An old man dressed in a Mao suit walks slowly into The Village, a new shopping area in the diplomatic and rich part of Beijing. He enters an Apple Store and anxiously looks around with bewildered eyes: the man remembers the old neighbourhood that has now vanished completely to be replaced by these icons of global capitalism. Utterly puzzled, he continues wandering, feeling forever lost in the city that used to be so familiar to him.

In his fictional documentary Beijing is Coming (2008), the Hong Kong filmmaker Bono Lee tells the story of an old man who returns to Beijing after 30 years. Like so many Asian cities, Beijing has grown dramatically over the past two decades. The unprecedented scale, scope and speed of these changes makes a returning visitor easily lose his or her way – as parks have been replaced by buildings, neighbourhoods have morphed into parks. In Lee's documentary, the Asian city serves as a trope for probing into the alienation that comes with China's speedy march into modernity. But the story steers away from being a onedimensional critique on the transformation of the city. Instead, it also speaks of the emergence of new intimacies that are rendered possible by the changing city. In the story, a love relationship unfolds between record shop owner Jun and a girl named Ling, who are both part of a new generation born after 1980. The girl had planned to study abroad, but she stayed to experience the summer of 2008, to be with Jun; or, as she wonders, maybe she stayed because of the city of Beijing itself.