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Thursday 4 December 2008

Diary

David Tang on the opening ceremony at the Beijing Games

An immediate rumour after the opening ceremony at the Beijing Games was that an emergency meeting of the British Olympic Committee was convened in order to find an excuse for cancelling London 2012. There might have been even greater panic because Britain is expected to produce a ‘performance’ of eight minutes as part of the closing ceremony in two weeks’ time. Beckham kicking a football was believed to be billed as the British climax, but if that’s all he would be doing, the meaning of ‘damp squib’ might well assume a new dimension. 

One could well understand the British alarm, given the phantasmagorical display of brilliance that the Chinese team put together under the maniacal direction of Mr Zhang Yimou, whose supreme delicacy and elegance found in his early films such as Raise the Red Lantern gave way to a fevered explosion of bombast and spectacle. The extravaganza was a gargantuan success — every aspect of anticipation satisfied, every ounce of excitement fulfilled — and every sceptic and party-pooper, not to mention terrorist, entirely frustrated. The army of Chinese officials with individual Olympic responsibilities must have felt a huge relief from a reign of many sleepless nights. The Politburo would have nodded with satisfaction, and most of the Chinese population filled with pride. Every foreign visitor I met afterwards (the Fosters, Schwarzmans, Mittals, Sachses and Tessa Jowell, etc) gushed with praise in the firm belief that they had just witnessed the most outstanding live performance of their life. 

But the night was insufferably hot and drenched in humidity. Unless one was a head of state, of whom there were 94, there was no escape from sweating through a long hike towards the stadium with five hours to spare. Columns of hoi polloi as well as irate heads of fancy banks and mighty corporations and billionaires were forced to march along in the sweltering heat under a tiny hazy sun. I, being fatter than most, had no trouble recalling the description by the Bard of Falstaff: ‘as he lards the earth’. At the security check, every pill and tablet had to be swallowed, every lotion sniffed and eye-drop dripped for proof of innocence, and writings in books and pamphlets were copiously filtered for subversive materials. By the time we got to our seats, our clothes were thoroughly soaked, and the whole stadium felt like a giant washing-machine, spinning in a Mobius strip. I dreamt of the oasis of a cold shower and a chilled Diet Coke with ice and slices of lemon, yet the air inside the Bird’s Nest was as still as warm Evian. For once in my life, I became conscious of what it must be like to be a piece of Peking crispy duck.

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