Beijing, Beijingers obsessed with looks

Helly Minarti, Contributor, Jakarta

I woke up in the morning to find a flyer slipped under my apartment door. Beijing, the year is 2004, and the flyer is an advertisement for some new plastic surgery clinic. That is one of the many ways you can greet the day here, the modern capital of the Middle Kingdom. Contemporary Beijingers seem to be obsessed with their looks -- plastic surgery clinics are mushrooming, penetrating even your private space.

The spa lifestyle has finally arrived in this part of the world. On the streets, promotional girls push flyers into your hands. This year alone, China hosted at least four beauty pageants, including the Miss World.

A new beauty pageant was dedicated to women who had had plastic surgery. As absurd as it might sound, this pageant was triggered by a woman who was disqualified from another beauty contest because the judges found out she had had plastic surgery on her face.

The body is the new temple for many Beijingers. This theme moved choreographer Wen Hui to stage Report on the Body, a performance by the Living Dance Studio, the first independent dance company in China.

"I'm amazed with this change. You can find bathhouses or spas almost in every corner of the city. Manicure-pedicure, branded clothes, expensive cosmetics. What's this all about?" mused Wen Hui.

This seemingly newfound bodily obsession is transferred to the stage -- unfortunately it was performed only once in front of the public in Beijing, back at the end of 2002, but ironically has toured several cities in Europe.

The city of Beijing also can be seen as a "body" -- constantly undergoing a makeover. This once ancient, imperial capital has gone through massive changes in the past few years. Built as if imitating a fortress, with four ring roads circling and bordering it, Beijing is vast and spread out.

Construction sites are ubiquitous: apartments, malls and the new Central Business District. A passionate taxi driver took me on a little tour of his favorite fangzi -- traditional Chinese houses normally located in hutong (alleyways). He has lived for decades in one of these houses, he said, and he despairs at their alarming disappearance. Experts predict that at least 600 hutong disappear every year, replaced by modern buildings and developments.

I find one of the most delightful things to do in Beijing is to stroll down the old hutong and sample the arguably most charming slice of life in the city. The kind of hutong around the Jishuitan area (not the lakeside where the glitzy Hou Hai is located). This is where life revolves around a few simple things -- fangzi built originally and most still with no toilets (that is why public toilets are a truly Beijing feature), small restaurants lined up next to "barber shops" (where girls with dyed blond hair wait for customers).

Everything is in harmony. It's an arena to show what the Chinese used to be very good at -- the Taoist art of loafing -- where guys play mahjong on the side of the street, eating spicy kabob for half cent a piece at a cheap food stall, drinking a bottle of Yanjing beer. The bonus is you get genuine hospitality from the owners instead of the brisk, baffled fuwuyuan (waiters) at the bigger restaurants. Living is cheap, yet so rich.

Sure, you also can have a much nicer hutong-like environment -- a line of newly built siheyuan (courtyard houses) like the ones next to the Forbidden City. Re-designed in grayish bricks, these two-story houses are really a bargain compared to those flashy, overpriced, modern apartments.

Something in between is like the area around the Central Academy of Drama -- a mixture of local flavor (with surviving moon gate and the "double happiness" signs over the doors of some of its houses), but with trendy cafes and bars sneaking out.

A thorough makeover is indeed in the offing. Much work is going into the hosting of the 2008 Olympics, but there are other reasons for the changes. The 20 years or so of the "new economy" put Beijing in the rat race to establish the "one country two systems", or it is simply setting the mood of "capitalism with a socialist character". It is in a way an example of Deng Xiao Ping's famous saying from the 1970s that "it doesn't matter whether the cat is white or black as long as it can catch a mouse".

Deng, the architect of reform in China, set the credo: "To be rich is glorious." Surviving the Cultural Revolution, China emerged perplexed in the 1980s, catching the wind of change in the odder 1990s and now riding the new millennium full of optimism. It often feels like Southeast Asia during the much- hyped "New Asian Tigers" period in the late 1980s, only at a much more dizzying pace.

Although the Chinese government just issued a green card procedure for foreigners, it was not until 2003 when foreigners were free to live the accommodation of their choosing (previously they were confined to certain areas and apartments). Export permits for private companies were only recently issued. And the restriction on international publishing will not be lifted until next year (so don't expect to find a wide range of English books or magazines even in a city as big as Beijing). Some Internet news sites are banned.

And although now MBA students can apply the McDonald index -- where you measure people's buying power against the price of a Big Mac -- this does not mean the quality of service in general is predictable or standardized. In many cases, the idea of serving "customers" is still vague, in contrast to the big campaign of consumption endorsed by the marketing gurus.

On the surface, Beijing seems like any other capital in Asia -- vibrant, lively, renao in Chinese. While it still has traces of its history -- temples, palaces, antique tombs -- it invents new spots: the infamous Sanlitun bar street, idyllic nightlife at Hou Hai, stylish eateries at Nuren Jie, underground gigs, cafes for filmmakers, club life or the funky shopping center at Xidan. It is not as savvy and natural as Shanghai in tapping the global lifestyle; although the coffee culture finally hit the city of tea houses, you still have to go miles to find a decent cup of coffee. But scratch the surface and you will find the true soul of contemporary China.

Compared to Shanghai's superficial art scene, for instance, where money is the main currency, Beijing offers a genuine dynamic reflected in its range of expressions, practice and level of sophistication. Good and bad, gem and trash art, all is up for grabs. It is hard to imagine that a phenomenon like the Dashanzi Art District -- a former Bauhaus-style factory complex, built by the East Germans in the 1950s -- happening in Shanghai.

Two years ago, it was just a run-down area, ready to be demolished. Some artists moved in and in no time turned it into a seemingly organic, trendy complex of art galleries, studio spaces, cool cafes, restaurants, bars, clubs and boutiques. Now it's on the art world's map.

Indeed, this is a moving, beguiling time to be in Beijing. At a quick glance, Shanghainese may be more fluent in English and business, more embracing of the cosmopolitan culture -- they are now lobbying to build special between-two-cities ties with London. The Guangzhou-ren may be more pursuant of new ideas. But Beijing sets the parameter of progress, where the next wind of change blows. No doubt, this goes beyond the city's old charm as a mere site of imperial or socialist memorabilia.