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By Root 1243 0

that is roughly the size of Slovenia. For many years, I had lived in another capital, Washington, D.C., a city that many think has been transformed over the past twenty years. Not so long ago, Washington was a sleepy hamlet in the South notable for its swampy weather and dissolute politicians. The weather has remained the same, of course, and so too the dissolution of the politicians, but what’s changed in Washington is the exponential growth of lobbyists. It is really quite amazing that the government of the United States was able to function without them for quite so long, but now that everything from education to war is regarded as a commercial enterprise, the private sector has moved in. Whereas once you could be reasonably confident that the neighbor next door was an employee of the federal government, today should you have a pressing need for a cup of sugar, it is just as likely that you’ll be knocking on the door of Blackwater’s friendly representative in Washington. Money permeates the city. Untidy neighborhoods have been transformed by Whole Foods. The mom-and-pop delis have made way for Pottery Barn, and today Washingtonians speak smugly of their rivalry with New York, a self-proclaimed rivalry about which New Yorkers can barely muster a snort of derision. Nevertheless, it remains true that the Washington of the mid-aughts looks and feels like a vastly different place than the Washington of the mid-1980s, that colorful era when the city was ruled by a mayor with a fondness for crack and whose most celebrated zinger was “The bitch set me up.”

But nothing can compare with the transformation of Beijing. It is an immense, seething city. Washington still has but one ring road, the notorious Beltway, and you are either inside where you matter or outside where you don’t. Beijing is constructing its sixth ring road, and within those six rings, an entire city is being razed and reborn. Tiananmen Square will always remain an ode to Stalinism, but just past the Great Hall Of The People lies an ode to the odd—the new and otherworldly National Theater, otherwise known as the Alien Egg. Throughout Beijing, the superstars of international architecture have been given license to realize their inner whimsy, with the result that today no city can claim to have embraced the avant-garde with greater enthusiasm than the capital of the People’s Republic of China. From the Bird’s Nest, or Olympic Stadium, to the Twisted Donut, the new home of CCTV, Beijing has said good-bye to the bland uniformity of Mao’s day. Whether it succeeds in creating a cutting-edge capital for the twenty-first century—China’s century, they hope—or whether they’re merely constructing tomorrow’s Brasília remains to be seen, but there is no denying that today’s Beijing is buzzing.

To help me navigate the wonder that is contemporary Beijing, I called my friend Dan. Once upon a time, Dan had been an unassuming temp in Washington, D.C. Like me, he had received a graduate degree in international relations, and while our fellow graduates were finding jobs with the State Department, the United Nations, and Citibank, Dan spent his days filing and rearranging supply closets—also like me. But, unlike me, Dan had real-world skills. He spoke Chinese. He had studied in Nanjing. He had even been the quality-control manager at a shoe factory in China. And so one day he stuffed his last binder, organized his last supply closet, typed his last invoice order, and left the world of temping for the new land of opportunity to become the man he is today.

Dan the Man, titan of the Orient.

Dan and his business partner had arrived in Beijing several years earlier to help fill the yawning gap between foreign investors and Chinese businesses. “There’s the Western way of doing things,” he explained, “and there’s the Chinese way of doing things. We try to bridge the two.”

And make some money. I felt so proud. I remembered when he was a mere pup, just another temp at the National Association for the Advancement of Proctology, and now here he was, fixer extraordinaire in China. Dan knew