9 May 2016 Monday HANGZHOU
The rain spat a bit but waited util we were all back at our respective home nests before it came gently, early in the evening. Still, it was a very dark day. Gray light can make good photographs, but this was very gray.
At nine o’clock, those of us who could stay an extra day climbed into a van and were taken to LIngyin Temple to enjoy the honor of dining with the Master after a tour of the temple. One of the guides, Siaya, is a twenty-nine-year old sophisticated Ph.D. graduate, doing post-graduate study under Professor Shen and headed for Oxford in November for research on the background of Thomas More’s Utopia. Utopia was the subject of her dissertation.
Siaya is married to an artist – a sculptor- and they have a studio and a loft in Beijing, where he works and she stays when she is with him. Tomorrow, they were off to an art show in Shanghai now traveling internationally.
Shiya had seen the temple and suggested we sit and talk while the other tromped around taking photos. She spoke of how she was considered “a weird woman” in China because for wanting to study so much. In China, apparently, as a woman, you go to university, study very very hard, and when university is completed, you marry and have a baby. You marry a man who is a party member and so can hold a government job,and the money is secure. Artists are – as ever – considered outside proper society, but there seem to be many of them anyway.
Shiya described the life of her father, who loved literature and had many books that, as I understood it, were secreted during the Cultural Revolution, which had divided her family, for one side joined the Party, but her father did not, and so his job remained always menial. As with so many life-time office workers, she felt he did not live a healthy life, dying at fifty from lung cancer. But what kind of a life? Every day to sit at the desk, after hours to play Mah Jong and smoke – not healthy – and so she thought it was not surprising he died so young.
Professor Shen Hong is supporting a number of – from what I can gather – independent-type students. He has a group working under him doing research on Christian missionaries in China, who are compiling a biography of every Christian missionary who ever worked in China. His other group are Ph.D. students in English and English literature, who are writing on early English literature – such as More’s Utopia or Shakespeare, and who, once graduated, teach English language and literature. – all bright, enthusiastic people.
After our non-tour of the temple, someone rounded us up and told it was lunchtime. To eat with the Master! We were instructed that we were not to speak during the meal – complete silence. We marched into this vast hall with – maybe twenty – rows of polished wood long tables and benches that went in long rows from one end of the room to the other. In front of the long rows of empty benches and tables and facing us were sitting the master and the other masters, all shaven heads in various degrees of regrowth, all in gray robes, all men. Of course.
We were marched in single file to the very last bench row against the back wall. We sat on the benches without speaking for quite some time, one hand on each knee. facing the master(s). On the table in front of us were two white paper bowls and chopsticks in cellophane. After some time, a troop of orange-clad, variously shaven-headed monks appeared in single file and climbed onto the bench row directly before us, sitting down in their long row. One orange robed monk directly in front of us, stopped to honor his seat with the hands in prayer, and almost stopped the march, for his small bow had a domino effect on the row of monks behind him. When he stopped, his follower did not and for a moment the second follower did not. All recovered, but – nasty me – had visions of a row of orange-clad monks, one falling on top of another, piled up high behind a long wooden bench and table.
Once the monks were seated, a great gong was struck, the sound hurting my ears and body and the – forget the name of the screechy things played with drums – was whisked and scratched. The gong sounded again and again, each time more unpleasantly as far as I was concerned. Finally, it stopped, and there was a sonorous song-chant, neither one or the other but a mixture of the two. It went on for quite awhile, and sometimes it sounded as though they were saying “Ave Maria,” but I am fairly sure that was not the case.
.
Finally, the gong stopped, everyone sat down, the remaining rows between us and the one row of monks and the masters facing us at the far end of the hall remaining empty. Monks had come around with pails and ladles, piling into one bowl the white rice, into the other potato, some greens, a piece of fried tofu, and another vegetable. It tasted fine, and they even came round checking bowls and offering to pile more food into the bowls for seconds. Indeed I saw a number of monks, when they took off the full orange robe and were seen in their motley gray, to appear very well fed.
Time to eat was short. More song-chant, and everyone filed out. Back into the van and on to a boat tour of Westlake.
A young Chinese lad – Joshua T. Perry is his Western name – came up to me and said they he thought that the three carved figures that I had shown during my presentation were remnants of a local religion, now probably not practiced ,but belonging to the Hongzhou region. Wonderful news, because no one else had any idea what these strange statues were about. He was vital and enthusiastic and on his way to Australia in August to deliver a talk on art that had been protected the Cultural Revolution. Joshua had been in America, In Utah, for two months at a home stay with a Mormon family with seven children, and had worked at MacDonald’s under a Mexican supervisor, who hated Chinese. He had been all over the South and is working on his Masters and wants to go to University of Chicago for a Ph.D in Art history.
He pointed out how wonderful was this gray day in Westlake, as all becomes misty and mysterious, not detailed in the glaring sunlight. It was romantic, but taking photo,s unless you had a special camera, left you with only gray blobs.
We disembarked on the largest island of the three in Westlake, all park and curving paths around the lake that is within the island, along with tourist shops, and all crowded with many tourists. We wandered around, learned about the three moons that are reflected in the lake and the reflections of the candles lit within the stone lanterns submerged in the lake – so many lights multiply reflected – returned to the boat, passed a half-moon bridge that Sidney had taken a photos of, and were returned to the dock
And then Gwang came up to me and offered to take me to see the three- arched bridge on the Grand Canal. Super!
Gwang teaches English and English Literature, sixteen hours a week, at the University and has written on the Moule family, who were British Chinese missionaries for several generation in China. Joshua and another lad who is another university joined us, and we saw the three-arched bridge on the Grand anal, whose history goes back centuries, but whose details I cannot access on the Chinese internet. The day still misty and romantic and all details impossible to see or photograph but what I could see clearly was the maybe 50 – I have no idea how many – storied skyscraper that overlooks the Canal and its vast surrounding public spaces
It all smacks of prosperity and good living, at the same time honoring traditional Chinese architecture and values – We walked through a traditional area, but modern in every other aspect, tea houses and upscale shops, studios for people to create with clay or to paint their finished work, a shop where several were practicing the flat-stringed instrument that belongs to China. Inventive clay figurines and pottery and everywhere, beautiful plantings and greenery. All the best of the old and the new pulled in to a package of gracious living with Feng Shui and Traditional Chinese Medicine much practiced. Gwang’s father-in-law and her husband are both TCM practitioners.
It is difficult to become used to people yelling at each other and at me, but it is just a way of being friendly, and I did find that not everyone yells.
