Cup of Cha
This is China

The Beijing subway map has always been interesting to me. Line one reaches tantalizingly far west, while line eight [correction: batong xian], the extension of line one, goes right off the map into an unknown, unexplained land. It’s almost as if the city is saying, “Don’t worry, no one important lives out there. If you need to know where it goes, you probably already do.” Yesterday I took line one to the last stop going west, 苹果园(Apple Garden), which stretches far beyond what most people consider Beijing proper.

When I wondered aloud once what was out there, someone told me that it was actually quite beautiful, although never really explained more than that. It is seventeen stops west of Jianguomen, the station where I transferred lines. About halfway there the bustling and crowded subway car filtered out enough that I was able to sit down. No longer were people anxiously standing by the door, hoping they could push their way off before the conductor impatiently sealed their passages back home. Instead, riders were mostly sitting quietly, waiting for the long ride to end, where the train would drop them near their homes, or more likely, near a bus that would scatter them even farther from the city’s business center.

Going west in Beijing is an odd experience. When I came back to China about a year ago, a former colleague, then studying in England, was nice enough to put me up in her empty apartment. It sits about 2 kilometers south of the Muxidi subway stop. Usually when foreigners would ask for a more useful description I would say, “You know the west train station? Near there”, although in reality that is about a 45 minute walk away. In a city with a huge foreign population, much of the west, particularly the southwest, remains No Man’s Land.

I’m not exactly sure what I expected the end of the line to look like, but it did feel eerily like I was at the edge of the city. Las Vegas always seemed like a place that thinned out until it was just sand, and that is kind of what happens in Chinese urban areas. Going northeast, or due west, in Chengdu, the buildings and businesses suddenly give way to rice paddies. You might think that the agriculture was seeping into the city to swallow modern life, if only you didn’t not know that quite the opposite is taking place.

At the end of the old line one it looks like any industrial rust belt in China. It more resembles Beijing from when Seoul hosted the Olympics, than a year before the Chinese capital will. In the near distance, only a few hundred meters away, I could see a few hills. This was probably as far away as you could be and still have them in view on a day when the fog, smog, and smoke conspired to turn the sun a dim orange. Make-shift homes dotted the rising earth, like they might in South American slum. Except in China these types of houses never have the desperate feel of Africa or Brazil, but instead, they just are, meager existences, but without the enveloping influences of gangs and drugs.

I walked down the street, relatively empty, with cars and bicycles going by every few seconds. Billboards lined the sidewalk advertising a clinic for the child-planning center. They way they phrased it I wanted to believe it was for advice on young parents, maybe with some contraceptives. But inside I knew that the goal of fewer kids was the most critical goal. If you did not show up before to get your birth control, well then, that smiling young woman would just have to come up with an alternative. After all, this isn’t rich Beijing where people can simply pay the tax for a second or third child.

Across from me I could see a building with the scarlet letter 拆, indicating that even out here, on the edges of Beijing society, someone had bigger plans for the lot where a one-story grocery sat. But the characters were old and peeling. Perhaps it once seemed like a good idea to build something here, but so much time seemed to have passed I wondered if developers had given up, or even forgotten. Outside the store were stacks of cabbage–or is it bok choy? I can never get that right–sitting on the dirty ground, lined up for sale.

As I reached the corner I noticed on a sign that I had been heading west, not south as I had suspected. Most subway maps do not bother to show that the tracks veer north just before the last stop. Why would they? If you needed to know, you already would.

To my right was an open air market where people from the countryside came to sell their vases and knick-knacks. A hidden treasure I thought to myself. But the skeptical looks on the shoppers’ faces told the real story. This was not a great find, just a few country folks hoping someone would buy their shoddy copies of Chinese eras gone, and nostalgic memorabilia from decades for which few feel actual nostalgia.

I passed construction sites that seemed to be making little progress, and old Communist-era apartments that had not yet been designated for demolition, but surely would once the boom finally cast its eyes west. A huge factory, or possibly power plant, billowed smoke into the sky just past a highway pulling people toward the city. Such open displays of pollution can only take place outside the great cities, like stretches of New Jersey, and Pingguo yuan.

By the time I finally found a place to eat it was nearly 3 O’clock. The waiter informed me that they were out of bottled water, Sprite, and bottles of coke smaller than 2 liters, feeding into my already-budding suspicion that this neighborhood only received food deliveries after distributors were sure they had satiated the needs of the rest of the city. Finally I decided on Coconut Palm Drink, the official drink of state banquets.

As I got up to leave a waitress came over and blurted out, 我羡慕你们外国人, I envy/admire you foreigners. Why, I asked her. 你们会说外语, you can speaker foreign (non-Chinese) language. I wanted to ask her why it was so great to be able to speak ‘non-Chinese,’ given that English was my first language. But I did not. I just gave her a slightly blank look, and said nothing. Then I took my leftovers and headed toward the subway station for my 19-stops-and-a-transfer ride back to the other end of Beijing.

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Tags: beijing, exploring, one child policy, pollution, subway
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