Two Days in Hangzhou

West Lake at Hangzhou

Despite our taxi driver's confusion as to how to access the tour bus lot, we got on the bus for Hangzhou at 7:30am, crammed among happy chattering Chinese. We passed misty canals and orchards. "Ecological Harmony, Happy Homeland" a sign read. Rice fields flourished alongside dilapidated concrete developments. We passed close by another bus of lounging and sleeping Chinese. Jacques pointed out a sign for Hardened Verge (which in French means the male organ). It was a swampy, agricultural area, with bridge construction going on. Above the fields of bright light green, 10 meters up, were elevated trains, power lines and tall buildings in the mist.

lunch on the road

We rolled along in sleepy chatter for several hours till a tiny bright-faced gay guide bounded onto the bus and began a barrage of Chinese chatter till we arrived at West Lake. Next to us a couple from Liverpool (whose English was nonetheless poor, though she was second generation, and had the look of a European) interpreted the gist of our instructions.

The parking lot was packed with buses where we climbed the stairs for lunch. In this case my note from Dr. Li got us seated at a table of Germans from Hanover, a mother and her fashion model daughter (with a narrow body with a frighteningly large head, who had just finished Fashion Week in Paris), and a large German guy with his new Shanghai bride, who looked overwhelmed. The model waited for no one, but dug into the food with her horsey face (she'd probably been starving herself for a month, or was bulimic.) I had a bit of tender white fish along with tasty fresh cooked cucumber, pumpkin and greens. Next to us a huge young man from Taiwan had an occasional word in English but did not want to discuss the difficulties of getting a visa to China. Then we tumbled back onto the bus and were deposited in the deeply verdant woods and walkways by the West Lake.

The tea plantation

We boarded a "pleasure boat" out onto boundless smooth water in a mist, the humps of hills and pagodas smudged away. It was a classical Chinese setting, and very beloved of the people of China. The barrage of information continued, thick and impenetrably Chinese, while in the rear another Chinese guide spoke Russian for his charges. The beautiful scene is featured on Chinese currency, the one yuan note. Finally, having understood nothing but having loved the still lake's abstraction from daily life (where a few days earlier a Chinese woman had jumped in and been rescued by an anonymous American woman, which sparked a national internet debate), we walked among trees to a pen of peacocks. (Jacques pointed out, this could be Lake Geneva for all we know.) A bright male peacock came up to the fence to inspect me. A little girl from our group kept coming up to me, but shyly retreated and claimed she could speak no English.

Chang turned out to be a lucky draw for a guide. Frisky and communicative (but, "sorry, no English!") he loved tending to us, his flock, scolding shrilly like a palace eunuch, twitching his little rear end back and forth as he paraded us with his tattered red flag, joking, even carefully plastering Jacques' badge on his chest for him. These tours are heavily salted with visits to "museums", or "factories," really government-run shops where a hard sell ensues and obviously the guide gets a take. But Chang did not press us to buy. We did, nonetheless, get our share of "museums."

We were driven to a "very important" silk factory with even less pretense to pedagogy than the one outside Beijing. We were not even allowed to see the exhibit rooms, but were rushed straight to the the sales pitch. A few Chinese bought silk comforters while we desperately searched for the exit, which brought us through numerous shopping opportunities for sweet and knick knacks. It felt to us like adding insult to injury, to be waylaid by these fixed prices.

The Rock-carved Buddhas

The tea factory was an even quicker sell. We had tea in a glass (they called it a tea ceremony) and even before we finished the money came out. But the fields of tea and mulberry bushes outside were exquisite, stretching on and on as we drove endlessly to the Lingyan Temple.

Preceded by a tiresomely commercial shop and such thick Chinese chatter that Jacques and I missed buying the required tickets, we came, finally, to a remote, lush monastic retreat, reaching it alongside a rock outcropping on which were carved truly beautiful "Sanskrit-style" Buddhas from the Yuan and Song dynasties--from about 951.

Breathless with relief, we missed the goodies of a Chinese bible and hans, but were finally given free rein to climb up the ascending temples, which had been the site of a temple founded by the monk Huili in 326.  Chang indicated we were free to explore on our own by swirling his head around in a wanton fashion. He had been painstakingly instructing the others on how to light the incense, etc., but we were so enthralled by the carved rock Buddhas that we missed all the orthodoxy.

We were doubly furious about the time wasted at the "museums" as we took in the gorgeous site. Below, along running water, were 470 rock-carved Buddhas in niches and caves. Up the hill rose one temple after another, including the largest sitting Buddha in China (created in 1956 of camphor wood), at whose back was carved a Guanyin and an enormous mountain of novices becoming Buddha. 

The setting was the most beautiful we'd seen in China. Then young monks, evidently novices, paraded down the long stone stairways from the top, chanting. (On the way back up, they shouted to us "hello", skipping steps with their robes wadded in their hands.) 

We took a final look at the carved statues where an impish monk in gray pointed the way to a tunnel of exquisite carvings. But it was growing dark.

Then we were taken--miracle of miracles--to a sweet, clean, simple hotel sequestered on a vocational college campus. Before it was a classic rock garden built among serene landscaping of green and rock filtered from view by peonies, palms and trees.

It was now or never for dinner, so we left the oasis of the hotel for the uncertain dark rainy street, along a series of grand facades on our left that seemed to be university buildings and found a tile and cement open arch with a sad-faced woman who dished magnificent vegetables and tofu, cafeteria style in a poor man's setting, onto a steel plate. She was so amazed at all I took she stared and stared at me as I ate. (We shared, after all, Jacques and I.) It was where street workers go, dirty from their day, and we ate at the front, and it was delicious - for $2.70.

A night of clean, though spar,e comforts and then I went out to do my morning tai chi in the rock garden, where the Chinese congregated to chatter and I shared tai chi space with a slight man in black. Meanwhile Jacques learned, via TV images whose English words were overdubbed in Chinese, that Qadaffi was dead. Then we boarded our bus.

Chang was eager and impatient and cracked a few jokes, perhaps at our expense. We drove through mysterious highways, up through the leafy reaches where mulberries and tea bushes grew, where the ravishing monastery was, and then down by waters through thriving towns and shanty townd, vast construction sites and barrios that seemed to serve the inexorable machine of construction, on sad dusty roads by choked waters across from which mansions were being built, past a huge Buddha, large as a building, behind a very old wall, but we'll never know what that was. And finally in the remote sad edges of these lowlands we entered the gate to a "nature-viewing leisure park" that was still under construction.

View from the Pagoda

We were led via blaring megaphones (we were only about 10 people by then) down a cave to see the geologic processes of water and rock, which to the Chinese seemed quite remarkable although such caves are all over France. Up and down slippery steps among chimeric formations lit by colored neon lights we carefully inched, not understanding a single word. We came to the most gigantic chamber - you could also see the dynamite lines - lit in operatic colors, and descended to a temple to what looked like the God of Wealth, gargantuan as ever, where we were given a stick of incense, told to bow (this time Jacques refused) and asked for money (we declined).

Woodcarving: the White Snake Goddess

Still in the flaring neon purples we were taken to a boat where the underground staff were all eating, and ferried a short distance, then shown some salamander-like creatures. The 2 foot long one lifted its head, sensing something, and I grew very depressed for it, trapped under birght lights in a tank. But Jacques said it had no eyes. The megahone was amplified to unbearable decibels by the low ceiling. Then they took everyone's picture against hte bright rock light show. Eventually we were put on a small train back to light and air. I swung on a swing briefly which cheered me up.

At a dusty roadside place, staff and locals chatting and rushing around chaotically, we had the usual tasty food, fresh and abundant. (These meals cost each of us about $2-3.)

Then off again to the Pagoda of the Six Harmonies we had seen by the lake, lavishly restored by the army. Originally built in 977, it became the site of the White Snake legend in the 12th or 13th, when the tale grew to become an opera. It is told magnificently in wood carved friezes in the pagoda. A female deity descends to earth and marries a scholar, then became trapped in the pagoda till it finally crumbles during the Ming dynasty. But the actual tale is epic and many-layered. Other friezes on other levels told the story of the Buddha or portrayed the views from the pagoda, which are superb: the misty lake and its many pockets, a Buddhist temple climbing the next mountain, and on the other side urban industry and smog. We departed via Sakyamuni's relics, other pavillions restored of old, the pond of Freeing Living Things filled with turtles, and the Statue of Going Home.

Opera scene

Then on to the Garden of the Yellow Dragon Clothed in Green, a conglomerate of good luck gardens, with the Matchmaker God, a cute god of wealth dancing before a toad, one photo opportunity after another for the myriad Chinese who were steadily arriving busload by busload. And busloads still kept coming. There was a segment of Beijing opera which was too shrill to tolerate, a pavillion of couples dancing, another of card playing - still, in the darkening evening the busloads kept coming.

The Matchmaker God

I walked through the Matchmaker God's temples, enjoying the pretty and comical murals of girls in gardens and of men with wealth and the god's wisdom (the Matchmaker God is a wise old man peering into a book), though I had seen Jacques take a different direction. But as I exited I sensed someone behind me and turned - it was Jacques. "I'm sorry that it's only me you see at the Matchmaker's temple!" he said.

The long ride home took us to a different side of the Indoor Stadium where stood - gift of fortune! - a gigantic brilliantly lit supermarket, a huge emporium that had automated barcoded lockers for your bags and a sparkling (squat) toilet. The girls at the checkout counter were dressed like Air France Flight attendants with elegant silk scarves. And we found olive oil! And lemons! What a coup! We will survive!

Life as Chinese Tourists

"Pleasure boat" of Xitang

As we exhausted the sights of Shanghai, with almost a week left before our flight back to Paris, we investigated the famous excursions--to the water cities, built on canals as early as 2500 years ago, or to the beloved lake of Hangzhou, or to the gardens of Suzhou. Underestimating the footwork involved, we stopped at the railway station, and discovered that no employee could be found who spoke a working level of English. Several trains were pointed out to us on a schedule, but we had no idea really of which station they left from or when they returned. The bus stations offered less information, but directed us to the tour buses. With new hope in our hearts, we discovered that at least there was an English-language loose leaf with descriptions of the tours, but the tours themselves were all in Chinese.

Still contemplating our options, the next day we took the metro to Hangshen Road (in the French Concession), supposedly the Champs Elysées of Shanghai but really a kind of residential 8th arrondissement. The streets were shady and comfortable, with café terraces and the casual comforts of life--an optician where I could actually buy contact lens solution, for example! Under the cool sycamores, we were able to ask for information in English, and got information! Encouraged, we stopped in a travel agency and asked if anyone spoke English. After a phone call, two very young women appeared who told us they were the directors of premium-level tours, one in shorts and the one talkative with a broad smile. They led us up dark stairs to an office of young women and stuffed animals and toys and they offered us a tour to Suzhou for one day. They said they wouldn't give an estimate up front. Instead, they hemmed and hawed about revealing their price, which finally came to 1800 yuan, about 30 times (at least) the price of a Chinese tour. We played along but clearly saw where destiny lay---we would become Chinese tourists.

Pricey pets of Xitang

Our first trip was to the water city of Xitang, a one-day nearby excursion--our bus left at 9:30am. The bus station would become very familiar, and we were grateful for its escape route to new horizons. But it was a simple place. The toilet at the bus station was a long trough running the width of the wide room, stalls sitting atop. (We were saying goodbye to sitdown toilets for awhile.) Ironically, just outside were gleaming Tibetan prayer wheels.

And then we were driving past endless developments on one side, low industrial networks of wires and factories on the other. There were gold mosque-like domes mixed in the low haze with drab high rises. Broad catalpa leaves reached over the highway. The tour guide was rapidly delivering a great deal of information in Chinese. But it was nice to be on the road.

Streets of Xitang

There were stops at places unknown to us--one an ancient school and scholar's home, another at the Shanghai film industry, where we viewed a film on a Chinese film star and meandered through a film museum of heroic scenes. We dined in a stuffy salon up the marble stairs of a somewhat dilabidated hotel where, as usual, fireworks were going off for a wedding. (Everywhere the battle cry of fireworks proclaims a wedding, the more violent, the more important the wedding.) I produced a note Dr. Li had written for me, informing the staff that I was a vegetarian. Then our Chinese fellow tourists urged me to help myself first to the rice.

There were marvelous fresh cooked cabbages and hot spicy eggplant, and Jacques shoveled everything he could into his mouth. The note seems to somehow break the ice--the tour guide became personable after I had shown her the Chinese note. (Perhaps it explains that I am not really stupid or snobbish but actually completely helpless with the Chinese language--please be kind.) Then we climbed into the van (which says "One Day Shanghai Tours" in English).

Xitang, we somehow gathered, is a 1,000 year old village preserved within a hellish rash of development and an overheated Asian strip mall city. The origins of the Xitang lay in the 8th c. BC, because of its strategic location on the waters, but the oldest existing buildings were from the Ming and Qing dynasties.  Entering the majestic gates of water animals we took a little junk (with bright life preservers strapped around us), propelled by a short thick man using much the technique as the gondoliers of Venice, through renovated Chinese eaved buildings inclining over the opaque waters, and round bridges at regular intervals that seemed fairly new, of stone or concrete As he rotated the oar we entered the village, old and decaying white buildings with Ming woodwork.

A hotel room in Xitang

On one side couples relaxed in dilapidated porches over the river, from what turned out to be hotels; on the other the brisk tourist business and food frying and bridges were thick with Chinese tourists. The guide told us we were free to wander, since we couldn't understand a word she said, but she gave me repeated instructions, look, look carefully how to come back. (She actually did speak English but it wasn't really her job to do so.) Watch carefully.

Almost immediately when I noticed my iPhone had come to life and I was sending an email to my family, Jacques stomped off, leaving me in a labyrinth of non-English speaking centuries-old alleyways. I went into a charming shop and bought a lovely rustic chemise for the equivalent of $18. After half an hour of wandering among roosters and dogs in a quiet section where old people cooked over open fires-- no English speakers to be found-- we spotted each other. Then we took in the official sites.

The West Garden was an old palace used by a 20th c. scholar as a retreat, now dusty and sad, displaying jade seals in dim rooms over rock gardens. The Root Carving Museum had enormous monstrous creations of carved roots, conglomerates of dragons, apes in jungles, lions, thrones -- ingenious carvings of roots utilizing their surrounding medium of rock or concrete. A hundred meters away was a torrid strip mall. But in the idyllic quaint village ladies knitted baby booties and no one flinched at the tourists crawling all over their town, for the tourists had made them rich.

We bargained for a bamboo painting of a tiger (hand-painted, he said - I saw an identical one at the exit gate). The Drunk Garden was smaller and more charming - or was it just empty of tourists? We explored side streets where hotels where starting to occupy ruined alleys, with giant wood-carved beds. Art students were making rather uninspired water colors of the canal which, for all its features, lacked charm--at least on that day-- because of the dull yellowed air of nearby industry, which cast everything in dispirited browns.

At the exit there was a last temple, to the grain god, a kind fonctionnaire who had been executed for his troubles--he had given people grain when they were starving. A pretty Chinese girl with a broad, lazy smile and floppy silken hair gave us incense sticks and I bowed before the fierce-faced "god." "Very good," she smiled and brought us before a Maitreya where a monk bade us to our knees and beat a gong to orchestrate our prostrations. "Same family?" he asked, and seated Jacques before a monk with account books, who bade me stand with my hands folded.

This "notary monk" looked at Jacques' palms (very good! he said) and folded them around a cellophane of a silk pocket and han, the Chinese coin with its square center. He chanted something over Jacques' folded hands, then slipped a jade bracelet over my wrist. He had Jacques write his name and country (usually Jacques makes up a name, but not this time) and tben demanded, "100 yuan" and Jacques promptly coughed it up.

Amazing. Half the price of the Tibetan tea that we have spent the trip scorning. Then we were shown the way out.

"The Senegalese outside the Louvre could take a leaf from their book" was Jacques' only comment. (Jacques has been waging war against the scam that some French Africans are pulling at the gates of the Louvre, claiming the money is for African children. Jacques has asked them for their credentials and called the police, to no avail.)

And then we rode back in rush hour traffic past fields mixed with bulldozed rubble, past rough workers in the backs of trucks, and the cargo of gigantic pigs, sitting up intelligently, observing the road leading them to their doom.

Unexpected Landscapes of Shanghai

Guanyin at the Temple of the Jade Buddha

The metro headed north where we emerged to a kind of Bronx meets Fritz Lang's Metropolis, where glass skyscrapers tapered to heaven bound filaments, while bulldozers munched on huge blocks of rubble and laundry hung on billboards, trees, over public parking lots, anywhere but the unaccommodating smooth glass surfaces.

Arhats

We visited the Temple of the Jade Buddha, and had one of these ample vegetarian lunches, to which habitués bring take-away containers and rapidly stow most of the meal, and the restaurant staff is more than happy to provide plastic bags. Then we took directions from a young entrepreneur who spoke French as he addressed us from his scooter, and found a taxi for the contemporary art galleries of Moganshan lu: Gallery Shangh'art, BizArt, Eastlink, ArtSea Studio & Gallery, Art Scene Warehouse and U Gallery.

Repetitive motifs brand these contemporary paintings like any of Shanghai's products, but nowhere else had we seen such mocking irony and pop vulgarity, housed in cool, clear spaces abstracted from the heartbreak outside. 

(Outside a lone man was destroying a house brick by brick, blow by blow. A couple stood in front of their half destroyed house, looking confused in the rubble. A man wandered around a half destroyed house, dazed. I was taking photos and someone stopped to regard me with the look of a powerful man, then began taking photos himself.) 

One artist painted everyone with pacifiers in their mouths---Mao Tse Tung was the only character in scene after scene without a baby pacifier. Other painters featured the erotic (notably lacking in most of Chinese society), the grotesque, or world leaders wearing gas masks as the world burns.

Also unexpected: The Jewish Refugee Museum

Sephardic Jews like the wealthy Sassoons from Iraq had settled in Shanghai and made their mark from the 19th century on. Later, as world events precipitated the exodus of European Jews, and country after country refused them asylum, Shanghai became a surprisingly hospitable refuge. Among blocks of rubble and construction and other nondescript buildings is the beautifully restored old synagogue which comprises the Jewish Refugee Museum.

A group of Israelis were beginning a tour, led by a Chinese girl. At first she seemed Jewish. When she stated, "This is our synagogue" a ripple of emotion swelled among the Israelis: "our" synagogue! (It turned out this was just a government job for her. But she'd done her research.) The Jews had been able to land in Shanghai because of Dr. Ho, the Chinese Consul to Vienna, who had taken a personal decision to issue them visas. One can only speculate, considering the Shanghai of the 1930's in the throes of Communists fighting Nationalists and Europeans squatting precariously, why Shanghai took this unique life-saving measure. (One also speculates fruitlessly what exactly happened to all those Jews once Mao took the helm.) Shanghai's occupation in the 40's was by the Japanese and not the Germans. The Japanese chose to defy German orders concerning the Final Solution, because they counted Jewish business acumen as an important resource. The Israeli translator embellished this a bit, praising the business AND INTELLECTUAL acumen of the Jews, and the group nodded gravely. Our guide nodded gravely too, as if she understood Hebrew. Thirty thousand Jews survived in the Shanghai ghetto under the Japanese. As in so many places we have visited, the narratives surrounding Jewish lives are the most intact, the most clearly articulated. 

After the warm, moist Israeli crowd departed, Jacques and I stayed and studied the exhibits, which told of so many near-tragedies, saved by Dr. Ho. An exhibit quoted a poem he wrote:

The gifts heaven bestows are not by chance.

The convictions of heroes not lightly formed.

Today I summoned all spirit and strength.

Urging my steed forward ten thousand miles.

A worshipper at the vegetarian restaurant of the Jade Buddha

We were joined briefly by a woman from Westchester (How long have you been here? What did you buy? How much did you spend?) 

Then I sat in the clean, bright air of the courtyard, where even the cleaning ladies of the museum treated me as if I were a mourner visiting my ancestors' graves. A perfect refuge from Shanghai.

Faces of China

Our Chinese home exchangers, Laura and Iris

Poor, poor Dr. Li, left holding the bag. He, you may recall, is the father of Laura, one of the charming Chinese girls who spent two weeks in our Paris apartment, only to remove their own home exchange listing, with its photos of a colorful, sweet apartment, from the home exchange web site. So we arrived in Shanghai to something quite other than what they had promised.

A neighborhood worker

To recapitulate: The place had been vacant for 5-6 years. Empty and sooty and dirty, it was a kind of tenement which maybe 5 or 6 years ago in China would have seemed normal.  We were blessed with a hot plate and a microwave from the previous century, a shower spigot sticking out of the bathroom wall, so you had to use the filthy mop that was available to dry the bathroom floor when you took a shower.  The air breathed of soot. There were some old dusty shelves, no furniture really, window screens clogged with grime.  The washing machine was ancient and its settings were all in Chinese characters. The kitchen shelves were so filthy we used take-out cardboard to eat from. 

Wu Garden

Dr. Li had been there to welcome us to our abysmal home away from home, and subsequently spent days trying to compensate for what he didn't quite seem to understand about the situation. He repeatedly tried to get us an internet connection, even offering to lend us a computer (he's a professor on campus and connected to the internet). He lent us a cell phone for local calls. And he told us that Laura wanted him to prepare dinner for us, since we had taken the girls out for a last dinner in Paris.

Dr. Li is a short man, trying, pressing his efforts on you, his neck bulging as he tries to make you understand. His English is extremely limited. His wife is always there, an ephemeral presence - she seems to have a kind of wasting disease, and smiles distantly with her tiny rosebud mouth and strained pale face. He is pushing, pushing her into place, patting her on the back, reassuring her, including her, and she stands there, helpless. Trying to make everything work with this distant and weak companion, he is practically roaring with effort.

Tourists in Hangzhou

He informed us that he would pick us up for dinner at 5pm on a Sunday, and we were ready. The neighbors seemed to be admiring us, his classy guests, and he spoke excitedly with them. He had told me that he lived 7 minutes away, but that Sunday he told us the drive was 40 minutes. He began the drive saying, "My English is very poor"-- and the rest was silence. We had told him I was a vegetarian, and so when we arrived at a distant suburb in a Swiss-style complex with cute little wooden driveways, all very densely packed nonetheless, he carried vegetables out of the car.

Nanjing Road

His car was immaculate - it was as if his life had not absorbed the many things that we Westerners have-- and so was the apartment, with ultraviolet lights illuminating a neo-Chinoiserie style ceiling. He put us on the sofa in a spare living room and turned on the large flat-screen TV, while he and Madame closed the glass sliding door of the kitchen and chopped vegetables for half an hour. And then we sat before many bowls of coldish food. They gave us the two plates, and kept for themselves tiny bowls. Chinese-style, we picked at the multitude of dishes in front of us with our chopsticks. Madame took a tiny cocktail tomato at a time, chewing slowly. Dr. Li would sit and watch us, momentarily paralyzed, and then roar into action, grabbing food and chewing with gusto, popping into the kitchen as he had another idea, taking thick dumplings out of the freezer and putting them in the microwave. Madame would pause, her eyes inward, concentrating on his absence, until he returned. We smiled and munched till we couldn't eat more. Madame took the smallest bites of cucumber, her impenetrable face focused on something inside and, without turning toward him, on every movement of her active husband. He kept pushing, pushing everything into place while she abstracted quizzically, chopsticks in hand.

Knitting in Nanshi, "Chinatown"

When we declared ourselves full he smiled broadly, a huge burden lifted. He joined us before the TV, kicked back on the couch and grinned like a kid. We showed him the pages of our French guidebook, which had both French and Chinese titles for all that we had visited. He pounded the pages and shook his head hard, yes, yes, that's what we have in Shanghai. Half the time he laughed out loud saying YOU visited THAT? (This applied to the Museum of the First Communist Congress, the home of Soong Qing Ling, and anything of recent history.)

Our duties to each other had been discharged, leaving us with more questions than answers. Who are these Chinese before whom the whole world is beginning to quake?

Fellow tourists in Hangzhou

It was while we were in Shanghai that a tragic incident took place which quickly became an international internet conversation.  A toddler, daughter of rural immigrants, was hit by 2 different hit-and-run vehicles and left bleeding in the street. Finally an elderly woman picked her up. One driver had stopped briefly, calculated his risk, and driven on. One driver had said to the press: It would be better if she dies, it would cost him less. She died shortly afterward. 

The conversation that swarmed the internet grappled with: "what kind of people are we"?  It has been picked up by the Western press as well. On the Care2 blog it is linked to a conversation about Chinese students in America. According to a study, 90% of them misrepresent or forge their credentials to get into American universities. Most of them plagiarize to get through. (As a former college professor, I can say that many, many students plagiarize to get through, immigrants or no.)

Food vendor in Nanshi

At any rate there is quite a discussion going on about the products of the single child policy in China. The Canadians with whom we exchanged in Beijing had just had their beloved golden retriever killed by some kids just trying to see how fast they could drive their new BMW. 

The same week as the toddler was hit, a  woman tried to drown herself at Hangzhou, in the beautiful lake we would visit a few days later. An American woman jumped in the lake and saved her, then vanished without waiting to receive any recognition.  These two news items were being linked in the internet discussions among the Chinese and around the world.

Passerby in Nanshi

Our experience of personal relationships was that we were anonymous and not anyone's problem until we were really face to face, and then individuals could be wonderful. Or, in the case of Beijing, predatory. But once you are eating at the same table, or sitting in the same taxi, there is a stirring of kindness, of a shared responsibility. 

For example, nobody gets up to offer their seat on the metro, nobody.  But once we were rushing into the metro. I was very upset--I didn't even realize how upset I was. An older middle aged woman said to me, you sit, you sit, and gave me her seat.  And then, to my own surprise, I burst into tears!  Another time an older middle aged woman saw that Jacques and I were sitting very far apart on the metro (we were the only Caucasians in sight). She started yelling for Jacques to take her seat and sit next to me, and then she stood for another three stops!  So it's as if there are two psychic distances, very distant and very intimate.

in Pudong

Every day now the New York Times runs an article on life in China. We can see other close-ups of the faces of China in the work of Chinese writers, and in Peter Hessler's wonderful Oracle Bones, which explores the lives of his former students and the news reporting he's done in China. There is no simple answer. The Chinese people have strong personalities. They are charismatic, pragmatic, and very present. It is hard to imagine them swooning with allegiance to Chairman Mao.

It's simply as if there is a profound incoherence in the society, as  this country hurtles, with its infinite number of individual lives, into the future.

The French Concession

An itinerant barber in a Shikumen

We proceeded in a cool fog to the French Concession, upscale and jarringly chic where it occupies the old renovated Shikumen, a form of 19th c. brick architecture. Shikumen had been built by the wealthy Chinese fleeing political turmoil in the 20's and 30's, in the shelter of the French concession. They claimed their Chinese creds by housing starving poets in their garrets. They also brought the street scene into their courtyards - shoe menders (in fact, a woman had just attached herself to Jacques' foot even as he walked, trying to polish his shoes for 10 yuan) and junk dealers, barbers and tailors. The deep dark polished wood in high ceilinged white interiors, entered through exquisitely finished Ming-style reception rooms, is elegant in a spare fashion.

The Shikumen of Xintiandi have become a small trendy mall of upscale restaurants comprising two alleyway blocks. Recently the dilapidated alleyways had housed about 2,800 families and more than 8,000 people. The Shikumen Museum proclaims: "To salvage the city's remaining heritage houses from bulldozers, the developers (from Hong Kong) took painstaking effort to retain the original looks, a fusion of the old and new. Xintiandi is a placer older people find nostalgic, young people find trendy, foreigners find cultural and Chinese people find foreign. It is a place where everybody finds something of his/her own."

First Communist Congress - heavily renovated
courtesy WikiCommons

Another Shikumen housed the first meeting of the Community Party at a shiny wooden dining room table. Eerie wax figures depict a young wholesome Mao, attended by his inner circle and two members of the International Comintern. The home of Sun Yat Sen repeats the same themes of oppressive unfair treaties with the West, the brutal oppression by the Japanese (in a newsreel, kneeling bound Chinese are being shot; in another, myriad hanged bodies sag in nooses). The museum recalls Sun Yat Sen's austere personal life (he budgeted 2 yuan--today, 20 cents--a day for the family food budget) and his continuing presence even after he'd been pushed out of power. Stalin odered the Comintern to stay in touch with him.

Art and poetry café

Much of the French Concession has the crumbling charm of a defunct French outpost in Indochine or Afrique, housing edgy cafe's with art and poetry, or thrift shops - like Brooklyn. Penetrating the facades are alleyways, called lilongs, some of which have been deemed "Model Quarters" by the government. We entered a lilong and found the same structure as our tenement, with the same colored chalk drawings of beautiful Shanghai and glass covered message boards. An old lady in a wheelchair, browned and furrowed, latched her eyes onto mine and smiled.

Don't honk your horn!

Our own Soviet-apt-lilong is a village where everyone speaks and congregates. This morning the basketball court was taken by young people shooting (since 7am on a Saturday). One of them watched Jacques do chinups and yelled "You're still young!"

The Shanghai Museum

A lovely park...

Downtown Shanghai centers on contiguous and beautiful parks like People's Parks - parks that have displaced thousands of families with a few high-beaked swans, and lovely urban achievement.

...where  4,387 families had lived...

There, in People's Square, the square rose-stone museum stands, while inside its tiers have hanging gardens dripping from Ming wood carving. The four levels are clearly and pedagogically arranged to present the glories of Chinese aesthetics - Bronzes, Ceramics, Calligraphy, Painting, Jade carving, Furniture and Currency in clear sequences of a not huge nor brilliant collection, but a beautifully presented one where lights rise as you approach a work.

11th c. BC food vessel

China's early and fastidious technique yielded bronzes and jades so extraordinary and brought procelain to the world in the 1st AD. The early stylized beauty - like Mayan designs - becomes more delicate and intricate with time, but is never matched by figurative brilliance.

Around the 21st c. BC China entered the Bronze Age. The earliest Chinese bronze culture is of the late Xia dynasty (21st-16th c BC). Ritual bronzes had animal masks and were sometimes inlaid with turquoise. A second flowering began in the 7th c BC-221 BC, as ritual functions gradually diminished with new and delicate daily utensils. Decorative dragon paterns became minute and intricate, and scenes of daily life were used for the first time.

Tomb Guardian - 608-917 AD

"Pottery belongs to all mankind, but porcelain is China's invention," the museum declares. The earliest Neolithic pottery in China dates from about 10,000 years ago. The Shang period (16-11th c BC) used high fire glazes, and potters' wheels appeared in the 3rd millennium BC.

Jade was being mined 10,000 years ago, and carvings of beauty emerged by 5,000 yr BC. An aesthetic took shape and never radically changed. China has an 8000 year history of jade carving, beginning with ritual and ornamental jades with strong regional features. Distinctive among them were the jades produced by the Neolithic cultures, with zoomorphic and geometric shaped forms.

Jade man, 2000 BC

Jades had an early ritual use in political power, frnom the 21st c. BC-771 BC, and later became decorative, their design more creative.

In the Han Dynasty, (206 BC-420 AD) jades were increasingly part of elaborate burials, and there was a magical belief in jade amulets. But the warring period blocked transportation of the stone from western Asia, leading to a decline

The sculpture exhibit is brief, considering the huge amount of Buddhistic stone carving the rest of the world has obtained from China. The beautiful ones must have been stolen. (But the museum is a pleasure with its unified highly polished wood and reliable cheap shops of small, gorgeous knick knacks.)

13th-11th c BC dragon in jade

Furniture had appeared as early as the Han Dynasty (180 BC-220 AD), but its flowering was in the Ming Dynasty (14th-17th c.). The museum's furniture exhibtion, of mainly Ming and Qing, is exquisite, design that easily surpasses the Western equivalents.

Jade dragons, 206 BC-408 AD

The currency exhibit traces China's cowrie and crude money back to Neolithic times. Paper money came earlier than the West. But this civilization that had such technical sophistication became petrified. With the perfectiib if inner details, it lost its outer resilience. Money from the Silk Rd, however, had vitality with the magnificent heads of rulers.