Zoology

There are ducks in the hall. A little girl brought them home in a shoebox two days ago, and now, in this ultramodern apartment building ("Stations Park: Where Tycoons Live" read the advertisements lining the street), behind the steel self-locking door with the video monitor, two fuzzy yellow ducklings are huddling in the corner, making peeping sounds, and pooping on everything in sight.

Robin worries about them. She's put out a cardboard box for them to hide in — they cower every time someone opens the door — and whenever she thinks we're not looking she sneaks out to the hall with a handful of bread crumbs. She doesn't like to see an animal in any kind of pain, and she had no interest in coming to the zoo with me today.

I don't blame her. There are things at the Beijing Zoo that are hard to see. The polar bear exhibit is a huge cement bowl — a wonderful thing if you're a skateboarder, but not so great if you're wearing a winter coat. I was sweating through my clothes just standing there; I can only imagine how the bear felt.

But most of the exhibits at the zoo aren't that cruel, even if some of them are bizarre. The Rhino House, for example, contains rhinos, hippos and a food court. There's something a little off about sitting down to a burger, a piece of fried chicken or a sausage on a stick while a rhinoceros does its thing behind a wall of glass in front of you. And yet the animals in that exhibit seemed content; maybe they appreciate being able to sit and watch the things we do for a change.

On the whole, the layout of the Beijing Zoo is more beautiful than almost any other zoo I've seen. The outdoor enclosures are grouped along wide paths lined with cypress, bamboo and weeping willows, and there are plenty of little side alleys and stone steps rising into hills where families sit and have picnics. That's something I really like about Beijing — even though it's a city of millions, I never feel as crowded as I do in New York or London or Washington, D.C. There isn't much privacy, but there is always space.

I tend to think the animals do better when one or two of them comes to us in zoos than they do when hordes of tourists go tromping out to the places where they live. There are animals at the Beijing Zoo that I'd probably never see anywhere else — the Yangtze alligator (which must have inspired the little plastic Godzillas being sold throughout the zoo), the graceful Schnauzer-sized Chinese river deer, and, of course, the panda. Pandas are the stars of the zoo, and they know it: at least one of them was game enough to lumber from one group of cheering visitors to another before plodding, hamster-like, back to the corner of his enclosure to chow down on a piece of bamboo.

I've always wanted to believe that zoos existed to make us care about the creatures that might otherwise become abstractions. I'd like to think that Newt Gingrich wouldn't have argued that men are biologically constructed to hunt giraffes if he'd been the child I saw yesterday, gaping in astonishment as one gently took the bunch of leaves from her hand. But you never know — on more than one occasion, I've stared deep into the soulful brown eyes of a cow and then gone out for a burger at Wendy's.

The Beijing Zoo does a lot as far as education is concerned. There's an interactive science center at the zoo, a park with giant plastic dinosaurs and several petting zoos, or "careful small animal parks." I saw many, many children's groups, which meant hearing many, many small voices saying "Hello! How are you today?" as soon as they saw a foreign face. At one point, I heard a roar of children's voices and rushed over — I couldn't imagine what animal would produce that kind of reaction — only to discover the zoo arcade.

I try to avoid the primate house — it's too depressing — but it's hard to do in a place where you don't speak the language, and so yesterday I found myself staring across a moat at a silverback gorilla, enthroned beneath a little platform of wood and staring right back at me. I'm convinced at that moment we were both thinking the same thing: We are the same, you and I. What is it that gives you the right to be where you are and me to be where I am?

I wish I knew the answer.