Sunday July 15, 2012

BEIJING – On a hot Sunday morning, with the temperature nearing 90  
degrees, we walked with tens of thousands of other people across  
Tiananmen Square and into the main gates of the Forbidden City, which  
for more than 500 years served as home for Chinese emperors, their  
families and concubines. The crowds were incredible—imagine everyone  
leaving a college football game through the same few large gates, but  
for hours and hours and hours. It was a beautiful scene, though, a sea  
of brightly colored sun umbrellas moving across the stone walkways and  
into elaborate, brightly colored palace buildings. The Forbidden City  
is a collection of more than 900 buildings, and we toured fewer than  
two dozen of them over a period of several hours. It’s a massive  
place, on a scale that is hard to grasp even as you are being swept  
through the place with the sea of other visitors. During the trip,  
Will made a new friend in the group, Nicholas, who is here with his  
grandparents, and the two 10-year-old boys navigated the Forbidden  
City and its crowds together, chatting and pointing out things to one  
another.

From the Forbidden City, we went to a group lunch at a small hotel  
near what is known as the Drum Tower, which served as a night-time  
clock tower in old Beijing, with drummers pounding out the time in  
intervals of every two hours. After that, we climbed two by two into a  
flock of pedicabs that had assembled outside the restaurant. Mitchell  
rode with Will, and after the driver took our camera and snapped a  
picture, Courtenay and I rode away on another cab. We rode slowly in a  
long line through a series of hutongs, the small alleyways of  
Beijing. We rode by Chinese cooling their infants in pots of water  
and old men playing board games. The cabs didn’t seem to have working  
brakes, and every time the group slowed for a corner, or a passing  
car, we’d bump the cab in front of us, and get a corresponding tap  
from behind. Yes, it was a touristy little ride that went out in 20-
minute circle, but it was fun and interesting to rattle along through  
the hutongs, where there are piles of sand, dirt and brick everywhere,  
people working on their homes and tiny businesses.

The bus ride back to the hotel took us by dealerships for luxury  
cars such as Maseratis and Jaquars, and it was jarring to go so  
quickly from the sight of men driving rusting pedicabs to those  
shopping for some of the most expensive cars on earth. Beijing is both  
desperately poor and incredibly rich, sometimes within the same couple  
blocks. Everywhere you look you see the deep economic tensions in this  
country, which were described to us in an hour-long lecture late  
Sunday. The speaker, Frank Hawke, a Stanford grad who has spent most  
of his life in China, says it can go either way—with a hugely changed,  
reformed China joining the community of nations with a free and  
democratic economy, or a China in chaos. But it cannot go on this way,  
without change in some way.

By late-afternoon, we were back at the hotel, and Will hit the pool  
with some of his other new buddies among the Stanford travelers, while  
Mitchell and I took refuge at the hotel bar. It’s a great treat for me  
to have both of my sons here together, sharing these experiences. For  
Courtenay, today also was a new experience, the first that we have  
ever had together as part of an organized tour. It’s probably not  
something we’ll always want to do in our traveling, but it was clearly  
a relief for her to leave the organizing and the communicating and the  
decision-making to others, and just wander along taking everything in.

We go next to the Temple of Heaven and the next day to the Great  
Wall, before we say goodbye to Beijing and head for Xi’an, the home of  
the terracotta warriors. Whenever I think of Beijing, I will remember  
the mass of people streaming into the main entrance of the Forbidden  
City, the brilliant umbrellas flowing like a river through the blazing  
sun.