden City, he would escape to this place and paint and do calligraphy (the Chinese word for calligraphy is shu [flat tone] fa [falling/rising tone]). The emperor also wrote poetry, and I'll be saying more about him in a future post.

For now, I'll note that while the studio's interior is off limits, one can still get a good view and take nice photos of its inside through the building's large windows. Since the weather was still warm, the windows were open on this day, making it possible to get some decent shots with my digital camera. These three photos were among the pictures I took during my 2008 National Day Holiday visit to Beihai Park.

How not to get to Beihai Park during the National Day Holiday

We had our one-week National Day holiday at the beginning of the month and I once again stayed in Beijing. Traveling during this so-called "Golden Week" is a real hassle. Train tickets are practically impossible to get, unless you buy them at wildly inflated prices from scalpers (for some reason, the Chinese call these folks "Yellow Cows", or huang (rising tone) niu (rising tone) (黄牛). Plane fares are also more expensive than usual. And Beijing's weather at this time of the year is very nice and there's plenty to see and do in the city.

Unfortunately, most places here are pretty crowded, due to the large numbers of out-of-town Chinese tourists. As the Chinese would say, they're ren (rising tone) shan (flat tone) ren (rising tone) hai (falling rising tone) (人山人海), or "people mountain/people sea." I had enough sense not to visit the Forbidden City. Indeed, when I met a trio of German tourists at the Summer Palace and spent several hours practicing my German with them, one remarked that going to the Forbidden City "war eine Katastrophe" (was a catastrophe).

At Beihai Park, which is located between the Forbidden City and Houhai, the problem was not the crowds in the location but rather their impact on my getting there. Since I live in Dongzhimen, the best way to go to Beihai Park is by the 107 bus. On a normal day, it takes about a half an hour to get there by bus. On this day, however, it took the bus nearly 15 minutes to do the final, very short last leg of the trip down the Dianmen Dajie to the bus stop at the north end of the park. The problem was that scores of tourist buses were parked around the bus stop. This, in turn, caused the traffic to be even more congested than normal. And matters weren't helped by the fact that the 107 bus is a tram bus, which made it even harder for it to maneuver around the parked tour buses.

Luckily, I was able to get a seat as we literally inched toward the bus stop. I could at least sit as the bus moved a few yards at 5 mph and then stopped before moving another few yards. I had got on the bus at 2:30 or at Dongzhimen and expected to be in the park by 3:00. As it was, I didn't get there until at least 3:30 and then had to fight my way through the tour groups to the ticket windows and through the narrow north entrances.

The bus ride back home was no picnic either. I literally had to jam my way in through the door and then spent the better part of the journey being literally cheek to cheek and toe to toe with my fellow passengers. So the moral story: if you want to go to Behai Park during this holiday, it's better to take the Nr. 1 subway line--even though it will be jammed as well, it won't get stuck in the city's ever-worsening traffic--get off at the Tian'anmen West station and walk to the park from there. It's about a twenty minute trip up the Nanchang Jie, and this route makes for a very pleasant stroll along the west side of lovely Zhongshan Park and the Forbidden City's northwest corner.

In spite of all of that, the time spent inside Beihai Park was, as usual, very pleasant and rewarding. More on that in a another blog entry.

Introducing Myself

Hello readers, my name is William Daniel Garst. My friends all call me Dan. I'm very new to blogging, but want to give it a try as a way of sharing my writing and photography with a wider audience. Let me begin by saying a word or two about myself. I'm a late 40 fortysomething former academic--before coming to China, I held visiting in political science at universities like UCLA and Cornell and published a number of peer-review journal articles, most of which are still being cited. However, through a combination of bad luck and a downsized academic job market, I came very close but never quite managed to get a tenure track job. In 2005 I decided to give living in China a try. My first China home was in the Middle Kingdom's relatively poor heartland, Henan Province; I then moved to Beijing in the summer of 2006. Like many laowai (老外), the slang Chinese term for foreigners, I first taught English at Chinese universities, but now work in a Chinese company.

Notwithstanding its traffic and pollution, I think that Beijing is a fascinating and incredible place to live. Unlike, say Shanghai and certainly Hong Kong, the city offers a mix of both Western amenities and the best of Chinese culture and history. You can stroll through ancient hutongs (胡同) and courtyard houses, or siheyuans (四合院), visit other historical places, like the Summer Palace, Temple of Heavan, Forbidden City, Great Wall and the like by day and then enjoy either contemporary Western style food or Chinese dishes for dinner and top it off with live jazz and other kinds of music, modern, classical, or traditional Chinese. The city also has a myriad of cutting edge art and photography galleries, beautiful parks, great museums, and so much more. Plus this moveable feast and urban adventure can be enjoyed for fraction of what it costs to live in New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco.

Thus I plan to stay here for the long haul, for at least another three years, perhaps four years in order to speak Mandarin like a native, understand Chinese culture, and see first-hand the incredible social and economic changes occurring in China. I will be posting writing about my experiences so that people living in and outside of Beijing and China can better appreciate this place and obtain practical advice about visiting and residing in the city. And there will lots of photos posted on this blog too. Enjoy!!