“It was difficult to decide what had changed more, Beijing or our own family” Coming to terms with a rapidly changing world in the midst of a visit to old stomping grounds…
by: Zary Fekete
Twenty years ago, the Haidian district of Beijing was another world. A pedestrian would dodge bicyclists pedaling ten lanes deep across the wide boulevards fringed with vegetable markets stretching leafy arms into the concrete byways and everyone used cash. Today there’s a robot barista who makes you a latte while you notice that most of the passersby are wearing Gucci. Half a block over a gleaming line of yellow rent-a-bikes are available at fifty cents a pop. If you are a university student you can use them for free. There are ten different high end coffee shops. There is a Chili’s, a Five Guys, and a Popeyes. And no cash anywhere; everything is paid for with WeChat.
While visiting my son in his first semester of graduate school at Peking University, my wife and I blinked at everything. Before our flight, we poked around online, wondering where we should stay. When we told him we found a Holiday Inn, we could hear exasperation in his voice. “Let me do this for you guys,” he insisted. He booked us a Chinese chain, one considerably better equipped than anything in Minnesota. A chaur restaurant in the hotel basement hopped all night long and breakfast was available for $1.
This trip was a homecoming for us. We lived in Beijing when our son was in elementary school. Before moving to China with our 18 bags, we emailed questions to a small private elementary school in the northern part of the city. Could our son make friends with classmates? Was learning Mandarin realistic for an eight year-old? He stuck it out for two years, but the system was so focused toward preparing the students for the gaokao exam, he did better at the international school up the road. For his high school years, we were back in Minnesota, but his love for China continued to grow and he became almost fluent through university.
The next day he gave us a tour of his university. Since Covid, the school installed an intense guest registration process. He scanned our passports and had to tell the guards, within fifteen minutes, exactly when we would arrive at the south entrance. Once we were inside, we strolled the grounds and he pointed out where he had classes. The buildings were immaculate and the students bustling back and forth were a mix of Chinese and other nationalities. Our tour ended with a view of Weiming Lake where other proud parents sat with their kids and watched black swans and Peking ducks floating. We visited the Edgar Snow monument describing how his ashes were scattered somewhere around.
The third day my wife asked, “What hasn’t changed?” We found the answer by visiting our old neighborhood in north Beijing. The TianTongYuan area between Beijing’s fifth and sixth ring roads benefited from the 2008 Olympic summer games because the extended subway line 5 transformed the commute for half a million people. Before that it was a sleepy suburb of mostly wide open fields. Now it was four square miles of high rise apartment buildings and more than 600,000 people. We boarded subway line 5 and were glued to the windows when the familiar TTY streets came into view. There were a few new buildings, but the small streets still held most of their dusty, weedy charm. We walked into our xiaoqu and found the nine-story apartment building where we had lived. As we took pictures, we suddenly heard a familiar voice, one of our old neighbors, coming home from the vegetable market on the next block. She didn’t recognize our son, but was immediately impressed with his language skills.
At the end of the week, a DIDI driver picked us up at our hotel in a Tesla. Twenty years ago, we would have been swerving around bicycles on the way to the airport. Now Beijing had nearly thirty subway lines, high-speed trains connected cities across the country, cash had nearly disappeared, and electric cars were on every street. It was difficult to decide what had changed more, Beijing or our own family. We had first brought our son here as an eight-year-old, wondering if he would make friends and ever learn Mandarin. Now he was the one booking our hotel, getting us through the gates of Peking University, and explaining a city we didn’t really recognize anymore. Earlier in the week, we watched him laughing with his Chinese girlfriend beside the lake. He looked completely at home. Maybe that was the biggest surprise of our return to Beijing. We had come back looking for pieces of the life we remembered, only to discover that our son had found a new life of his own there.
Zary Fekete grew up in Hungary and currently lives in Tokyo. He has a debut novella (Words on the Page) out with DarkWinter Lit Press and a short story collection (The Written Path: A Journey Through Sobriety and Scripture) out with Creative Texts. He enjoys books, podcasts, and many many many films. Twitter and Instagram: @ZaryFekete Bluesky:zaryfekete.bsky.social.
