Shanghaied

"It seems we have been sold" are not necessarily comforting words in a foreign country, removed from familiar elements and devices. David and I had taken advantage of an underground taxi (smoking allowed) from Shanghai and, short of the first toll gate, we were “sold” to another driver. The transfer involved scrambling up an embankment and over a K-rail onto the freeway, from a leather-interior of an Audi sedan to the all-purpose utilitarian blue "bread loaf" taxi that is ubiquitous in Asia, and once again I was giggling at the absolute silliness of travel in China. Or rather travel with David in China. (I should point out the obvious, that this is not group travel, not paid-lots-for travel, not a “guest” experience).
Suzhou was interesting...its beautiful classical architecture has been celebrated to the point of being duplicated in every new structure in
the old part of the city (not unlike Santa Fe, Santa Barbara, etc.) This could only be an improvement over the tenements-covered-with-bathroom-tile approach of China’s Great Leap Forward, and more tasteful than the current trend in blending euro-classical architecture with Chinese Bauhaus: it can’t be described, really, but I have vowed to do a photographic study of freakish architecture one day. Anyway, Suzhou has a lot of what were once private gardens, by our standards small parks, that are beautiful and quietly appealing. Always with tufa-like stones from Tai Lake...there’s a solution to the Mono Lake crisis: it is a ready-made classical Chinese garden! It is also the first time I heard the awful phrase “lookie lookie” called out at the tourist gauntlet shops, despite the Hollywood stereotype. A nice silk factory/museum with good prices and an odd Vegas-style extravaganza a la Cirque de Soleil (or their expansion troupe) called Suzhou Dream, which has nothing to do with Suzhou at all. It was very cold though; Gobi winds that were playing havoc with Beijing life were affecting “south” China as well, but without the sand in our teeth. I braved a shopping excursion to a department store to buy long underwear there.
Hangzhou, China’s Heaven on Earth according to the Poet, has suffered from overdevelopment and rapid development and places an awful lot of faith in the words of the past. The western lake is beautiful, and you could spend a happy day wandering at leisure if you can ignore the
astonished stares from people who should be well used to foreigners by now. My hair seemed to be the chief culprit in this area where a lot of
people had chosen the orange-Asian look: they probably thought I had a bad stylist. The Silk Museum is well done here, very nice, with a
competent interpretative consultant.
Between the two cities is an old, living-history city called Tongli built around canals, so very much like Italy’s Venice without St. Mark’s Square and Murano glass, right down to the unlikely prospect of delivering a piano to a residence downtown. No doubt that is what has saved it the Sovietization of other communities. It was beautiful, on UNESCO’S world heritage list, so of course admission is charged to tourists. Admission to a city! So far it seems to be off the Western tourist circuit, though, and there are more vendors who literally drop what they are doing to see a laowai rather than call “hello!”
Dinner with `David’s local contact was in Suzhou, in an upscale teahouse with private, curtained rooms that met my every expectation of a stereotypical opium den. I thought it was enchanting; David has no patience for opportunistic fakery and found it overpriced and overrated. Hero, David’s friend, was all business: he handles all the American tour business, and has accounts with Globus Gateway and other
large tour mills, quite successful. I imagined he spends a lot of time in the teahouse, curtains drawn, as he seemed reluctant to go home to
his wife and child as David suggested.
The last bit of the trip was a mad chase to get to Mt. Putuoshan. This is one of four sacred Buddhist mountains, a place the Lonely Planet
describes as “the China we all dream about.” There has been no development on the mountain, the temples are intact, the trees very old and very big, cobblestone streets, ocean views abound as it is on an island. Getting there satisfied David’s conception that a visit to a sacred place should be a pilgrimage, and a pilgrimage should not be easy. A four-hour bus ride and a ferry got us there; a return ferry and a six-hour bus ride got us out. David paid his respects to the Goddess of Mercy, Guanyin, and to my utter surprise, filled his suitcase with souvenirs such as dried fish and a collection of the Four Famous Shells (conch, nautilus, something, something else). We ate seafood all day...or he did, and I picked at veggies. I am still seasick.
We arrived in Shanghai by bus, snaking our way downtown through a maze of 60-storey highrises, advertisements in English and Chinglish, past a Bentley dealer (a first for me), Gucci, Versace, Dior...it could have been downtown San Francisco, Rome, Paris, Rodeo Drive. David was
innocently unaware of the monetary value represented there, but he did look disgusted and I knew he was thinking about the people in Yunnan
province; poor, undereducated, without medical care, denizens of the Burma Road and other byways of Old China. As exciting as it was for me
to be in this overwhelming (an understatement) but somewhat familiar civilization, it was an unfortunate conclusion to his pilgrimage to
Putuoshan. I sealed the experience by treating him to dinner: I had planned on the Hard Rock Cafe but as it was closed, we went to a churrasco restaurant called Brasil Steakhouse instead. Carnivores take note: $12 buys you a salad (salad!!!) buffet, a dessert buffet and all
the grilled meat (beef, pork, chicken, beef, beef) you can eat, sliced off the spit at your table and served with salsa. The place is run by
Brazilians, with waitstaff and cooks from Brazil with whom I chatted giddily in Spanish. The clientele is largely Western refugees from the
expat community. David was intimidated and overwhelmed: he ate too much meat and drank too much red wine and suffered correspondingly from it. I told him. "Welcome to America!"