In tales told by Westerners who have morphed into emigres in Beijing, the city itself undergoes a metamorphosis -- from temporary backdrop to center stage -- in the odysseys of their lives.

And as they navigate the currents of Chinese culture or check the charts of Beijing's passages, they find that "heaven and earth have changed places" -- or the entire place has gone through a sea change -- in a fleeting moment.

Thinking Chinese

Gabriela Filipovici's sojourn in Beijing began when she stepped across the threshold of a traditional Chinese medical clinic in the Romanian capital in 1991.

It was there that she met her future husband, "a very very good man" who convinced her to begin a new life thousands of kilometers and worlds away in terms of culture.

"When I first came here 10 years ago, it was not so easy," says Filipovici.

Unable to speak Chinese, she felt isolated from her family and friends, and had landed in a consumer's purgatory.

After touching down in Beijing, she took crash courses in Chinese, and would listen to her husband's patients or relatives for hours on end, sometimes understanding nothing but their gestures and expressions.

Yet today, she says: "I don't have to translate from Romanian anymore -- when I think, I think in Chinese."

And "everyone seems to be studying English (in Beijing) because it's the global language."

At the same time, the capital has become a shopping paradise, and the two trends are related, she says.

"Everyone wants to make their homes, their lives more beautiful, just as Beijing is creating a new international ambience for itself."

Her 6-year-old son David attends an internationally orientated Chinese school at Fangcaodi Primary School, with classes in Chinese and English, set up for embassy children and others who want to get a cross-cultural education.

In spite of the boy's Chinese, Romanian and English exposure, his mother considers those too narrow for life in a globalized world.

"I want him to study Spanish, Italian and other languages...being able to speak many languages can help you understand many peoples and many cultures."

A color revolution

Simon Osman, a Briton initially sent to Beijing on a 12-month assignment in the late 1980's, says his enduring first impression was one of gray, "with everyone dressed in blue or green Mao suits."

As one of the top hair stylists in the Chinese capital, Osman has been in the inner circle of Beijing's fashion industry, watching it explode in a big bang of expansion and creativity over the past two decades.

But when he first arrived individuality, even in dress or hair-style, was something to be feared: "When the first fashion models started showing up at my shop, they didn't want anything too new or too strange -- they were afraid of the latest fashions from London because basically they had never seen them before."

Osman, who runs a premier hair-cutting salon on the eastern outskirts of Beijing, says in contrast with the dance clubs that are now spreading like cloned culture colonies across the capital, night-life then was a contradiction in terms: "The city shutdown after sunset," he says.

He says one of the big social events of the winter season was watching the annual invasion of cabbage into Beijing.

So many cabbages would engulf the place, often overnight, that it almost seemed the city had been bombed with the vegetable: Cabbages lined hutongs, doorways, rooftops, staircases and corner shops.

Osman says sensory deprivation sometimes set in, and he would jet back to Britain, vacation on the coast of Cyprus, or take jaunts to Thai or Hong Kong isles to get a color fix.

He bought an early-model Beijing Jeep, and then a Harley Davidson, to explore the byways of Beijing and beyond.

And he started studying Chinese to map out the masses around him.

Meanwhile, as Beijing edged open its gateways, a trickle of Taiwan and Hong Kong pop music infiltrating Beijing became a flood of pop culture from the West, with MTV, satellite TV, and compact discs everywhere.

"This wasn't a gradual evolution -- this was a massive bombardment of outside influences hitting the people all at once," he said.

An eruption of new fashions, new values, new films and new money lit up the streets of the city: This was a color revolution repainting the capital.

On the outside, Beijingers, especially the young, have been transformed.

With Jean Paul Gaultier, hip-hop and electro music, Internet cafes and the latest fashions from Milan and London washing over the city, it is hard to tell the young people in Beijing from their counterparts in Paris or Prague, he says.

"Today, when young Chinese come into my shop, sometimes they want crazy (hair) colors they've seen in some magazine -- just so they can be different, more individual," says Osman, who now calls Beijing his home.

And "Chinese fashion circles are becoming more and more creative, in leaps and bounds."

It is only a matter of time, he predicts, before "Chinese models are going to be stars on the leading catwalks in Paris and London."

(China Daily February 23, 2005)