Wednesday 30 June 2010

The heavy rains would come later, and when they did, lightning reflected in the glass and steel of new buildings, and thunder rumbled like the empty belly of an angry god. But the morning began with a searing hot sun -- sharp, hurtful, sticking into you like a bundle of needle-fine rays reflected through a dirty magnifying glass.  It was a welcomed change.

I walked to the Starbucks on Hushu Nan [South] Road, three klicks or so from the hotel.  The main entrance is at the periphery of  a small plaza - a plazette? - that stands between two clean modern buildings, and at the mouth of the Hong Shi residential compound. "Hong Shi" means "red stone", and toddler-high san serif letters - something like Arial Bold - on the margins of the plazette spell it out in English. The 'N' is backwards. 

I'm sitting in the sun, working on my Guan'zi, hoping my skin clears up before I see my girl again --- a few shaving nicks, a stubborn ingrown hair, bad tweasers, tropical humidity, and my chin looks like its been nibbled by a weasel with gingivitis.  In the mornings I patch it up with calamine lotion as best I can. It gives me a look that seems to frighten the natives, though I think I did that before I applied chalky pink primer to my fissog.

A friendly voice, my old friend "Dugal", calls my name -- he's walking out of Starbucks carrying some kind of overpriced juice drink with expensive proprietary packaging. Dugal and I have known each other for most of this decade, and in years past we've had some fun. We met for the first time one night on the wrong side of midnight in a tacky overpriced franchise cafe/restaurant in the center of Hangzhou, he with a girl he just met and me with a buddy I now hardly know. I was trying to keep him from assaulting a native with whom push had come to shove and who'd just reached for  the dull blunt-tipped knife that is the least non-lethal component of the meal-service flatware set. Dugal - Scots Algerian, or Algerian Scots, I can't remember  - is a DJ,  and a painter, who since 2003 has been keeping himself in whisky and acrylics by punting grammar to students at an upscale English language training center.  He is possibly one of the most entertaining and humorous people I have met in my life, and already a minor deity in Hangzhou's  pantheon of lesser barbarian gods.  He is handsome in a way that women seem to find irresistable -- boyish and charming, something in his eyes and in the alignment of his jaw nonetheless has him at the threshold of looking downright menacing. Has a short fuse. I'm pretty sure he's nobody's fool.

I didn't recognize him at first.  His hair was shorter than I'd remembered, and black wayfarers covered a third of his face. Pleated trousers, oxford shirt buttoned at the cuffs, and black brougues that didn't need buffing --the very figure of a gentleman. We'd not met in over a year, maybe two, and catching up took about an hour.  Hangzhou's become quite an all right city to live in, he said, knowing that I know that he was previously not wholly enamoured of the place, and had more than once come close to being repatriated on account of his low boiling point and swift right hook.  He cited a few examples of how the provincial capital has improved, and spoke some about his medium-term plans. They're good ones. We confirmed each other's contact details, and shook hands. It was the handshake of good friends, sympathetic friends far from home, meeting  after a long absence and knowledegable of the uncertainty of reunion. He left, to teach English to Chinese yuppies.  I stayed, to wrestle with 2300 year old Chinese sages.

*              *              *

"The questions of contemporary time can be exlpained by examining similar questions of the past. The future can be foreseen by doing research on history".  Guan'zi

*              *              *

In the morning, many of the city's older male residents can be seen taking their birds out for a walk.  Hours before thousands upon thousands of cars appear on Hangzhou's streets, a number of the city's seniors are taking their birdcages and their captive residents onto hillsides and into parks.  It is a charming if puzzling sight, and personally  I am undecided as to whether the ritual is unintentionally perverse. Ren or bu ren? Is this The Way of Heaven?  I'm not sure. Taking a caged bird into a park seems a bit like having kindergarten-aged kids sit at their desks during recess and watch streaming video of a busy playground. 

In May of last year, at the foot of one popular approach to Baochu Hill, a favourite with the white-haired bird men, I had chat with a young scholar who was then in China on some Ivy League junior research grant.  It is irrelevant, but I will tell you that she was, and presumably still is, quite pretty, in a way that is both  striking and unmemorable, like an LL Bean model.  (She'd be flashing a broad smile while carrying one end of an Old Town canoe, and not modeling tartan Polartec pj's.)  She was a recentish graduate of a respected and moderately prestigious Boston college, with a boutique degree in something like "Peace, Faith & Justice", and had come to China fresh from an extended stay in India where she'dbeen researching locally-run microfinance initiatives (or something like that). I forget how she got my email address, but seemingly I was recommended to her as someone worth chatting to. I am confident that, by the time our conversation ended, she felt she had been misinformed. The Spring of 2009 was a bad season for me, and I should not wonder if I made the kind of lasting impression that I wish she'd forget.

We talked about China -- our impressions of the country and her people, about Hangzhou, about life here, and where China and her people will be years hence.  I just love it here, she said, smiling, tossing a tangle of bright brown locks over her shoulder, and brushing errant bangs over her ear. And what do you love about it, specifically?, I asked.

Oh, just... everything! 

Except the food, she added -- that, she said, was taking a while to get used to. It wasn't the healthy down-to-earth fare she had anticipated, and it wasn't agreeing with her. But I love being in China!

And the traffic. That she did not love. She had a bicycle at one point, but quickly thought better of it --- a prudent move. Some figures suggest that, in Hangzhou alone, there are on average 400 newly-registered cars on the road every day. The newspaper I edited (from May-August 2006) reported at the time government figures claiming  30,000 new cars were added to the city's already heavily taxed roadways in May 2006 alone.  My interlocutor was wise not to cycle here, and I told her so.

But really, I love China!

Public transportation didn't turn her on too much, though, and she said that she found the buses hot, smelly, and always overcrowded. (Heaven knows how she survived India.)  Taxis were the way to go, even though the driver's tended to be surly and impatient.

But China is just...awesome!

Except maybe for the people --- those, she confessed, were starting to get on her wick. The staring, the touching of her hair, the pointing and the giggling, the neverending echo of  "lao'wai!" ("foreginer", intrinsically perjorative); the spitting in the street; the parents helping their children to piss on metropolitan sidewalks; the daily incivility, and nagging curiosity.  Nice people, you know, but, after a while... I understood, and told her so.

But I mean, it's such an experience!  I love China.  I will definitely be back!

I'm sure she will be. I forget where she was headed next. We didn't stay in touch.

I'm thinking it was possibly something I said.