The Lake is Everything

I'm ashamed to admit it here, but it took quite a bit of effort to get up my nerve to go to Hangzhou last weekend. I was planning on going alone, and there seemed to be a lot of logistics to consider. Navigating the train, finding the hostel, not disappearing into the country. But I saw sun in the forecast, and I was ready to get out from under the cloud of smog and see what else this part of China might have to offer.

West Lake. That was the starred site in the day-trips-from-Shangha section of the guidebook. Just this whole huge empty blob filling up most of the city map of Hangzhou. What would it bee like in real life? Not like the absurdly technicolor photos in the inset, not this time of year. Maybe like nothing at all.

The train station at Shanghai's western edge was like Penn Station at rush hour times twenty and still somehow more logical, vast. I wanted to turn around as soon as I got there, but I pressed on, through the station where the multitudinous signs told me everything and nothing, in both English and Chinese. Arrows took me in circles, electronic voices asked me to look up from my phone, to respect the property, to separate my recycle waste from my other waste, to keep my tissues out of the key hole toilets, to queue, to not recline on the benches.

On the train I got a window seat, but the country I looked out on was nothing to write home about--just more developments petering out into agricultural land, and before we could have gotten very far at all, we were there. The subway station in Hangzhou was almost as ridiculous as Shanghai, the old woman behind me in line at the ticket machines kept shoving her body into me as if that would make it all go faster, and I shoved back. Ridiculous. Who gave a crap about this lake, this place? What could be worth all this?

It was only when I finally got off the subway and began to walk into the old part of the city, and towards the direction my hostel supposedly was that the air stilled some, and I looked up to see see meat hanging from doorways, laundry drying in trees, a woman cooking a mysterious something in a tiny room fronting the alley, people lined up on the concrete stairs to buy her secret. I almost walked on, ever the oblivious outsider, but some force that we'll call the idea that I MIGHT NEVER HAVE THIS CHANCE AGAIN pulled me into the line that was rife with happy chatter I couldn't understand, and the thought that they were making fun of me rolled off, and I just stood there, smiling. "I am here," I thought, "It's me. Here."

When it finally came to be my turn, she said something to me and I shook my head. Then she switched to English: "Spicy or sweet." "Both," I said. Definitely both; She squirted an orange sauce and a purple sauce. Speaking Chinese again, she wished me happy new year--one of the only phrases I know. How were we still celebrating this? I thought, and in the same beat returned her wishes with a sense of cheer that was surprising to me. The food was rolled up in a newspaper and in my hand. And it was good. So was everything else I ate and drank in Hangzhou: sweet sesame beef jerky, preserved duck, spicy beef noodles, steamed pork buns, french-style elephant-ear cookies, braised fish head in stew, a whisky cocktail with a charred cinnamon stick, a beautiful pot of fresh ginger tea.

And it was when I had the cocktail on an impulse stop at a mysterious place--called Sunrise Lounge--on my lovely mobike ride back to the hostel which now felt like home that I realized I had been playing a game with myself all along, a game of withholding the lake from myself. Because when I had gotten to it, after the tea and before the fish, in the hour or so before sunset, it was clear the lake was everything--the amoebic expanse of it, the silver light reflecting off it, on it, the hills in the hazy distance. I can't even really tell how it's true that there were many of us crowded around it, but still, when I looked out, I felt like I was alone, like I was no one, and that was a miracle, it felt.

I played the same game the next morning too. Wandering in a new direction from my hostel and into the Sunday market where they were selling every kind of fish and every kind of tangerine. And eggs and plungers and dumplings and finally in the back of the wet market I found some yogurt and then went to sit in a park where I watched street sweepers gossip over their cell phones and children play badminton and a man go on and on with some terrifying form of beatboxing and two women dance with swords and time kept ticking by and I pushed on to the lake. And even though the map on my phone showed me walking towards it, I felt like I would never get there, finally finding a park with hills the map didn't show and twisty paths and then more roads and everyone and then, finally, after I was out of breath and sore and sweaty and the sun had finally come out from behind the clouds, there it was again, that blessed lake. There were so many more pagodas and paths and temples and vistas and and and ...

I missed my train home. I wish I could tell you I had stayed in Hangzhou and am writing from there now but the nice people at the train station shoved me on the next one, where it was standing room only, and somehow through the sardine-crush of all the Sunday people finally coming back to this massive city I made it back to the quiet of my temporary apartment with all my temporary things, and since then it has been a really intense week of work filled with classes, meetings, emails, conversations, so many meals and drinks, so many steps and thoughts and plans, so much good news and bad, but just above it all, floating somewhere just out of plain sight, this vision, this lake.