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.