I got my first Chinese massage in the pink building behind the Asian Games sign in 2011

My Own Private Chinese Village

The manager of the coffee shop gave me a cheery wave as I walked past for the first time on this trip. The employees of the chemist shop were surprisingly enthusiastic to see me again (did they know something I didn’t?). The lady in the convenience store showed me how much her little boy had grown since my last visit… and when my mobile rang it was an invitation, if not a command, to come to dinner. After a two years break it was as though I had never left.

As 2011 was my eighth visit to Beijing I was asked how I thought this huge city had changed over that period. I was embarrassed to admit that I had absolutely no idea. I think the point is, though I may frequently ride through the concrete canyons in taxis and watch local English language television, while in Beijing I always stay in a small area known as Anhuili (where things may get older but they don’t really change).

In fact almost every year I return to this little sanctuary in Beijing: the same hotels and shops and the same small group of friends. This was the area where I first arrived in 2002 to find my very good friend from my old university had arranged everything. It was a calm, quiet and completely safe area where I could wander around on my own.

According to signs on the buildings that line its streets, this is Anhuili. Think of the Water Cube and the Birds’ Nest from the 2008 Olympics and you know pretty much where it is. It’s too small to be a district in its own right (not even big enough to be a suburb in one of the World’s biggest cities) yet Anhuili has its own unique quality and its own special history.

My best friend in Beijing had been a Masters student at my Australian university when we first met. I was already very interested in China so she patiently taught me my first few words of Mandarin and, to help our food budget, introduced me to my all-time favourite northern Chinese snack food: JIAOZI!

At this time I had not yet been to China, so after she completed her Master’s and returned home she invited me to Beijing in return for my hospitality. This was 2002 when Australians were still being told things like “Chinese people eat dogs” and “you must avoid looking directly at the Chinese police or they will shoot you”.

I still remember that phone call from her in which my friend explained that I would be spending my first night in China at the exotically named Tibetan Medicinal Bathing Hotel. I imagined a small, charming bungalow building with carved Ming Dynasty wooden doors.

Of course what I got was a brand-new, ten storey redbrick hotel, carefully built so that every room looked out over the rest of Anhuili (which is broad and flat because, until the early 1990’s, it was a cow paddock). The hotel was also the venue for her organization’s official dinners. It was fascinating to rub shoulders with all these awesomely qualified experts from all around the world, meet my first Tibetans and generally get treated like a celebrity because no-one knew who the Hell I was. Frankly, I enjoyed myself but I was right out of my depth.

Before I arrived in 2002, the hotel’s management were keen to establish it as comfortable venue for foreign devils like me, so they recruited two of their staff – Kang Meixin and Liao Yun (I remember their names so well because we are still friends today) to learn English in my honour and take me sightseeing. Together we visited the Lama Temple (Yonghegong), Beihai Park (Beihai Gongyuan) and the Ming Tombs. When I invited them to end the day by having dinner with me there would be a hurried phone call to management for permission.

My friend then trumped everyone by taking me to see the Great Wall at Badaling with her husband. Being a brash and ignorant laowai I wore a Mao cap from the souvenir shop and swapped salutes with young PLA soldiers and their mums.

Within walking distance of my hotel I can choose from an amazing variety of restaurants and cafes. There are also a couple of small art galleries and museums. There are banks, a post office and a laundry… even a little nightclub (but I sensed my big nose was not welcome).

A few years earlier I had strayed into a similar nightclub after being enticed by the proverbial tall, smiling, beautiful lady in the red silk qipoa slit to the thigh - a suburban Gong Li. Inside there was music, dancing singers, …but very few customers.

Most evenings in the hotel I would hang out the window of my room to watch the passing parade below. After a while I noticed that several young women would often appear at the roadside opposite my hotel to meet their admirers.

One evening on my way back to the hotel I turned a corner and blundered into the middle of this group to their general amusement. The boldest of the ladies held up two fingers while carefully pronouncing “ar yuan” (two dollars) - then there was more hilarity as I fumbled in my pocket for the appropriate coin.

China's phenomenal economic growth in the 1980s and 1990s (and it’s current status as the World’s second largest economy) was largely due to the policies of Deng Xiaoping. Some of those policies included gradually opening China to the West such as in the decision to stage the 1990 Asian Games in Beijing as a trial run for the Olympic games. It was decided to hold them largely in Anhuili – close to the city but apart from its bustle.

The 11th Asian Games was held in Beijing from September 22 to October 7, 1990. It was the first comprehensive international games event hosted by China. The Stadium and the residential area, the Asian Games Village, were built in Anhuili.

Today this area remains largely intact. It still has the residential area that is laid out like a suburb with cul-de-sacs, small apartments and narrow laneways between them. Each entrance is marked by a concrete and tile map in the shape of a hand with a raised thumb and dated 1990.

Next to the accommodation area is a park with a play area for children, well-tended trees and shrubs and a paved area for public events like ballroom dancing and group singing. On summer evenings there may be a morally uplifting open-air movie. The adjoining shopping centre contains banks, shops, hairdressers, restaurants, a post office, a community activities centre, and even a “Foreigners Hospital” which has recently been renamed a community health centre. A truly major shopping centre, the largest in North Beijing, is a short walk away.

The China Tibetology Research Center

My friend is employed by the China Tibetology Research Center that occupies an extensive area near the Anhui Bridge and on the Fourth Ring Road in Beijing. The Center is an academic research organization devoted to Tibetological studies (i.e. the study of Tibet and all aspects of Tibetan Culture, history and also of subjects related to everyday life in Tibetan areas - culture, history, economy, ecology, religion and medicine). The China Tibetology Research Centre was founded in Beijing on May 20, 1986.

Chinese people are fascinated by Tibet and Tibetan culture – everyone wants to go there, has a souvenir, or plays Tibetan Buddhist music in their cars. In recent years I have enjoyed proofreading a tiny percentage of the flood of documentation produced in English by the Centre. I have been fascinated by the varied and detailed information being published on Tibet.

Speaking of Tibet, for a while I thought the word “Sichuan” was mandarin for “extremely hot food”. Australians on the whole have a low tolerance for what the Chinese call “spicy” food but Chinese love it. So when Liao Yun and Meixin took me to a new, small Sichuan restaurant opposite my hotel I had no idea what I was in for.

Sichuan, I eventually discovered, is a Tibetan-speaking province in Southwest China famous for it’s “tongue-numbing” cuisine. I was certainly struggling with the pain but reluctant to reveal myself as an inexperienced foreigner… until I noticed my companions were also coughing, gulping down glasses of water and wiping their eyes and noses. The restaurant was to close shortly after. By my next China visit it had reopened to offer a different and less challenging ethic cuisine.

Meixin with the Birds Nest under construction in 2007

As the years passed Meixin and Liaoyun moved on to other jobs but I retained phone and email contact with them. Liaoyun was to become a tourist guide after her early experience with showing me around. Meanwhile their positions in the Tibetan Medicinal Hotel were partly replaced by the wonderful Zhengna who was in charge of my floor and who spoke perfect English. She has to be the sweetest-natured lady I have ever met. It seemed nothing was too much trouble for her. However she was to provide me with an important lesson: speaking the same language does not necessarily lead to understanding.

The hotel had just introduced plastic cards to replace the usual metal keys for the guest’s rooms. For some reason, carrying the card around in my pocket eventually rendered it useless. I’d slip the card into the slot in the door… a green light is supposed to come on, it goes “beep” and in you go. With me it would work a few times and then it would only get the red light, no beep and no entry.

After fiddling with the lock mechanism and replacing the card a few times, hotel maintenance staff grew increasingly frustrated with me and a little resentful too. They seemed convinced I was “doing something” to destroy the functionality of the card. Eventually I was told to just ask Zhengna to let me in with her key whenever I returned to my room.

Each room in the hotel has a small “false” room between it and the outside window facing the street. This houses the air conditioning unit, reduces street noise and allows natural light into the main room. This tiny room made a great little photography studio for me to take portraits of my friends. It would also (I reasoned to myself one day) make a great place to dry my clothes after washing them in the bath tub rather than walking to the laundry, having forgotten where it was and not wanting to appear stupid by asking for directions… again.

Zhengna and the angry maintenance men, Tibetan Bathing Hotel 2007

When I asked Zhengna to lend me some string (to hang my clothes in the front room) she was mildly puzzled. It was when I showed her my shirts, jeans, undies and so on floating in the bath that her equanimity slipped. To her this was clearly totally bizarre and irrational behaviour. But she recovered brilliantly – she would find a suitable basin for the clothes and take them downstairs to the staff laundry to rinse and spin dry them for me. I followed helplessly but once the machines were whirring she took me back to my room to relax, await my clean clothes and stay out of trouble (she didn’t say this but I have no doubt she thought it).

The trouble was - at this point we both realised that the huge key ring she usually carried around with every key to every door on my floor… was now lying on my bed, in my room, which was now locked and the only available key, mine, did not work.

To make a long story short, a hotel employee had to volunteer to climb down the outside of the hotel (with a safety rope around his middle) from the tenth floor to my room on the eighth floor, slip in through the open window, recover the key ring and open the door.

When he eventually appeared in the doorway of my room, covered in sweat and with a bleeding wound on his face, he was clutching the keys. Apparently he did slip and almost fell. I often wonder how my life would have been with this man’s death on my conscience.

With the 2008 Olympic Games I can’t explain why I refused my friends’ offer of tickets to various events. It’s true I have no interest in sport (unlike all my Chinese friends) but the stadium was so close the explosion of the fireworks in the closing ceremony shook my hotel. I had no excuse except I was just a country boy afraid of big crowds.

In 2009 I was back in the Tibetan Bathing Hotel and using that little front room as a photographic studio when Liao Yun found me my first Chinese model. This beautiful lady did not speak any English but Liao Yun translated and at the same time was very protective and sisterly so the model was quite relaxed. We did two sessions, I got some wonderful images and the model certainly got her price.

During my most recent (2011) visit to Beijing I caught a cab from outside another of my usual hotels in Anhuili, right next to the Fourth Ring Road. As I sat with my camera in my lap and without any discussion the driver stopped his cab on a busy bridge so I could get a good shot of the Bird’s Nest. He was clearly very proud – and so he should be.

Asian Game Village Community Activity Centre, Anhuili 2011

Community Guide, Anhuili

Olympic Sports Center Hotel, Anding Road, Chaoyang District

“Olympic Flame Tower” (left) and “Watercube” (right) – Anhuili, March 2011