Enigma of China(68)

She wasn’t that intrigued by these stories, which were from so long ago and far away. Chen was walking close to her, though, and that made all the difference. But Xiang was coming back, something she decided not to think about at the moment.

Despite the many legends about the park, they were the only tourists there. They sauntered over to a stream embosomed in trees and bamboos, where a fitful breeze brought down a flutter of glistening raindrops from the green boughs above.

“It’s here. This is Lanting,” he exclaimed. “Wang and the other poets gathered at this stream, engaged in a wine-poem game.”

“A wine-poem game?”

“They let wine cups flow down from the head of the stream. If a cup came to a stop in front of someone, he had to write a poem. If he failed to do so, he had to drink three cups as punishment. The poems were then collected, and Wang composed a preface to the collection. He must have been very drunk, flourishing his brush pen inspired by the exquisite scene. That preface marks the very peak of his calligraphy.”

“That’s incredible.”

“Many years later, in the Tang dynasty, Du Mu wrote a poem about the scene. ‘Regretfully we cannot stop time from flowing away. / Why not, then, enjoy ourselves in a wine game by the stream? / A blaze of blossom appears, indifferent, year after year. / Lament not at its withering, but at its burgeoning.’”

“I’ve never read it, Poet Chen. That’s a marvelous poem, but the last line is a little beyond me.”

“When I first read the poem, probably at your age, I didn’t understand the ending, either. Now I think I do. When it first blooms, it’s still full of dreams and hope, but there’s nothing you can do to slow the journey from blooming to withering. That’s something to lament.”

She was intrigued by his interpretation. She tried to conjure up the ancient scene of the poets reading and writing here, but she failed.

“The times have changed,” he said, as if reading her thoughts.

It was engaging to have him talking like an experienced guide, she thought as they strolled in sight of a yellow silk banner streaming in the breeze over an antique-looking hall. The banner read, “Calligraphy and Painting—Free to People Who Really Appreciate Chinese Art.”

“Free?” she said. “Perhaps people here at Lanting still practice art for art’s sake, like in ancient days. We might find a scroll of the poem you just recited to me.”

They entered the hall. The front part of it had been turned into an exhibition room, with scrolls hanging from the walls. To their puzzlement, each of the scrolls was marked with a price, not exorbitant but not cheap, either. Behind a glass counter near the entrance, a man wearing an umber-colored Chinese gown stood up, grinning. He read the question in their eyes and said, “They’re free. We just charge for the cost of making them into scrolls.”

“Exactly. Writers and artists cannot live on the northwest wind,” Chen commented. “If you add up all the paintings and calligraphies in this hall, you couldn’t buy one square meter in the subdivision of Binjiang Garden.”

“Ah yes, the Binjiang Garden in Pudong. The paper mansion that the Yus burned at the temple was in that subdivision,” Lianping said.

Another peddler emerged from the back room of the hall, gesticulating, swearing, and pushing on them a brocade-covered box containing brush pens, an ink stick, an ink stone, and a jadelike seal.

“There are four treasures of our ancient civilization. They are instilled with the feng shui of the culture city. An absolute must for the ‘scholar and beauty’ romance,” the peddler said, making his unrelenting sales pitch.

They left quickly, like a fleeing army.

“It’s more commercial than I thought,” she said with a touch of regret. She was intrigued by the peddler’s reference to the “scholar and beauty romance,” which was a popular genre in classical Chinese literature.

“It’s too close to Shanghai to be any different, and day trippers like us don’t help. Here, there, everywhere, green grass spread out to the horizon.”

The line probably referred to commercial activities, Lianping thought. But he didn’t have to cite a Tang dynasty line for that. He was extraordinarily exuberant, coming across not unlike one of those scholars in a classical romance, eager to sweep a young girl off her feet with allusions and quotations.

“Let’s go to Shen Garden,” he suggested. “It might be quiet there, without the commercial hustle and bustle.”

“The other garden shouldn’t be too far away,” she said as they walked out of the park, “but I don’t know how to get there.”