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Lively and Lovely, It's the Beijing City.
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Author:giayan
Submitting time:2005-08-31
Browsed:634
Nationality:China
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I was on vacation in Los Angeles, California, away from home in New York. At the Chinese Theater of Hollywood, a guy asked me in front of hundreds of people through the microphone, ¡°Where are you from?¡± I said it out loud, ¡°Beijing, China¡±.
And yes, I said ¡°Beijing¡±, but not ¡°New York¡±.
When I turned on TV to watch CNN and HBO, when I wondered along 5th Avenue in bright sunshine and a bit New York breeze, when I stopped around the corner of my block to buy my National Geographic and waited for my hot dog, I was often mistaken by many Americans as ¡°ABC¡± (stands for American-Born Chinese).
Oh, maybe through their eyes. But through mine? I¡¯m always from Beijing.
I¡¯ve been trying so hard to associate myself with the city I loved most in this world through identifying that I am from Beijing. Besides being extremely Beijing-ish, I¡¯ve always wondered how to call myself. A Beijinger? A Beijingese? A Beijingian? Or something else. Then the phrase ¡°Beijing Native¡± sprang to mind.
It was the exact term I was looking for. I am a Beijing Native.
I grew up on constant changes of the City of Beijing. When I was in second grade, the Third Ring Road was just being built. When I was in seventh grade, China¡¯s Silicon Valley ZhongGuanCun had just begun to thrive. When I was in high school, the Forth Ring Road construction had completed. When I was back in Beijing from New York during my junior-year Christmas break, the Fifth Ring Road was running fine. And when I graduated from college one and half years later, I found out online that the Sixth Ring Road was under construction and progressing fast.
Changes made Beijing full of energy and alive. So it is lively. Beijing appears to be in physically good shape because it went through a series of changes on the city¡¯s infrastructure. But how about mentally? If the changes had made Beijing lively from the physical perspective, then I¡¯d say no matter how Beijing has changed from its original form, it is always the same lovely Beijing to me. Maybe you¡¯ll say, ¡°Of course, changes can make a city more functional and beautiful¡±, but hey, only changes are not enough. See, changes are only physical; you have to be emotionally prepared to feel a city¡¯s vibe. And Beijing¡¯s vibe is not its constant renovations, but its loveliness as a whole.
I¡¯ve always been on the emotional side when I look at Beijing. In fact, I don¡¯t see it, but I feel it. Who can forget the endless bus-riding and a variety of activities on the Third Ring Road with a bunch of good, old friends? At 12, we gazed at the well-lit and then-astonishingly-tall Beijing Television Station building on the night bus and vowed that we would eventually get jobs like crazy cameramen and crazy TV producers. At 15, we became regular riders of the No.300 bus line, not for sightseeing anymore, but for our first part-time jobs as student journalists and photojournalists for the Beijing Youth Daily and subsidiary paper the Middle School Times. At 18, we witnessed our beloved Beijing Youth Daily moving from a dodgy building to the newest building on the Third Ring Road. At 20, we had a warm and small New Year party at a Szechuan Restaurant just off the Third Ring Road after almost two years apart from being the most active in college or being the most insane about work. So many years have passed and we are still best friends above all. I still remember the time we used to go half-way around the city to see friends or do our news stories. With friends and the ¡°people in the news¡± living in every corner of the city and showing me their everyday life on top of the changes of the city, some ordinary and some extraordinary, Beijing became uniquely lovely to me all of a sudden.
Lively and lovely, Beijing delivers its beauty both physically and mentally. It is a city where my dreams had begun. With more changes to come and more people to impress, let more dreams begin, Beijing.
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avin_leecb
2005-09-07
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I love my motherland, I love my hometown,the city of Jilin, and I like Beijing, the capital of PRC. Just I was born here and brought up here! |
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