Snow Green by Lindsay Shen

I met him in a temple. I’d gone there to photograph faith. He’d gone there to eat. Later, he convinced me his was the better deal. Four kuai for an “endless bowl” of rice, spinach and tofu. My sixty kuai ticket entitled me to purchase another ticket to view the reclining jade Buddha—a numinous, but un-photographable ward of the abbot.

I’d returned to the outer courtyard and set up my tripod, attendant on the generosity of those who flowed around me, composing themselves into rhythms of light. To be in a crowd is to be lifted by water, to feel water braiding through one’s outstretched fingers while it sweeps before and behind. Buoyant.

 Heedless of me, the crowd swelled in eddies round a trough of smoking incense. It coursed through the entrance to the Grand Hall. It was a bore tide, funneling through the temple courtyard; it was a million scattered droplets that I tried to fix in my viewfinder—the snap of a twisting hem, a lock of hair caressed by smoke, the flailing padded limbs of a shoulder-borne child, the flush of prayer.   

He was an object in my lens before he became my friend. Fire flared from the belly of an incense burner. I considered it against a wall glowing saffron. A distillation of orange. I am, after all, an alchemist. What is a photographer if not a sorcerer, fixing the ephemeral, then in salts, now in pixels? I was calculating the best exposure to fix this eye-smiting orange when an indigo blur disrupted my view. It hovered, retreated into focus—the arm of an indigo jacket behind which the orange field began to vibrate and advance. I lifted my eyes to meet the swell of orange and the laughing eyes of an indigo-jacketed jokester.

Discomfited, I was glad of the tripod and camera between us. I wasn’t used to being approached by Chinese men; they tended to ignore me. I’d come to like it. It allowed me grazing space. I’d learned discretion in photographing women but men never seemed to notice. Overlooked, I took my fill of looking.

The image of him that day, laughing against the orange wall, is the one fixed in my mind but never captured. His jaw-length black hair was threaded with silver, and his open mouth revealed teeth perfect apart from a gap between the front two—a sign of lack of good fortune, he was later to tell me, with no unhappiness. “The wealth whistles out.” He was dressed in cotton trousers and a loose-sleeved indigo jacket that fastened at the side like a farmer’s. I’d seen men dressed like this before. At first I’d had trouble placing them. Once, at a fashion show in a club on the Bund, I’d seen such a man so obviously eschewing the labels that enfolded his glamorous companions. I’d later decided that this was its own form of anti-cosmopolitan chic. I’d seen it on art critics, and on the most successful of stock market speculators.   

I tried to focus the man in front of me now, to fix his position. But the only comprehensible thing was the sensation of blue against orange.

Holding my gaze he reflected my thought.

“Orange advances, blue retreats.”

Four words that said You see as I see, You think as I think. This is the type of flattery to which I respond. I returned his smile.

“Artist? Art teacher?” I guessed.

“Gardener.”

At that time my Chinese was indifferent. I could speak about things but not well about ideas. I could say I felt hot, cold, famished, happy, unhappy, but not that I’d expected a pomelo to taste tart as grapefruit,  and been astonished at its clemency. My words were like an unschooled palate, without discrimination, subtlety or play; I wouldn’t starve but my diet was often dreary. Much of the time I just spoke to myself. And then, not even in English, but mostly in pictures.

I thought about “gardener” and wondered if I’d misheard, or more likely missed a shade of meaning that neatly twisted gardener into kindergarten teacher, or maybe biologist. Or maybe he was playing. Maybe he was a cultivator of stocks and bonds, a pruner of poor performers, a reaper of bountiful yields. I hovered, prevented from ducking back behind my camera by his continued smile.

“Xu Weibai,” he offered.

“Alice.”  

 He paused long enough for politeness, then helped me again.

“The light’s good. Better than at the middle of the day.”

It was now approaching five o’clock on an overcast afternoon, and the objects around us seemed to gather the intensity of their colours inwards. It was the time of day when the physical world seemed most persistent in its hard-edged here-ness.

            “You see like a painter,” I said.

            “Or a gardener,” he replied. “If you took my photograph, would I be a more real gardener?”

            A bell began ringing in the farther courtyard. Three monks walked from the office behind us towards the living quarters, and a laywoman appeared with a covered tray of food. He picked up my tripod bag.

            “Time to leave. Shall we walk for a bit?” he asked. We followed the departing crowd out through an exit in a wall no longer vibrating but folding quietly inwards. 

            We wandered south, past canopied fruit stands in pools of fluorescent light. We bought bananas to stave off hunger and admired a child being bathed in a laundry basin on the pavement. The light reflected off the canopy above turned his skin a streaming green.

            “He looks like a river fish, or a young frog.” I found I had words enough for the beauty of children. Talking and not talking with Xu Weibai was easy. With some people, space in a conversation is like a mis-composed photograph. Instead of the subject you see the awkwardness of the space around it, all wrong angles and over-exposure. But with other people space is the potent thing. It makes everything else significant, even if the subject is such a small thing, like reflected light on a child’s skin as his mother lifts him dripping from a basin.

            “Frog green,” I offered. “Or apple green. Spring apple green.”

            “Spring apple trees have blossoms, not apples! A gardener should know. How about willow green?” he countered. Willow green was good. Each March it was the first blur of yellow-green in the late winter grey. I had a photograph I took of a canal by my apartment one year. A grid of grey horizontals scored by charcoal tree trunks. Almost a monochrome except for the falling drifts of willow green reflecting in the water.         

I thought. “Bamboo green.”

“Scallion green.”

“Grasshopper green.” My young friends at the apartment compound had taught me the names of the insects they stalked along the canal. Cicada, cricket, mantis, grasshopper, dragonfly. And of the creatures that crept along its cloudy banks. Crawfish, salamander, crab. I had a respectable vocabulary for things that flew, hovered, slid and scuttled. It was easy learning from children. I could imagine playing this game with them—naming all the greens that are young and firm and pliant. 

I waited for Xu Weibai’s response.   

            “Snow green.”      

I paused, and counted the meanings of xue, or the limited number I knew.

            “Snow?”

            “Snow. China’s cheapest beer.”

I’d drunk Snow plenty of times, three kuai for one green bottle, sitting by quiet roads in semi-rural suburbs. Cheaper than water.

            “It’s what gardeners drink,” he added. 

Half way down the next block I was arrested by the sight of a stout hand in a florist’s window grasping the wrist of a waxy Buddha’s Hand citrus. Before I could reach for my camera, both hands disappeared—one into a plastic bag, the other into an apron pocket for change. A pity, I considered. In my mind I already had the shot. It was the inversion that pleased me—all the compassion in those roughened worker’s fingers, and the absolute submission of the Buddha’s Hand. I liked pictures like these, pictures that cartwheeled away from banality, and I felt a pang at its loss.

I’d spent my first months here taking photographs of stumpy shacks menaced by the tusks of skyscrapers, or families delicately balanced on a bicycle, or underwear like bunting on bamboo laundry poles.  This was the identity the city first offered, but on further acquaintance it was clear these things were part of an endlessly recycled surface. With time I saw such images constantly, in gallery windows, in magazines, in western restaurants. I saw them through the viewfinders of tourists (I could follow their thought process as they reached for a wide angle lens to accommodate the shaft of tall buildings.) I felt abashed about those images now, like someone who realizes he has been tricked by a person of intellectual acuity, dissembling as an ingénue.

And so I’d been humbled, and since then content to wait for snatches of clarity. I was patiently fishing. But really I was more like the dazzled fish, my mouth a pink O of astonishment.          

We continued our walk past cafes and peeling remnants of art deco mansions, returning to themselves in the softness of dusk that smudged the pocked plasterwork, and smoothed the rusted window frames. We came to my favourite—a formerly handsome Moderne villa with balconies that swept round the façade, glazed terraces, and porthole windows cranked permanently open on corroded frames.

            “In daytime I feel sad when I see this house, but in the evening it looks like a ship,” I said, then worried that sounded mawkish—exactly what a foreigner would say, when inside this overburdened ship its passengers doubtless parried for privacy and space and peace.

            He didn’t laugh, or worse, flinch.

            “Some places seem more optimistic by night. Maybe even this whole city. Within a couple of years this place will be the office of a real estate company. They’ll put an electric fence around it, and guards at the gate, and you won’t be able to afford to look at it. Get your fill while you can.”

By now the light had leached from the walls. It was too dark for a photograph, but I stepped back to consider the house from another angle, and thought about which lens I should bring when I returned. A wide angle to emphasize the lines. I craned to see where the balcony ended and my ankle twisted on the curb. As I stumbled backwards it was the cyclist’s breathe I felt first, hot on my neck and the heat of his curses. I felt a handlebar plunge into my pelvis, and watched myself curl over the pain. I saw a bicycle wheel like a shattered umbrella frame beneath the tyre of a taxi. I saw the cyclist pedal furiously away, his cries and the flaps of his jacket like shards in the night air. I saw my hands wet with my tears, but my body whole.

Xu Weibai waited.  I fixed my gaze on the villa, and counted the panes in each window. Eight times four windows. And when I’d counted in English I counted in Chinese. And by the time I’d finished I could speak.

“My sister died in an accident.”

He waited.

            “A motorcycle. We were walking, it was raining. It was night-time. He said he didn’t see her.”

            “I’m sorry.”

            “It was a long time ago. We were home from art school for the winter break. She was a sculptor. She was such a good artist. Much braver than me. She was making these glass landscapes with light inside. She made the light. I only chase it.”

            “What was her name?”

            “Anna.”

            “You were there, too?”

            “I was looking away.”

            The headlights of a taxi turned into the street, and I held out my arm. Xu Weibai held the passenger door for me, as I stowed my camera and tripod.

            “Will you meet me on Sunday? Four o-clock?” he asked.

            “Yes, alright, I’d like to.”

            “12 Wulumuqi Road. Can you find it? Near Changle Road.”

            “Yes, I’ll find it.”

On Sunday I took a taxi from my home in the west of the city. We turned east on Changle, heading towards Wulumuqi Road. I’d given myself plenty of time for our meeting, but we soon halted behind the tail-lights of a phalanx of Volkswagen taxis. The lights at Wulumuqi were too far away for me to see, but I sensed them turning as we nudged forward. Three cycles of lights, and we were still far behind the intersection. I tamped my impatience, and resigned myself to being late. Xu Weibai hadn’t given me a telephone number. A cyclist in a white lab coat pitched between two stalled cars, and a taxi turned into oncoming traffic. Ignoring the bleating horns, its passengers unhurriedly unloaded a wheelchair, and eventually its elderly owner, her small head cradled in a knitted bonnet.    

Huashan Hospital. Around which taxis disgorged the infirm, infectious, morbidly injured, chronically diseased, and their families who would wash, feed, and watch over them. I smelled affliction and anxiety, and willed the taxi onwards. It crawled through the lights and stopped, and the driver flipped up the meter. Before I could question him a couple jockeyed for the front passenger door and the winner slid inside.

Twelve Wulumuqi Road. You’ve brought me to Huashan Hospital. I couldn’t idle on the pavement any longer, and so once again allowed a multitude to draw me towards a meeting with Xu Weibai.

Have we come here to eat? I looked around at the tiled high-rises. Inside the hospital campus the crowds thinned and dispersed to the various departments. It was ten past four in the afternoon, and compared to mornings when urgent crowds thronged for too few appointment slots, relatively quiet. I began to feel a bit better. Rejecting the pharmacy building to my left, I walked forwards, towards a much older red brick neo-Renaissance building, surrounded by bedding plants and palms. A drift of yellow petals aglow against violet. Hospitals have gardeners too. Are you here?

The road through the campus abutted at a carved screen, beyond which patients strolled by a clipped lawn. There were maintenance workers in sky-blue overalls, but none of them was Xu Weibai. Where are you? Beyond the lawn it grew quiet. I wondered whether I should listen my way towards him instead. The slap of pigeons’ wings, the muffled bray of traffic, the sigh of an air-conditioner, the silence of a ginger cat padding through the pampas grass. I can’t hear you.   

            Cache-cache. Zhuo micang .We all understand the pleasures of hide-and-seek. I’d reached a rockery beside a pool stilled by algae. Reflecting the grain of rock and bark it was like the surface of a silver albumen print. Silver and gold locked in egg white. There was nobody here. But someone must have smoked the cigarette on the ground, and tossed tissue into the camellia bush. Someone must have brought the needle still attached to coiled tubing on the path. This isn’t your place, you’re somewhere else. 

            Still further, a tile-roofed corridor zig-zagged against the boundary wall. I allowed it to lead me past blighted pavilions, past padlocked doors and the laundry of maintenance workers hanging from the eaves. These aren’t your rooms.

            “Xu Weibai!”

The chitter of sparrows.

            The last door was falling from its hinges. Through the gap I could see green.

            “Xu Weibai!”

The ginger cat slithered before me.

We padded through the abstract world of a bamboo grove, all inked horizontals scored across vertical culms; all moist, light-streaked shade.

“Xu Weibai!” My cry rebounded off the lacquer stems that clicked and swayed around us. Above us, leaves like the prints of frantic pigeons masked the sky.

We emerged into a small clearing.

Orange advances. An extravagant bank of pomegranate-red peonies with flaming anemone centres. They dazzled, against the blue-green pines behind. Glossy mounds of ilex holly, spiny yet softly rounded. Pots of orchids, some the precious cymbidiums, discrete blooms like tiny shooting stars amongst the foliage. I stood beguiled.

He saw the cat first.

“Xiao mao. And Alice!”

He led me to a table—a slab of stone balanced on clay pots. And on top, four bottles of Snow, and dishes of hickory nuts, oranges and rice crackers.

“What is this place?”

“If you mean the garden outside, that belongs to the hospital.”

“But what is it?”

“It was someone’s private courtyard house and garden. I don’t know why they keep it, all this land right in the center of the city, but I’m glad they do.”

“And in here?”

He held out his arms to encompass the small clearing. “My own private courtyard house and garden. To which you are most welcome.” He handed me an opened beer.

            “Are you the hospital’s gardener?”

“No. Not exactly. Though I work for some of the doctors. I make them gardens, and partly in return they let me keep this garden.”

“You make them gardens like this one?”

“Usually bigger, with water. But yes, somewhat like this.”

“I’d like to photograph the peonies—before they’re over. But in the morning. I want the early light.”

“You know how to get here.”

We sat together for the rest of the afternoon, and into the evening. I asked him to describe his gardens, and he told me stories. He asked me why I took pictures. “We’re the same,” he said, finally. “I work in the garden because things change. And you take photographs because things change.” He considered a moment, then asked, “Do you have a picture of your sister?”

“Anna?” It didn’t seem strange talking about her, though I seldom did now, at least not to anyone else.

“No. I was planning to photograph her in her studio.” I paused a moment, seeing the texture of her skin and hair liquid behind glass and her grey eyes made green. Glass green. “When you’re young you never imagine you don’t have time. I wish I’d paid more attention.”

            He let me talk about her for a while. Cracking open hickory nuts and extracting the kernels gave us plenty of time.

“Alice, can you come over here today?” It was a Tuesday afternoon. For the past month I’d spent part of each Sunday with him. I’d fixed a silver-edged herbaceous peony at dawn. From a few centimeters, with a macro lens at f/8, the edges of the petals were stilled rivers. I’d photographed the peony beds in rain, and after rain, the banked earth steaming. I’d focused on the water droplets on the stems of orchids, and afterwards, touching the moisture, been surprised to find it viscous and sweet. On Sundays Xu Weibai tended his own garden, and we talked. I’d bring bags of fruits and nuts and we counted the hours in the pile of shells and peel.

But I’d never seen him during the week. I had my own work, and he had his. It wasn’t our habit to talk much on the phone, so when he asked me to come, I simply agreed. By this time it was July. The pool in the hospital garden was an olive slick. I looked forward to the cool of the bamboo grove.

I smelled the change before I saw it. As I approached the corridor, I noticed ladders leaning up against the eaves, and industrial paint buckets. I realized that as far back as the fetid pond the acrid odor of exterior paint had mixed with that of rotting plant life. The ladders marked a tideline behind which the woodwork had been sanded and painted lacquer red. The doors had been removed from their hinges and the glazing repaired. Eyes smarting from the chemicals, I hurried to the end of the corridor. Xu Weibai was waiting for me.

The last door had been removed, and was stacked in a pile like the others. Beyond it, the bamboo grove was still there, but a concrete pathway had been poured through it. Its edges were jauntily staked with yellow bunting to prevent it being trodden on before dry. A cat’s paw prints flouted the effort. Tentatively I placed my foot on the bamboo mulch beside it.

“It isn’t there anymore,” he said simply. In his hand he held a striped tarp.

“What’s happening?” I couldn’t see to the edge of the grove.

“What always happens.” He nodded to a maintenance worker balancing two buckets on a yoke across his shoulders.

“It’s alright. They’re repairing the hospital garden.”

“What about your garden?            

He whistled through the gap in his front teeth. “A tea house.”

            “What about those doctors you work for? Can’t they stop it?”

            “I don’t want them to.”

            I looked more closely at the tarp, from which soil was seeping.

            “Let me see.”

He spread it on the ground before us. Clumps of peony roots, the earth still clinging, clipped below their foliage. I imagined the bruised wreckage of branches and blossoms the other side of the grove.

            “It’s not the best time to move them, and they won’t bloom next year, but they’ll come back.”

He picked one up to show me more closely. “I’ll cut this one here, and here, and if I’m lucky I’ll end up with three.”  

            I looked down at the camera around my neck, and thought about all the photographs of the garden I’d stored secure. I looked at the remains of the bamboo grove until I’d had my fill of looking. And I knew I couldn’t fix the smell of warm earth.