today i bought this second-hand bird. the FP brand was once china’s national bicycle, but is losing credibility among the young who want shiny new electric scooters and such, and is fast becoming a daggy representative of the old china for which only foreigners like me are nostalgic. i adore its squeaky pedals and safety colour scheme.

if you read that wiki, you’ll see the factory was declared the national bicycle factory almost as soon as the communists came to power. Then it was a symbol of another New China, a different brand of onward-rushing social reconstruction and industry, and i am beginning to see this country as a series of such reinventions. Walking through the neighbourhood I catch glimpses of so many previous incarnations that my experience of Beijing is all layers. I feel like an ant crawling up a paperbark tree. In the hutong where i live (i recently learned its name means Department of Internal Affairs Street) there are market stalls going by on the backs of bicycles, neighbourly noodle stands and little stationery shops for the schoolkids, and apart from the occasional flash car honking at you it is a scene of serenity which i doubt has changed much in the last 100 years. But at the end of the street is a boutique shopping district, where bright clothing stores pump dance music into the street from speakers as the hipsters of china steadily build their fashion empires. i can carry on through the back lanes to the Forbidden City, which has held steady as a symbol of power and high culture for the last 600 years, or i can ride a block or so south to where several massive hotels loom over the area, raking in the profits of the new openness.

I can’t hope to make sense of all these disparate realities and say what if anything is Beijing’s character as a city, but so far, the most prominent feature of the place is its constant efforts to reinvent itself. Is there a straightforward battle between new (capitalist, ‘westernized’ or outward-looking) ways and old traditions? I think it’s a lot more complicated than that. It’s a multiplicity of ways of living. old temples are preserved behind glass-walled office buildings; bustling markets exist side-by-side with homogenous chain stores. i am only getting a glimpse into the life of the place, of course, like the glimpses you get into doorways as you cycle past. but it seems to me that the people here are adept at slipping between all these layers of rebuilding and reinvention, as if they have developed a sort of ability to see through time – while i struggle with maps and circle my way into places, losing entire buildings in the process. If there is a word for all this, i guess it’s modern.