Beijing

Arrived in Beijing about 11:30am. Clouds thickened as we approached the Chinese mainland and Beijing was overcast. But at least it was a grey haze, and not orange or brown.

The coastline of Korea is peculiar with many small green islands encircled by brown shallows and sandbars and not a wrinkle of swell. Or maybe the California coastline is peculiar and this is closer to the norm. In any case, it was new to my observation. Of course, we were flying over the western leeward shore. The China Sea is effectively a large bay.

I made it through Customs and Immigration without incident. S met me as soon as I left the baggage claim area. She was accompanied by two women and a young man. I thought they were her mother, aunt, and brother. It turned out that they were her mother’s two assistants and the driver. All three were very friendly and funny.

S told me that I was being received like a governor – an honor, she added, well above my real status. I did not agree that I was all that undeserving. It is true that I may never be governor, but I could have well run for governor in the last election, if American politics wasn’t generally beneath my contempt.

I had been served another meal on the plane to Beijing, but everyone else was hungry so we decided to go to lunch. But first one of the women needed to run an errand. We drove to a hotel near Peking U. (I think that’s still it’s official name – at least, that’s how the alumna in my department refer to it) and took the elevator to the 7th floor. There we proceeded town a corridor of room in varying stages of upkeep and operation. Just outside the elevator was a rather nice office with a glass door and polished wood reception counter. Other offices looked no better than TA offices. We were led to an office about halfway down the by a young man who it seemed had met us by chance at the elevator. In the room, there were two young women and a couple desks with computers on them. S’s mom’s assistant was purchasing a CD on business etiquette. A debate erupted between her and the young man, who I took to be CEO of the fledgling startup. It had something to do with a computer. She wanted to buy one or something, but even S was lost on the particulars. I found it all very foreign. In America, I imagine, the program would simply be bought online, or perhaps sold by mail order or at a convention. Here in China, you go to a dingy little room in a converted hotel room and yell at each other for five minutes.

The transaction peaceably concluded – or deferred to a later date – we headed for the restaurant. We passed Tiananmen Square and the famous portrait of Mao outside the Forbidden City. (I didn’t realize they were across from each other. Where was I in ’89?) I thought they were giving me a quick driving tour of the city. It turned out that we were lost.

If undergrads decided to rally in Tiananmen today, I think they’d have the upper hand. The protestors would be graduates and getting EE Ph.D’s in the US before the tanks could get through the traffic. I thought I saw a sculpture of a surfer up the road from Tiananmen. It was a bit abstract, but looked a lot like the old Surfer logo. Strange and comforting.

We were heading for the most famous Peking Duck restaurant in China. But by the time we got to the restaurant, it had just closed after lunch and would reopening a couple hours for dinner. So we walked across the street to the most famous dumpling restaurant in China. S told me that it was called something like, “Too Good for Your Dog.” The dumplings were good – the best I ever had, in fact. There were chicken feet, too, which were cold and rubbery as opposed to warm and greasy like the time I had them in SF.

After lunch, the women headed off to do some shopping and S, the driver, and I returned to the car so I could retrieve my camera and take some photos. We wandered the boulevard for a couple hours until dinner. S said that it was the Times Square of China. The jet lag was starting to set in.

Outside the Peking Duck restaurant was a large yellow duck. The Peking Duck? It looked rather like an oversized rubber ducky. The restaurant, as noted, is famous throughout China. It was Mao’s favorite restaurant for duck and there were pictures in the lobby showing him sitting at a table in front of roasted duck with various foreign dignitaries, including Kissinger. Indeed, this was the restaurant that put the Peking in Peking Duck.

A chef brings your duck to your table and slices it up. The first pieces are the crispy skin. These are like potato chips of the gods! So crispy. So greasy. So perfect!

You receive a card indicating the number of the duck you were eating. Not quite as poetic as the elegy Adam Gopnik describes receiving with the turkey he bought in Paris (an elegy composed by the turkey!), but it was a pretty card and I saved it somewhere.

I have now been over 36 hours without sleep. It is 11:15pm local time. So hopefully I have cycled out of the time difference and won’t suffer too much jet-lag.