Ch-Ch-Changes.

It’s common knowledge that Beijing (and China more broadly) has been changing as quickly as I used to change my clothes (up to 4 times I day I’m told). But lately, the changes have been slowing down. I’ve returned after a year and a half, and found everything as I remember it for the most part. Sure that building didn’t used to be there, and things are suddenly more expensive, but the City really looks…the same. What’s changed more than anything is how I see it.

Today, in honor of my birthday, and the fact that I’ve yet to land a real job, and the fact that the weather had turned (only in Beijing does 90 degrees and 100 percent humidity count as nice) I went for a long walk in a part of town I’d never been to. I knew I was walking south east, and that’s pretty much all I needed. I brought a camera, and a book, and I was all set.

I walked along busy streets for a while before turning down a side street into an older neighborhood. This is the kind of street (it could be called, albeit improperly, a hutong) that once struck me as cool in a quaint kind of way. By the last time I was here I’d graduated to seeing it as a valuable example of realness. The street was full of people who didn’t necessarily want to be my friend, filth, dogs, people selling vegetable, and children with crotchless pants (the subject of another post maybe…). Some other time I might have stopped to take pictures, but today, I just felt kind of sorry for the people living there. They didn’t want to be carrying on a semblance of tradition. Give any one of them an apartment in a nice new building and they would have taken it in a second. There was nothing romantic about their situation, there was little value in their squalor.

There are still romantic back alleys in Beijing, where grandparents live in direct opposition to modernizing influences, where toddlers play on the same streets their parents played, but this part of town, the middle nothing between the third ring road and the zoo, was not that. But that’s ok. City’s have shitty neighborhoods, and Beijing is like any city in that regard. Physical changes may have slowed (never stopped) but the city is still in flux. All of the sudden there are poor people in the socialist republic, and hopefully they’ll succeed in the new way of life.