Not so long ago

One year and one day ago my plane touched down in Beijing, the last stop on my two week, four stop tour of China. The last time I visited this city was 13 years ago. Needless to say, the city had changed quite a bit since then.

My memories of that first trip are a blur of awe at the vastness of the Forbidden Palace, pain from walking the long boulevard of Chang'an Avenue and "wow, things are so different from home" observations like the elderly men in their open-air hair salons (basically a stool parked oustide the red wall of the Palace) beckoning to passerbys.

Fast forward to 2008. I was balancing a mojito on my knee while lounging in Bed Bar, when a member of our group mentioned that today was the 19th anniversary. Floored that I had completely forgotten the significance of that day (encouraged no doubt by its complete lack of mention in the local media), I and that member hailed a cab bound for Tiananmen to check out the scene.

As we approached a few minutews past midnight, we were greeted by silence. No signs of rememberance existed. A few guards watched a handful of tourists snap portraits of themselves under the watchful gaze of Mao's portrait and harsh street lamps. That's it.

Will I feel the same emptiness tomorrow?

Book Cart Binge-ing

Beijing is a relatively dry city so street vendors abound. Selling ceramic coffee cups, Communist propaganda posters, toothbrush holders shaped like Hello Kitty and everything in between, I can browse, haggle and buy to my consumer heart's content. And this heart has a weakness for books.

Thankfully some book vendors have a few English language titles in their bicycle-drawn carts. Despite having two unread books from my previous book cart binge, I bypassed Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series and Barack Obama biographies and picked up three books. Today's loot: Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (read it many times but gave my old copy to a co-worker), What Would Machiavelli Do? by Stanley Bing and delightfully trashy chick lit Secret Diary of a Call Girl. Three books for 28 RMB. A fair price? At least it's cheaper than The Bookworm's wares.

I remember a time when Eat, Pray, Love was the book to read in New York. Subway cars were lined with women clutching the overhead railing with one hand and a paperback copy of that book in another. Recommended to me by a particularly sensitive masseuse during a wine-and-spa weekend in Sonoma, this bestseller helped galvanize me into making some life-changing decisions, one of which led me here.

Network Timeout

I've become familiar with these words loading onto my browser, as this means my desired site is apparently blocked by youknowwho. And of course this blocking of YouTube would start on the day when I need to view one of its videos for a project. I've tried logging on all day with no success.

So. Frustrating. I hope that they don't start blocking Blogger and Flickr again.

Choose Your Words Carefully

Catching up on my New York Times reading, I spotted a profile of CCTV anchor Rui Chenggang. CCTV is the state-run television network and Rui is its rising star. "At just 31 years old, Rui Chenggang has emerged as the media face of Chinese capitalism: young, smart and, to the dismay of some, deeply nationalistic."

Although I rarely watched Brian Willams or Katie Couric deliver the nightly news in New York, I have watched a few CCTV news broadcasts here. CCTV is hard to avoid as their channels are the only ones my television can receive.

Rui points out the obvious, "China has a really bad image problem," (Remember last spring's news about China hiring a global pr agency to assist in pre-Olympic damage control?). Fear not, he has a plan to fix that! First, he has to tackle that pesky credibility problem that his network has with viewers outside China.

Because his positions often parrot Beijing’s critiques of foreign journalists, Mr. Rui is asked whether he engages in propaganda handed down by the government. He compares it with Fox News coverage of the White House during a Republican administration.

I don't think that comparing his employer to a certain American news network helps his cause.