beijing snapshot, saturday night

Sanlitun on a Saturday night is strangely heartbreaking. Not heartbreaking in the way you might expect, young lovers wearing each other to pieces in dim bars and hidden rooms. But heartbreaking, more fundamentally perhaps, because behind the French restaurants and gleaming mirrored lounges are broken-down lots, full of demolished rubble and low ramshackle 'houses' that look like they may fall apart with a slight push.

On a Saturday night, people here are sitting beneath awnings at a makeshift night market. They’re eating Y2 per bowl of cold green bean noodles, and grilling kebabs from meat that has been sitting out on a wooden board for perhaps far too long. Hasty menus advertising fried rice and noodles are scrawled on plaster walls. Men loiter, smoke, hunch over wooden tables in the shadows.

A woman wrestles with a bouquet of long-handled mops: everything sold here is strictly functional. Bright pink plastic slippers, cleaning detergents, buckets, water bottles. A sign on a the wall points to the grains store around the corner.

But less than 500m away, on a very different Saturday night, clubbers are dancing behind the impregnable walls of Mystique. Water flows down the walls at Alfa, where people dance and press up against one another in black booths. Other people burst into spontaneous laughter as they lurch down the street. There are stores with Y3000 wooden tables and spas that offer baths in milk and rose petals.

It’s really the same scene as in any modern city, but here the surrounding contrast is more jarring and startling. The space between is so much smaller, the 2 different worlds separated by just a few meters, but also overlapping becasue they share the same roads and the same names.

And then there are the people who work here, in these sleek, elegant places. Do they live nearby? Do they care they are here? They smile and they smile and they are so nice, but I wonder, what are they really thinking, as I wave goodbye.