Voices
Seniors dance the night away
By Steve Hubrecht (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-03-09 09:33
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The strains of music fill the night air outside Shuangjing subway station. It's a weekday evening and retirement-age couples are gracefully dancing in what appears to be ballroom style.
The dancers, and there are scores of them, neatly glide through their steps, not perfectly, but with enough confidence to suggest a fair bit of practice.
The routine tonight is energetic, involving dips and swings, but it's no sweat for the elderly dancers, many of whom look a good deal fitter than people half their age.
The dancing, which seems to happen in many open spaces across the Beijing, not only lends the capital a quaint elegance, but also keeps the participants active.
Retirees in Beijing are anything but slouches. Not far from the dancers outside Shuangjing station, groups of elderly are wielding badminton rackets, practicing calligraphy or kicking around jianzi, or Chinese feathered shuttlecocks.
In the West it is a different story, retirees are often cooped up in senior citizens' homes.
Many seniors seem content with this arrangement, quietly idling out their golden years in these comfy assisted-living residences, with the noise and bustle of the world safely on the other side of a fence.
Not so in China, where the silver-haired are out on the streets in force after dusk, singing, dancing and playing the night away.
The Chinese way seems a much better model. It's a great way to socialize and keep a sense of community, something that seems a bit lacking in the sterile retirement homes of North America.
And it certainly keeps Chinese seniors in commendably good shape compared to their card game-playing Western counterparts.
Just watch the grannies kick the jianzi around next time you're out in a park; some of their moves look like something straight out of the Matrix.
And it's not just at night. During the day retirees are just as active, briskly strolling around the back lakes, bravely breaststroking up the capital's fetid canals and taking advantage of the exercise equipment that every public park in the city seems to have.
Weak-armed comparative youngsters can only stand back in awe as octogenarians shuffle over to the pull-up bar and then proceed to rip out sets of 50, one-handed.
In the morning Beijing seniors are up with sun, walking, running, swishing swords and doing taichi.
It's certainly true that elderly Beijingers have plenty of pastimes that are less than physically rigorous. Walking birds in cages, raising crickets and mahjong, for example, are not likely to give the participants a good cardiovascular workout. Although the animated gesticulation and loud shouting that accompanies some mahjong games probably gets the blood flowing a little faster than normal.
And some Western seniors do play golf or tennis instead of sitting around a card table.
But on the whole retirees in Beijing are far more active and far more fit than those in the West.
It would be quite a head-turner, in a North American park, to see grannies, snapping their wrists at cobra-like speed, lunging and grunting while bashing a badminton birdie back and forth with ferocious intensity.
Or to see a silver-haired gent calmly lie on the ground and then, like a human piston, break into a seemingly-never ending series of stomach crunches.
But such sights are common here.
Hopefully they will be common in the West one day and elderly North Americans and Europeans will be out kicking up their heels, waltzing the evening away in public spaces.
