10 May 2016 Monday HANGZHOU
Aizezi picked me up at nine this morning , and off we went to see Ancient Street. We took the boat that runs on the East Canal from the center of town for a ride of about an hour to reach the East Canal”s end, from where we could easily walk to this glimpse into nineteenth-century Hangzhou..
The ride on the Canal, which everyone calls a “river,” is beautiful, with willows hanging over its placid waters and trees and shrubs lining the banks of both sides. On one side, home come almost down to the edges of the banks, but on the other side, the banks are filled with trees and plantings, parks and docks for loading passengers on the boat. We saw two egrets, a fisherman pulling up crabs in a net, all sorts of people walking or strolling along, a beautiful variety of plants, many bridges, one of which, rebuilt, dated back to the Song Dynasty – though a dispute arose about that, for another passenger said “Ming” Dynasty. Ether Ming or Song, rebuilding was certainly a good thing to do. The boat chugged gently, the pilot sang along with the traditional Chinese music, and you could imagine Hangzhou as it must have been a century ago, without traffic or vehicle horns or petrol fumes.
Ancient street looked just like my photo, with its narrow streets and many shops, the products sold from the twenty-first century, but the extent and energy of the commercial transactions unchanged. My interest in Ancient Street was somewhat diminished by the most awful odor (Aizezi said it was tofu), and I completely forgot to look for the ancient shops that I had read about in my haste to leave the area.
Aizezi is a Uyghurs, one of the fifty-five recognized minority groups of China, who are not Han. Aizezi grew up near the Russian border in the northwest of China. HIs parents wanted him to be well-educated, so they sent him to school in another province at age sixteen, where he lived with three other students in an apartment.
Those from Uyghurs, along with those those from Tibet, are viewed with great suspicion by the Central government, About once a month, Aizezi, a student of world literature, working on his Ph.D. dissertation on the Turkish writer Pamuk, is called into the police station to sign papers testifying that he promises not to destroy the Chinese government. He cannot stay at ordinary hotels, but he is a student at the University of Zhejiang and a teaching assistant in his Department of World Literature. He hopes to find a teaching position after he competes his studies.
