#81: Beijing Dreamscapes

Hutong heaven; our Spirited Away moment; peak sandwich eating.

Before last month, the last time I visited the Chinese capital was during the 2008 Olympics, when my parents nabbed tickets off a friend to see the men’s hurdles at the national stadium.

Our passes were no longer in demand because the apparent GOAT, Liu Xiang (I don’t know anything about hurdling, but I also don’t know the names of any other hurdlers), withdrew from his big race. I watched athletes circle the tracks like mice in a maze, but felt closer to the spectacle when the Russian women’s gymnastics team showed up at our peking duck restaurant, all blonde and ponytailed. I ate lamb dipped in sesame paste, after swirling it around in a hot pot with a conical hat.

Going back to Beijing as an adult, with an actual interest in old Chinese design and food, was tremendous and quite poignant. I asked my mum if she could fish up any of our old photos from the trip, which sent her down a family album rabbit hole. Alas, none from Beijing, but she did send me this of her and my dad on their wedding day.

‘Evidence that [I drove] myself to the wedding,’ she typed, followed by ‘He didn’t have [his] license yet.’

Also, I’m getting married in six weeks!!!

---

This entire chapter of the trip has since taken on a dreamlike blur not only because of its sheer brevity and the surreal, sweaty majesty of our Great Wall expedition (more below), but also as we got to call the Mandarin Oriental Qianmen—less a single unit of a hotel than an ecosystem of luxe hutong abodes—our base for the two nights. It’s one thing to weave through the hutongs on foot or bike; it’s another to peek out your bathroom window at the sloping tiled roofs as you wash your face before bed, and get almost lost in the alleyways on your way to breakfast in the morning.

The courtyard of the hotel's Chinese restaurant; a neighbour's papered-over windows; our own private courtyard (!)

As someone with a Chinese—specifically, he’d want you to know, Ming Dynasty—design obsessive for a dad, I grew up taking a lot of this beauty for granted. (I was also made fun of at school because classmates had come over and seen an old erotic painting, which at the time took pride of place on the wall by our front door. Lots to unpack there.)

At the same time, having grown up sitting on his carved wooden stools and slowing my pace around his glass cabinets, populated with small grey-green vessels and blue-white porcelain, being surrounded by vestiges of old Beijing felt comforting, beyond the obvious creature comforts of a five-star hotel—like I’d stepped into an extension of my dad’s aesthetic universe.