angelazito’s posterous

The games end today, and I return to New York tomorrow with my favorite Olympic souvenir: the rings in their five colors made into bracelets.  (Nails extra!)  This from Wikipedia:  "The emblem chosen to illustrate and represent the world Congress of 1914...: five intertwined rings in different colors - blue, yellow, black, green, red ... represent the five parts of the world which now are won over to Olympism and willing to accept healthy competition."  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_symbols  The number five carries far more cosmic significance in China  than the number eight, I think. It is the basis for something called wuxing, or five phases  theory, a system for creating links among the things of the universe that became popular in the Han dynasty (ca 200 BCE- 200 CE) . The five basic phases are   wood/green, water/blue, fire/red, earth/yellow--in the traditional system metal is white, not black. Waving goodbye to the Olympics--- While I'm on the plane, you can read about this theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_elements_(Chinese_philosophy)

OK I promise this is the last mention of my favorite Olympic logo using the second part of the word "beiJING" shaped like the Running Man: I was having coffee and realized he was on my milk carton!  Of course, he's also here, in Tian'anmen Square, and considerably bigger. The will to decorate the whole city (much of it beautiful and really appreciated by the populace)  has harnessed and combined advertising with the state propaganda machinery!  You have got to love that cow on the rings!

   

As the swimming events ended, I ran into another mysteriously beautiful giant mural-like thing (technically it is a series of hanging banners). This one doesn't cover any ongoing construction;  it just suddenly greets you as you walk along.  The use of huge images in public space is familiar to us in the USA, of course, through advertising.  But their use in Beijing also has another genealogy-- presenting the faces of leaders as the face of the state. These days the giant portraits that fill the city are of regular people: Athletes, certainly, some famous some not, some Chinese, some foreign. But their political import is oblique, like advertising,  if anyone here thinks of it at all.

   

I made it to an Olympic Event last night!!!  Yes, the local  bureaucrats of Unification Lake organized a quick last minute busride over to a local stadium built especially for—Beach Volleyball!!! We got in for free as a group.  The one event I go to has to be the big party event. I mean, it's not exactly Michael Phelps nailing a gold, is it? Or some serious track and field thing. No, I go to first see Holland vs. Germany men's—with their few respective fans howling along to tunes like Doowadiddy (..there she comes just a walking down the street, singin' dowadiddy diddy dum diddy doo…). This was followed by women's matches: in Norway vs. Mexico Norway won because, after all, Norway has a lot of really great hot sand beaches.  Ah, and let us not forget the "Beach Babies" who jump out and dance around in extremely tiny bikinis between serves.  The Chinese TV NEVER broadcasts THEM even though they are Chinese!  (Is this stuff some formal part of Beach Volleyball matches at the international level?)  You'll note the many empty seats—this is due to it being just after an afternoon of heavy rain, and the late hour.  I was told that European events are scheduled for their TV viewers. However, attendance has been a problem. We could see other special collective groups being ushered in.   Note the ever-present mascot in red—the kids inside them must be mighty hot!

     

Just have to write more about this issue in the Opening Ceremonies. As I wrote last time, the consistent attention to marking out clear male/female difference in the ceremony, both in terms of costume and in terms of the "division of labor," startled me and several foreign friends here in Beijing. I already mentioned that I think it helped draw the conscious line between "now" and "then," the "then" being Maoist Socialism. People have noted how a kind of end-run was performed around the history of 100 years of war and misery, and the founding of the new nation in 1949. Under Socialism, gender difference was played down in public, and here that old trend to androgynous dressing and glorying of female labor power was elaborately reversed.  I think there was a woman qigong practitioner, but pretty much the men drummed, ran around, lifted stuff and did the writing while the women stood around looking really pretty. And the Chinese team chose to continue this gender segregation:  the women came out first, dressed in gold jackets and skirts, followed by the men, dressed in red jackets and trousers.  Even team Spain—who also marked men  from women in gold and red—at least had everyone walking together.

Because I am an anthropolgist (full disclosure) this kind of thing interests me intellectually. Because  I am also a woman myself, and politically a feminist, this stuff interests me practically as well.  So I have another thought about it:  I think that because gender styles are often felt to be just "natural", this helps, unconsciously,  to make everyone think that current trends in China are just "natural" and thus definitely good. Now some parts of life in China ARE wonderful and better (more and better food, more opportunity for more people to do things they like, the chance to read about and travel all over the world if you can afford it, a sense of security that comes from economic power.)  But some things about China after Reform are not so ideal: lack of health care, the problems of underemployment in the countryside, pollution, growing gaps between have's and have nots, a marked lack of freedom of expression for dissent. All of which is to say: China is an expanding very modern nation with growing pains. And while the opening ceremonies are not a time for self-criticism (hah!)  it would have been great to see just a little of China's true modernity and its place in an international world reflected in the Zhang Yimou extravaganza. Instead we got a big helping of looking back, and then of looking inward. The way women and men were divided from each other helped to do this.

Last word on the gender thing:  Just as the woman weightlifter Chen Xianxia was actually winning China's first Gold,  lifting so much weight for the Republic in concentrated silence, Zhang Yimou who directed the ceremonies was basking in a bilingual press conference on the "making of " where the toughest question that was put to him was:  which part was most expensive?

Aside from the lucky 91K people in that stadium, the rest of the country and the world watched the ceremonies on TV--so here are some shots and thoughts from our TV. Ah,  as I write this, a live news conference with Zhang Yimou who directed the ceremonies is on the TV next to me:   Zhang is calling it the world's biggest performance art piece. "The giant scroll will be preserved:  first, the dancers sketched the outlines of our ancient landscape, the children drew the colorful faces of today,  and then the world's athletes left their rainbow footprints."

A couple of things I noticed--first, we saw no women until that beautiful, scantily clad dancer emerged on top of the giant carpet-like thing being carried as part of the Silk Road portion.  (This was well after the 2008 seemingly all -male drummers opened the show...) So I think the way male/female differences were handled was very important.   They were very clearly separated,  as when the Chinese team came out last--there must have been over 1000 members--the women wore gold jackets, red shirts and white skirts while men wore the opposite: red jackets, gold shirts and white pants. The women came out first and walked ahead. Clearly marking men from women seemed to be very important in the whole ceremony:  Women overwhelmingly appeared in decorative roles, dressed elaborately and fancily. There was no trace whatever of the days when everyone wore army pants, or blue jackets under Mao. Indeed, the "Maoist Period"  was utterly ignored.

Secondly, the gymnast Li Ning was not only flown up on the Peter Pan wire--he ran, as he dangled,  the length of the big screen that rims the stadium, in a spotlight and in the front of an unrolling scroll--so there was this figure, running slowly in mid-air looking exactly like the logo for the games--the word  "jing" (meaning BeiJING), transformed into the person on the red seal.  So Li looked like that logo to my eye, carrying the torch while the crowd screamed and waved their own plastic torches in the dark below. Then he lit the a wick and the flames snaked spirally upward to light the Big Guy. 

TV screen captures follow illustrating the second point.

       

As promised, construction in the Beijing has halted, providing cleaner air, less noise and a definitive end to migrant-labor boom times as most of the workers have been invited/forced to leave the city for the Olympics.  The past 5-10 years have been especially grinding for the eye, ear, nose and throat: roads, subways, very tall buildings, yr neighbor's apartment--bang, bang bang!  At one point the view out a friend's 8th story window in a far northern suburb showed 14 (fourteen) huge cranes!! Buildings that were not quite finished, have been covered by gigantic tarps/billboards/print-art images of athletes. Where do they get these things made???

   

As promised last week, video stills of the Big Round Lanterns going up inside the East Gate of Unity Lake Park.

         

The south gate of Beijing's largest public park, Chaoyang Park, on the east side of the city, decked out for the games. Chaoyang district contains a lot of the Olympic sites, is where most foreigners live, and my own neighborhood, Unity Lake, is located here.

 
It looks like the New Year holiday around here.   Today I walked out to see Chinese flags hanging from every entryway (provided by the local gov't)  and a few days ago, the square in the park--see the garden photos below--was hung with red cloth lanterns. Today it's the long strings of round ones going up in the pine trees...tomorrow some others. Last photo--some of the thousands of retired folks acting as Olympic volunteers: they sit around in their official T-shirts, on benches and little camp stools, ready to help anyone with anything, and acting out, at street-level, a keen sense of neighborhood participation in preparations for the games.