19. A redistribution of wealth

After passing several pristine housing estates in the countryside, two hours after leaving Shanghai, we arrived in Hangzhou. Touts lined the train station’s exit gate trying to get our attention by waving photos of hotel rooms and en suites. We walked by and Five-foot led the way to the taxi stand nearby.

The six-lane roads took us through the central city high-rise buildings of Hangzhou on our way to the West Lake, the tourist draw-card of the city. We arrived at an alleyway surrounded by nightclubs, the driver pointing at the sign leading to a hostel at the far end. We walked down the shingle driveway, interrupting builders who had metal and wood material spread out on the ground while they continued working on the buildings next door.

The courtyard of the hostel was surrounded by trees and ponds, home to goldfish, and I left Five-foot to humble people on the Playstation Football inside while I went for a walk. The West Lake was only two minutes walk, and I took a stroll along the shore, greeting people and dodging cyclists as the need arose. The sun was going down, but the temperature was not. The lake’s water seemed to evaporate in the sunshine, hitting me like a sauna on its way up to make clouds. Water taxis cruised in and out of a small dock, taking people to the lake’s islands and far shores.

I walked through a park to a road lined with trees. Large, modern hotels, restaurants, bars and casinos were getting knocked up at every turn. One street over, however, I walked through a street suffering with potholes and unkempt buildings and shacks. Some people washed themselves out of buckets while sitting in the gutter, while others grilled food on skewers placed on tiny charcoal grills. Again, I offered greetings, but I only received stares in reply.

Before returning to the hostel, I passed several car showrooms, such as Porsche, Ferrari, Chrysler, and Mercedes. Glass shop-fronts protected the exceptionally expensive cars from the elements and salesmen dressed in immaculate suits waved to me as I went by. Seeing squalor nestled firmly within reach of extravagance was becoming familiar to me.

I returned to the hostel courtyard and bought a beer, waiting for Five-foot to lose at football. The heat was energy sapping just sitting outside having a beer, even after the sun had set. A few foreigners commandeered a stereo and played some Samba music, dancing and singing the night away.

We took a water taxi tour to the islands situated in the centre of the Lake the next day. Each piece of land accommodated temples, defunct bathing pools filled with lily pads, and tourist shops. Tour guides and groups took over much of the limited space although on the larger islands there was still enough room to roam and relax.

We tagged along behind a group following the noise of a megaphone on bridges above the bathing pools. Some of the Chinese tourists tossed money into the water, I guessed to make a wish or as an offering to something. With the small currency notes and coins sitting on top of the numerous lily pads, I wasn’t shocked when a man with a scoop net promptly redistributed the wealth to himself. It was amusing to see him do this in broad daylight as the next tour group lined up behind us to toss more money in.

Our water taxi tour left us at the opposite side of the lake, so we walked back to the hostel in sauna-like heat. The streets were lined with trees, cafés, restaurants and bars setting up for the evening’s business. Men stood in boats offering rides to us in English and Mandarin. Lily pads engulfed much of the water near the shoreline and we passed a few painters replicating the various landscapes on offer.

The next day, we went to Suzhou, only a few hours north by train. The city was smaller and dustier than Shanghai and Hangzhou, and the streets were mad with taxis, buses, trucks, cyclists and pedestrians. At a restaurant near the hostel we got a room at, we began playing table rugby, other patrons’ looking on intently, as we waited for our dinner. The rules of table rugby are pretty simple: place a coin flat on a table then flick it three times to your opponent’s side and if it’s resting over the table’s edge, you try to flick it in the air and catch it with the same hand. To make a conversion, you spin the coin on the table, try to catch it between your thumbs then project it between your opponent’s thumbs’ held like the letter “H”.

After lunch was finally served, and we’d lost a couple of coins to the tables around us, we went to the Garden of the Master Nets. A nice stroll, the garden was situated in a small, confined compound of many rooms, housing rock gardens, a large pond, and a man playing a guitar. Also found there were landscape paintings for sale.

We left and returned to the hostel to play more rugby. The next morning, Five-foot and I only needed to look at each other to agree that the city was boring us.

After I lost yet another game of rugby while waiting for breakfast, we decided to go to Nanjing. An hour later, we were at the train station. Five-foot lined up to purchase our tickets while I sat by a wall. As I sat on my bag, several people sat down beside me. They had been sitting with their stuff in the middle of the room, but upon seeing me leaning up against a wall, they decided to do the same.

A woman began waving a group of people over and soon I had a dozen people sitting around me, like I was offering a class. Five-foot arrived with our tickets, and I squirmed past the group and headed for the departure lounge.

Five-foot decided to buy our tickets back to Beijing once we arrived at the Nanjing station. The station was under development and our train stopped by a yet-to-be-completed building that we were directed past, walking over rubble, mud and wooden planks, and passing the touts with their hotel photograph books.

We walked up past the new building to a ticketing hall filled with people. The lines stretched nearly to the back wall, where a baggage store was run. I held the bags again, sitting on my own, while Five-foot lined up. As I sat there, several men came up to me and squatted, watching me intently. Their gaze never wavered. I said “Ni hao,” but no one offered a reply. Five-foot returned to save me for the second time in a day and we left the men who stood up to go about their business.

Between losing rugby matches to Five-foot, disappearing coins into water filled pot-plants and out windows, we went out sightseeing the next very hot, humid day. We left the comparative safety of the bar at our hostel and three buses and a twenty-minute walk later, the Memorial Hall of the Nanjing Massacre was finally in front of us. We were suffering from a temperature beyond what anyone would consider uncomfortable and everyone was searching for any shade possible, although there was little to be found at the memorial.

The massacre happened in 1937, and on that particular spot, Japanese forces murdered 30,000 people in a major act of genocide. I arrived not sure what to expect, other than a sombre memorial to the dead and maybe a poignant message for peace. Respectful mourners would make their way through the exhibits, considering the people who died, which is stock standard for these places, I thought.

I was disappointed when a few people walking around joked and laughed about whatever they thought was funny. They pointed at lists of names of the dead and laughed and jostled with each other. One guy jumped up on a wall covered in names, I assumed of the dead, earning himself applause from a section of the crowd he was with.

We were then shown to the excavation of a mass grave. Lying in the soil behind glass protection were human remains riddled with bullet and blade wounds, each death described by alarmingly detailed cards placed nearby. None of the people passing by were in any sense mourning or respectfully observing. Noses were pressed against the glass for a better look and people pointed and took photos despite the signs asking not to.

I thought it horrible to dig up the dead for any reason other than giving them a decent burial. The display served to outline a terrible event and something that should never be forgotten, but I didn’t think the bones of the dead needed to be on show.

In a time where Chinese-Japanese relations are strained, to say the least, I wondered what the motives for this place were. My thoughts leaned towards the Chinese government trying to encourage a sense of nationalism throughout a country that may lack a lot of things, but a hatred of Japan it does not. This Memorial, for one, expressed China’s plight against the Japanese in the past, something that the Chinese want to keep very much in the minds of the people.

Quite literally, I believe, the government dug up the past to serve themselves through the polarisation of the population. The country of people agreeing on their hatred of Japan is much easier to control than a country with no sense of agreement at all. For those means, they took away the dignity of the murdered people from years before. I personally found it disgusting.

The museum hall beyond the excavation sight was filled with stories from the murders, each one horrible and absorbing giving blow by blow accounts of the actions of the Japanese. Each chilling photograph and caption gave a sense of how little regard for life there was during the occupation in 1937 yet the others around me laughed and joked about it.

Whether it was a reaction to the confronting nature of the exhibits, I didn’t know, but I found it rude and disrespectful. I found a lot of that place disrespectful to the dead and not least was the actions of the people who went there. And they were Chinese. This was their history. And they didn’t seem to care about the people who died, they just hated the Japanese because of it. I left with a disconsolate feeling about Chinese people and the government, although I didn’t think any less of Japanese people. Maybe it’s due to my British ancestry and wanting to put New Zealand’s own brutal and manipulative history in the past.

As we left, Five-foot and I crossed the road to a bus stop outside the memorial, and were soon taken directly to our hostel, saving us the twenty-minute walk and three buses that we’d done foolishly earlier. I managed a smile when I finally beat Five-foot at rugby. Then he kicked my ass when we played pool.

Communication between us had reduced to little more than grunting. One of us would point at a restaurant and the other would grunt in agreement or rejection. We didn’t really talk anymore. We were like an old married couple, all topics dried up. At least we had sports.

The hill to the northeast of central Nanjing is, amongst other tourist haunts, home to the resting place of Dr Sun Yatsen, father of the modern nation of China. It’s another one of those pilgrimages that Chinese people “have” to make. Braving the sunshine and ridiculous heat the next morning, we joined the thousands of others on the hill choosing, as always, to make our own way up rather than join the many tourist groups that obligingly donned red and yellow hats and followed the flags waved by their omnipotent megaphone wielding guides.

Climbing the hill was insane as the heat sapped exponentially greater amounts of strength with each step. The forty-degree heat, a constant red-hot sun offering no mercy, had me dripping in perspiration while I poured water down my throat by the litre. The staircase stretched up the mountain from the south directly up between forest, with shrines offering intermittent spots of shade on the way. I kept muttering positive thoughts to myself, trying to get to the top and survive getting roasted alive at the same time, passing families and tourist groups by the dozen.

Finally, we got to the top, Five-foot smiling at me as if it wasn’t hard for him and we managed to crawl into the blessed shade of the mausoleum, a nice breeze flowing through to cool us off. Filing in with the masses, we stood in a circular room shaped like a dome, the outer circumference operating as a platform overlooking the centre of the room below, where a coffin carved in stone lay, shaped in Dr Sun’s image.

I wasn’t exactly excited once I got in there. I was relieved to get it over and done with, but also felt a little short changed. Apart from the view of a coffin that looked like Dr Sun, the mountains structures all seemed to be a little redundant. As we walked down the steps to the bottom of the hill to visit the other sights on the hill, I mentally ticked that box but couldn’t help but feel disappointed.

The view to the south and out to the west was great, even with the pollution haze having a strong grip on the day. Forest spread out along the hills both to the east and west and swept down to the edge of the city, which was surrounded by the remains of its ancient fortress walls. The magnificent concrete staircase led back down from the mausoleum beyond the shrines and into the trees in the distance.

I liked the natural beauty of the area, but couldn’t let go of how over-priced it seemed. The place seemed to be set up for the reaping of cash, and felt like a con job by a country that was full of them.

The Mausoleum and the mountain are considered a conjoined sacred place and maybe I should’ve felt honoured to have been allowed to visit. But people were selling tickets, hiring out tour guides, selling t-shirts, carvings and so on, on the basis of the mausoleum being there. I may have failed to be as gracious as I could, but saw few shows of honour from those who were profiting from Dr Sun’s memory.

Profiteering from those supposedly sacred shrines and monuments is something one can’t avoid all across China. It was something I didn’t know how to respond to. People have got to eat, but I wonder where most of the money really goes.

Maybe I was having a whine, just for the sake of having a whine. The place was pretty interesting but this travelling for the sake of box ticking was getting a little old.

The next day, we pottered around the city and did some DVD shopping while we waited for a train that night. It’s illegal to sell pirated DVDs in China, but if there weren’t any on display in the many roadside CD stores, all we had to do was ask for DVDs. A minute later, the staff would have a large box placed in front of us full of cheap movie discs, all of dubious quality. It was a bit of a lottery as returning them if there was a fault was not usually an option.

After dinner, we caught a taxi to the station and were taken for a joyride by the driver. He took us all over the city, while he racked the fare up over Y30. Ignoring my complaints, Five-foot tried to tell the driver we were in a rush, receiving nods and mumbled agreements in reply.

We got there just before the train left and as we got to our bunks, Five-foot told me this would be his first overnight Chinese train ride, which seemed unbelievable.

“How long have you been in China?” I grunted.

“I’ve been coming and going from Beijing for two years,” he grunted back. “How many have you been on?”

“Five?” I guessed. “How can you travel around China and not use overnight trains?”

“I just never thought about doing it,” Five-foot said.

He looked around like he felt out of place and unsure what to do with himself.

“What do we do now?” he asked.

“Sleeping, reading and chatting are all allowed,” I said.

Before long, the lights were out and everyone in the carriage was quietly in bed. The air-conditioning unit was situated directly above Five-foot’s top bunk near the ceiling. The next morning, having had no sleep due to the humming above him, he said he’d never take an overnight train again.