Mountains, Flutes and Constants

Last weekend, most of our group (roommates and all) headed southwest on a 5 hour train journey to a city named YuShan in the Jiangxi province. From there we had a short journey up to SanQingShan (roughly translates to the Three Distinct Mountains). I think most of us were not quite sure of what we were getting in to, for example not many of us packed for colder weather as we had just left Hangzhou’s mid-thirties. But we were treated to an amazing range of granite peaks and valleys and wooded slopes, with the life-sized versions of the trees that Bonsais are likely to have been harvested from.

The whole spectacle, with the sunlight appearing and disappearing in a moody display with the clouds and fog, I remember thinking that poor Ansel Adams had missed out on quite so much out in the East. Speaking of which, I have uploaded some photographs to the above link and I warn that they do not do justice. We spent the night out in tents at the courtyard of a Daoist temple near the summit of one the tallest peaks in the area and woke up early the next morning with the hope of catching the sunrise. It turned out that we were slightly late which meant that we, draped in our sleeping bags to keep warm and holding our bamboo walking sticks had a very brisk Gandhiesque march up the rest of the way. Still beautiful. We got back late Sunday night and after getting all my homework done for the next day couldn’t help but feeling really enthused about wherever my next trip out of Hangzhou would take me.

Otherwise, the last two weeks have seen me falling into the academic routine, which also means that I am beginning to discover where my free time in the week tends to lie. I have taken up learning the Dizi (the Chinese bamboo flute). The class is held in a music instrument store right outside the main gate of the campus with my teacher is a 60+ year old man named Tu Laoshi. His strong southern accent, with all the technical and music terms he throws at me and the fact that the Dizi is a little more complicated than its Indian counterpart all adds up to the class being pretty challenging but I already feel that I am starting to get a hang of things. And it helps that the man’s tea is excellent. Also the class is held close to the glass window of the store which tends to collect a crowd of little kids watching me struggle. If anything puts pressure on the laowai to perform, that’s it.

Hangzhou has cooled down suddenly and drastically this last week due to the typhoon at the nearby coast and the grey skies and constant drizzle have let loose a tangible gloominess. But that didn’t stop a few of us making a quiet weekend evening getaway to the commercial downtown of the city in search of a Subway sandwich. This was my first time to that part of the city and it is really quite impressive. It only lacks a certain rustic charm, in my view, that much of the rest of the city boasts. I feel that there is a constant push and pull between the traditional and (pardon the cliché) the western. If I were to compare Hangzhou to Bombay, I feel that the existence of the extremes of these two concepts is definitely more prominent here in Hangzhou and there is not much of interplay. I worry whether the youth of my generation have been forced to choose this way or the other, with a compromise yet unheard of. The generation gap, for historical reasons and others, is considerable but it means that the country is socially heading into an eerily predictable direction. I hope, on this one, that I am wrong as there is much to lose.

But I begun to gain a sense of one thing that is slower to evolve and has locked within its nuances so many little pieces of culture and history; the language. Whether it is the chengyu (the four character idioms) which itself can carry the meaning and weight of an epic, or the basic everyday greeting of ni chifan le ma? (have you eaten yet?) maybe the forces of yesteryear are putting up a fight without us even realizing.

Hangzhou, our new home ...

Being away from college while it’s on is a weird experience, but finally beginning to feel at home. This week went by really quick, classes are in full swing- three weeks of rest after Language School and I am finally back to being a full time college student again. And what do college students do best? Enjoy their weekends. Our weekend began on Thursday (no class this past Friday) with a hike up Hangzhou’s Baoshishan (Gem Mountain). Once you summit, there awaits a beautifully-aged pagoda and a grand view of the Western Lake beneath and the expanse of the city. The weather that day was particularly humid and warm which meant that by the time we made it back down we were all pretty exhausted and famished and a dinner at a Thai restaurant and a midnight snack at McDonald’s ensued.

The next day was definitely my favourite yet, while at Hangzhou. We all slept in and did absolutely nothing but hang around and chat till the afternoon after which a few of us decided that we should cook dinner. After a trip the supermarket for Indian food ingredients (where it took longer than expected because turmeric isn’t all that easy to explain in Chinese), we cooked a very multiethnic but equally yum meal. The weekend also including a very embarrassing performance (to all of us) when we went bowling and a couple of hours at a very swanky KTV (karaoke place).

While at the supermarket, my friend and I came across the little animal section (not for consumption, by the way) and decided that post dinner we would head to the night market to buy ourselves a couple of little turtles. We did indeed head to the night market near our school after dinner, but the xiaodongwu seller chap was nowhere to be seen. So the bunch of us didn’t lose hope and KangKang (my good ole roommate) said he knew of another place a bus ride away that possible also sold turtles. After a couple of hours on our critter-hunt we finally found a store. But after much deliberation, Aiman and I went on to buy not turtles but rabbits instead.

2 of them. Little, brown and named BuSan and BuSi (literally means “Not three” and “Not four”. When put together BuSanBuSi roughly translated to the ever useful words “shady” or “dubious”; a favourite of Middlebury Chinese students). So far they have been quite a joy, though BuSan is proving to be a little troublesome. He escaped from his cage and disappeared into a hole behind a desk in my room on the first day we got him, which prompted a stressful 12-person search for him throughout the building at 1 in the morning for a good half an hour. And yesterday he did his business on poor KangKang’s bed.

Anyway, back to school. I am taking 4 classes- Hangzhou Studies (A class about the city of Hangzhou, a historic, cultural and ethnic look at the place where I shall be spending my next 3 months), Classical Chinese (the counterpart to Europe’s Latin), Business Chinese (A class about foreign and local businesses in China) and my One-on-One class (The topic I chose for this class is China’s International Environmental Policy). My classes are all very small and very engaging thus far. The teachers seem pretty dedicated and interesting and they also expect us to work hard and the daily load of homework is pretty heavy. But that means I have more to look forward to this weekend when we have the first of our small group travels planned. I am heading with my roommate and 4 others to a place called SanQingShan (Three Distinct Mountains, I swear these things sound better in Chinese). I hope to get a look at a different side of this part of China, away from the chaos of the city, and up the poetic stony peaks at SanQingShan.

Till now Hangzhou has struck me as a place where the people attribute to their natural surroundings a sort of essentiality and importance. There isn’t a resistance to the flow of the seasons and the seasonal adjustment to the cuisine is a sign of this, for example a special dish made from bamboo shoots is only available in the winter time and in the fall, each yet having distinct flavours). The recognition of the vitality and the dominion of nature in the olden days leads to places in China tending to have names more like Hangzhou (the province at the crossing of the river), Beijing (capital to the North), Shanghai (literally- on the sea) as opposed to Mumbai (named after Mumba devi, a goddess) or Washington DC.

Moreover, as you may have a gathered from this and previous posts, the Xihu or Western lake, is quite evidently the historic and in some senses the emotional heart of the city. You can’t say you have traveled to Hangzhou and have not spent a couple of hours by the calm waters of the lake. But overall, it isn’t all that big, and not that all that clean, and the causeways and lotuses and mountains do provide it with a certain gleam but nothing that Lake Champlain can’t match up to, for example. What really makes the lake special, is as much the human investment in the idea of the beauty of the lake as much as the actual beauty of it. It is said that there are 10 scenic views to the lake, including QuYuanFengHe (To see the lotus stirred by breeze in the QuYuan garden) or PingHuQiuYue (To see the autumn moon over the calm lake) or even DuanQiaoCanXue (To see the snow melt on the Broken Bridge). There is even one that made it onto the 1 yuan note is the SanTanYinYue (To see the three pools mirroring the moon).

Such a consciousness of what surrounds them provides the people of this city with a sort of natural desire to preserve. In the years to come, when the choices that China will need to make get harder and more vital to where we as a globe are heading; I hope that this inherent trait will play a role.

The Start ...

[I want to first apologize for my poor English in this post but I have been speaking a whole bunch of Chinese and I am sort of losing my grip already. Also, its late and watching Inception in Chinese (just got back from the movie theatre) can really fry one’s brain.]

My short break at home had come to an end and I after reaching Singapore spent the evening with my family who resides there. At midnight I caught my next flight to Beijing. Of course, we Bombay folk must be everywhere and I bumped into an old friend from middle school who was to be on my flight as well. As the only waiguoren on the flight down to Hangzhou from Beijing, I fulfilled my solemn duty as a Chinese student and attempted to eavesdrop on as many conversations as possible. I threw my poor neighbour quite off guard (who was earlier engaged in explaining to his wife that most Indians are very tall and that I wasn’t anything spectacular) after ordering a glass of apple juice in Chinese from the airhostess.

For formalities sake, I guess my first impression of China was probably being pretty surprised at how popular kendeji (KFC) at the Beijing airport can be at 8 in the morning.


My to-be roommate Zhang Kangzhong and his friend, also another roommate on the program, Zhou Li picked me up from the Hangzhou airport. Thus it begins... I guess a good place to start is to talk about our roommates as they have been a very important part of these last few days for each of the 13 of us on the program this semester. Each of us has been assigned a Chinese roommate from our host university, the Zhejiang University of Technology. These 13 students were first nominated by their teachers and then selected after an interview from a pool of more than a 100. So one can imagine that they are a pretty bright and dedicated lot. There are also exceedingly kind and have welcomed us very warmly to their campus and into their lives.

The campus is located bang in the centre of town and is walled off from the chaos of the surrounding city. Thus far, Hangzhou has come across as an elegant balance of the new and old but all very authentically Chinese. The other 12 students on the program also seem like a pretty enthusiastic and fun bunch and I am excited to get to know them better.

School starts on Monday but until that day we have been kept and kept ourselves really busy. There could not have been a better way to spend our first few hours in Hangzhou than to receive the inaugural Chinese medicinal paojiao (foot soak) and massage at a place near campus. Other than that we have spent much time walking around the campus and neighbourhood getting accustomed to our new surroundings (and the September Hangzhou heat). This included picking up my Chinese cell phone (for those who are interested the haoma is 15258854108- I know it by heart because I have had to say it so many times in a different language), buying other necessities at a local mart and frequent stops at the night market (and yes language-schoolers they actually do sell xiaodongwus (litte animals)). A couple of days ago a few of us also watched 3 Idiots (a new Bollywood movie) with English and Chinese subtitles; it was a very good movie though there were definitely parts where I was not sure what to read and what to listen to.

The food so far has been brilliant. Midnight snacks at the night market; the baozis, jiaozis, bubble teas and other objects I don’t recognize are all things I look forward to enjoying over the next few months. The 3 canteens on campus offer a really wide spread of cheap and tasty food. This evening was our opening banquet at a local, pretty classy restaurant and that solidified my belief that Hangzhou was a worthwhile culinary choice to make as to where to spend a semester away from Proctor’s Panini grills.

Yesterday evening, our entire group cruised on world-famous Xihu (West Lake), Hangzhou’s biggest attraction for good reason, and with the small boats making their way around the lake to the backdrop of wide pagoda-topped mountains and the sunset, it truly is beautiful. After our hour-long cruise we headed off to the famous Coco jiuba (club) for our first night on the town. What was supposed to be a short half an hour to check out the scene before retiring for the night became a long and very fun night with new friends and the excitement at the sudden realization that in this new and strange land there is so much we can and already were all enjoying together.