November 17 – Beijing
Breakfast this morning was a leisurely affair since I am almost finished with my conference obligations. This hotel clearly caters to a different clientele. They even had coffee…not very good, and strong enough to peel paint, but still good. They also had fresh fruit and toast so I had a lovely, familiar breakfast.
After breakfast, Alan came to pick me up. He took me to his parents’ apartment, which turned out to be on the other side of the parking lot from my first hotel. They have lived there for about 20 years. It is very hard to judge things here – the corridors of the building are very tired looking: grubby and needing paint, with lots of burned out lightbulbs, but the inside of the apartment looks very normal. Clearly the standards about what is important are different.
Then he took me to his office. It was a former government building that is still owned by the government but leased out to tenants. It is in a good section of Beijing, but all of the buildings look remarkably similar. Alan explained that all of the buildings were built by Russians in the time of Stalin, which is why this area looks like parts of Eastern Europe. I can only conclude that the Stalinists only had one architect and he either hated people or wasn’t very good. They have taken functionalism to an extreme – grey, square, and with no decoration. Their only concession to style is that they all have huge open areas on the main floor as you come into the building. Now these spaces sit empty, but I wonder if they had a purpose in a Soviet world?
In exchange for paying our travel costs, the sponsor wanted to interview us. They maintain a database of interviews with librarians from all over the world that is available to any library that is one of their customers. Apparently, it is very popular, both with students and with practicing librarians. Our interview was scheduled for five, and was to include me and a Chinese-American librarian who was acting as an interpreter for me. At five we appeared at the library to meet them, and they were fretting because they didn’t like the walls as a background for the interview. After a great deal of animated conversation, all in Chinese, it appeared that we were to go back to the hotel and conduct the interview there.
At the hotel, they decided to use the Chinese-American librarian’s room. While we stood around waiting, they rearranged all of the furniture in his room, to give a better background. This involved calling down to the desk and asking for another armchair, which was promptly delivered by two very small women. More furniture rearranging followed, and the lights were set up by the videographer. Then it seemed like a good idea to have dinner before the interview, so we all went down to the restaurant.
In many Chinese restaurants, when you are entertaining guests, you are able to book a small room with a table and a private bathroom. Depending on the restaurant, these are different sizes and some of them are very elegantly decorated. This one had lovely carved wood panelling, and elegantly carved chairs. There were softly lit shelves on two sides with some excellent pieces of pottery. As we ate, the managing the director and the videographer were carrying on a side conversation, which resulted in the decision to conduct the interviews in the dining room. When we had finished eating (along with another glaring fish), they rearranged the furniture so that we would have the carved wood panelling behind us.
This all took so long that they didn’t have enough time left for the interviews before the restaurant closed. Instead of two, one-hour interviews, they filmed about 35 minutes of two of us chatting. They didn’t seem worried and it didn’t seem like my problem. Afterwards, the Americans were going bar-hopping and perhaps for the first time in my life, I decided that bed was a better option. All I needed to do was get a taxi back to the original hotel, where I am staying for the rest of my time in Beijing.
The reason for all of this back and forth between hotels is that, except for the two days of conference, I am paying for this myself, and would rather spend the money on something other than fancy hotels. There were lots of taxis outside. Hotels here give you a little map showing where they are located, and all you need to do is show it to a taxi driver and they know where to take you, even if you don’t speak Chinese. Unfortunately, the first two taxi drivers didn’t want to take me…I’ve been told it’s because they would rather take people to the airport or somewhere far, and can’t be bothered with shorter trips. It has apparently become so bad here that a car company that is like Uber is making great headway…one of the outcomes of the growth of capitalism. Eventually I found a taxi driver and made it home safely.