Braces How Long For Crowded Teeth

Walking slowly through the streets. II

"There are cities that seem to dream himself. The vast majority of people live outside the back streets legendary journey. Living with your city without paying little attention, as background noise and an endless traffic jam. Beijing is one of these mega-cities of the XXI century, busy, vulgar, unknowingly inhabited by literary dreams to flight. Francisco de Quevedo wrote in his sonnet to Rome buried in the ruins: "You search in Rome Rome, oh, pilgrim!, and Roma in Rome itself not find it. "The same could be said of Beijing.
Very little of old Beijing can record on your camera's memory modern digital pilgrim who comes to the imperial capital still in the north. Just a dozen islands: temples, palaces, parks and miraculously saved the iconoclastic fury of the Cultural Revolution to survive amid a forest of cranes, dual carriageway bypass, neon signs and skyscrapers under construction. The mirage Olympic is taking the blow on the last mists of the past inevitably abolished. Certainly, the hutong , alleys full of teepees and flavor of old Beijing immemorial, nests were unhealthy clammy discomfort for its inhabitants, but it was not the only simple solution systematic demolition possible. Neither the protection of a few streets converted into a theme park of cardboard to the delight of the legions of tourists in procession. Meanwhile
city has never ceased blowing herself. The combination of cross and lives in a single pressure point on the map of centuries of accumulated history crystallize into pages of fiction, memory and legend. The faint aroma unmistakable literary cities see it as no new arrivals and those who know foreign inevitably, pass on them. He has never missed who watch and who encrypt this dream, at dawn, sitting at the blinking light or a flickering LCD. There are few cities able to arouse a morbid fascination and incurable foreigners have lived in them, but few cities able to provide relatively even those who have never visited. Beijing is one of those rare cities essentially literary. "Manel Ollé


...


" Beijing was my home since 1946, two years before the communist revolution, until 1950, two years later. I was the American half of an exchange between the University of Michigan - where he was studying Chinese culture - and Yenching University in Beijing, so I left China as soon as I graduated and came to Beijing in the fall of 1946. I was two months for his twentieth birthday. (...)

Chinese dish, nineteenth century

© Johanna Lozoya

During my first few months I never imagined I would live the last siege of the largest city walled world, nor do I marry the daughter of one of the oldest and most aristocratic families in Beijing. Instead, I took with relish to see the surroundings and make friends among colleagues Yenching University, where he studied Chinese poetry, and Quinghua University where he taught English. Later I met this extraordinary group of foreigners who had made his home in Beijing. The city invited us to stay, to settle in a beautiful old house, to enjoy their backyards in the shadow of the cedars, to organize parties to admire the moon and the snow-covered gardens. Beijing had the power to touch, transform and beautify all who lived within their ancient walls.
There are only a few of those Westerners who lived in the city will not be m's by a score spread across the city will not be more than a dozen scattered all over the world. I always hope that some bright young academic - scholarship generously - be interested in us and our Chinese friends before it was too late, we were all dead and the wonders he had seen were buried in oblivion.
But this young man has not yet appeared bright. From what I know, I'm the only writer with first-hand material on those extraordinary years that saw the end of the old China and the beginnings of the new. "

David Kidd, Peki n Stories, 1988

David Kidd, History of Beijing, Foreword by Manel Ollé, Barcelona, \u200b\u200bAsteroid Books, 2008. ISBN 84-934315-9