“I just want to make some money!” — Mr. Wang, Express Mail Driver
REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK: Sandy Tolan
Some stories start with a whir.
Well, I didn't know that before I went to Beijing for the first time, in March 2007. But sure enough, one morning, as I sat with my friend and fellow journalist Mark Dowie in a quiet hotel courtyard — a respite from the frenetic pace of the biggest city in the biggest country in the world — we heard an odd, haunting sound, and looked up to see a flock of pigeons swooping overhead. Whiiiirrrrrr, sang the circling birds. Whiiiiirrrrrrrr. From these pigeons came some of the most beautiful, eerie sounds I'd ever heard.
"How do they make those sounds?" Mark wanted to know. I wondered too — it was too otherworldly to be coming from their flapping wings, or from their beaks — even if they did speak Pigeon Chinese. Something else was making that noise. I wanted to find out what; in the answer, I suspected, would lie a story of an old China living alongside the new.
And that is how I met Mr. Wang. Working with a young Chinese journalist, Lou Li (who uses an English name, Lois), I began walking through the wonderful old neighborhoods of one of Beijing's dwindling hutongs, searching for a pigeon-keeper — someone, I hoped, who could reveal the working life of old Beijing with the growth-or-bust mentality of modern China just beyond the hutong's borders.
Lois and I walked down the narrow warrens, past the clusters of old homes surrounded by ancient walls, dodging armies of cyclists and vendors calling out their wares and services. Near the end of one of those alleys, we asked for a local pigeon keeper, and suddenly we found ourselves shaking hands with Mr. Wang (pronounced "Wong").
Still, no whirring. What about the whirring? Ah, those sounds, Mr. Wang said, smiling. And then he produced a small collection of tiny bamboo whistles, which, like his neighboring pigeon keepers, he occasionally attaches to his birds. He blew through them, producing a glittering collection of whistling sounds. And there, at that moment, we heard such a sound overhead. Whirrrrr, sang a neighboring flock of pigeons. Whiiiiirrrrrrrr. It was the sound of the wind sluicing through the bamboo whistles of his neighbor's birds.
Mr. Wang looked down upon the waves of tiled roofs — remnants of old Beijing — and at the skyscrapers in the distance: metaphors for a white-hot Chinese economy. He spoke lovingly of his old hutong, and of a culture that is slipping away. "Even today we don't need to lock our doors," he said with a smile. "The neighbors will always keep an eye on our house. I feel quite safe. It's unusual compared to other parts of Beijing."
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