Barbarians in Beijing
Story and photography by Jerry Kobalenko

From bling on Wangfujing to tea in Jinshanling, two travellers explore China’s capital and Great Wall as Olympic fever nears the boiling point

VISITING CHINA is one of those unexpected opportunities my wife Alexandra and I look out for: an invitation out of the blue from an old university friend who does a lot of work in Beijing. She won’t be there, but her contacts will host us. We scramble to renew passports and secure visas, do the barest of research - where to eat and shop, where best to hike the Great Wall - then hop on an Air China flight out of Vancouver. Twelve hours later, we arrive.

When I visited Moscow in 1987 during the dying days of Communism, I stepped into an alternate universe. Drably dressed people trudged through sinister streets like vanquished humanity. Few cars, empty shops, no neon. China may still be a Communist society, but Beijing is nothing like Moscow was then. It is abustle with ATMs and malls and cellphones. As long as they don’t rock the boat politically, people in China are free to try to make as much money as possible. Capitalism - the economic wing of democracy - has the official stamp of approval. In mercantile matters, they is us.

Alexandra can tote a 30-kilogram pack and face down polar bears, but she also has a city woman side. She loves buying shoes and can happily wander through stores for hours, touching things. Joining her on these expeditions in Beijing is my chance to earn some marital points, since according to her, we never take beach vacations. Apparently, Arctic beaches don’t count.

I can muddle by in a few languages, and before now, I’ve never visited a place where I can’t read the street signs and the only word I know is thank you - hsieh-hsieh - which Alexandra and I dutifully repeat 500 times a day, an all-inclusive mantra. To ancient Greeks, anyone who did not speak Greek was simply idiotically babbling “bar-bar” - hence the term barbarian. In Beijing, we are barbarians.