The Friendship Hotel, a Beijing hotel with an extraordinary history
“This is like a ghetto in reverse. No one wants out and everyone wants in." This is how the writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez describes the Friendship Hotel, a Beijing hotel with an extraordinary history.
he does it in look back , a book that turns into a novel the vital vicissitudes of Colombian filmmaker Sergio Cabrera. His life, purely bizarre (he was a Red Guard in China, a guerrilla in Colombia...) seems invented, but he is not. Neither is the Hotel de la Amistad, a rarity that runs through many pages of a sensational book in which History, with a capital letter, and the life of a man, intertwine until you don't know where one and the other begins.
A complex made up of 15 buildings surrounded by gardens and a sign that read Beijing Friendship Hotel.
This is a story of politics, utopias and paradoxes. To know your mission, because the Hotel de la Amistad had it, and quite ambitious, we have to travel to China in the 1950s. It was in the middle of that decade that the Chinese government built a hotel for Russian contractors who traveled to the country to participate in the Maoist revolution. It was a complex made up of fifteen buildings surrounded by gardens and a sign that read Beijing Friendship Hotel.
Once that friendship between China and Russia cooled and the 2,500 guests had to cross the border back to their country, the hotel changed its use and clients. From then on it would serve accommodate the majority of foreigners who arrived in Beijing fleeing the "capitalist" world and that they wanted to be part of the radical transformation of the country.
The explanation of why were they staying in this hotel of gray stone walls and green porcelain ceilings is easy: foreigners were not allowed to have their own domicile, therefore, the government concentrated there those who came paid by it and whom it called experts.
Sergio Cabrera's family was one of the many that came from Latin America drunk with idealism to settle in a country for a long time.
In its day, it welcomed the majority of foreigners who came to Beijing fleeing from the “capitalist” world.
They lived in the hotel for months or years people from all over the world who worked as Spanish teachers, proofreaders or translators. It was a kind of Tower of Babel in which there were entire families, people fell in love, studied and felt that they were making the revolution. In the hotel you could find a Peruvian poet, a Uruguayan intellectual and an American professor playing pool.
The Friendship Hotel became from the 60s to the 80s in that ghetto you speak of light ellen, Sergio Cabrera's sister and one of the protagonists of Vásquez's book, which has recently published Alfaguara in Spain. The inhabitants of Beijing, unless they worked there, did not have access to that place. They wondered what was in that hotel that was a cross between paradise and trap.
And what was inside it? Everything that was not outside of him. There were luxuries, restaurants with service, tennis courts, a bar, an indoor Olympic pool and an outdoor pool (the only one in the city), taxis at the door and bellboys.
At the time when Sergio Cabrera's family settled there about 700 foreigners lived, that were distributed among the fifteen buildings of the hotel. They ate in one of the three restaurants, one Western, one Muslim and one Eastern, although many suites had kitchens.
Alfaguara
Cover of the book Looking back, by Juan Gabriel Vásquez
And here lies the extravagance: in a country of immense poverty, those who traveled to him to build the socialist revolution ended up living surrounded by privileges, “in a life of unreality”, as Vásquez writes. Hence many of them will abandon it after time suffocated by the conflict. They, who had crossed the world and burned the ships to fight against capitalism, ate every day served by waiters and could take a dip in a pool whenever they wanted. “Fantasy life”, to continue quoting Vásquez, had a limit.
The writer tells in the book that Sergio Cabrera's parents found the hotel too bourgeois, so they decided to send their teenage children alone to live in another, the Peace Hotel. The solution was absurd to say the least: the boys were the only guests in a seventeen-story hotel. The entire service was under his command.
Until the 1980s, those who stayed at the Hotel de la Amistad needed some link with the Communist Party. From then on he eased that condition and opened up to other foreigners.
The Spanish journalist Antonio Broto lived there between 2001 and 2003 and stands out as the best of your stay “the number of people from all over the world who were there: pro- and anti-Saddam Iraqis, Palestinians, Cambodians who had been Khmer Rouge, Castroist and anti-Castro Cubans, Latin Americans who had been guerrillas in their countries, Africans, Russians... “.
Foreigners were not allowed to have their own residence and the government concentrated there those who arrived paid by it and whom it called experts.
Broto, who lived in China for two decades and writes on the blog Chinochano, tells how, from 2004, when the government allowed foreigners to live anywhere in the city, many left him and settled in Beijing. He himself returned to the hotel on occasion, but as foreigners no longer lived, the essence had been lost.
The unavoidable question is: who paid for the hotel? This journalist, who now works for EFE from Geneva, says that he didn't pay anything, but he sensed that part of the gross salary was given to the hotel in exchange for his stay. He calculates that the cost would be about a thousand euros a month. Today the price of a night in the hotel is around 85 euros.
This Friendship Hotel It is not the only one in China, but it is the one that drags the most epic. Before finding him in Looking Back, he had already been the subject of articles and documentaries. One of them is called like this, Friendship Hotel, and is led by Pablo Doudchitsky, an Argentine filmmaker who lived there from 1963 to 1967 with his family and returns to connect with his past. At that time, his family coincided with that of Sergio Cabrera. Today, almost 60 years later, he remembers that the hotel "It had beautiful gardens, an extraordinary buffet and the food was super."
In the film he begins by saying in off voice: "This was our home for the entire time we lived in Beijing with my parents and my two younger brothers." Doudchitzky speaks in the documentary “from a poor country where the greatest personal and collective virtue was poverty itself.” And in the midst of it were this luxurious hotel and its guests, who had traveled from far and wide to change the world.
The Friendship Hotel is still active. Anyone can stay in one of its many rooms. It maintains its majesty, the immense swimming pool and a certain weight of having been part of history and of many stories, such as that of the families of Sergio Cabrera and Pablo Doudchitzky in the sixties and that of Antonio Broto himself in his most recent times. Some of those who lived there maintain the link in Facebook groups, such as Youyi Binguan.
Today, the Hotel de la Amistad is just another hotel, so normal that you or we could book a room in it.
There were luxuries, restaurants with service, tennis courts, a bar, an indoor Olympic pool and an outdoor one.