| Thursday, July 25, 2002 |
From: Meg Thomsen meginchina@yahoo.com
Subject: Riding High
Dear Friends and Family,
There's nothing quite like the feeling of flying on a bicycle through the concrete desert of Beijing. The wide streets are filled with ramshackle buses, taxis, motorcycles and private cars owned by either cadres or entrepreneurs. Then there are the bicycles. Thousands, no millions of them. It's estimated that Beijing alone has 11 million bicycles. They carry people to work. They haul vegetables, mattresses, ducks and children. They're held together by rubber bands and pieces of string. Some even have little motors attached that sound like coffee grinders.
I bought a bicycle last week for the 45-minute daily commute from my apartment in Chaoyang to the WWF office. Joanne, Amy and I went to Sanlitun, where some grinning guys with rotten teeth sold then to us. $20 each, brand new. They have one gear and marginal brakes. The chain guard is made of aluminum only slightly thicker than tin foil, but the body is solid, heavy. It's painted a shiny blue and silver and proudly states the brand BEITAHE. It's built to fall apart and be repaired, to tie a flock of live ducks to the rack on the rear of the bicycle, to put a sack of ginger and potatoes in the huge basket on the front.
Three days after we bought our bicycles, Amy's was stolen from outside our apartment. Our neighbors watched our consternation with a great deal of amusement, much to our annoyance. "Of course your bicycle was stolen!" they said "It's new! A new bicycle has much attention! Nighttime is not safe for bicycles."
We then found out about the secret bicycle parking lot in the basement for new fancy bicycles like ours. It's down a ramp and has a locking door. An entire family lives in a tiny basement room guarding the bicycles. "This place is safe!" the neighbors agreed. At work, Mr. Ma had this to say about the incident: "In China, there is an old saying. You are not a true Beijinger until you have your bicycle stolen." Now that's a Confucian saying that I've never before heard...
When people in China ask me my favorite sport, I often say, "mountain biking!" They always look at me like I'm crazy. Bicycling is not something that one does for fun, it's what one does to get around, to haul garbage, to carry newspapers and cabbage to the market. It's just like if the guy in the cubicle next to you informed you that his favorite sport was "driving." You'd think he was pretty weird, too.
This spring, Chinese television aired ESPN's Extreme Sports. After they watched it, all the students wanted to know was about the bicycles.
°Tang Mali, we are very confused. Chinese people ride bicycles everywhere, but when Americans ride them, they can ride them up and down mountains. How is this possible? And why are they doing it?"
How can Americans ride up and down mountains? Riding down a mountain is nothing compared to what I've seen people do here on their bicycles. The average commute is a showdown of man against machine or bicycle against farm truck. People ride through rotaries and underpasses full of zooming cars. Ladies in their sequined high heeled shoes sit side-saddle on the back of their boyfriend's bikes. People haul couches and refrigerators. People drive bicycle taxis with two or three people in the back. And it's no Extreme Sport. This is no Tinker Juarez or Gary Fisher. This is your average Zhou, going to work. Bicycles are a livelihood here, as essential to life as your right hand (because of course, there are no left-handed people in China).
Tonight, I'll ride home, bags of vegetables in my basket, narrowly missing death by speeding buses at least four hundred times. I'll dodge the vegetable seller who shouted "LAOWAI!" and threw corn cobs at my legs when I rode by last week. I'll ride through a construction site, swerve to miss piles of garbage in the street, come home dirty because of the ever-present soot in the air. I'll probably curse at a hundred different cab drivers and other bicyclists, but all the time I really know that this is a million times better than being behind a closed window in a car, protected by the glass and air conditioning from the SO2 and the spit, from the shouts and the laughter. It feels good to be swept into Beijing this way, into the constant river of cyclists. We all end up in different places from this chaotic river- some are headed to offices, some are headed to the market to sell their wares. Some are doctors, some are peasants, some are thieves, some are students. In the river, we just want to cross the intersection, and make it to our next destination without being flattened by a bus. And in this way, we swim together.
Love, Meg