Flying a Kite in Tiananmen

So there he was, staring right back at me and the rest of China. Perched above the gate to Tiananmen Square, with a smug smile on his face, and that ridiculous haircut he had in his older years. I had just exited the subway station with Warren, Mary, Bridget and Ian, and that was the first thing I saw when I looked across 长安街, the 8 lane street bustling with cars. Mao Zedong’s portrait seemed to be watching everything that was going on. But I ignored him, the group had plans to find and fly a kite here. We asked a street sweeper where we could buy a kite, and she pointed us away from Tiananmen. Then she went back to sweeping the streets, using that oversized broom common to all sweepers. She started walking away her orange construction worker jacket failing to assimilate into the crowd. The scratching sound of the broom’s straw rustling against the ground as it pushed leaves and other less pleasant items to the side. But the sound was lost among the countless people. We even stumbled across other waiguoren, some were fat, older American men, walking hand in hand with a Chinese girl, others were just tourists, and I hated how they looked at us and grouped themselves with us. We are not just visiting, we are not depraved middle aged men... well maybe a bit depraved, but that’s not why we came to Beijing. We live here. We are Beijingren. After walking down the left side of the boulevard that Mao overlooks for ten minutes, we began to get frustrated; there were no kites anywhere. So we asked a guard. He was wearing that grey-ish green military suit and hat. He stood as rigid as a plank of wood, his posture stuck out amidst the slouching that walked around him. Even if he hadn’t been in uniform, I’m fairly certain I still would’ve been able to tell he was a guard. But we asked him where we could get kites. He said kites weren’t allowed to be sold at Tiananmen, but people still sold them anyway. Today was different, though. There was a meeting of some political sort inside the Square, so there were guards outside to prevent any bad face, which apparently meant stopping the people on the streets from selling stuff. So asking him where we could get a kite, he pointed us in the direction we had just come from. Mao just looked at us and kept that smug smile on his face. Stop mocking me. We walked on, crossing Changan Street and found a kite store down a semi-busy alleyway. They had all sorts of amazing kites, it was a Golgotha of kite animals, all hanging, dead, crucified even, waiting for someone to buy and then revive them with a strong wind. Dragons hung limply in the middle, turtles were turned on their back so that the shop’s owner could show off the moving limbs, snakes jaws hung loosely, birds roosted on shelves and rafters, and then there were just plain old kites hidden behind a nest of bird kites. They were poorly decorated, eyes drawn on, and the rest was cheap plastic and balsa wood, but 15 kuai is hard to argue with, so we now had our kite. A little red thing, balsa wood glued to the plastic and remnants of glue turning the plastic a darker red than the other spots. We walked back to Tiananmen and were getting ready to fly our kite, when a person in street clothes, perfect posture, came up to us and told us we couldn’t fly a kite here. There was a meeting going on inside. Yep… I was right; I could tell a guard apart from the rest of the crowd even if he wasn’t wearing a uniform. Mao’s expression was ever the same, and I scowled and pointed my finger at him. My fellow kite flyers pretended they didn’t know who I was momentarily, and then we went off trying to find a way around the rules. There’s a small park… if I can even call it a park, next to Tiananmen Square. A small stream doesn’t really flow, as it does lay stagnant, through this “park.” There are trees and the wall to Tiananmen Square on the far end. Best of all, there were no guards, not even those perfect postured “vigilantes” prowling around. Just old men doing Taiji, young couples trying to find a place alone, and there was even a couple that had just been married, walking along the bank of the stagnant stream in full wedding garb, smiling. The younger couples looked enviously at them. Someone was getting lucky tonight and it wasn’t them. Except for me saying, “Zhuhe nimen,” as we walked past the newlyweds, I ignored the rest of them. We got the kite up, but it kept crashing down. Occasionally Ian, Bridget or I would keep it up for more than 2 minutes, but we could never get it close to Tiananmen. So we teamed up. We were going to fly it over that wall, even if it was just briefly. I had to, just to get back at Mao’s smug smile. As individuals are skills were poor. But as one, we became an unstoppable kite flying force than almost amounted to the skills of one elderly Chinese kite flying man, that Jamie, Gavin and I had stumbled across the last time we tried to fly a kite. But this team we had now got it up above the trees and we ran with it to the edge of the wall. Some of the old men practicing Taiji stopped and looked at us, smiling and laughing. The kite continued to go forward and then started crashing faster than America’s economy… or at least as fast as it sounds like it is over here. The kite barely made it over the wall. I had accomplished my goal, and I was happy, even though the whole point I was proving was immature, selfish and pointless. The kite got stuck and we couldn’t get it back, so we cut the string, leaving a memento inside the square. The old men laughed at us and told me that’d he teach me to fly a kite sometime. We walked out of the park, Mao’s smile didn’t seem so happy anymore, more solemn than before. I started heading back into the subway when I looked up and saw another kite flying above Tiananmen Square. It hadn’t just been us and I suddenly didn’t feel so guilty for breaking the rules. I walked down the stairs and went back to the adventure of the subway.