Word: courtyard
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Around the courtyard, the potential recruits, men of all ages, squat and stand. There are half a dozen in their 20s; at least twice as many older men, some as old as 50. A group of 10 Cossacks - in their traditional blue breeches with a wide red stripe down the side, green tunic bedecked in medals and tall black riding boots - forms to one side. One man has a curled handlebar mustache and watery pale-blue eyes. The men in this group won't talk to the press and keep walking off to stand and talk in a circle...
...month or so later, on Christmas Day, I was standing in the dirt courtyard when I saw that same guard approach me. He walked up and stood silently next to me, not looking or smiling at me. Then he used his sandaled foot to draw a cross in the dirt. We stood wordlessly looking at the cross, remembering the true light of Christmas, even in the darkness of a Vietnamese prison camp...
...moved into a quiet hutong, a traditional narrow lane lined with courtyard houses, in eastern Beijing. Since April, the city's Olympic buzz has reached deafening proportions. In a period of months, my district, laid out 700 years ago during the Ming dynasty, saw lanes repaved, streetlights installed, sewage lines overhauled, roofs repaired, doors painted, windows replaced and rooms that had been haphazardly added onto old homes demolished and rebuilt in a traditional style. Piles of construction debris filled the streets; antique wooden eaves with hand-painted floral patterns were left out as scrap...
...hubbub produced no shortage of inconvenience for the two dozen families I share a courtyard with. The work went on for weeks; sewer repairs meant walking through a ditch to leave one's door; the dust was so heavy that a spring sandstorm came and left without our noticing. But the occasional grumbles could never sink the enthusiasm of my neighbors. I came home one day to find one perched precariously on his roof, sawing away. "For the Olympics," he said with a grin. At a party in February, I asked several neighbors their hopes for the coming year...
Some Beijingers have opted to leave town on what's jokingly called a biyuntao--"avoid Olympics package"--which rhymes with the Chinese word for condom. Others, including huge numbers of migrant workers, have been forced out. A group of builders from Sichuan who lived in our courtyard while refurbishing the neighborhood left recently, taking their coal cooking stove and pet kitten with them. A few blocks away, restaurant owner Liu Ruilin complains that some of his best customers are gone. "I thought the Olympics were going to be good for business," he says. "But lots of outsiders are leaving...