The Perfect Spot Planning to watch the opening ceremony / China’s coming out party is surprisingly not that different from planning the best New Year’s Eve party. In the end you just end up home lazying around on your couch, or you spent the night out walking around aimlessly and wished you had just been lazying around on your couch. I’d considered a couple “perfect” spots to watch the opening. There were the 26 cultural squares with projection screens set up around the city. But being a dot among thousands on a visit to Tiananmen Square made me have second thoughts. So we changed plans and made contact with friends who had reservations at a bar, but then our friend who could get us in was stuck outside fifth ring and coming into the middle of the city by car was an ordeal in Beijing traffic. Maybe it was to our fortune that we ended up crashing on a couch at another friend’s place who happened to live right by the Nest.
The Opening
So we were a couple blocks/a fifteen minute walk from the Bird Nest, at the home of a friend’s in a dense, high-rise residential area. From the bed room window, we get a perfect side view of the nest and the lit-up Olympic torch. It’s snugged almost picture perfect between two buildings and a construction site with four cranes frozen in mid-motion (a scene that all the aerial shots of TV coverage seems to magically eclipse). My friend Rong and I kept on bopping back and forth between the living room with the TV and bedroom every time the fireworks exploded on screen. We are so close we could hear the cheering erupting from the some 90,000 people inside the Bird Nest. The opening fireworks sequence was such a stunner we actually stood up during the national anthem, shaken with pride. Though the harmonious Tai Chi Kung-Fu (dude, I was expecting some Yuen Woo-ping action) and parade of nations kind of slowed thing down, and to be honest, Li Ning lighting the torch wasn’t so impressive beyond the big up yours to Adidas.
After the ceremony, we took a walk around the Bird Nest. No one was allowed in near the stadium without a staff or volunteer pass. So we just wafted through the crowds doing some classic people watching. Hordes of athletes, staff, performers, and volunteers were streaming out of the Nest making their way to a bus or waiting around to be picked up. The city sanctioned that buses run for 24 hours on 8.8.08. Everyone in the crowds appeared to be more exuberant than exhausted. We passed by one Canadian TV reporter who was streaming straight back home something to the likes of “well, they finally wrapped it up in over four hours. This being one of the longest opening ceremony in the history of the Games…” We had a few words of exchange with an athlete who was looking for a good disco, and then there he was, Epke Zonderland of the Netherlands on TV the next morning on the parallel bars. Hope he had a good night out.
Mini Interview with Mr. Mao from China Mobile Communications Corp
(aka largest cellphone provider in mainland China)
At two-thirty in the morning, I caught up with a friend who worked from inside the Nest during the opening ceremony for a quick Q&A.
Q: What’s your job title?
Mao: China Mobile Basetransmissions Engineer
Q: What were you responsible for during the opening ceremony?
Mao: I work on a team that ensures the CMCC network and signals are strong during the opening ceremony and throughout the games in this area.
Q: How many hours did you put in today?
Mao: Eighteen. We worked from eight in the morning to just now, two in the morning. It gets easier after today though. Today’s the big hurtle for the entire nation. I just have to come by the stadium everyday for about two to three hours to check the signal strength after this.
Q: Were you able to see the opening ceremony live?
Mao: No. We were underground doing backstage work and only caught bits and pieces on TV. It’s okay though. I saw some rehearsals and they were impressive enough. They were rehearsing just the other day when it started dumping rain, but everyone toughed through it, streaked makeup and all. I hear they picked their performers straight from the Chinese Liberation Army. All the guys had to be taller than 180cm so they can look regal in those flowy robes. On TV they might look stately, but the entire backstage pretty much stunk of sweat from the thick, sweeping robes. Today’s been really humid.
Q: What was your favorite segment from the opening ceremony and why?
Mao: I loved the part where they had the warriors with the sails, conjuring Zhang He and China’s heritage of exploration. Those sails look like feather but they actually weigh a lot… and I don’t know. I was just watching them and was suddenly really moved. I think that was sort of the tipping point for all the efforts put into this coming to fruit. You have no idea how tense the backstage was during the entire thing. Everyone was holding their breath and freaking out over minute details that could result in mistakes. It really was more tense than celebratory, and I guess while watching the sails sequence, I felt like I could finally let go of my breath and just enjoy it. I mean, for China, the Olympics really is an important turning point for us to join the world stage. China wants to map out a new image of itself, because the images foreigners recall when they think of China are still stuck in history. So like the ‘64 Tokyo Games where the Japanese re-invented their WWII image or how the ‘88 Seoul Games became S. Korea’s coming out party after its civil war, the Beijing Games provides the stage for a nation ready to prove itself.
/Mao Gongyin from CMCC, 8.9.08, 2:30 am