Du Bin for The New York Times
In Living Room, a Window Into the Games
By HARVEY ARATON
Published:
August 8, 2008
Beijing
The Zhang family watched the Olympics opening ceremony from their living room in the Shijingshan District on Beijing’s east side.
The flat-screen plasma television was purchased two weeks ago for the long-awaited night of pride and pageantry. It sat on a low-slung cabinet that rested against a living-room wall in a small, cramped apartment, as a symbol of modernity fronting a diminished vestige of the past, a screen of high definition framed by what had been a window of elaborate carpentry detail.
“Beijing,” Jacques Rogge, the International Olympic Committee president, would say on the television with his trademark solemnity as the long and lavish opening ceremony of the Beijing Games neared its conclusion, “you are hosts to the present, and gateway to the future.”
From his couch, Zhang Wei could also look back more than a century.
“That window is 120 years old,” he said, pointing to a complex weave of pinewood on the wall behind the big screen. It was all he could save from the house in the narrow Beijing alleyway known here as a hutong that Zhang’s family had inhabited for 80 years.
The building was razed in 2000 to make way for an office tower, and the demolition changed Zhang Wei’s life. He became an activist in the preservation of the hutong, if mostly through the lens of his camera.
“We try to find parts of our heritage and inform the government of things that can be done but we do not get feedback,” said Zhang, 31. “What is lost is so much more than we can protect.”
But such talk on the night that was supposed to be about all China had gained? With the start of the ceremony minutes away Friday night, Zhang’s father had come in from the apartment across the hallway on the second floor of the austere building in the Shijingshan District on Beijing’s West Side.
“Don’t say that, don’t say that,” said Zhang Yuewen, 62, the product of another generation, a protective dad who worried what bounds his son was overstepping.
He became more relaxed, giddy even, when the subject changed to one that father, son and a healthy portion of China share a growing passion for.
“We love basketball,” Zhang Wei said. “My father and I will be watching all the games.”
“Kobe Bryant, the Lakers, I am a huge fan, I only wish Yao Ming could be with them so he could win the championship,” the elder Zhang said while his wife, Fan Guixin, and Zhang Wei’s girlfriend, Li Ying, settled in for the early fireworks display. Refreshments were served. An American journalist invited to watch the opening ceremony with a photographer and an interpreter were treated like part of the family.
By the time the big show began, all perceived societal flaws and bones of contention were on hold, would have to wait through a couple of more weeks and a trove of Chinese medals, although Zhang Yuewen guaranteed — “100 percent” — that the United States would win the men’s basketball gold, citing Bryant as the difference.
“I watch him all season and I see that he has matured, grown up,” he said. “For two years, all he wants is to shoot. This last year, he is passing to the others.”
Told that his assessment matched that of many experts in the United States, he shook my hand and asked if I could get him Bryant’s autograph. I promised to see what I could do and we both laughed. I’d made a friend.
The more I come to the Olympics, and this is my 10th, the more I agree with Rogge: the Games are too bloated — though not with sports, as he has maintained, but with self-aggrandizement, the belief in itself as a great global agent of peace.
The Olympics are more of a big, messy party that always has the potential to create as much acrimony as harmony. We should probably stop expecting too much and maybe, from that context, we can grudgingly come to grips with the unmet promises of the Chinese authorities and enjoy these Games, remember that they are also for ordinary folk like the Zhangs, and how excited and proud they are to have them.
Friday night, I asked Zhang Yuewen, a former steel factory worker, about China’s women’s volleyball victory in the 1981 World Cup that is considered the rebirth of Chinese sports after the Cultural Revolution. He nodded vigorously.
“Even now I can feel the excitement from the volleyball victory,” he said. “We celebrated because at that time many years ago we didn’t have much entertainment to watch.”
Now, along with the Lakers, he has the Olympics. He (and David Stern, no doubt) considers that progress.
When they played the Chinese national anthem Friday night, Zhang Yuewen swayed gently and mouthed the words. Bryant, his favorite Yank, would soon be coming at the back of the large American delegation as it marched into the architectural triumph they call the Bird’s Nest, followed later by Yao leading in the Chinese team.
It was easy to imagine families like the Zhangs in their modest homes all across China, on their couches, leaning forward, galvanized by the realization that it was time for the basketball games and the Beijing Games to begin.
E-mail:
hjaraton@nytimes.com
