Saturday morning

It was an eerily tranquil Saturday morning in Beijing. As I strolled along one of the less-traversed streets in the Haidian district, I witnessed a peaceful layer of mist floating in mid air, as if persuading me into a slumbering repose.

It was 4:30am, and dawn was still more than an hour away. It seemed that my early morning jaunt was devoid of any purpose, just as my body and mind were drifting away amidst this enormous calmness. All that seemed ideal, well, until I got into a cab, in a moment that reminded me of my purpose: I was going to Tiananmen Square, not merely to witness the raising of the flag (officially at 5:52am), but also to be one of the first few to pay respects to Mao during the Tomb Sweeping long weekend in China.

The cab driver was soundly sleeping inside his cab along the curb, before I woke him up by knocking lightly on his door. He woke up, and signaled to me that, whatever good dream of his that I just smashed, he was nevertheless ready to do business. When I told him that I was going to Tiananmen Square, he lifted his head slightly, in a moment of acutely heightened alertness, as if he was not just ready for business but awakened for a purpose. As he started his car and slowly drove off the curb and onto the main road, he asked me, with a solemn but serious tone: "when does our flag go up today?" ("今天我们的国旗是几点钟升啊?")

It was this reassuring first person plural, "our", that made me feel I wasn't too delusional into believing that waking up at 4am to watch the national flag was a serious yet superbly cool idea. The 20-minute cab ride in a hibernating Beijing was accentuated by a nice conversation between me and the cab driver about Mao's politics (idealistic), his place in modern Chinese history (undisputedly secure), and what we thought might happen during the Olympics (probably some isolated protests around the world, but droned out by the spectacle and the media frenzy dedicated to the Event). Sensing that he was probably a Mao fan, I promised him that I would dedicate (and I did) a bouquet of flowers on his behalf at Mao's Mausoleum.

The day was cloudy, and the flag raising ceremony was not much different from another one I saw back in October (though that one happened later, around 6:30am). The crowd was noticeably larger --probably because most, like myself, was going for both the flag raising ceremony and a visit to Mao's Mausoleum (for the symbolic tomb sweeping). Not long after the flag was raised, and definitely before 6am, there were already hundreds of people lined up in front of Mao's Mausoleum (it officially opens at 8am). By the time I got in line (I was sidetracked by photo-taking in and around Tiananmen Square) there must be at least a thousand folks ready to get in. The Mausoleum opened a little after 7:30am, ahead of time (probably to adjust for the increased number of visitors during the Qingming Festival), and I got in just before 8am. Seeing Mao (or just the prosthetic Mao) was surreal, not merely because of the earlier cab conversation but because I was there during the Qingming Festival weekend. It was an unforgettable experience to see how patriotic countrymen, some traveling from faraway provinces and others with small children in tow, went in droves to pay respect to a man who singlehandedly founded the modern Chinese psyche, much of which is attributable to Mao's voluminous poetry and general writings.

The enormous crowd also made me wonder what Mao would think of modern China as it exists today: the first thing I saw after leaving Tiananmen Square was a two-story KFC, which would probably be visited by many of those hungry tomb sweepers but to me also represents the kind of foreign commercial invasion that Mao by and large detested. Some of the folks in the crowd probably even love some of the modern extravagance and excess that were once thought to be capitalist vices. Some of these folks walked into Mao's Mausoleum wearing the Vuittons and the Guccis of the world in a stratified society where the rich holds considerable influence, economic and political. Is that the China that Mao envisioned? I certainly didn't see Mao rolling in his grave (or on the Mausoleum bed), but are some of these Gucci-totting visitors (or the modern Chinese in general) ready to revert back to a share-all society steeped with Mao's proletarian values?