Riddle Me Middles

Last China missive

June 2nd, 2008 at 7:23 pm (Unaussprechlichen)

Pingjiang Lu, Suzhou: You can almost forget the modern world here, for a few moments, until the next galoot on an electric scooter reminds you by nearly running you over. But even then, there’s something unique amid the canals and pathways and worn stone steps. Perhaps it’s that it isn’t swept clean.

Oh, sure, the traditional Chinese music is piped in via carefully hidden speakers, but this isn’t and can’t be a Disneyland, not with less-than-rich locals poling down the canals on very real boats and hanging their laundry on iron rails outside the hutong courtyards. The street sports the usual share of ash and broken glass, a man passes by selling twine on a bicycle via his hawker’s cry playing on a recording megaphone, a Duracell beach-umbrella shelters a few worn wooden chairs where old men sit and smoke (and one offers me a seat when he sees me writing), a crowded group gambles inside one of the old buildings while a woman empties out the coal heating pieces from a stove — in short, it’s a way of life preserved, not untouched, bits of the modern world folded into it.

And that’s China, a grainy emulsion of cultural contexts, people doing what they can with what they have. Once I might have seen contradiction in it, but the longer I’ve been here, the less ironic it’s seemed.

And now I’m going home.