Today, when Lin returns to Beijing for business, he visits his parents and familiar landmarks. But he's largely a tourist in a foreign land. The homes in which he was born and raised no longer exist. In a sense, the city in which he was born and raised doesn't, either.
"I am like a person who's never been to the city," he says. "It's crazy how different it is. I always go back with mixed feelings. I do enjoy when people tell me, 'Oh, what a beautiful city.' But it's really no different than any other modernized city."
Dennis Frenchman fondly recalls his early impressions here, too. As a leading urban planner at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he has been coming to Beijing for 20 years. Of his first visit, he recalls a memorable hotel, a single modern-looking building with reflective glass. It was a lone, shiny pillar of progress amid an unremarkable string of squat brown and gray buildings.
On subsequent trips, the hotel faded into the background. "It was just another building on the street with no context," Frenchman says, "and it was one of the most shocking experiences I've ever had. It was so bizarre. It'd be like going back to your childhood home and seeing it suddenly in the middle of an urban street. It was very disorienting."
Since that initial trip in 1988, Frenchman has been intimately involved in planning and discussions about Beijing's future. He brings students here every other year and talks simultaneously about preservation and fresh construction. The final results, which most of the world will see for the first time during the Summer Games, are not exactly what Frenchman envisioned.
"I think one solution fit all in Beijing, which was, 'Let's get rid of this old stuff so we can get foreign investment in here and make some money,' " he said.
While most of the world's megalopolises are a product of time and evolution, Frenchman said, Chinese leaders were methodical in the hurried development of Beijing, laying out a city plan as if nothing had been there before.
"It was a big block pattern, and they just plopped it down on the old map as if to say, 'We're going to demolish everything in these red lines to make these new roads and this new city,' " he says.
Driving around Beijing, visitors are struck by the mishmash of architecture, myriad styles that could be found in any other city.
