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This is an account of a real-life experience. HOWEVER, considering that I have the worst sense of direction in the world - the geographical placement of Wang Fu Jing has been embellished slight - so East end could actually have been West end for all I know. Having said that... enjoy!
Beijing Summer
I swipe them away in annoyance.
The ground shudders beneath me as I make a mad dash across the street – a look right, look left, and oh-God-help-me-I’m-gonna-die – before I’m over and alive and on the other side. Behind me the cars continue to rumble and growl and screech, weaving wheels and melodies around each other like some cacophonic urban symphony.
But it is not only my ears and my skin that are brutally assaulted. The swell of colour from my surroundings floods my virgin eyes, and its blinding brightness is bluer than blue, greener than green, redder than red… overwhelmed, the rhododendron tree on its little patch of lawn back home withers in the corner of my mind. They number thousands, these billboards, plastered cheekily on every available space and crevasse, modern day Da Vincis in this ‘communist’ city of Have All, Be All – As Long As You Can Pay. Dimly, I wonder why the whitewashed walls and dull concrete beneath do not blush at this frivolity as the dust swirls restlessly around my feet.
On the ground, the people are crammed just as tightly, spilling over the pavement like carelessly poured green tea. Teens in green Chucks, men in green ties, fashionable ladies holding little green umbrellas as delicate shields against the sun. Because green is THE colour this season, twelve short weeks for a thousand shades of olive and jade, to be quickly worn and just as quickly discarded when the timer runs out and next season’s new colour pushes in. In my red dress and purple umbrella, I am no better than an alien – more out of place among my own people than in the distant world of the ‘foreign devil’. “Poor, ignorant country bumpkin” their contemptuous eyes say, and I can only clench my teeth tighter and quicken my pace.
Along this street, the cityscape sways like the twelve dancing princesses as the buildings turn from concrete to steel, steel to chrome and chrome to glass, each one taller and more beautiful than the last. Here be McDonalds, there – KFC, and on the corner, Sony and Motorola tumble with Dior while the top local brands cheer them on. It is a race, a war, and all Darwin’s theory, a mad 25 meter sprint to be the richest, the brightest, and the better than best.
It is dangerously distracting. At a gleaming shop window, my eyes almost miss the little girl huddled beneath, so caught was I by the sleek Gucci heels on display. She is nothing special – nothing much at all, really – grey rags dangling from grimy stick arms and matted dark hair covering an equally filthy face. I notice with an almost detached air that she seemed to be missing legs, until my heart finally catches up with my brain and I am forced to look away, back towards the shoe leather and crystal diamante of 6500 RMB. Several moments later only 20 is dropped into her bowl, but I have not the courage to meet her eyes, and immediately cross the street when the lights turn green.
I don’t look back.
By now the heat has become a bloated leech on my body, shriveling up my innards like drying prunes, but I feel no warmth now, not anymore, only the fluorescent brilliance of the blue silver glass that flashes high overhead. The end of Wang Fu Jing approaches. The opulent gates of the North Arch tower into view. And then, all of a sudden, as I attempt again in vain to see through shadows and the smoke above, I am hit by the force of a ‘why’ – why we are selling our minds for money and our souls for skyscrapers, clawing our way forever higher and higher to a goal, a sky, that is only unpitying and bleak and grey.