Beijing

At Easter we headed north to Beijing.

26 million people live in China’s capital. The scale of the place is breathtaking: from its cavernous, spanking new airport terminal to the broad six lane boulevards that traverse the city.

We arrived late expecting to be met. None of the waiting drivers had a placard with our name on it. Suddenly aware of the helplessness that can neither speak, understand nor read the language we looked around, bemused and a little concerned and returned for a second look at the signs. Our eldest saw it first:

MY.DY
YSDAL
E.MAL
CDLM

He was right, but you’d be forgiven for not having known it.

The next morning the sun is trying hard to shine through the dull, yellow cloud that sits on the city. We are met by our guide who introduces herself as Sweet Lee, But you can call me Sweetie. Or not, I think. Beijing is pleasantly warm, spring like as the leaves bud into a green haze and blossom transforms the winter greyness. It is so different from evergreen Hong Kong where seasons are identified by rainfall, temperature and humidity.

Sweet Tea takes us on a tour of the Forbidden City*. While we admire its vast, ancient, wondrous beauty we are swarmed, at every stop, by crowds of curious onlookers. Mildly entertaining to begin with, it becomes increasingly trying. Sweet Tea does her best to assure us the interest is not malevolent, that provincial tourists may be seeing blonde hair or blue eyes for the first time and are unable to contain their delight at the sight of four siblings. We try to shrug it off and yet I hear both my own and my husband’s voice bark out a loud “No!” in unison when a stranger lifts our daughter from her buggy to snatch a photo opportunity and a cuddle.

We head to Tiananmen Square* where ‘it’ all happened in 1989. It is hard not to think of this as yet another Stalinist parade ground. Chairman Mao lies embalmed in a mausoleum at one end and yet this was a square used for gatherings and festivities, celebrations and fireworks as long ago as 1406 when the Forbidden City was first constructed as a playground for China’s Emperors.

Next we are driven to a silk manufactory, shown the life cycle of the silk worms and how each strand of silk is spun from ten individual cocoons. Sometimes cocoons are interwoven by two worms and these matted fibres are used to make wonderful light weight silk quilts which are on sale at a snip. I decide a purchase is in order for our spare bed where our guests have hitherto had to sweat out the humid Hong Kong nights under a 13 TOG winter duvet. The Pioneering Accountant has simultaneously decided that this purchase is entirely surplus to requirements. He takes an ideological stance against the silk factory on the grounds that we have been brought here solely to part with hard currency. I couldn’t care less if this is the reason. If the cap fits, wear it, I say, and I consider a double silk quilt a bargain at RMB380 (approx £33).

To my intense annoyance I have left my credit card in the hotel and am thus totally dependent on the Chancellor of the Exchequer. All reasonable appeals on grounds of practicality, functionality, usefulness, durability, value for money are in vain. He has entered the valley of stubbornness on a one way street. I feel like a child who has been refused pocket money and thus behave like one for the rest of the day.

My husband then decides on an ill-fated excursion to the Summer Palace just as the children are tipping over the edge of exhaustion and are no longer able to take in any more of Beijing’s imperial buildings. They are cheered by a paddle boat trip on the lake while I sit shivering and resentful on the bank listening to the babble of a million tourists.

By evening we are too tired to hold out our entrenched positions. A visit to the Flying Acrobats Show is on the cards. The children are easy to motivate once more and we enjoy an extraordinary display of Chinese contortions and daring do complete with parrots and lasers yet all bizarrely dressed up as some journey to the depths of time with cavemen, time lords and primeval warriors. For the row of students sitting in front of us we appear to be the main attraction and once more we have to fend off the requests for photographs while the children practise their Mandarin and receive compliments such as Bootifur and Vewy intewigent boy.

At the hotel a Chinese guest asks if all the children are mine. I confess, Have they been misbehaving? Here we are only allowed one child, she explains. There are big fines to pay if you break the rules and sometimes if you work for the government you can even lose your job. People here will think you are very rich to pay all the fines for four children. Forget the fines, I think, what about the school fees, the shoes, the after school activities and, let’s face it, the need for a vast house? It’s self-induced financial punishment, that’s all.

Saturday sees us marching along the Great Wall* some 90km north of Beijing. Sweet Pea has once more excelled herself and we stagger and clamber up and down the steep steps that were built to keep the Mongol hordes out. It is a beautiful and impressive sight in as much as we can see: the mist is low but the cherry blossom is out and we are atop one of the wonders of the ancient world. A cable car takes visitors up to the Wall and there is an option to ride down on little carts along a giant zig-zag chute which the boys delight in doing.

As we return to the city, the driver takes us by way of the Olympic village, the Water Cube and the Bird’s Nest stadium. Like the rest of Beijing, their scale is magnificent. They sit unused, but for the steady flow of visitors who are charged Y50 to see the empty insides, a reminder of Beijing’s glorious last summer.

We are herded into a tea ceremony and have four different types of tea brewed up in front of us to taste, and it is assumed, buy. Another opportunity to divest us of our cash but this time we are in complete agreement. We’d swap all the tea in China for a good cup of Tetley’s.

We eat at Beijing’s night market, fried meat on sticks, beef and vegetable wraps, fresh fruit and banana doughnuts, marvelling at yet eschewing the star fish, silk worm larvae, scorpions and river snakes also available fried on sticks.

Sunday is Easter Day and yet there is nothing to suggest it here except the warmth of a spring day, the yellow forsythia and the pink cherry blossom. We are taken by rickshaw to see the traditional Hutongs*, an area of narrow lanes and courtyard homes that once housed all Beijing’s inhabitants before population growth and space restrictions caused many families to be re-housed in suburban apartments. We get to meet the lady of one Hutong and our guide interprets our questions about life in Beijing. I ask her if she would have liked a second child. She asks me if my children fight. Both of us answer with a resounding Yes!

We eat dumplings and fried rice and take in the Temple of Heaven*, another vast complex where the Emperors came twice a year to give thanks for the harvest and to worship their ancestors.

I am pleasantly surprised by Beijing. I had anticipated traffic chaos, pollution and high rise monotony. Instead the city is low rise, spacious and light. The air is heavy with the yellow sand of the northern Gobi desert which blows in during the spring leaving our hair and skin grimy at the day’s end. And yet it is surprisingly organised and modern, clean, but for the smog, and orderly. There are decorative flowers and trees throughout and the parks are well tended and green. High-end designer stores cosy up to the big hotels in the city centre, as anywhere and yet there is an undemanding simplicity to the place, a relaxed atmosphere and a welcome depth, history and culture.

I’d live here, I tell the Pioneering Accountant. I imagine myself learning Mandarin, making Chinese friends and pedalling about on my bike with the children in tow. Whereas a year ago the very thought of China scared me, its size, its pollution and crowds all that has become the substance of the life we lead, no longer frightening, just fact. Or testimony to the ultimate adaptability of the human being.

*I’ve taken pictures but on a new camera and I don’t yet know how to upload them.