dreams

I awoke yesterday, my first morning here, with a song that I don't especially like,  “Other Side of the World,” in my head, my subconscious informing me of my location before I was even really awake.   Dreams have been a theme of my first days here, especially since the new Xi Jinping regime, which took office last year, has adopted as its governing slogan the “Chinese Dream.”  All over Beijing you see signs reading “Zhongguo Meng, Wo de Meng,” meaning “Chinese Dream, My Dream.”    I suppose by the associative principle that could be the case.  “Chinese Dream” as national policy, I am Chinese, thus the Chinese Dream is “My Dream.”  However, the vagueness (and possible plagiarized quality—do Chinese really want to emulate the United States in such an overt and unoriginal way?) of this has led to a wide array of interpretations regarding its meaning.

For instance, might the "Chinese Dream" be the dream of real estate?   I’m currently staying in my old friend Xie Lihua’s city apartment, just north of the Second Ring Road—she also has a suburban house with her husband where these days they usually live to care for her elderly mother-in-law. She was a fairly high-ranking official, a vice-editor of the China Women’s News, the official newspaper of the All-China Women’s Federation, and later the pioneering and entrepreneurial founder of her own NGO, Rural Women.  Here is an article about her from the Washington Post some years ago:

Ex-Mao Devotee Devotes Career to Women

And a more recent one from the LA Times:

A voice for rural women of China

And here she is making me dumplings for dinner on the night I arrived:

She was initially assigned the apartment by her “work unit” but purchased it in 1995, at the dawn of the privatized housing market in China, for what was then about $10,000.  If she were to sell it now, it would be worth about 7-8 million RMB, or over $1.2 million. The apartment is spacious by Beijing standards—three bedrooms, one bathroom—but otherwise totally modest.   (Note the size of the kitchen in the photo above: no granite countertops or SubZero fridges or any other amenities that might characterize a property of that value in the United States).  Awhile ago I had Chinese friends urging us to buy an apartment here, which at the time I dismissed as way too much of a hassle.  However, in hindsight that might have been a Bad Decision.

Or are they urbanization dreams?  When I first came here over 20 years ago, Beijing had perhaps 10 million people; now, it is over 20 million.  Xie Lihua claimed that 80% of the people we see on the street are waidiren, or “outsiders.”   That number seems high but it does point to the enduring sense of native place here as well as discrimination against outsiders.   Why wouldn’t they want to come here?  The distance between rural China and Beijing is much farther than can be measured in kilometers or train tickets; it is a wide expanse of mentality and lifestyle, of different historical eras.

This increase in population can turn dreams to nightmares.  Yesterday I visited my favorite neighborhood, Nanluoguxiang, a street of cafés and shops in restored siheyuan (courtyard homes).  Unfortunately due to it being the National Holiday, or "Golden Week," with seemingly most everyone except taxi and bus drivers and shopkeepers not at work, the street resembled a pedestrian version of the right side of this Golden Week Guangdong highway:

Guangdong Golden Week traffic jam

Yet, my morning run today took me to Houhai, lakes in the center of the city that were once part of the imperial playgrounds.  It is in places like this that the Beijing I remember from two decades ago can still be discerned.  Old folks chatting and strolling and doing tai chi, men fishing with long poles or carrying pet birds in cages, farmers selling vegetables on the street.  One difference is that whereas 20 years ago there were virtually no pet dogs in the city, now there are many, most somehow obediently and companionably finding their own way beside their owners without leashes or collars. 

These are dreams of a normal existence, of “cultivating life” as the anthropologists Judith Farquhar and Zhang Qicheng write of Beijing today.   After over a century of war, famine, and turmoil, this seems an eminently reasonable goal.