One stands arrogantly, glass plated and new. It leads to the atrium of some office building where women with summer scarf wrapped necks, like 1960s stewardesses greet you with slanted smiles which clearly invite you to state your business or go. Beyond them is the street, all bustling thoroughfare, ripe with the working class. Looking in, they would see only the building’s front, clean and pristine, reeking of today.
But we are still in the courtyard, and behind us there is another egress.
There is a gate of rusted greenish grey. It sits on rusted hinges, slightly aslant. It is the color of a Great War tank and it opens to a world seemingly from that era. Through that gate lie the hutongs: the narrow alleys and streets which once comprised the whole of Beijing, and which now exist between the whispers of the city. They fully inhabit their niche, swelling with smells both sweet and sour, lined with vendors whose wares have not changed in scores.
The hutongs are the old men of China. The thin veins of their streets ill fit the cars which occasionally traverse them. The children playing, even, are children of another aeon. The old men and women, wizened, worn, and small, but stately in their way, hunching never at the shoulders, hands clasped behind decade bearing backs, pepper the hutongs like living reminders of all that was, and living denials of all that is. The hutongs are fewer with every passing year, victims to progress, and their swan song is as breathless as their unvoiced protest.
This, it seems, is the China of the day; perhaps the China of all days that have gone before; perhaps the world itself, reflected through an Eastern prism: the new and the old, the young and the aging, locked, not so much in struggle, but in constant change as the generations roll inexorably by and the children have their turn to shape the world.
The essence of China is not in the shining city, however, but behind it. Like the smog, which often hangs heavy over the city like a shroud, the bright lights and monoliths are a curtain obscuring the reality. This is a place which, 40 years ago, did not exist in even a semblance of the fashion it does today. In many ways it still does not exist.
The city has all the trappings of a contrivance, all the glamour of a façade. The fluxing reality lies hidden behind that front; a secret world trapped within an ever changing cityscape, and fading, slowly, into memory.
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