White Sands. Geoff Dyer

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СКАЧАТЬ with no chance of getting here for at least an hour. The sidewalks were jammed with people trying to hail taxis, all of which were full, none of which were moving in the dreadful traffic and the terrific heat. It would be quickest, Min said, to take the subway.

      ‘We must improvise!’ she said. ‘Though it will be very crowded.’

      ‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘Any half-decent city has crowded subways.’

      But none had subways as crowded as Beijing’s. Every part of the process—buying tickets, going through barriers and along walkways (the longest, surely, of any subway anywhere in the world)—was exhausting, and every part of the subway system was packed to bursting. Any corridor we had to go down was a solid mass of citizens, from beginning to end. For each of the two changes, we had to queue to get on a train when it came, not with any hope of getting on but with the hope of securing a better position when the train after next pulled in. There was no queue-barging and no pushing and shoving; everyone had adapted to living in crowds and went politely about their tightly packed business.

      I was shattered by the time I got back to the hotel, to the room where I’d woken up feeling shattered ten hours earlier, but there was no time to unshatter myself by taking a nap, as I’d banked on doing in the car that was supposed to have met us, before the truly shattering experience of taking the subway back to the hotel. There was time only to shower, change into fresh underwear, a clean blue shirt—the last clean one, kept in reserve—and jeans before meeting Min in reception. We were going to a restaurant to eat Peking duck. This, Min explained, would mark the symbolic end of my visit: the eating of Peking duck in a restaurant in Peking famed for its Peking duck.

      It was only a five-minute walk away. The pictures in the elevator showed dozens of the world’s leaders and celebrities eating Peking duck, though the restaurant in the pictures didn’t necessarily look like the one we stepped into when the elevator doors opened.

      There were six of us for dinner, in a private dining room. Qiang, the head of the publishing house, was there, and Wei, whom I hadn’t seen for a couple of days. She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt with something written on it in Chinese characters, and carrying, as always, a pink rucksack made out of some soft and fluffy material. When we’d first met I’d guessed that she was Qiang’s daughter, accompanying him during the school holidays. In the rucksack, I assumed, were a few toys or computer games to stop her getting bored—until I passed it to her and found that it weighed a ton. It was crammed with books, a laptop and various electronic accessories. She was twenty-four, the marketing manager. The reason I hadn’t seen her for a couple of days was that she’d been taking care of another visiting writer, Jun, from Hong Kong. She introduced us; we shook hands. Jun was exactly my age but, unusually in a part of the world where everyone seemed a decade younger than they were, looked five years older.

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