teisipäev, november 20, 2012  letters from beijing and shanghai
The world belongs to you. Estonia belongs to you. I'm a
dinosaur. I imagined Beijing, I conjured Shanghai. I could see
the men and women in their gray and blue uniforms with their
gray and blue hats and their little red books, the walls but
tapestries of propaganda red with little golden stars. Nothing
but bicycles, nothing but cigarettes, nothing but military
police and rice. But the "bicycle era is over," they told me
from the driver's seats of their BMWs and Mercedes, and Big
Brother is no longer Mao, but a retired American military man by
the name of Colonel Sanders.  The satanically smug Colonel
Sanders grinned down on me from a hundred locations in Beijing,
Shanghai, Hangzhou. In the Beijing metro, one can watch a
commercial on the small digital televisions that are mounted in
each train, a young pretty woman, a young handsome man,
fashionable, sporty, business-like, the future, walking in
peace, hand in hand, through a local business dist