The marmalade cat that comes to our building for his lunch every day was sprawled on the tiled floor inside the doorway, his tail facing outwards and his paws pointing towards the staircase. The gentlest footstep is usually enough to send him running but as I approached he raised himself slowly onto his haunches, stretched and turned around to slope out the door.
It was 41 degrees outside on the hottest June day Beijing has seen in more than 60 years and the light breeze brought no comfort, creating instead the feeling of being inside a fan-assisted oven. It was the start of the Dragon Boat Festival, a three-day holiday, and the pavement was thronged with people walking at the slowest possible pace, many carrying umbrellas to shield them from the sun.
The little outdoor recreation area next door, with its steel ping pong tables and fitness equipment is usually full of retired people playing games or performing tai chi, sometimes carrying long, plastic swords as they move. Now it was empty except for one old man who gripped the scorching railing as he stretched first one leg and then the other, achieving a more impressive angle each time he bent forward.
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Like many Chinese holidays, the Dragon Boat Festival, which begins on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month each year, is connected with death and associated with food. It commemorates Qu Yuan, a poet and politician who lived from 340-278 BCE during the Warring States period at the end of the Zhou Dynasty.
Slandered by his enemies and driven into exile, Qu fell into despair when he heard that his state had fallen to a rival kingdom and drowned himself in a river. Villagers rowed out to search for his body, beating drums and splashing the water with paddles to repel evil spirits and throwing rice dumplings into the river to feed the fish and keep them away from Qu’s body.
Nowadays, the festival is celebrated with boat races and by eating zongzi, sticky rice dumplings wrapped in bamboo leaves. Many Beijingers use the three-day holiday to get out of the city, so trade was slow in the mall down the street.
On the first floor next to the guitar shop, the tailor’s wife was patting a young man on the bottom as he checked the fit of his newly-altered trousers. And at a round table in a fiercely air-conditioned restaurant on the same floor, my friend was waiting to show me the result of her new facelift.
We had met the day before she went for the laser treatment a few weeks earlier when she told me she could not bear the thought of going under the knife. I told her she was taking the first step on a path to perdition, choosing burning over cutting and that everyone I knew who had tried such treatments had become addicted to them.
But she had a reassuringly expensive doctor and was confident the procedure would be safe and fairly painless and with a short, two-week recovery time. Non-surgical cosmetic procedures are increasingly popular in China, which has one of the biggest medical beauty economies in the world.
Apps like So Young use artificial intelligence to suggest cosmetic procedures and to connect clients to a directory of surgeons and clinics. Long under-regulated, the sector has drawn greater scrutiny from the authorities in recent years with curbs on advertising that prey on people’s insecurities about their appearance.
My friend sent me a picture from the clinic with her face looking like a highly polished apple smeared in Vaseline and the message “I feel prettier”. Now it was time to see the finished product but when I sat down that I noticed she was wearing a scarf around her neck.
Removing it, she showed me the clusters of dark red marks like insect bites along the side of her neck up to the bottom of her ear and in the middle of her right cheek a larger mark like a burn or a blister. When she turned to greet me it was with her entire upper body because she was unable to move her neck.
“The doctor said it will be better in seven days. I have to trust in her,” she said.
“She said my skin is too sensitive. So it’s my fault.”
I told her she would never be able to move her neck again and she would have to keep her face veiled for the rest of her life. But she ignored me, pointing instead to the unmarked portions of her face and preening.
“It does look much better doesn’t it?” she said.