My last Sunday is a dirty day in Chongqing, the fastest growing city in China, perhaps the world. The marble-tiled pavements are slicked with grey rainwater, as slippery as black ice. Subdued shoppers jostle umbrellas in the street bottlenecks while pop music blares from cavernous mobile phone shops, white-lit and alive with wide-eyed young people. In the broad piazzas of ShaPingBa – one of this city’s glitzy ‘down-town’ centres - the romance of outdoor ballroom dancers and the cheer of laughing families is missing.
Today through the mud spattered pedestrianised streets, impatient cars hassle the crowds with jammed-on horns and nudge their bumpers up against people’s backsides.
The Chinese love of harmony is at odds with the ferocity of its drivers. Through a quiet, tree-lined street, we scream past a Maternity Hospital scattering pregnant women and parents carrying new-born infants. On the elevated motorway which skirts the wide Yangtse River, a small, ox-strong man with a bamboo pole and two laden baskets of vegetables lurches across three oblivious lanes of lightning traffic, swinging his yoke this way and that to avoid being flattened.
As I walk across the square I am taken aback by a man singing sweetly, plaintively into a red microphone. He is hauling a trolley behind him on which there is a big speaker, wrapped in old polythene. How delightful and incongruous I think. Then I see his pitiful family: a wife who has no legs seated on a primitive wooden trolley, pushing herself along with two short sticks. Tethered to the trolley wheel-chair by a rope is a boy aged perhaps five or six.
Each morning, I am enchanted by the calm poetry of red-dressed men and women with glinting swords and taut limbs, practising t’ai chi to the music of strange birdsong. Their balletic movements are fluid, controlled, precise. In China life is all about the flowing of energy; like water coursing around a rock in a stream, it finds a way through.
It’s nearly time to leave. I have a date at the Chinese Opera (with no great hopes, I have to admit). But the show is intoxicating: words are declaimed in short, staccato phrases accompanied by an off-stage percussionist beating out the rhythms of the verse with a wood-xylophone. I best enjoy a solo piece, the story of a man exiled years before and now living alone, far away, in the mountains. He explains his crime and punishment, and weeping, heart-broken, he tells of the pain of eternal separation from his family. Suddenly there is a prowling tiger, so he runs to the top of the mountain (a table covered in a blue silk drape) and stays still until the danger passes. Returning to his humble home he realises that he must not spend his life in a state of regret and loneliness and anxiety, but must go forward and make a new life for himself. And there it ends optimistically.
That’s how it is here. Chongqing offers terse glimpses of both Heaven and Hell.
[From 2010]
Today through the mud spattered pedestrianised streets, impatient cars hassle the crowds with jammed-on horns and nudge their bumpers up against people’s backsides.
The Chinese love of harmony is at odds with the ferocity of its drivers. Through a quiet, tree-lined street, we scream past a Maternity Hospital scattering pregnant women and parents carrying new-born infants. On the elevated motorway which skirts the wide Yangtse River, a small, ox-strong man with a bamboo pole and two laden baskets of vegetables lurches across three oblivious lanes of lightning traffic, swinging his yoke this way and that to avoid being flattened.
As I walk across the square I am taken aback by a man singing sweetly, plaintively into a red microphone. He is hauling a trolley behind him on which there is a big speaker, wrapped in old polythene. How delightful and incongruous I think. Then I see his pitiful family: a wife who has no legs seated on a primitive wooden trolley, pushing herself along with two short sticks. Tethered to the trolley wheel-chair by a rope is a boy aged perhaps five or six.
Each morning, I am enchanted by the calm poetry of red-dressed men and women with glinting swords and taut limbs, practising t’ai chi to the music of strange birdsong. Their balletic movements are fluid, controlled, precise. In China life is all about the flowing of energy; like water coursing around a rock in a stream, it finds a way through.
It’s nearly time to leave. I have a date at the Chinese Opera (with no great hopes, I have to admit). But the show is intoxicating: words are declaimed in short, staccato phrases accompanied by an off-stage percussionist beating out the rhythms of the verse with a wood-xylophone. I best enjoy a solo piece, the story of a man exiled years before and now living alone, far away, in the mountains. He explains his crime and punishment, and weeping, heart-broken, he tells of the pain of eternal separation from his family. Suddenly there is a prowling tiger, so he runs to the top of the mountain (a table covered in a blue silk drape) and stays still until the danger passes. Returning to his humble home he realises that he must not spend his life in a state of regret and loneliness and anxiety, but must go forward and make a new life for himself. And there it ends optimistically.
That’s how it is here. Chongqing offers terse glimpses of both Heaven and Hell.
[From 2010]
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