Shaoxing (绍兴)
Day 1
During the first days after Chinese New Year, from an outsider's perspective, the country presents its blankest face, as everyone retreats behind closed doors except for rare firework-lighting sorties. Shops are locked and shuttered, streets are emptied of traffic, and you look in vain for signs of activity. The silence, like the weather, is numbing, and it can give rise to dark daydreams. For example, with this backdrop, I find it so much easier to imagine how Beijing would look if it were under siege, or in the grip of some frightening epidemic.
Absence is all that an outsider can see at this time. But this doesn't mean things aren't going on. They are, but indoors, inside the family, which has drawn in and bolted the door, at least for a day or two. The blank mask that the street shows you is purely for strangers; inside, there is warmth and intimacy and trust. The two stand in relationship with one another - the more the family draws itself in, the more it shuts out the outside, the greater the feeling of belonging. This is why you can never really "get" Christmas or Chinese New Year until you have won inclusion in the group - the power of these festivals lies in the sense of belonging they create.
To get away from the blankness of Beijing, I came to Shaoxing, which is a small city near Shanghai. It's famous for its wine, which is made of rice, and tastes like sherry, and for its famous people. The most famous is Lu Xun, who wrote bitter, satirical short stories to jolt his countrymen out of (what he perceived as) their apathy during the early part of the twentieth century. Shaoxing has threading canals, and black-tiled-whitewashed houses that remind me of those in Suzhou, but seem somehow less loved.
The whitewash is peeling in places, and where the canals in Suzhou were lined with graceful trees and teahouses, the canals here are lined with nondescript, dingy shops selling bric-a-brac. One can imagine a time when the two cities looked the same, and speculate on how their paths diverged: Suzhou embraced tourism, moved the residents out, beautified its canal-side walks, and decked out its old buildings with boutiques and souvenir-shops; meanwhile Shaoxing languished as a backwater. The result is that the old parts of Shaoxing are still lived-in and used by the community to an extent that I didn't see in Suzhou - this afternoon, I saw old women washing their clothes in the canal-water, as well as heritage architecture with laundry, dried fish, and eviscerated ducks all suspended from a washing-line outside - but at the same time everything is quietly falling apart.
This atmosphere, of lives lived, but disintegrating, combined with the raw, wintry weather, and the New Year's blankness (which is inescapable no matter where you are in China) to create a melancholy feel. But perhaps this is no bad thing at New Year. As the poem goes:
Now, the New Year reviving old desires
The thoughtful soul to solitude retires…
In the spirit of this, I would like to wish everyone a happy, peaceful, meditative New Year. Best wishes for the Year of the Snake!
Day 2
Today, I saw the crowds that I missed the day before. It turns out they were all waiting to see Lu Xun's house. Maybe they were there yesterday too, and I was just walking in the lonely parts of town. Whatever, the melancholy air was no match for tour-guides and camera flashbulbs.
I didn't have much time, so I skipped the crowds, and went to Qiu Jin's house instead. Qiu Jin was a rich, educated woman from Shaoxing who became an anti-imperial revolutionary, before being caught and executed in 1907. Lu Xun knew about her, and may have been thinking of her when he wrote "药", a story about an executed revolutionary whose sacrifice is misunderstood and rejected by superstitious townspeople. I didn't know much about her, but her house creates an interesting portrait: high life meets high conspiracy - I especially liked the way her room had a secret compartment where she used to hide guns and pamphlets. And then there are other details…I was taken with a photo of her defiantly wearing men's clothes. While I am a long way from being able to understand the motives that would push someone to plot an armed uprising against their government, I can easily relate to someone who rebelled against society's ideas about men and women. That's why, for me, the guns were picturesque, turning Qiu Jin into a larger-than-life heroine in an adventure novel, while the cross-dressing made her human again, not to mention raising all kinds of other questions about her life. It would be nice to think that one day both kinds of revolution - the democratic and the sexual - will be far in the past, and the efforts of Qiu Jin and others will seem implausibly romantic.
Finally, just before taking the train back to Beijing, I stole a glance at the Bund in Shanghai. I went back to Shanghai briefly last year, but it is years since I saw the Bund. Shanghai, and especially the Bund, has a unique place in my heart, which goes back to my first visit in 2005. I can't even describe it, except as a kind of swoon that has never gone away. I was very young when I first went to Shanghai.
