Four Years of Living, Learning, Teaching, and Becoming Half-Chinese in Suzhou, China
| Home Page ABOUT THE BOOK Why a Memoir? Meaning of the Title Book Format What/Where Is Suzhou? Why Suzhou Is So Fitting for This Book Where Can I Buy The Book? SELECTED PREVIEWS Chapter 5: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? Chapter 20: A Precious Belt Chapter 29: A City Shuts Down UPDATES SINCE 2006 Our Story Suzhou's Story EXTRA PHOTOS Related to the Book Suzhou 2001-2006 Suzhou Since 2006 ABOUT: The Author My Next Book My SuzhouPlus Website |
 
 PREVIEW FROM CHAPTER 20,
Author's Note: The excerpt below does not include the chapter's sidebars. "A PRECIOUS BELT" Spring brought Suzhou back to life. Elephantine leaves reappeared on the sycamores, delicate green fans blossomed on the ginkgos, and scarlet stars decorated the Japanese maples. Entire brigades of weather-beaten countrywomen doing the city’s roadside gardening summarily evicted the white, purple, and green winter kales, replacing them with daisies, petunias, marigolds, and chrysanthemums. Even the bamboo, green all winter long, was topped with the pastel shades of new growth. Apartment buildings that had been virtually blacked out on winter evenings now shone with fluorescent blue-white auras and an occasional incandescent yellow. With the cold weather finally passed, Suzhouren could enjoy a little nightlife again rather than simply huddling in darkened homes under layers of blankets, with only hot water bottles and each other for warmth. Another sign of the season, a marked increase in bicycles on the streets, infected me with a craving for physical exercise. The more sure of myself I felt in Suzhou, the more interested I was becoming in exploring on my own. Not the tourist sites, but the everyday places, the hidden nooks and crannies. I had taken a couple of tentative excursions the previous fall on Ping Ping’s brother’s decrepit Yongjiu, a rusting, three-speed bike with only one working gear and thick tires that mysteriously insisted on sudden deflation whenever I strayed too far from home. Jian Ming’s old bicycle might indeed last forever as its Chinese name promised, but not for me. With Ping Ping’s help, I went shopping for something more befitting a waiguoren and ended up with a banana-yellow, 21-speed, Giant brand mountain bike, manufactured just twenty-five miles away in Kunshan by a Taiwanese company. My new wheels set me back twelve hundred yuan ($145), a monstrous price compared to the two or three hundred yuan most Suzhouren paid for their new bicycles. “Do you tomorrow like to see Bao Dai Qiao la?” Ping Ping asked me only a week later after dinner at her parents’ house. “My father say he take you, ride bicycle.” “What is Bao Dai Qiao?” I knew qiao meant bridge, but I had never heard this name before. “This bridge famous in Suzhou. Very old, like tourist place. Cannot using it. Just kan kan, look look.” “Sure, that would be nice. I’m always interested in seeing gardens and historical places.” I also wasn’t about to turn down any chance to explore a new section of Suzhou, especially by bike. “My father know you like this places. He tomorrow morning take us.” When we returned to Ping Ping’s apartment, I did a little Internet homework. Bao Dai Qiao (Precious Belt Bridge in English) was so named to commemorate Wang Zhong Shu, the ninth century governor who reputedly donated a valuable jade belt to help pay for its construction. First built as a canal towpath in 819 A.D., Bao Dai Qiao was famous for its fifty-three arch design; at 317 meters (1,040 feet), it was the longest ancient arch bridge still standing in China. The bridge’s biography made our planned excursion sound moderately promising. We set out around ten o’clock the next morning looking more like a circus menagerie than a bicycling tour group. Ping Ping wore Capri pants and sandals while perched on a red, banana seat bike sized for a twelve-year-old. Her father, dressed in the unofficial Chinese uniform of white shirt, gray slacks, and black shoes, pedaled the two-wheeled equivalent of a rundown pick-up truck. I was typically American: bicycle T-shirt, gym shorts, white athletic socks, and Nikes to go with my shiny new, flaming yellow mountain bike. We pedaled east on Nan Huan Dong Lu, quickly reaching the entrance to the Suzhou Porcelain Insulator Works factory that terminated the alley behind Ping Ping’s apartment. Next came its neighbor, the Suzhou Fu Mei Shi Crop Care plant, a joint venture between Jiangsu Chemical Pesticide Group and the American company FMC. I felt less than heartened by a reminder that I lived two doors down from a pesticide factory. We turned south on Dong Qing Lu, paralleling one of Suzhou’s lesser waterways. We biked at an easy pace for Ping Ping’s father’s sake, and also because Ping Ping required two rotations of her pedals for every one of mine. On our left, parked barges crowded the canal bank, their tiny pilot houses doubling as studio apartments for their husband and wife crewmates. Steady breezes fluttered the family wash like naval pennants and wafted the mixed scents of fried food and burnt cooking oil across our path. Small children peeked wide-eyed from a few of the cabins, while scrawny black dogs skittered past them, rushing from one end of the deck to the other. To my right, I noticed the guarded entrance into another industrial complex, this one facing back toward our apartment. A dual Chinese/English sign proudly announced Jiangsu Chemical Pesticide Company, again. For the first time, I realized that my stays in Suzhou were taking place at the fringe of a pesticide manufacturing park. Nervous thoughts flashed through my mind: the air I breathed every day, the tap water Ping Ping boiled so assiduously before we drank it, the small daily accumulations of dust on our window ledges and furniture, the local produce we ate. Not to mention the possibility of toxic chemical clouds from industrial fires or explosions. Was Ping Ping’s apartment upwind or downwind from her neighborhood pesticide plants? I wondered. The canal beside us suddenly transformed from a maritime trailer park into the loading dock for a brick works. A dozen enormous barges sat side by side, filled to varying degrees with tens of thousands of neatly stacked, orange-red bricks. Those barges would eventually be roped together to form another of the water-borne freight trains that plied Suzhou’s canals like floating strings of homely beads. Further south, at a ninety-degree bend in the road, Ping Ping’s father dismounted his bike, as did we. He spoke briefly to Ping Ping, then walked over to confer with a man standing outside a small shop. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Are we lost?” “My father say before this road straight. Now change it. He ask somebody another road.” The detour forced us west, away from the canal and through a series of busy streets. I didn’t know where we were until a replica of the Eiffel Tower loomed in the center of a roundabout ahead of us, a landmark I instantly recognized from past rides on my own. We were in Wuxian City, a southern district now fully incorporated under Suzhou’s administrative umbrella. I also knew that after forty-five minutes of riding, we were barely ten minutes from home at my normal pedaling pace. We circled Wuxian’s mock Eiffel Tower and forged onward with best guess as our compass, abetted by local residents who Ping Ping’s father periodically interrupted for directions. Our circuitous route led us past a gated complex of bright yellow garden apartments standing alone amid open fields of turned earth. Garden apartments like these had begun grabbing up huge handfuls of the country’s most fertile farmland. Further down the road, we came upon another urban finger extending into the countryside, this one a small collection of two- and three-story villas. These were houses in the classically American style, complete with driveways and garage doors, back yards, patios, and terraces. Plain, dirt-brown country houses and vegetable fields flanked both sides of this new development. After uncounted millennia spent as marshy rice fields sprinkled with bent-backed peasant farmers, these rural lands were giving way to suburbia. Expensive new villas, wide avenues, and personal cars were fast replacing farm huts, dirt paths, and rickety, three-wheeled carts. There was precious little room for xiangxiaren peasants here any more; soon, there would likely be none. “What does that sign say?” I asked Ping Ping, pointing at a billboard for the new houses. “For the new house sell it,” she answered. “Price 1,880 yuan one meter.” About $228 per square meter, $21.17 per square foot. “Is that a good price in Suzhou?” “Yes, price cheap. Industrial Park house now seven thousand yuan one meter. Before, Industrial Park more cheap, maybe two thousand yuan one meter. I before should buy this, but I cannot. Now price very up. Maybe you buy house here. Good, price can up.” I wasn’t quite ready to invest in Chinese real estate, but I was still curious. “Why is the price here so cheap?” “This country, far from city. Here have no bus, no taxi, no supermarket, no fruit or vegetable. I think here every must have car.” I couldn’t judge the construction quality from the road, but the villas looked reasonably attractive despite being tract-house identical and set closer together than Americans would like. Nevertheless, these were the first detached houses I had seen anywhere around Suzhou, and the price seemed a bargain. A three hundred square meter residence would come to 564,000 yuan, or just $68,360 for thirty-two hundred square feet. Thanks to Ping Ping’s father’s persistence, we eventually found ourselves traveling along the same canal we had followed earlier, only now it was on our right. We had obviously circled around past our objective and were headed back northward. The canal beside us had also morphed again, this time into a recycling station crowded with barges slowly filling up on newsprint, cardboard, plastic bottles, metal cans, and Styrofoam packing material. “Do you know where we are now?” I asked Ping Ping. “Bu zhidao. I don’t know this place. My father say this right. Soon go there.” I kept pedaling, enjoying whatever the passing scenery brought. For me, it was all new, all sightseeing. Instead of great walls or famous pagodas, I was getting a guided bicycle tour of the people’s China, for better and for worse. I only worried that Ping Ping or her father might be getting tired. A fence up ahead marked a dead end in the road. Now what? On our left, an abandoned factory stood silently, surrounded by a chain link fence leaning heavily over a head-high harvest of weeds. Broken windows checkered the building face like square Bingo tokens randomly scattered across an upright card. High above the ground, two huge, jagged holes had been cut out of the building’s side, perhaps to evacuate machinery too big to fit through the doors or carry down the stairs. Now they were just gaping wounds, left untreated, on an industrial carcass already picked clean. “What was this building?” I asked Ping Ping. “What did they make here?” “Bu zhidao,” she responded almost reflexively. “I don’t know. Before maybe government company. No money. Just go away, leave it.” We followed the road all the way to the dead end. There on our left, hidden from view by that hollow industrial shell, Bao Dai Qiao trailed directly away from us to the north. The two-dozen arches at each end were short and all the same size, giving most of the bridge a long, low-slung look. The five central arches rose to a modest peak, as though the two ends had been compressed enough to create a small bulge in the middle. Curiously, the bridge’s long, low-slung design looked vaguely like a stone belt passing through fifty-three arched loops. Where I had expected to find a neatly groomed tourist site, I discovered a lonely, half-abandoned stone bridge. Instead of guides, ticket takers, souvenir stands, and tourists, there were only three aged, heavy-set countrywomen squatting near the water’s edge, pulling weeds from the dirt-covered plot. On the far side of the bridge, a young Chinese man sat on a stone bench, his girlfriend perched crosswise on his lap. They were Bao Dai Qiao’s only visitors, undoubtedly looking more for privacy than for history. We parked our bikes and crossed a weedy field to the foot of the bridge. Two rows of skinny saplings were the only signs of recent landscaping; mounds of dark earth still pyramided loosely around their bases. A pair of weather-pitted stone lions faced us at the near end of the bridge. Across the bridge, two more stone lions sat with their backs to us, guarding a small pavilion, a modest stone monument, and a black incense burner. “Is safe la?” Ping Ping asked. It seemed like a pretty good question. The bridge was covered with uneven, irregularly spaced paving stones, and wild grasses and weeds sprouted neglectfully in the spaces between. More disturbing, mazes of supporting timbers crisscrossed beneath several of the arches. I had read on the Internet that the bridge had been renovated to its present form in 1831, but it looked as though little had been done since. Precious Belt Bridge looked more forgotten than precious, nearly as abandoned as that old factory behind us. “Well, it’s been here for over a thousand years,” I ventured, fingers crossed. “So I don’t think there’s much chance it’ll fall down while we’re here.” The three of us headed a bit more cautiously than necessary across the bridge. Ping Ping and her father continued down the other side while I stopped in the center to snap pictures and take in the scenery. Before me stretched an ancient, stone-paved walkway over twenty-six arches, leading back a dozen centuries into China’s imperial past. Behind me, another twenty-six arches led to the ruined hulk of the empty factory, bleak testimony to the recent past of state planning and state-owned enterprises. On my left, two old men cast fishing nets into the water from a broad, flat-bottomed boat. To my far right, the four-lane steel bridge that had taken Bao Dai Qiao’s place carried dozens of honking blue trucks toward a new economic future in which Mao and the dynastic emperors had already been mythologized almost to irrelevance. I joined Ping Ping and her father on the far side of the bridge. “What are they going to do here?” I asked. Her father laughed while he answered. “My father say the city soon fix Bao Dai Qiao, make nice garden for tourists,” Ping Ping translated. “Some boat ride take tourist here, see other places too. My father say the foreign come here, pay thirty or forty yuan can go in, see the garden and the bridge. He say we today see free.” Now I understood why he was laughing. Few things please Chinese people more than getting a bargain. I was pleased as well, but for a completely different reason. I had arrived in time to see Bao Dai Qiao as it really was, not what it would look like after being cleaned up and converted into a prettified, tourist trap version of itself. Regardless of its humble appearance, Bao Dai Qiao seemed destined for another renovation, to stand yet a while longer. Perhaps it was blessed by the choice of fifty-three arches, following the Buddhist proverb, “Climb fifty-three steps to pay tribute to Buddha,” that had led some holy sites to install precisely that number of steps at the final ascent to their temples. When the tourists finally arrive, however, the abandoned factory will certainly have been demolished, and the old fishermen will be gone. Departed as well will be yet another fisherman I watched row shirtless alongside the twelve-hundred-year-old bridge while his bevy of cormorants dove for small fish in the dirty water, ropes tied securely around their necks to keep them from swallowing their catch. He will doubtless have been forced elsewhere for the sake of a tourism industry that prefers its history more neatly packaged. |