• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

I waited at a discreet distance and watched three plain-clothes policemen take this elderly woman, screaming mightily, into an unmarked minivan. Well, maybe there is something Westerners can teach the Chinese, I thought. And then I thought of events in the U.S. over the past few years, where it is now acceptable to jail people indefinitely and without charge as long as the President says so. Perhaps I’d approached this wrong. Maybe the Chinese aren’t working toward some vaguely American-type model. Maybe it’s us who are moving toward the Chinese Model, and this realization caused a fleeting moment of despair, and then I remembered that it was time to search for sustenance again, and I walked onward into the Shanghai night.

10

In the year 1298, a romance writer by the name of Rustichello found himself sharing a prison cell in Genoa with a man who called himself Marco Polo. Bored, they got to talking and the results of the encounter eventually became the book known as The Travels of Marco Polo, which was the Harry Potter of its time. Well, not quite, as it would still be another 120 years until Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Nevertheless, the book captured the imagination of the medieval literary world, which was composed of the approximately eleven people who could actually read in medieval Europe. But for these eleven people the book was a sensation. And it is no wonder. In it, a young and intrepid Marco Polo leaves Venice with his father and uncle, crosses the Black Sea, and follows the Silk Road all the way to the summer court of Kublai Khan in the pleasure dome of Xanadu. Young Marco clearly made a fine impression on the emperor, for he remained a part of his court for the next seventeen years, during which time he was frequently sent as a diplomatic emissary to the far-flung lands of what we now think of as China. During one such mission, he was sent to Hangzhou, a city that so enchanted him he referred to it as the “finest and most splendid city in the world,” full of stone bridges and charming lanes and winsome women leading an idyllic life on the graceful shores of West Lake.

Of course, these winsome women would have been tottering on bound feet, an observation that seemed to have escaped young Marco, and the beverage of choice in Hangzhou, and indeed throughout much of China, would have been tea, another detail somehow overlooked by Marco, leading some to believe that The Travels of Marco Polo was really a fabulist’s dream. Perhaps Marco Polo did really spend an eventful seventeen years in the court of Kublai Khan. Or perhaps he simply had a keen ear for the tales told by the Arab merchants who traded along the Silk Road. In any event, someone somewhere in the late thirteenth century once described Hangzhou as the “finest and most splendid city in the world,” and this alone seemed like a compelling reason to visit.

I’d boarded a train in Shanghai, where, as I tumbled among the multitudes of travelers, I was quickly reminded that Shanghai is not all money and glitz. There are 200 million migrant workers in China, and I do believe they were all migrating together through the Shanghai train station on that same day. And really, these migrant workers with the disheveled hair, clutching worn bags, economic refugees from a rural China that has seen none of the prosperity of the cities, remain representative of the vast majority of Chinese. There is an enormous gap in China between the women in Chanel on Nanjing Xi Lu and the migrant workers washing windows high above the city. These workers sat behind me on the train, in hard-seat class, while I stretched in relative comfort in a soft-seat car, watching vendors wander the aisles selling drinks, food, trinkets, toys, bracelets, and even golden commemorative plates graced with the visage of Chairman Mao.

Next to me sat a nattily dressed elderly man.

“You are traveling in China?” he asked in flawless English, a linguistic feat that startled me, as I had to yet to hear a soul over forty