Living Outside the Olympic Bubble

Janet Kolodzy celebrates Olympic spirit in front of the Bird's nest.
Photo by: Janet Kolodzy

Climbing the Great Wall, strolling through the Summer Palace grounds and dining on Peking Duck top everyone’s list of things to do in Beijing. But touring a sewage treatment plant? Welcome to the start of my two-month Olympic adventure.

It was no ordinary sewage plant but one that would be providing water (albeit not drinking water) for the main Olympic area. So the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) provided some 300 U.S., British and Australian college student media volunteers (and faculty coordinators like me) with their metaphor for the Olympics of a cleanedup city with cleaned-up air and water. Several of my Emerson College students objected to this blatant spin and propaganda. It was one of many times when the ways of the Chinese, the Olympic organizers and professional journalists confounded them and challenged me.

Because we lived so far outside the areas most tourists and journalists frequented during the Olympics, our Beijing experience differed from what we read online in some Western media. Our home away from home, the Communication University of China, is outside the Fifth Ring Road, Beijing’s version of what would be the Outer Outer Beltway if Washington had one. We truly lived outside the bubble of the Olympics and Beijing expatriates.

Unlike some of the stories we were reading, we didn’t have major problems with the Internet or Googling Free Tibet. Our Blackberrys generally worked. It wasn’t the Chinese but NBC-Universal anythat took one student’s YouTube videos down from the Web. The air was bad but it was a lot worse in early July than in early August. Our first clear day was four days into our trip, and that’s when we discovered the cooling towers of the nearby power plant on our horizon.

During the Olympics themselves, 13 Emerson students worked in media services at sports venues like volleyball and boxing, often being the only native English-speaking volunteers. They would have to navigate between Chinese supervisors who had one operational plan in mind and non-Chinese journalists who had quite another. That required delicate diplomacy.

Another 20 students served as Flash Quote Reporters at the National Stadium for track and field events. They engaged in the journalistic scrum of scrambling for athletes’ quotes. Several liked mixing it up in the mix zone with the pros. But a few were perplexed to learn sexism survives in 2008 as they overheard some sports reporters discuss female athletes’ derrieres.

Finally, many of the Chinese people my students encountered didn’t talk of Tibet oppression and the Tiananmen crackdown. My students interacted with college students like themselves who talked of China’s growing pains and how they expect to take charge of their country’s future. A few Chinese, who now have to put together post-Olympic professional lives, said they prefer to make their mark in the business world, not in government. That may be an unplanned Olympic legacy. As for the sewage treatment plant? That will live on.