Big in China by Alan Paul

Author:Alan Paul
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins US
Published: 2011-03-01T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

Them Changes

My day-to-day existence was being transformed, with the band moving from a fun little side project into a far more central place in my life. This all felt normal in Beijing, where growth and change were the only constants and anything felt possible.

I had even taken up hockey, despite not having skated in twenty years. A dozen of us who had never held a stick before took up the sport after Canadian friends turned some nearby tennis courts into a mini ice rink. We improved rapidly and soon actually considered ourselves hockey players, resenting our group’s official name: “Monday Night Learn to Skate.”

None of this reinvention felt disorienting. Not in Beijing, where the whole landscape was being transformed. I would have had to spin a cocoon and emerge as a butterfly to match my surroundings’ pace of change. In this atmosphere, sitting still or staying the same would have been the strangest, most radical move of all.

In that environment, remaking yourself—just hitting the reset button and starting over—seemed like the most natural thing in the world. It was happening all around me: there was the journalist running restaurants and bars; the doctor with a thriving export business; the teacher designing T-shirts; the Italian musician selling antique furniture; the Boston bakery owner hanging his shingle as a sports marketer; and the British banker directing an art museum. Anything felt possible, and the only crime was setting your sights too low.

The whole sprawling metro area often felt like a giant construction site, literally evolving in front of our eyes, making life in our Rust Belt hometowns seem positively glacial. Even in New York, projects like the World Trade Center site could take years to get off the ground.

When we arrived in Beijing two years earlier, our compound sat on the edge of urban sprawl, with the countryside lapping up against the walls. Now, many humble local businesses had been replaced by higher-end establishments; fields had become shops, compounds, and highways; and the formerly dusty, dingy Jing Shun Lu was lined with trees, bushes, and flowers after a beautification spurred by the Olympics. I saw sections of the road transformed from morning to evening.

When a friend mentioned that a major construction project had begun on a quiet country road lined with fields and man-made fishing holes, I jumped on my bike and pedaled over. The field was filled with earthmovers, cranes, huge drilling machines, and dozens of workers. The farmers who usually dried their corn there in the fall were nowhere to be seen. Pylons were rising for an elevated highway that would transform the area, with flyways and a massive concrete structure cutting through what was now a village, many small businesses, light industry, and farmland. Dust already covered everything, and blocks of businesses, homes, and factories had been reduced to piles of bricks, which were being carted away by mule-drawn carriages.

I wondered about the displaced people and mourned the loss of the country vibe—I liked the feeling of living on the frontier.

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