BEIJING — As China held the biggest coming-out party of the century last week, one of its citizens had quite a celebration of his own. Lu Xiangwu turned 100 the day the Olympics began, and he had one wish for his centennial: to come to Beijing to watch the Games.
The great-great-grandfather with a wispy white beard and barely a wrinkle did make it to Beijing, after riding 20 hours on a train from central China. But his auspicious birth date -- 08-08-08, the luckiest of numbers -- meant little in the shiny, hard Olympic city where the long-held Chinese reverence for elders is hardly enough to open doors to the hottest show in town.
With no ticket in his pocket and no connections beyond a remarkable birthday, all he got was a drive-by view of the slick new National Stadium, called the Bird's Nest.
"I didn't get to go inside. This is my biggest disappointment," said Lu, sitting in a budget hotel in the shadow of the big city.
That's all he would say about his broken dream. He didn't want to upset his two sons, who are in their 60s. The two, plus a grandson in his 40s, had accompanied him to Beijing for his birthday.
They know he is crushed on the inside. "My father kept saying to us, 'If you weren't here, I don't know if I could make it back home alive,' " said son Lu Zhidao, 66.
According to the younger Lus, they were let down by a businessman from their hometown in Hubei province who promised to pave the way for the elder Lu to journey to Beijing as a gesture of goodwill.
"This trip has been a farce," said Lu Jie, the grandson. "They told us when we get to Beijing, we'll get the red-carpet treatment. What a joke. We feel totally abandoned."
Because the businessman also promised to get everyone into the Olympic venues, they didn't bother to buy tickets. When they got to Beijing, they realized that the businessman was all talk. After much wrangling, one ticket emerged. For handball.
"He's 100 years old -- he doesn't even know what handball is," Lu Zhidao said.
The first and only time the senior Lu had set foot in the Chinese capital was in 1961 to visit his eldest son, who was working in the city. There were no subways at the time, no traffic jams and no skyscrapers along the Avenue of Eternal Peace or anywhere else in a city that is today a museum of futuristic architecture.
