6. Suzhou

We were five minutes too late to see the Minister’s Garden, a Ming Dynasty destination famous for its architecture and greenery. That turned out to be a blessing: instead, my family spent the evening wandering through the centuries-old streets of Suzhou. 

Suzhou is a literary and artistic haven: comparing it to any other city wouldn’t do it justice. It was in Suzhou that poets and writers perfected the craft of literature down to the arrangement of desks and the positioning of pens; it was in Suzhou that jade and calligraphy rose to fame. A quote sums it up: “above, there’s Heaven; below, there’s Su-Hang.” Su-Hang refers to Suzhou and Hangzhou, the gems of the Southlands. 

Suzhou is stunning. Waterways shimmer gracefully between the watercolor architecture; an apothecary nestles between a bookmark-painter, a candy-weaver, and an antique library. 

It’s a city that fully understands and grasps the present, but keeps its feet in the past. I.M. Pei, one of the world’s most renowned architects and the designer of the Suzhou Museum, pretty much sums up Suzhou’s attitude towards art and history:

“Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history but it’s not very deep. I understand that time has changed, we have evolved. But I don’t want to forget the beginning. A lasting architecture has to have roots.”

We visited the Suzhou Museum and the Minister’s Garden the next day: neither can be captured in words. I can say, though, that the architecture of the Suzhou Museum perfectly complimented its exhibitions; the black-and-white minimalism lent an airy, swooping quality to the calligraphy and paintings.

But I think pictures will do those sites more justice; what I want to write about, instead, took place in the streets. 

My family bought quite a few items in that ancient alleyway: a pouch from the apothecary to fend off mosquitoes (it worked until we got to Hangzhou, which is famous for its poisonous mosquitoes), delicacies made from roses and hibiscus, a box of dragon’s-beard candy. 

Dragon’s-beard candy is made from peanuts, coconut, rice flour, and sugar; it’s similar to cotton candy, but with a subtler and warmer taste. It traces its history to the Han Dynasty, and the master who handmade it before my family was nothing if not proud of his culinary lineage. 

“Twenty years of dragon’s beard!” he declared, as my dad asked him how long he’d been working. “I’m a master.” To my surprise, my dad - who is not usually a generous tipper - insisted on giving a huge tip for a box of candy. 

We headed deeper into the alleyway. Then something caught my eye: a small shop nestled in the corner, with barely enough room for two people. The walls were lined with bookmarks, gentle colors roosting on shelves of weathered wood. In the corner of the corner was an old man, hunched over a blank piece of paper. 

Fascinated, I approached him. He was painting a bamboo pattern onto a bookmark. 

He looked up. “Hello,” he said serenely. He had a sort of knowing smile; his face was as worn as the sparse furniture in his shop.

“Hi,” I said. And then, “your bookmarks are beautiful.” The designs featured everything from blossoms to bamboo to birds to images from Tang poetry. 

He nodded, nodded again to my dad, who’d entered after me. On his desk was an array of brushes, a palette, and a ceramic bowl of water. 

“Can I watch you paint?” I asked. 

He nodded and resumed his work in silence. After a few minutes, I started looking around. 

“Do you have any designs with peach blossoms?” I asked, suddenly struck with the idea of gifting a peach-blossom-bookmark to my middle school math teacher (long story behind the peach blossoms). 

He raised his eyes. “No,” he said. “But I can do one right now.” 

“No, that won’t be necessary - ”

But he’d already dipped his brush into a pink pigment. Before I knew it, peach blossoms were blooming on a blank bookmark, followed by the steady strokes of a black branch and spots of green. 

It was stunning; it was humbling. The detail to the petals: he used at least four shades of pink and red. A bird appeared next to the clusters of blossoms, feathers golden and blue. 

He looked up. “Is there anything you’d like to write on the side?” 

“Um,” I said. “What about ‘master of mathematics’ or something like that?” 

He nodded. In slender strokes, he transcribed my phrase down the side of the bookmark, waited for it to dry, and then tucked it into a protective sleeve. 

I marveled at the finished product: it was beautiful. 

“Thank you,” I said. 

“It’s my duty,” he said mildly. “Is there anything else you’d like? It’s twenty-five yuan for one bookmark.”

Are you kidding me? Manufactured bookmarks in the States cost three times as much. 

“Sure,” I said. “I like your bamboo design. It’s beautiful.”

“Will do,” the artist said. He pulled out the bookmark he’d been working on and continued tracing thin green strokes into the paper. 

In that moment, I understood why my dad had given the dragon’s-beard maker such a huge tip. In this little haven of artists and artisans, the residents breathed and loved and lived within their crafts; they nourished themselves on it. This sort of artistic purity is so rare that we outsiders must view their humbleness and good humor and low prices as selflessness. And with our materialism, we repay this selflessness in the only way we know how: money. 

“Here,” he said, the smile still on his face. I wondered what his apprenticeship in painting had entailed, whether he’d taught himself or was part of a lineage of bookmark-makers. I wondered what memories were tucked into those countless wrinkles. “Shall I write your name?” 

I opened my mouth, closed it in embarrassment. 

“She doesn’t know how to write her name,” my dad said. He’d been silent the whole time, watching the master paint the bookmarks, studying the art on the shelves. 

“Oh?” He looked bemused. 

“I’m from America,” I explained. The excuse felt flimsy: each time I said it, I seemed to wear it one inch thinner. 

“I can write it for you,” my dad said. The artist passed him a piece of paper and a pen - on it, my dad inscribed three Chinese characters: 陈若云. My Chinese name. 

I swallowed down a lump in my throat. Although I’d shrugged off the uneasiness from Shanghai in the last few hours, it returned in full force. What seventeen-year-old didn’t know how to write her own name? What Chinese girl couldn’t write - or even recognize - her family name?

The bookmark maker, to his credit, made no comment other than a “well, you have time to learn.” And then he wrote the characters onto the bookmark. 

As we bid goodbye to him and shuffled sideways out of the shop (the entrance was too small to fit two people), I couldn’t turn away from the suffocating knowledge that two of three people had known how to write my name in the last five minutes, and that not one of them had been me. Suzhou’s streets suddenly seemed too narrow, as if the walls were going to squeeze me through the pavement and out of the city.

If I hadn’t belonged in Shanghai’s metropolis, I definitely didn’t belong here, in this sanctuary of the past. 

“You okay?” my dad asked. “You’re very silent.” 

“Just thinking.”

The evening turned out to be one of the best nights of my life, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was always one step behind everyone else, a blip in the synchronous beauty that was Suzhou.

And I’m not sure if that feeling will ever leave. My Nainai (paternal grandmother) gifted me with 3000 Mandarin flashcards before I returned to America, and that daunting plastic stack has become yet another symbol of the distance between me and the blur of yellow faces that has become them. But, being a stubborn optimist, my clumsy attempts to relearn Mandarin (although it’s going surprisingly smoothly, perhaps because of all the work I put in two years ago) feel encouraging at the very least. There’s something soothing about tracing the characters over and over, something akin to the rhythmic lull of Mama’s Mandarin and the steady folds of dumpling dough in Baba’s hands. 

I want to love China, in the same way that people try to love the parts of themselves they cannot change, and what I saw of Suzhou and Shanghai intensified that desire to a near-painful extent. 

Just yesterday, I learned how to write the names of some Chinese cities, Shanghai among them. On a whim, I wrote out the phrase that had made me cringe for so long: 我爱上海

I couldn’t help but laugh. Even though they were crafted by my hand - or perhaps because of that - the characters looked ridiculous. I erased them and continued tracing the 海 I was practicing. It means “sea.” 

No hard feelings, I thought for no particular reason at all. I wasn’t sure to whom that was addressed: myself? The phrase I’d just erased? The ambiguous American tourists? The natives in Shanghai? 

I gave up trying to dissect my feelings, and started tracing my name instead: 陈若云. In the morning light, it was hard to feel anything but a peaceful contentment.