Welmer

The years have pushed on since I lived in Beijing, so for better or worse, I think it’s time to write down some of the history of the city when I lived there in the late 1990s.

I lived in NE Beijing, on top of an old cemetery near sihuanlu (fourth-ring road) — a location considered suitable for foreigners at the time. My neighborhood was a growing suburb where flocks of sheep grazed in the vacant lot next to the nearest McDonalds. The Airport Expressway was still fairly open, so one could hop a cab and be in the center of the city in a couple of minutes. Although Beijing is an important and populous city, it isn’t – or wasn’t – very large. I was only about 5 miles away from Tiananmen, but my neighborhood was still considered suburban.

During the building season, tent cities sprang up around the roadside ditches housing migrant laborers from the provinces. Many of my neighbors were Korean, mostly from the north, and there was even a smattering of West Africans in certain buildings. So I lived in a banlieu of sorts, apart from the exclusively Beijingren danwei housing blocks that existed as self-contained communities. However, if I walked a few blocks down the road and over the canal I approached the tightly-packed urban environment of Beijing.

My memories of the immediate environment around my neighborhood recall empty lots that were nothing but dust in the winter, yet luxuriant in spring and summer. When the spring rains came grass and hemp shot up from the ground in a matter of days, and the constant irritation of yellow-brown dust was suddenly replaced with suffocating, damp heat. Mosquitoes bred in stagnant pools, and swarmed into my apartment. Shutting the windows at night was out of the question — the heat was too oppressive. Before I bought an air-conditioning unit, I would lie every night naked and miserable on my bedsheets, sweating from the humidity and itching from the bug bites.

Every Sunday morning during the growing season a farmer’s market opened directly outside my window, where food and goods were sold by shouting peasant hawkers starting at 7:00 AM. The hawker directly beneath me sold cheap keyboards, playing “happy birthday to you” on a loop to advertise his wares, slowly driving me crazy in the process. Almost as bad were the smells that wafted up. Meat has a way of rotting very quickly in 95 degree heat and high humidity. How does one describe the smell? Something like a piece of flesh that has been stuck between teeth for days.

But every few days relief would come. The heat would build and the moisture in the air would increase to saturation, upon which monstrous clouds would form and blot out the sun. During the middle of the afternoon, the sky would turn purplish black with swollen clouds – the color of a grievous wound – and then cool winds would sweep down as the sky unleashed a torrent of rain and a roll of thunder. The next day would be clear and tolerable, and then the cycle would begin anew, with the heat, the moisture and the screeching of the cicadas building to yet another climax, over and over throughout the summer of ’98.