Far From Home, Familiar

The cabbie smoked all of the way from the airport to Peking University, breathing back little puffs of smoke that would be my first taste of Beijing air. I didn’t really mind, though because I was more focused on the city around me. But squinting through the thick smog and 1 am darkness, I saw nothing but screaming lights and skyscrapers. And all I could think was, “where is Beijing?”

To be honest, even after a month, I’m still asking the same question.

People always say that China has finally entered the world stage, but from where I’m standing it looks more like the world has entered China. And the global offerings of choice for the Chinese are undeniably, almost invariably western. The torrential flows of capital into China have created a landslide of consumers yearning to perennially redefine themselves.

Often times Beijing has just seemed like a bad dream, a consumerist nightmare. Don’t get me wrong. The energy here is beyond description, but so is everything else. Beijing overloads your senses and for a while I was reeling from the sheer amount of commercial stimuli and its frightening similarity to the US. The only thing that’s different is the scale, which compared to the United States feels steroidal.

What some might call surface changes, the adjustments of a culture to the capitalist system, seem like much more to me. Not just western fashions, but western lifestyles, too are becoming more and more appealing as people move out of old neighborhoods, away from each other, and into high-rise apartments and far-flung suburbs. To an American, a Middle American to be more specific, the aftermath of the commercial siege of Chinese culture looks eerily familiar to the sort of shopping mall surroundings I grew up with. The whole city, and maybe even the culture are up for grabs in the new economy and are being sold at the lowest measures of value: money.

People here are refurbishing their lifestyles, their lives, and when all’s said and done probably their culture - not just their apartments.