February 05 2010
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The Pianobabbler is touring Asia, managed by The East West Entertainment Group. This is an ongoing record of his adventures.
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Beijing winter and (the Pianobabbler's hometown) Toronto winter mirror each other, give or take a few degrees. Brilliant weather befell us today. About 10 degrees Celsius. Sun. For heat-haters like me, weather nirvana.
The Pianoabbler is not normally drawn by sites, or a desire to see them. Tiananmen Square, though, beckons. It holds a focussed place in the Western image of China. The May Day parade. The democracy protests. Chairman Mao’s portrait.
My host Ivy- who speaks Mandarin thank goodness -and I hop in a cab and go. China sprawls, Tiananmen sprawls. BIG. Central Park sans trees. But beyond size, the square has little to offer. It doesn’t persuade. Its attraction lies in your knowledge of its history.
Nearby however, there are some small shops. Shops? Spaces with shelves with things on them. Old spaces. Spare. Drab. Grey. Small spaces. The décor is concrete and shelving. Nothing else. No architecture. No signs. No design.
One shop sells kitchenware. Low end, but fetching. We’re drawn in by some steel and brass pots in the filmy front window. We each eye and buy a Chinese hand warmer. A plain, graceful, small brass screwtop pot, into which you pour hot water, then hold to heat the hands.
It’s the purchasing not the purchase that leaves an impression. The people. Four people. The square man in dull winter clothes. Two others, one tall, one short similarly garbed, milling about, maybe, maybe not, working there. And the all-business woman, sporting an out of place purple blouse, at a utility desk handling cash. The four leave little room in the little space to move around the shelves.
They make our shopping a social process. We talk, they talk, we ask, they confer, they laugh, we laugh, they show, they fetch, they smoke (alas, still prevalent in China), they ask, we talk. They want to make the sale, but they want to make the connection with us as well. Old world shops must have operated in this way. Our buying is a logical, organic end to our time with the four, like a handshake, or a hug when you leave friends. The transaction does not stand separate from the interaction. They’ve reintroduced the com, the togetherness, into commerce. A contrast with the alien détaché of vendors back home.
The antisepsis of retail in the West has not yet reached Beijing. We leave the store with our hand warmer warmed by the personal, and unbleached by the cold impersonal of the mall.
That feeling of the personal, the social, runs generally through my experience of Beijing. I feel less human insularity than at home. No doubt this has a dark converse. Officious surveillance, perhaps, about which we know from Western media. But societies are more than their politics, and far more than their governments.
Beijing distills, for me, into a vital, social essence. I encounter that essence at the lakes near Tiananmen, on whose frozen surface a laughing mass totters on goofy jerry-built ice-bikes.
I encounter it on Gulou Street, with its mix of hip boutiques, next gen music stores, shanty dwellings, and street food vendors making savory jiang bing crepes.
I encounter it in the interactions I have just about anywhere with the people of Beijing.
I find plenty of warmth in cold Beijing.
The Pianoabbler has babbbled.
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