The thirty year old tree was uprooted, a raw ball of soil and naked noodle roots winched up above street level, a metal spiked fence sagging under the trunk. A group of workmen had cordoned it off and called us away when we took photographs. “The way they’ve planted them in this row, the trees fall over every time even a drop of rain goes on them.”
It’s rained solid for four days as summer ends and the weather breaks. I usually feel like a big old sloppy mess. Now I’m a big old wet sloppy mess with grey rain up to my shins. The rain’s so polluted my skin’s prickling.
The time hundreds of people died in the Beijing summer storm a couple of years ago, in the space of a few hours of rainfall, the water was waist high. In the villages people die in the storms every year. “In the last year the government said 800 people died, which is government-speak for thousands of people,” said the girl whose Chinese name meant Little Bridge.
During the worst storms the rivers rose so high that cars couldn’t tell the difference between the water, the bridge and the road. They drove their cars off the sides of the bridges and sank into the water. Manhole covers on the streets drifted away and people fell into the holes. “Have you noticed how many manholes there are on the street? Most cities are built with some organisation – you’d expect a manhole cover at every corner. But they built too many here. There are five within view. Once I saw some workmen lifting one up and underneath there was just dirt,” said Little River.
We passed a man selling tiny turtles the side of teacup saucers. Displayed on their backs, legs waving, the turtles balanced on the necks of beer bottles.
“People don’t care about the things they sell,” said my friend Peaches. She told the story of a family friend who had bought a puppy from a street vendor*. This friend bought a street puppy that had a bump on its head and seemed like it was going to die. He took it to the vet, who found a ball of thread in its head. The vet said the previous owners must have plugged a wound in the dog’s head with thread to cover it over a stop the bleeding, instead of healing it.
“Did the dog survive?” asked Little River.
“Yeah, it lived until it died,” said Peaches.
“When you say that it makes me think of that shop that says Open Until Closed,” said Little River.
*There’s another Beijing friend who found a dog that had been tied up in a plastic bag. And I saw puppies being sold in a cardboard box on the street. Every so often the man selling them picked one up by the scruff of its neck, brushed it with a hairbrush and threw it back in the box.
Other articles in the China Flash series:
“Yeah, it lived until it died,” said Peaches.
“When you say that it makes me think of that shop that says Open Until Closed,” said Little River.
*There’s another Beijing friend who found a dog that had been tied up in a plastic bag. And I saw puppies being sold in a cardboard box on the street. Every so often the man selling them picked one up by the scruff of its neck, brushed it with a hairbrush and threw it back in the box.
Other articles in the China Flash series:
- Lean In Beijing on corporate ambition, new sexism and awesome girls in China
- Beijing Night
- Film-maker Jenny Man Wu on comedy, pain and women's ambivalence
- Benedicte Bro-Cassard, Beijing photographer, on the Chinese luxury market, sugar daddies and sugar daughters
- Kong Lingnan, Beijing painter, on natural beauty and human ugliness
- Writer Kerry Brown on the seven elite men who rule a country with communist roots and capitalist shoots
- Writer Zhang Chao on media misogyny, China's momentous changes and the pressures facing young women today
- Graffiti crew ABS on legal, semi-legal and illegal Chinese street art
- Even afternoon tea says something about modern, monetised Beijing
- Porcelain dolls, bad Samaritans and the law
- Beijing storms, turtles and dogs
- Hair envy
- Two Chinese characters
- A delicate poem to explain the intense Beijing seasons