The End of the 00s: The Night We Sneaked Into the Center of the World, by Adriane Quinlan

by The End of the 00s

In the year leading up to the Olympics, I was working as a speed typist for the Ministry of Propaganda and I had agreed to spend the first night of Chinese New Year at the apartment of my roomate’s aunt. She lived in the far North of the city and the cab that took us up there skirted the stadiums that were still being built. You could smell the construction — an awful, coppery whiff — and see the things hulking there, but that was as close as you got. Shoddy plywood fenced the park, with guard huts at various intervals illuminated to show stern-faced bao an grumbling inside.

Of all the new buildings, it was the Bird’s Nest Stadium that most tempted one toward it. It was supposed to look like a nest, but instead it looked like a giant airy brain. The outer wall had been wrapped in a kind of twisted metal cage, which left huge gaps between the bars that one could easily walk through. Our friend A____, an architectural critic who was joining us for New Year’s, explained that it drew you in because there were no hard edges, no walls against you — you felt like you could just walk through it.

“Uh-huh,” we nodded, “uh-huh,” letting him talk, thinking nothing of it.

At the aunt’s apartment, we made dumplings. I took a post-dumpling siesta on a bed with a white coverlet. We watched a TV special, played with the aunt’s roomba, and ate a lot of various nuts from metal bowls. When it was dark, we all went into the courtyard and shot off fireworks. The hazy Beijing air became hazier and the fire-crackers were so loud that it became harder and harder to hear the shots in other compounds going off around us in staggered rhythms.

Full of energy, full of dumplings, we started walking home. It was a couple of miles, but there were no cabs to catch anyway — the drivers were all home on holiday. Under an overpass, a couple of kids were lighting fireworks on the ground and roller-skating between them. Later, we passed a gathering of neighbors out on the street aiming rockets with fiery, green tails over the road we were walking down. They stopped, waited for us to pass, and then started up again.

And then we were at the edge of the stadium.

The plywood fencing was even shoddier up close. There were gaps between the sections of wood where mud had shifted the boards — angling one outward and the other inward so that a triangular opening appeared. The guard huts, though still lit, were empty. (The guards were probably off shooting fireworks themselves.)

We started talking about what might happen if we sneaked in. No one would hear us — the fireworks were too severe. It was the perfect night for it.

“You know, we could get deported for this,” my roomate said.

But before we had really thought about it, we were doing it. A____ found the perfect gap and after only a few steps through the muddy field in our dress shoes, we found a board and tip-toed along it. Every so often we heard something — a rustling! what was that? — but it always ended up being nothing, just one of us.

We didn’t get any further than the edge of the thing. There was a tall wire fence, and we stood with our fingers looped through it, looking in at the stadium. The whole thing was lit — a massive metal knot glowing white and red with the sky at its edges opaque with smoke.

Months later we would go to the Olympics, see the whole choreographed spectacle, watch large women throw shot-puts and that Jamaican guy run really quickly. But it wasn’t the same as when we had been there alone and gone suddenly quiet, just looking at it, feeling like marbles that had been dropped in a funnel and had rolled, powerlessly, toward what had drawn us in.

Adriane Quinlan lived in China for a year. She now blogs for MTV, mostly about Shakira.