Chinese New Year in Suzhou

    I can't imagine how anybody calls anybody else to send New Year's greetings here in China; with the constant rattling of fireworks and ladyfingers, it's hard even to hear your phone go off, much less hold a conversation with it. Today is the Lantern Festival, yuanxiaojie, which marks the final day of Spring Festival vacation as well as the last day for fireworks in the city. The four boys from the building across from me have, I think, been running around with cigarette lighters in their hands all day, and the stone courtyard between my building and number 5 is blown with small drifts and lines of red wax paper flakes. Under the grey sky, they look like the aftermath of some destruction instead of old celebration.

    I have heard that Beijing is an exciting time during New Year, which officially passed on the 14th of this month (I know, Valentine's Day, and also the same weekend as NBA All-Star week, a coincidence that's generated more than a few good jokes over here). I'm sure it is a lot of fun up here, amid the cold and dirt, but since Spring Festival is supposed to be passed with family, I did the next best thing and opted for a friend's family; more accurately, Jingjing graciously invited me to spend the vacation with her family in Suzhou.

    If any of us had the power to open up American minds and leaf through them like encyclopedias, we would find in the title pictures of the "China" section more than a few images from Suzhou and its surroundings. Just quickly, if you think of China as a big chicken, the cities of Shanghai, Suzhou, Hangzhou and Ningbo are situated fairly close together right at the fullest curve of the ruff, below the Yangtze River Delta. Green lowlands, flat and very wet; a lot of ancient river bottom. No unrelenting, bitter cold, only the spiky, annoying kind. But no heating inside, which makes it worse than northern China in the winter, since Beijing's weather can at least be evaded.

    I admit I had certain preconceptions--no, call them lightweight hopes--about Suzhou long before I had a chance to go. The name of the place, ??, creates a fragrance of its own both when spoken and read; the name sounds cool and green and calm. The first character, ? or ? in traditional, originally referred to a full harvest, but later evolved to refer to mean revival, resurrection, particularly the revival of the spring season. Take the complicated character (the one on the right), copy it into your MS Word, expand the type to 36 or larger and look at it. On top a grass radical, on the bottom left a fish and to its right a rice shoot. On the plane to Shanghai, I read in a short local history book Jingjing lent me that the whole Suzhou area began as an island off the coast and below the mouth of the Yangtze (which I'm gonna call the Long River, 'cause that's its name). The land rose as the river deposited silt around it, and Tiger Hill (huqiu) rose out of the waves first. So Suzhou was born of the sea, like Aphrodite. I know, it's rather sentimental, but I couldn't pass.

    --Snow is coming down hard in the dark here in Beijing, while everything with a fuse is exploding as hastily as it can. Car alarms whirling everywhere. This might be Saigon--

     The next time I go somewhere, I swear I will do my homework on it first...and you know what, screw the history, I wouldn't even know where to start. Tiger Hill, which overlooks the western half of Suzhou, is hung with legends like a Christmas tree with ornaments. Beside one of the paths lies a massive boulder with a clean break right down the middle of it, said to be made by the First Emperor when testing a sword (perhaps the sword of the southern king Kelu) or scaring an old tiger away. Half-way up is a small pond, where one Buddhist monk is said to have preached to stones--since no people would listen to him--and so persuasively that the stones nodded as he spoke. Legends all the way up to the top. The hill itself has been carved and sculpted in places to make courtyards, narrow paths run around the slope over empty ravines, into gardens and past stand-alone buildings, those of the pillared, flying-eaves traditional variety. Winter plums, which had begun to bloom the week before Spring Festival, were everywhere, small yellow-green and pink flowers on carefully-pruned branches. At the top of Tiger Hill is a traditional seven-story Buddhist pagoda, a high one--but this one seems to look out on the city like we pedestrians do, because the building leans at thirteen degrees away from vertical. The Pisa of the East.

    I have said that Suzhou rose out of the ocean. It hasn't come all the way. The old city quarter, which is bigger than many of the "old quarters" I have visited, is quite defined by the canals. Canal and road run together, accompanying each other, as feet pass over the road and water down the canal--jade-green water, too, the color of purity in limestone-heavy China. My clearest memory is of Pingjiang Road, which runs north-south alongside the largest canal I saw there. The houses on the left side, their black-tile roofs and sooty white plaster walls are hugged right up against the canal wall, seeming even to lean over it in Venetian style. Then the green water, cold and twenty yards wide, moving over grey stone. The near bank, a low stone railing and a line of camphor trees backing it up. A wide tiled sidewalk, then storefronts and houses again of the same make. At intervals a bridge arches over the canal or a dirt lane moves off to the right, sometimes followed by a narrow canal of its own. Old men in leather hats walked by, and grandmothers led young children by the hand, presumably home to eat. Jingjing and I stood on one of the bridges and talked about what it meant to be from somewhere. That was a different road, actually, and a different day, but it might have been the same. And it might have been that day I had crabapple cake and plum-flower cake, and I swear between the two I can't match either name to either thing, though they are different enough. One looks like an ice cream cone made out of chewy batter, filled with red-bean and sweet osmanthus paste, sprinkled with candied fruit; the other a moon-cake-shaped thing of the same batter and similarly filled, with caramelized sugar on both sides. Oh, my, this simple-minded epicurean could die.

    I have to leave something out at this point, otherwise this email (which some will have deleted already) will be even more shamelessly long...and I think it'll have to be the Gardens. They are, collectively, Suzhou's most famous attraction, the Four Famous Gardens, with their flying eaves and window frames and green ponds, strange stones. Perhaps it was because I moved through two of them, Liuyuan and Shizilin, more quickly than they deserve that my impression of them is the least intense. And I think I'm going to leave out the New Industrial Park District, the new wealth of Suzhou.

    But the temple. At ten-thirty on New Year's eve, Jingjing's father--a nice guy, I wish I had the space to write about people--drove us to Xiyuan Si, the Western Paradise Temple, to burn incense. Driving in, it was like church on Christmas Eve: not a parking space for miles, the police out in force just to keep people moving. The temple is large, several courtyards, but the main section is an outer and an inner courtyard, with incense stands and troughs in the outer yard. For southern China, it was brutally cold that night. Yellow spotlights illuminated no fewer than eight hundred people in that outer courtyard, standing with not one pair of hands empty of a burning cluster of incense. A monk came out and began to speak, while the one hundred and eight strikes of a (the?) temple bell begun. The smoke was so bad I could not keep my eyes open for more than three or four seconds at a time, and the asthmatic realized he had no inhaler on him; it blew past my face in gusts, curled up over all the heads turned in one direction. A young man behind me was holding five clusters of expensive incense. I would never in my life have asked him what terrible luck he was trying to reverse, but I couldn't help but wonder. Then the snow began to fall; first sparingly, then growing severe. I wondered if all the sufferings of one year were really being covered up and muted after all.

    There is something very primal about Buddhism, something pre-intellectual, that Christianity has lost. Plated crosses on sky-blue altars decorated with a few flimsy pieces of silverware and fake poinsettias, these cannot compete with a single temple bell that vibrates straight through my heart. We threw our unfinished incense into a trough and proceeded to the interior courtyard. That area looks like any other temple courtyard you may or may not have seen: paved space, then a broad series of steps to the doors of the temple proper. At least ten military police stood in graduated lines on either side of the doorway, feet spread and hands clasped behind. Over the temple threshold, men with the left foot, women with the right; I stepped back as others kneeled, then followed the glued-together train of people around to the left, past the eighteen arhats, around the back to the Bodhisattva Guanyin, who must have been twenty feet tall. I would like someone who knows to explain to me why a temple is walked in one direction, and one does not go out the way one comes in. Then into the back garden before the exit. One halogen light came down hard onto a winter plum tree, which was in full bloom amid the snow. We squeezed out the narrow exit door and began to move out, and as we left, I caught sight of another temple building off to the side. Again, two sets of those magnificent sloped eaves, maybe three, red pillars and windows, orange roof-beams lit from below. It positively stared out at me through the snow, with that incalculably old, darkened dignity that I worshipped in the idea of China when I was very young, that some part of me wishes to reproduce somehow, or reflect.

    I will go back to Suzhou at some point, though on what pretense, I don't know. In nine days, I missed half of it.

    I hope everyone is doing well. The sap is running in the Maine woods, I hear.

    Best,
    Canaan Morse