[Olympic Side Story] Egg pancakes, pirated discs, and books reappear on Beijing streets…

   
I have devel­oped the habit of walk­ing to work these days.
   
This morn­ing, walk­ing to a street cor­ner in Hep­ingli, I was sur­prised to see a cart sell­ing egg pan­cakes. A few school­child­ren gath­ered around, one of them rush­ing to buy a pan­cake, and the oth­ers cheered for some rea­son. I could­n’t help but feel a surge of joy: “Long time no see, egg pan­cakes!” While these pan­cakes may not meet inter­na­tion­al or nation­al food hygiene stan­dards, they’re warm and fra­grant, and at least much safer than domes­ti­cal­ly pro­duced milk that’s in line with glob­al stan­dards.
   
It’s been over two months since I’ve seen these pan­cake stalls on the streets of Bei­jing. I remem­ber one morn­ing in late July, I was tak­ing my daugh­ter, who was on hol­i­day, to work at Hong­ni­ba, hop­ing to buy some kind of flat­bread along the way. But I could­n’t find any. Final­ly, I went to Xiaoguan Mar­ket, but all the pan­cake shops were gone! I was baf­fled. I asked an old man sell­ing eggs why, and he looked at me strange­ly and said, “The Olympics are about to start!” I’d just returned from the Sichuan dis­as­ter area, and I had­n’t been inter­est­ed in the Olympics at all. It was then that I real­ized what was hap­pen­ing.
   
Since that day, I have noticed that the cap­i­tal city has become very clean and “civ­i­lized”. Not only have the pan­cake stalls dis­ap­peared, but even the stalls sell­ing pirat­ed discs and books have dis­ap­peared. Many small audio-visu­al stores have also closed down. What’s worse, even the posters out­side the cin­e­ma have been removed!
   
Today, Sep­tem­ber 22, 2008, is the fifth day after the Par­a­lympics and the first work­ing day since the lift­ing of the odd-even num­ber restric­tion in Bei­jing (Sep­tem­ber 21). I can see push­carts sell­ing egg pan­cakes on the streets of Bei­jing again. I guess his­to­ri­ans would­n’t both­er to record this kind of event, so I’ll do my best to do it for them.
   
Also, I heard from a friend that I saw stalls sell­ing pirat­ed discs and books on the street again last night. I guess those small audio-visu­al stores will also grad­u­al­ly resume busi­ness soon. — Of course, this is not some­thing I saw with my own eyes, so I won’t record it in the his­to­ry books for now.
   
The rel­e­vant inci­dent that will be record­ed in offi­cial his­to­ry will prob­a­bly be the dis­cov­ery of a poi­son in sev­er­al domes­tic brand milks. His­to­ri­ans will regret­ful­ly tell us that it is a real shame that the “dis­cov­ery” was not made after the Par­a­lympics, oth­er­wise it would have been a fam­i­ly scan­dal “unspeak­able to out­siders”! What a shame!
   
Oh, how embar­rass­ing…