beijing, 1

Beijing was under construction when we arrived. From what I could make out, the screaming sounds that emerged from clouds of dust on the street were giant buzzsaws being lowered into the pavement, ripping open the city's skin.

The student who had befriended us on the train from Tainjin lived just minutes from our hostel, and offered to walk us there: an offer we were only too happy to accept. The walk from the subway station was a blinking shopping street of Adidas outlets, shoppers blithely stepped around the men who had turned the sidewalks into rubble pits, rooting around under the ground under massive headlamps like they'd lost something. Occasionally you'd walk down a path only to find it had been blocked off with temporary barriers, forcing you to retrace your steps for a few minutes. Robert and I blinked through all this, boots, backpacks and white skins touring through the jungle of Beijing sneaker boutiques.

The street unfolded like a cartoon illustration of a construction site, with clean young Chinese students sipping coffee in brightly lit lounges as scruffy construction workers dismantled scaffolding and swept the wood shavings off the newly tiled flooring, before moving on to finish the back door. It was an amazing parade of contrasts and forced myopia. Young Chinese shoppers coughed up laughter and stepped over broken looking men curled on the pavement. Construction pits would open in the sidewalk without warning: holes the size of pickup trucks where ropy little men in thin dirty jackets labored under high wattage projection lamps. The newly minted shopping class could barely stand to acknowledge the weary black bodies building their city for them, and the bodies had quickly learned to stop gawking at all the things around that they couldn’t have. Both sides had agreed to just put their heads down and get through this process as quickly as possible.

Hobbled by our ridiculous traveler’s backpacks Robert and I threaded through the mess as best we could, with the shoppers and the construction workers ignoring us as enthusiastically as they ignored each other. We followed the outline of Charlie’s bobbing melon-head, the student having volunteered to help us find our hostel. Our landmark for the hostel was the orange plastic sign of a Japanese fast food chain. Robert and I nervously fingered a map we had printed off of the hostel’s website, the letters and lines fuzzy and indistinct. After wandering back and forth for close to thirty minutes we found our turn: a black concrete box caged in a scaffolding of metal pipes and plastic bands, and empty except for tufts of wiring bursting from the ceiling. This was what remained of our landmark.

Charlie had a proprietary look on his face as he led us to the hostel entrance: a pair of red lanterns framing a wooden gate large enough to accommodate a bus. The three of us stood there awkwardly.

Umm, this is for your trouble I said, holding out a single yuan note. He stepped back with a twisted look on his face. Robert leaned in with twenty yuan and the smile returned. Bye-then!

That put Charlie twenty-yuan farther away from the men in the pits.