EPThttp://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?topic_id=391370
Sometime twelve years ago
For a thousand years, Beijing pretended to be older than it actually was.
You'd be forgiven if you thought, driving down Chang'an Jie (or the Avenue of Eternal Peace) that the imposing, Imperial, maroon-brick palace facing the grand emptiness of Tiananmen Square implied that China, had, forever, been centered on its Northern Capital.
That's intentional. It took the Ming emperors a million workers to put up that lie.
For most of Beijing's history, it was a peripheral city. While the bureaucrats and eunuchs plotted their intrigues from Luoyang and Xi'an, and the poets composed their lyrical works in the cool streams and mountains of Sichuan, Beijing sat on the northern border, forlorn, an outpost against the barbarian tribes. The only time it got into the news was when those tribes were causing trouble on the wrong side of the Great Wall.
First the Khitan--then the Jurchens--every time, some boy would saddle up on a messenger steed, switching horses every two hundred miles, until he arrived, breathless and dehydrated, collapsing in front of the Emperor for dramatic emphasis, and then the dynasty would convene its war council and a grand Imperial army would march out from the Central Plains to crush the invaders with sheer numbers.
The Mongols put the kibosh on that strategy, though, by blitzkrieging all the way through Southern China too. When they were done, they made Beijing, their point of entry, the capital of their new Yuan Dynasty.
Understandably, when Zhu Yuanzhang, founder of the Ming dynasty, finally kicked the Mongols out in 1368, he moved the capital out of the city. But his kids moved it right back, so that they could find out if someone was invading them just by looking out their bedroom window. They built a giant palace to go with it.
It worked. In 1644, the last of Zhu's descendants saw the Manchus coming, suited up, and used a tree in the middle of the palace gardens to hang himself.
After that, the Manchus, now called the Qing, set up their dynastic capital on the banks of the Yongding River as well. They expanded the palace some more, added a port called Tianjin, went on being the cool kids of China until the Westerners took that role. In the long night that followed, Beijing was sacked twice--first by a Coalition of the Willing, then by Japan. Then Mao came along--a Chinese peasant claimant to the throne, but one fuelled by foreign ideas and found Beijing the perfect place to start his grand experiment of the New China.
By the late 70s and early 80s, Beijing was showing its age. Stalinist apartment blocks dominated between subdivided siheyuan--tile-roofed garden houses--that looked like women aged beyond any possible dignity.
And so for the past forty years, Beijing has pretended to be younger than it actually is.
The result? An orchestra of construction cranes and jackhammering that lasts through the dead of winter and the sandstorms of springtime, pausing only for a few weeks in the summer as millions of Chinese students get ready for the college entrance exams from Hell. Mushrooming on the horizon, your usual assortment of monuments to easy credit, culminating in a seven-hundred foot headquarters for China Central Television that looks like a giant subjected to the ancient Chinese execution of yaozhan, or chopping at the waist.
It was in one of those unfinished symphonies that my patron and benefactor, a rising star of the New, New, China, told me his history of Beijing. Mr. Zhang Shenghan was one of the big beneficiaries of the building boom. And heading back to Financial Street in his chauffeured black Audi, underneath the smiling photos of Chairman Mao, Zhang Shenghan told me another nugget of wisdom:
Daughters are always a bad idea.
I first met Fang Fei-Na at one of those conferences, the kind with awkward PhDs milling around the open bar trying to look cute.
That night, I was a grad student from Fudan University. Non-official cover, the way real men do it. The lean, tanned, sly-looking guy in the corner of the Class of 2010 pic? That's me, photoshopped in. Me, with my rectangular designer glasses and designer stubble over the Tom Cruise grin.
Fang was one of those PhDs that had beauty and brains. Usually, Lady Doctors have neither. Just trust me. When she walked through those opened convention hall doors, I swear, you could hear the conversation volume drop and the collective sound of dozens of horny grad students adjusting their pants. What do I remember from her presentation?
DNA this, recombination that, magic happens--then boom, 100% yield increase, drastically shortened growing times, drought tolerance, disease tolerance, long permed ringlets of jet-black hair, high cheekbones flaring scarlet, thin waist, c-cup breasts, and an ass encased in a red, tailored, silk qipao. Okay, okay, I was making that up. She was wearing a black business suit.
Fang researched rice. You know, the beige-colored cereal crop that brown people cook to a golden yellow, yellow people polish to a gleaming white, and that white people prefer to eat while naturally brown. Her project was paid for by one of those giant biotech companies--no need for government funding, not with an idea that hot. Fang's English name was Persephone, daughter of the Goddess of Grain.
My job was to fuck her.
I'm one of three male honey traps in the Tenth Bureau. The only spear-chucker on the team though, because there are so few female scientists around. The other two guys took it up the ass for the motherland. My case officer, an owlish fifty-year old who wrote his dissertation on British-American Tobacco and deadpanned censored jokes, assigned me the callsign 'Lucky Strike'.
Anyhow, so we were at the open bar. Long faux-wood strip packed off to one side of the convention hall, tuxedoed undergrads serving alcohol they couldn't legally drink themselves. A few clumps and pairs of people, then this huge crowd of guys wrapped around Persephone. Sperm and an egg. Classic setup, easy lay. I ordered a scotch and an advocaat, then closed the tab.
I walked over real slow, waited for one of those moments. You know what I'm talking about. Those moments where a dozen unrelated conversations simultaneously arrive at the same pause. Then her giggle rang out, tinged with a certain claustrophobic hysteria.
I chuckled. "Guess an angel passed."
She chuckled back, vocal cords a little tense. Forty envious eyes turned in my direction. I shrugged, flashed my Tom Cruise grin, and reached over all of them, passing her the advocaat.
Her voice was innocent. "What is this?"
I lip-synced a bogus reply.
Know your enemy, after all. If she's spent a whole lifetime indulging her curiosity, make her guess to figure out what you're saying.
She moved closer, out of the crush of guys, and I told it was 蛋黄酒.
She asked why. I said it was because she was surrounded by 精英.
She laughed without reservation this time, and took my hand. I walked with her, shoulders straight, no swagger, no backward glance and smile. After all, it's just business--no need to spike the football.
Our night together stretched into morning, into tickets at the ferry port and my first trip through Boston proper. The rain kept up, beading on her plastic jacket, shrouding Boy Scouts marching past the monuments to American liberty in matching brown uniforms like the ghosts of Nuremberg past, until she'd stood with me in the midnight clatter of a college bar, and held my hand like a child.
She was twenty-seven. She was twenty-seven, and both her mother and father were dead.
Part 4:
http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=391996
