Olympics 2008

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Photo by Robert F. Bukaty
AP

Visitors walk along a portion of the 4,000-mile-long Great Wall of China in Badaling, near Beijing.

We'd been in Beijing all of 45 minutes when a couple we'd met on the plane asked if we wanted to go to this famous flea market they'd read about.

You bet. All I'd seen so far on this 23-hour trip were the insides of the LAX, Shanghai and Beijing airports. My sensible husband opted for a $20 in-room massage, and though I was tempted by the bonus foot bath, I was too jangly at being in Beijing. Off we went to the Panjiayuan flea market.

From the moment our cab pulled away from our five-star Jiangxi Grand Hotel until we left China eight days later, I could only ogle, drop-jawed, at the sheer humanity of the country. Of its 1.3 billion people, the .3 part (which pretty much equals the population of the U.S.) seemed to surround me wherever we went, including the flea market (or were pedaling there on their beat-up Flying Pigeon bicycles). Hundreds of thousands commute daily on bikes.

It was lively and noisy like a covered Turkish bazaar. I could have shopped and bargained and skipped another night's sleep. We'd stepped not 2 feet from our cab and I could hear hundreds of voices, chopped and tonal to my ears, sounding a bit like, well, chopsticks. Inviting smells from cooking food on the sidewalk wafted through the crowds. People bargained with each other over the price of things, from won ton soup to lichee nuts to Susie Wong sarongs.

A fan of high camp, my eyes immediately lit on an old red Chairman Mao wind-up clock (he smiled and waved every second).

"How much?" I hand-signaled the ancient fellow sitting on the pavement, his back against a wall, his few wares spread on a towel. He slowly stood, fished out a hand calculator and punched in the number 50.

Waving, smiling Mao or not, I wasn't paying $50. I shook my head. He handed me the calculator. Oh, I was supposed to punch in my counteroffer. I pushed 5.

Big scowl. (You're supposed to bargain at these markets or it's no fun, I'd read.) He then punched in 40. I shook my head no again. Then something clicked in my lint-filled brain. Dollars or yuan? I held out one of each to him, signaling "which?" He pointed to the yuan.

Ah, so. Seven yuan to a buck — $5.71. My head shake no became a big nod yes.

Big smile, big bow, big hand-over of happy, ticking, waving clock. During the week in China, I never came across a better souvenir.

My second-best would be the nine genuine Rolexes I bought at three for $10 from aggressive, omnipresent street touts. The watches were the only items I came across that week that weren't stamped "Made in China." "Swiss Made," their faces read.

My husband and I were with a 100-person group on an inexpensive trip to Beijing and Shanghai that the Ventura Chamber of Commerce and the Chinese government co-sponsor yearly: all meals, flights, four-star hotels, tours and English-speaking guides for $1,700.

The next morning, our group set out for Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. That same .3 billion people seemed to be on the square, the largest in the world (it can accommodate a million people). "Chop chop," our Chinese guide would say to steer us through the crowds. I asked her if it's an actual Chinese term. No, she said. She'd picked it up from American tour groups.

Among the thousands of stylishly dressed Chinese strollers was at least one soldier every 30 or so feet, standing at attention or performing close-order drills as a group. I saw no guns, but half of those at attention had fire extinguishers at their feet on this sea of concrete.

"Are they for demonstrations?" I naively asked our guide.

"No," she said a bit tersely. I don't ask and she doesn't tell, was the longer message. At the time, March 15, we were unaware of anything going on in Tibet. A giant mural of Mao hangs at the entrance to the Forbidden City, but this was to be the only such veneration of him I would see. Feelings seem mixed about him. One person said that he did 30 percent good things and 70 percent not so good.

That night we turned on the TV and found CNN-Asia. But the TV kept going black every time an anchor said something like, "In China today, all foreign media were banned ..." The next, he got only two syllables out: "In Tib." Blackout again. Five minutes later the TV would "fix" itself with a new story about how many U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq that day, etc.

We hadn't planned to watch TV in China, but now we HAD to, to see what the anchor could spit out before the TV broke again. We knew something unpleasant was happening in Tibet, just not what. It wasn't as though one could pick up the New York Times from a newsstand. On the fourth night, CNN-Asia showed some footage of Tibetans breaking store windows of Han Chinese, who've moved in since Mao seized Tibet in 1950.

Even with all the personal satellite dishes, Internet cafes, work and home computers, cell phones and nosy international travelers, the government is still shaping the news to its own people. Many probably know of opposing views, but I got the feeling there's no opposing discussion in the marketplace.

Photo by Robert F. Bukaty
AP

A cyclist braves rain and traffic during a recent evening rush hour in Beijing.

Several Chinese rather proudly informed me that most students begin studying English in grade school. But if every tourist hotel in China receives CNN, news censorship is surely as porous as a flour sifter. The sense I picked up is that they're sure they're right, and the West is wrong or doesn't understand. China's priority seems to be unity, while ours is individual rights.

The August Olympics are an incredibly huge deal for the Chinese — a "coming-out party" to show its best face to the rest of the world. Enormous banners and signs, new lightning-fast construction, countdown clocks and Olympics stores are everywhere.

Tens of thousands of athletes and tourists from 180 or more countries will descend on Beijing in August for 16 days with 24/7 coverage. What will happen if they start hollering, "Free Tibet," "Down with Bush," "Down with President Hu, too," etc.? I don't have a clue, and I'm guessing the Chinese government isn't sure either.

Part of my incentive to go to China was that I'm such an Olympics fan — I wanted to see the venues to make the Games more familiar. I'll bet the Bird's Nest, that stunning new opening ceremonies stadium, which the world will or will not boycott on opening day, becomes as iconic as Bilbao in Spain or the Disney Center. Ditto for the "Bubble Wrap" swim pavilion.

While I saw signs of great wealth in Beijing, I saw signs of barely getting by. An old woman riding a rickety bicycle in flip-flops carried an upright refrigerator on the back of her bicycle in the lane next to a Rolls-Royce. The driver on our rickshaw tour of an old neighborhood used his leather shoe to brake. He rubbed it against the front tire.

In Suzhou, an old woman shrunken to my height (4-foot-11), limped down a road pushing the saddest wheelbarrow I'd ever seen (the wheel had no tire, just a rim). She'd pick up trash, put it in her wheelbarrow, then slowly move on.

It was pleasantly sunny at the Great Wall, in forested mountains some 40 miles outside Beijing. When we were told part of the wall had been renovated, I was disappointed not to be seeing the original, until I heard it's been renovated constantly along its 4,000-mile length since the 1300s.

We spent nights in Suzhou and Hangzhou, after somewhat sunny days, visiting parks and temples along the way. We stopped at Dragon Well tea plantation, where the best green tea in China supposedly comes from (at $200 per pound on the premises). Mao gave two pounds of it to President Nixon in 1972. Nixon asked for more.

We rolled into Shanghai for two nights after passing through a hundred miles of seemingly poverty-ridden roadside. The next morning, we headed straight for the old Bund and its Huangpu riverside walkway. Across the street was the old British Customs House with its famous clock tower. I could have spent a whole day on the Bund, watching the mesmerizing barge traffic on the wide river.

But the picture of China that will always come first to mind will be Shanghai's thousands of towering condos and apartment buildings, no matter which way I turned, with no end in sight. With its 23 million in population (China's second-largest city) its skyscrapers make New York City look like Lompoc. The largest city, Chongqing, has a population of 34 million (roughly the same as the whole state of California).

Even the factories look like 70-story condos. Their windows aren't curtained and one can see dark heads bobbing in every window under fluorescent lights late at night. They're working the graveyard shift six days a week to flood the world with their goods and make themselves richer. "To be (get) rich is glorious," Deng Xiaoping famously said in the 1980s. Getting rich and richer is their credo today.

"They're all so industrious here," said my husband. "Everyone has a job to do and they're doing it."

Photo by Robert F. Bukaty
AP

A photographer focuses on the National Stadium, also known as the Bird's Nest, built for the Olympics.

"Made in the USA" is near impossible to find in China, but "Franchised from the USA" is not. Tired of tea, we hoofed it to the nearest Starbucks in Shanghai's old section (which the Chinese call Chinatown), a replica of every other U.S. Starbucks. Only other Americans sat inside. The nearby McDonald's, to which I dragged my husband so I could use an American-style sit-down bathroom, had four open floors, atrium-like, and was filled beyond capacity with Chinese diners. It was the noisiest and biggest cafe I've ever been in. The line for the women's room snaked 40 feet into the restaurant itself. Shanghai architects are no better than ours at realizing women's rooms need three times the facilities men's rooms do. My husband was in and out in two minutes.

At the airport we checked our bags before boarding for LAX. Out of nowhere, two stern-looking guards motioned to my husband to follow them. Uh-oh.

In a closed-off room sat our luggage. One guard pointed to my husband's luggage.

"To open," she ordered.

My spouse obeyed. Item by item, he removed underwear, camera, knockoff Rolexes, knockoff Beijing Olympic caps, vitamins and so on until he came to a T-shirt wrapped around my smiling, waving Mao clock, which had started ticking again. My stomach dropped. They'll take my clock and us, too, to Datong for three years of re-education, I was sure.

But the solemn guard picked it up, looked at it and sort of broke into a grimace of a smile. "OK," he said and handed it back.

I laughed in relief. International relations were preserved. And if Mao's embalmed corpse in Tiananmen Square could smile, I'm sure he'd be waving and happy that he could still stir it up.