Issue 20

Excerpt from Elegy for the Chinese of California

Alvin Lu

At some point it was decided there should be a hall. The idea started as a public square. Of course you’d want one. Somebody, I don’t know who, then floated the idea of a pavilion, even though it didn’t rain most of the year and it was getting worse with the years-long drought.

“Why not an actual building then?” asked one of the investors. It became a multi-purpose community center, which was what I thought the architect was presenting on an overseas video call I tuned into in the middle of the night for. But what the architect showed, by the radiant, intersecting planes of his 3-D model, wasn’t the glorified lounge I was expecting, but something like the interior of a church or temple, with vaulted ceiling and dais facing the entrance that might have served as an altar space.

Another investor, from offscreen, mentioned he’d like to see “messages” on the walls.

“Like a mission statement?”

“No, we aren’t building workers’ dormitories in Shenzhen. I’m thinking of a zhijia geyan.”

The reference, which translates into “aphorisms for running a household,” was breathtaking. The geyan were manuals on conduct published in the Qing Dynasty. Overseas, appearing as posters at family associations and other gathering places for hemmed-in migrant workers, they served as reminders to the new arrivals that, far from home as they were, they still had filial duties to live up to.

Son, observe the time and fly from evil.

“I went to one of those old temples in California—they treat ’em like national treasures, take really good care of ’em. Not like we do here. This one used to double as a halfway house for travelers, kind of a hotel. You could still read maxims the temple attendant had written by brush—with a fine hand, I might add. He pasted them onto the walls with rice—still sticks! I’m thinking a modern version of that.”

The architect dropped blank rectangles onto the “walls” in his model.

“This shows the world who we are, while at the same time binding us closer together.”

In other words, a tourist attraction.

The architect went ahead to come up with something more fleshed out.

A few weeks later, though, the project had stalled. When I asked why, my contact for the group (I had no idea what she actually did) told me she couldn’t figure it out. Something had turned the board upside down. In my experience, it wasn’t unusual for one investor to make some decree, then the others to walk it back weeks or even months later. My best bet was to talk to the architect. He was really put out, she said, so I should take whatever he said with a grain of salt, but since whatever was bugging him was what was holding things up, I’d get to the bottom of it.

So I drove out there. He lives in the “third” Chinatown of the city, in a navy-blue, white-trim stucco house off San Bruno Avenue. A three-story, built over in visible geologic layers. Even the paint jobs don’t match. Running around the lot is a cast-iron fence.

Once buzzed through the gate and then again through the front door, you find yourself peering up a long stairwell, enclosed on both sides, going straight to the third floor. I don’t know how the second and ground floors are accessed. The interiors have been completely scrambled, walls, halls, and doors added seemingly at whim. Everything looks brand new. The materials—floor, drywall, molding, lighting fixtures—have the suspicious gloss of goods just shipped from mainland China.

The architect was sitting in a corner room filled with sunlight. A leg-jiggler. Wall-to-wall wasabi carpeting. No furniture except a round table and a chair.

It was the geomancer’s fault, he said. For some reason the entire board had caught feng shui fever. Now they were worried the hall was too contemporary: too many rectangles, clean lines; too much light, air. Instead of an updated interpretation of Confucian enlightenment—something, by the way, that would stand as the architect’s defining gesture—they were sliding back into superstition. But who was going to design it? You couldn’t ship out a cadre of nineteenth-century folk villagers. No, but you could move an existing temple to the site. Just buy one. It seemed that’s what they were going to do. They would be coming to me about it.

I was speechless. I had no idea how to go about doing it. For some reason, a line from Confucius, of all things, came to mind: even side streets are worth exploring, but if you go too far, you might get bogged down.

The error, apparently, was to think simply because this was the new world it should be new, when in fact it was here where all tradition wound up. It was in the old country where everything started over again. So they’d gotten everything backwards. The hall should be made as much according to history as possible, because that was what people wanted—they’d made the mistake of projecting their own desires from over there.

The architect didn’t have much more to add. When I called the geomancer, he only said:

“I don’t know about shipping any actual temple over. All I told them was there’s too many straight paths to the whole plan. They’re going to have trouble with ghosts.”

It didn’t seem like the investors would take ghosts seriously as a concern.

To avoid traffic, I stuck to street level, cutting through one of the city’s last industrial zones. From on top of the southern hills, to the east, are views of the bay and, on the other side of it, the cranes and shoreline of Oakland, Alameda, and San Leandro. But what transfixes your gaze is the first of waves of yellow ridges, alternating with valleys in a repeating pattern up a gradual grade into the high country that acts as a shadow against the desert and the rest of the continent. Down that grade water flows. If you want to think of it that way, it all flows, along with goods and people, and at one time gold, to here. That water is moving all the time, while we sleep. Somewhere in those mountains, hidden for now, is the plot on which will sit the hall we’ve been talking about.

To the north, and I am headed in that direction, is downtown. In a warren of office towers is the Kong Chow Temple. It’s made of the oldest Chinese artifacts in America, but somehow it got onto the fourth floor—despite fourth floors being bad luck in Chinese, “four” being a homonym for “death”—of the post office. Going from Jackson toward Clay, watching the flaneurs of Stockton with da gai bow (steamed chicken bun) in one hand, you come to the conclusion the temple couldn’t have been moved to its current site whole. It must have been brought by these same people upstairs, piece by insignificant piece, then reassembled from memory.

Judging by the stream of visitors, obviously locals, winding their way up the steep, wooden flights of stairs, pieces are still being brought up. This is an urban temple. I’ve been to closet-sized altar spaces in Taipei, Tokyo too, but this is an all-American solution to fit it into the single floor of a thin high-rise, so what might have been laid out across expansive grounds is necessarily stacked and packed, strained to cracking, tightened, then stacked again, vertically as well as horizontally. As you come from the stairs up through what’s almost a trap door the first things you see are intricate wooden latticework and red and gold lanterns hanging down. You float up to them by the palpable ash pouring out of incense, burned paper-money offerings, and wicks in oil. Sunlight drifts through old aluminum windows. Indistinguishable clutter on the altar. Oranges and peaches piled on dishes catch the eye most, maybe. The gods, on the other hand, dim and veiled. Burnt scraps of yellow spirit money spinning around. Everyone, living people, seems fixed in a mural.

The pieces are continuously added by anonymous parties, exact to memory, so nothing changes.

Back at street level. Hunched figures with their backs turned. Sliver of bay and bridge in washes of gray like a vertical scroll painting. Trudge downhill, to the underground barber, same five old guys there for twenty years, slip back out, loose hair on shoulders and behind the ears, and around the corner to Golden Gate Bakery for almond cookies.

Check through the back door, into Shanghai. This is in fact the origin of the term. Prospectors went to go pee and next thing they knew they were in China.

You’re on the famous Nanjing East Road. The time the same time of day as the bakery on Grant Avenue, close to dusk. Always heady upon landing here, but to be thrown right into this. It must be admitted, it was, just as they say, just like being in a foreign country, so it doesn’t seem like actually being in one, at first. Number of black-haired heads much greater than in Chinatown’s narrow alleys, but somehow more orderly, that’s about it. Then, as your ears bend to the local hum, punchy Cantonese has given way to the sibilant local dialect.

At random, pick a place to stay. On the cheap side, lobby up a few flights of stairs over steaming ground-floor dumpling joint, one of those set up for domestic travelers, because our investors don’t do expense accounts. You’re paying for this trip. Outside, a car skids and hits a lamppost. Shrugs: suicide. The jazz-age hotels and department stores have seen better days. Now they’re shadows in the outdoor pedestrian mall, which, save for the Art Deco touches here and there, recalls, of all things, Santa Monica.

Because you can’t sleep, take a walk with the stream of people going to and back from the Bund, as signs come on and house music thumps from the most plebeian storefronts selling luggage or T-shirts. It’s been years since your last time here. The city has been built over ten times since, inward as well as outward, but bits and pieces are still familiar. Stick with those while ignoring the rest.

Last time here, Pudong, across the Huangpu, was built, but nobody was in it. It was there so everybody on the Bund could see their peopleless future.

Now Pudong is overrun with the same people as on the Bund, maybe a bit their “betters,” gazing on their yokel past.

In the hotel room, which is furnished with as basic of necessities as can be, even the amount left on the toilet paper roll seems to have been counted out just enough for use. Towel, in the singular, a gauzy hand towel.

Ash from the ashtrays, ash on the carpet. No window, flicker of the fluorescent tube. On the small TV, a pretty, heavily made-up woman, very pale face and gap in her front teeth, given to strident editorializing on a newscast. As you drift into fitful slumber under a slip of a sheet, brazen cries from next door and above.

On the morning train to Hangzhou, Marco Polo’s city. Shanghai Station was nuts. All of humanity, not in its finely delineated glory, but a black mass, was there. Hard enough just to push through the thickets of torsos to the counter, go through the barred window for a ticket for one of the perfectly literally named “soft seats.”

After the scrum through the gate, manage to grab a window seat, because you are in the civilized (expensive) section, a luxury you allow yourself, with views of the Jiangnan countryside, “south of the river,” an evocative place-name in the historical imagination, of pleasures and riches.

The offices are in a mirrored tower above the mist, subject of poetry, over West Lake. Waiting in the company reception room. Paintings on the walls. Signac. Check the inscription on the plinth of the bust: “A. Rodin.”

Not-quite-masterpieces, patrimony of France, are at their best here, over the old stomping grounds of Po Chü-I and Kublai Khan, while we’re rooting around for worthless antique buildings that haven’t been plowed under yet to take back to America.

It was my first time to see Irene, my investor group liaison, from not across the chasm of an internet teleconference, but she didn’t acknowledge this. Curt as usual, she just said nobody from the group was here to see me today, sorry ‘bout that, but they left a message. “Nice haircut, by the way.” In suspense as we went down to the lobby restaurant, where she ordered longjing tea to drink out of gaiwan, which takes a few tries to get the hang of sweeping back the loose leaves with the edge of the lid. Her eyes swam in big glasses on a moony face. She told me the name of a village that rang a bell.

“Somebody mentioned it to one of them and said it was interesting and they would sell.”

“For how much?”

“It wouldn’t be very much.”

“Is that all you got for me?”

“Here. I text you the train station. Just call a car. When you get back, tell us what you think. Send pictures. But don’t let them think we are buying anything, okay? The villagers like to play games. Act like tourist. This is easy role for you!” Her phone played the refrain from the old Wham! song. “Okay, I gotta go.”

The tea, glowing green in its open bowl, cooled on the table.

Instead of diving back into the train-station crowds, I bought a ticket off a scalper, which didn’t involve more than letting one approach me. A square-headed, thick-necked guy in loafers hit me up in a minute. He’d been at this a while, it was obvious, was nothing if not determined, but his heart was soft. It’s not easy for anybody; how much longer could he keep at it? Because I felt bad for him, I wasn’t interested to cut his take down to nothing. Besides, I had no idea how he sourced his goods, who his inside connections were. He was being truthful, I imagined, when he said he wasn’t making much. Who would? But I wanted to see him sweat, otherwise he wouldn’t respect me. This is the world. I didn’t fuck him over, I didn’t waste his time, I bought the ticket from him.

Maybe he got the last laugh, because the train didn’t go all the way to the station Irene told me to get off at. I had to change trains in a coal-mining town I’d never heard of but still had a population over three million, according to the sign. To make matters worse, my transfer was at the other train station—clear across town.

Pulleys over rooftops of low-slung buildings crisscrossing dark skies. Dowdy buildings, streets, cars peppered with soot. Yet, times seemed good. This wasn’t so much visible in things as in the faces of people. Instead of hiring a car as Irene advised (there were mobs of volunteers right as you came out of the station, pulling your sleeve), I maybe made the mistake of taking the bus. Actually, a little out of it because of jet lag and being ping-ponged around since I stepped out of the hotel room, I was hypnotized by one driver to board his bus when I should’ve gotten on the first in line. I was the only one there when we took off in a hurry, but didn’t realize what I’d done until I saw the other metal bread loaf, barreling full-speed down the town’s main street, pass us on our left then cut over, bringing us to a screeching halt. I flipped over the seat in front of me. Horns blasted and people cursed (cheered?) as the two drivers got out and started hitting each other. I hailed a cab.

At the station, kid pickpockets jumped me, little hands in empty pants and jacket pockets as I dug through the crowd. By now numb to it all, and just started throwing them off one by one. Bribed my way to a soft seat. The conductor was so pleased she brought me a couple bottled waters gratis.

At my final stop I couldn’t find any signs for where I wanted to go next. Maybe a mistake, but instead of jumping into the first car, tried getting my bearings first. Backpack hooked on both shoulders, checked the station map, which was on a large wooden board outside the exit gate. Somebody came over and asked if I needed help. I thought it was another tout and ignored him, but when I looked over it turned out to be an old man in a Mao suit. Maybe just a bit of country hospitality, I guess.

“Anything worth seeing around here?”

“You already here. What do you think?” He waved his arm. “Ha ha ha … There’s plenty to see. The best thing, though, takes a bit of work. You don’t mind walking, do you?”

“No.”

“Like views?”

“Sure.”

“You’ll love this. Don’t worry, it’s not that far, and I’ll tell you how to get there. Don’t worry, I’m not selling you a tour. I’m just a farmer, not a salesman. See this bus stop? Take 36, from here. Take it all the way to the end. If you’re not sure, just ask one of the other riders. Only locals ride this bus—this is inside stuff I’m telling you, okay—and they’re all friendly to strangers, like me. Once you get off, you’ll see a green mountain range. Just walk toward it. Eventually you’ll get onto a path that winds through some woods. All flat. Once you get out of the woods, the path starts to climb. Just keep going until you get to the top. You’ll see the village and a temple—”

“A temple?”

“I’m getting there. You’ll see the temple because it’s the tallest building in the village. Now, from the outside, it may not look like much. It’s a little broken-down, but don’t be put off. It’s because it’s old, since it was originally built in the Ming Dynasty. The best is yet to come. Go on in and take the stairs up the tower. There’s actually a little teahouse at the top now the villagers have set up, because nobody uses the temple for its original purpose anymore, and they’ve actually done a very nice job with it. You’d be surprised. Just sit down anywhere on the balcony and order yourself a cup of tea. The girls who work there are very friendly. Look out and you’ll have a panoramic view of the mountains—if you set off there now,” he looked at the sky, “you’ll get there just in time for the most beautiful sunset in the world.”

“Sounds complicated.”

“Not complicated. Anybody can do it.”

“What happens when the sun goes down and it gets dark?”

“You can take the same way down. The bus and trains run at night. But most people, they don’t want to head back right away.”

“You can stay overnight in the village then?”

“There are those options. There’s also the next village over, which is where I’m from, not that far, just over a few mountains, with more expansive accommodations.”

“I see.”

“Do you consider yourself a connoisseur of tea?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Sounds like you don’t know, but the hills here are prime tea country. The deeper you go, the better the tea. We only drink early-picked green here, because that’s all Chinese people drank back when tea was first cultivated, when they knew, in the Tang, not black tea, not oolong. Black tea came from the British, because the tea went bad by the time the ships got to England. It had turned black, but they thought that’s how you were supposed to drink it. Can you believe it? That goddamn king and queen sipping rancid tea that’s been sitting for months in the hull of a stinking boat. Now the whole world drinks rotten.”

“Maybe I’ll try a cup.”

“What luck, here comes the bus now! It’s a sign from the heavens. Enjoy!”

A few other passengers got on, all elderly. One sat at the very front, behind the driver, while a couple followed me to the row just behind me, even though every other seat was available. The bus didn’t wait around. As soon as we got past the station traffic, we were in the outskirts, shacks scattered between weedy lots. Then, in a blink, the country: rice paddies, winding hillside roads. Herds of goats, blue skies.

As soon as I got off, the old couple asked where I was going.

Scanned the horizon for mountains. Only smog. “An old temple.”

“Yes, walk toward those green mountains, see? Eventually you’ll get onto a path that winds through some woods. All flat. Once you get out of the woods, the path starts to climb. Just keep going until you get to the top. You’ll see the pagoda. Can’t miss it.”

“Thank you.”

“Make sure you go in, don’t just look at it from outside. At first you might think it might not look like much, but that’s only because it’s old, because it was built in the Ming Dynasty. But the best part is inside. Go in and take the stairs up the tower. There’s actually a little teahouse there. The girls who work there are really very nice. Make sure you order a cup of tea from them. Enjoy sweeping views of the mountains, if you get there before sunset.”

“Okay.”

The way through the woods took longer than either the old farmer or the couple from the bus made it sound. By the time I made it out, the sun was striking through the trees, and I was wondering if I would be able to take pictures of the temple in decent lighting and if I’d make it back to the station before total, rural darkness took over. I hadn’t been alone. There were people on the path ahead of and behind me, although keeping a good distance, as well as in the trees. None of them were going in the opposite direction. We were all headed the same way. The only exception was a young couple on a motor scooter. They buzzed past, came back, only to turn around and speed off again, leaving the smell of gasoline in their wake.

Going out the woods, the path was steeper than I imagined. I followed the tracks of the scooter.

The dying sun cast one side of the temple in a gentle light. Nobody around, only the wind whistling down from the peaks. I took a few pictures before it all fell into shadow. The mountain valley turned cold. The exception was the pagoda tower, which was still glowing orange. I caught a few more pics of that, at different angles. What I inferred from my chat with Irene was the group already had enough to go on. What information was needed, really? My coming for pictures was a formality.

At the bottom of the grade, all the travelers from the forest path gathered. A brown-gray mass. The old couple from the bus joined them, coming out of the trees. About ten or twelve.

The wind coming down from the mountains had the chill of altitude or of night.

I got to the bottom of the hill, my backpack feeling heavy all of a sudden, and struck an exaggerated smile, as if I were just moving on, as if all of us were just moving on, in opposite directions, nodding to the couple I’d spoken to on the bus. Instead of letting me pass, though, the group shuffled into a loose circle. A bent silence. I waited.

“Aren’t you going inside?” a woman with a motherly face ventured, finally.

“I just wanted to see the exterior. I saw an illustration in a book once.” This drawing, a manufactured memory, appeared vividly before me. I could tell they could see it too. “Ever since then I’ve always wanted to see it in person. Now I have.”

“But you’ve come all this way. You must have a cup of tea. Otherwise, it’d be a shame! Look, we know it doesn’t look like much, but that’s only because it was built in the Ming Dynasty. It’s a lot more interesting inside, believe me. Go in and take the stairs up the tower. They’re waiting for you there.”

“It’s getting dark.”

Eyes, unseen, inside the village on the hill, from inside the pagoda tower, gazing out. Silent. The indigo sky, at dusk. One step downhill. The crowd grumbled, stiffened. Inside the pagoda, footsteps, down stairs.

A door opening, slamming shut.

“I need to get going now to catch the bus.”

“It doesn’t come for another hour.”

“Look, don’t you think this is all a bit extreme? Planting that ‘friendly stranger’ at the train station, following me onto the bus, the whole recited spiel, then each and every one of you,” I pointed them all out, “stalking me in the forest … Just to sell a cup of tea?”

“Nobody is forcing you to do anything.”

“No, it can’t be just that. Who knows? Maybe you’ve trained the girls up there to administer a knockout drug. Or you talk me into staying overnight … ”

“How do you expect us to make money from you tourists who come here just to take some pictures on their phone and leave? You don’t want our tea, our hospitality, how about you at least pay us for those pictures!”

“Okay, now we’re getting into it. You want money? You wanna charge people for taking pictures of the temple? What if they take pictures of the sky? The mountains? The trees? You?” I snapped pictures of them. “This isn’t the way to do things!”

I took a few steps forward, but they formed a wall. Some grabbed onto my backpack. They may have been unzipping it, sticking their hands inside.

“Hey, there was this sleazy gang out here a couple weeks ago looking to buy the temple. You aren’t with them, are you?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. I told you I just came here to see your stupid temple from the outside. If you don’t let me go, I’m calling the authorities.”

At that, the ones directly in front let me pass.

“Say, where are you from, anyway?”

I turned around. “Me? I’m from Shanghai.”

“We get visitors from Shanghai here all the time. You don’t sound like them. You’re from Hong Kong, aren’t you?”

“No. Why are we discussing this?”

Somebody yelled—whistled? Buzz through the air. The young couple on the motor scooter. Felt only as a blast of wind. They skidded to a stop.

“You get back up there!” The boy’s windblown hair had stiffened into a terrible case of bedhead. The girl holding onto him, in pink shorts, not wearing any shoes.

An absurd order, all fraying apart now. The crowd had relented. But then: shove a gnarled old man who was a lot sturdier than he looked.

The girl on the bike slumped her shoulders. The older villagers stoic, already fading into time. Grab a stick off the ground.

“I’m serious.”

It’d probably snap in two if it actually hit anything.

I took the express to Hangzhou. Once I got back, I downloaded the photos onto my laptop and called Irene, saying I had a presentation. She told me to meet her back at the tower.

The next day, she came to pick me up from the waiting room again. One of the investors walked by. He was one of those I hardly spoke to. Tall, with a permanent smirk, which made him look like a drunk, which he probably was. He waved, seemed to think twice about it, then came over to sit next to me on the couch facing a bird’s-eye view of the misty lake. He grabbed an ashtray I had taken to be an art object and lit a cigarette.

“I had no idea you were here. You kind of startled me when I saw you sitting there.”

As it turned out, he was the only one there that day. After I told him what I’d been through and went over the brief deck, which consisted of the photos I’d taken and some data on the village I’d copied from the internet, he sat back, with that Cheshire grin on his face.

“It’d be a lot easier if you found something in California, wouldn’t it? It’d be in a lot better shape too. They take care of old things better than we do here. I never agreed with this cockamamie plan of shipping over a whole temple. Can you imagine the red tape in customs? Why don’t you look into this?” His face hid behind a puff of smoke.

Irene mentioned if we went along it’d be too bad for the villagers, who could use the proceeds from the sale, “although they’d probably slaughter each other trying to figure out how to split it up.”

Another scenario: the transaction made, the villagers in the money, the temple disassembled but ultimately left to sit in boxes in a warehouse downriver somewhere. The village would lose its tourist revenue, since, without the temple, it’d be harder for them to bag their victims and that third-rate tea alone wasn’t enough to convince anyone to make the trip out there.