A family inn at Gaobeidian village in Beijing |
When the city starts next month to recruit 1,000 local home owners to sublet a room to international tourists this summer, perhaps I best not apply.
It's not that I don't meet the requirements - my apartment, bought a couple of years ago on a 70-year lease, boasts a guest room with its own bathroom, my family is always appropriately dressed, I own a car and I'm willing to help guests find their way around the city.
And we'd certainly have no problem communicating in English.
Neither is it because I'm not interested in the money nor that I don't trust travelers who come with tour groups. They're expected to pay $50-80 per day, much less than Olympic hotel rates, but the figure could rise in accordance with demand.
I'm just afraid that a paying guest will leave dissatisfied and post less-than-flattering reviews on the Internet about their experience. If I decided to take a tenant, I might be obliged to issue prior warnings about a range of possible discomforts they could face in my neighborhood.
My apartment in a high-rise building in the city's east can be noisy from time to time. My neighbor upstairs is a nostalgic type who plays an irritating theme song from a hit 1990s TV drama early every morning before going to work. Other neighbors may carry out home renovations long into the evening and only be stopped by the building's guards.
Incessant car honking by impatient drivers has become a regular source of stress to residents after management started charging visitors' cars last year.
And neighbors are always in a hurry. Sometimes they leave their trash at their doors, instead of taking it to the rubbish bins downstairs; they're notorious for entering the elevator before you alight and are highly unlikely to press the button on your behalf when you're fully laden with shopping bags. And the same people you see everyday may not even want to say hello, let alone flash a smile.
The location is great -- just five to 10 minutes walk from a subway station - but beware; hot, sticky summer weather can unleash topless men who saunter along or play chess on the sidewalks.
The list of concerns doesn't stop here.
The Good Manners campaign in the city may already have helped reduce spitting or queue-jumping in public places, but it takes a long time to develop a high level of civility, perhaps even generations.
Recently, Lee Kuan Yew, founder of modern Singapore, said that the city-state might not become a gracious society in his lifetime.
Mr Lee hopes a gracious society - where people are considerate to one another, where they don't disturb neighbors by making more noise than is necessary and where drivers give way to other motorists - will come with cultivated living over a long period of time.
"I will not see it; maybe you will live long enough to see it; I wish you well," he reportedly told a middle-aged audience recently.
So when will people see a gracious Beijing, a city with a per capita GDP less than a third of Singapore's?
I used to view Beijing's courtesy promotions cynically as superficial window dressing, but now I tend to believe in the necessity of such efforts to cultivate new norms and accelerate emotional changes from the outside in.
Email: guwen_2008@hotmail.com
