A tiny blip in the continuum

On the first day of March, Terry, Deb, Eddie, Sam, Violet and I bundled ourselves into a 10-seater minibus—known affectionately as a ‘bread bus’ (面包车) due to its shape resembling that of a loaf of bread—and took a three-hour ride out of Shanghai to Wuzhen (乌镇), a sleepy water village in the Zhejiang Province.

The drive was uneventful save for the first ten minutes, when we commandeered the driver to the nearest Mackers for takeaway breakfast. Six McMuffins, six cups of coffee or tea, and six minutes later, Terry and Deb had all but knocked out; the toll of the whirlwind that were the past seven days divided between Shanghai and Beijing has finally made itself felt. Sam, being the tai-tai in training who once quipped she “woke naturally every day, at whenever”, soon dozed off next to an Eddie glued to his Playstation Portable. Its tiny electronic bleeps and bloops filled the cabin, accompanied in staccato by Terry’s snoring.

Out the window, and along the highway, I watched as flat vast lands unfolded as far as the eye could see, on which an ever-changing slideshow played, of landscape peppered by shandy low-rise cottages sitting in isolation amidst rice fields and undecorated factories in mint-new industrial estates lined on either side of the straight, wide boulevards which typified their look. The only way in which each estate distinguished itself from the next was in the choice of ornamental street lamps. Closer to Wuzhen, every factory was either a garment or a textile factory. At one point, Violet had awoken and, upon seeing the billboard advertising a factory outlet nearby, muttered dreamily about having to go there the next time.

We arrived late morning. Within the Visitors Centre that served as the entrance to its sprawling grounds, past the admission counter, was an exhibit of life in Wuzhen as it had been 2,000 years ago. Descriptive plaques provided a silent commentary to the wax figures posing in scenes of a day in Wuzhen, where life revolved around the many waterways of the village. The idea that everything was dumped into or derived from the waterways was just a little more than disconcerting to this modern-day visitor.

Entry to the village itself was made by taking a five-minute boat ride across a bay separating it from the Visitors Centre. The notion that Wuzhen ran in a timezone of its own began here, as the boat simply would not leave till it was filled to its full capacity.

Strolling down the meandering alley, I was glad that Wuzhen was left relatively real, with none of the garish decorations and addendum that screamed “tourist attraction!” From the various street signage to the trash cans, one could see that effort has been made to retain the authenticity of the village. The façade of the shophouses lining either side of the main thoroughfare retained its ornamental woodwork origins and betrayed little of what was inside of them. Every teahouse, restaurant or hotel, even, looked as though they could have existed all along.

Away from the bustle of Shanghai, Wuzhen was a fresh breath of air. It was serenely quiet; the denizens we encountered—whom we were told lived there—paid little attention to the regular stream of tourists flowing through their alleys and went about their ways quietly; chatting over tea and a smoke; another round of mahjong; fishing from rowboats. There was neither fanfare nor hawking, and Bali this was not. From behind the counters of their shops offering myriad goods from roasted melon seeds to noodles to handicraft, they peered out at us and into our camera lenses with nothing more than mild curiosity or an indifference I could not pin down to whether business was simply too slow to them to be bothered or to a genuine sense of carefreeness.

Such was the tranquility of Wuzhen that Violet announced, out of the blue, to us in all seriousness that she had made up her mind Wuzhen would be her place of retirement.

“I will sit by the river and write poetry all day. There’s even wireless internet here!” she added. That she had said that while standing right outside a smaller visitor centre within the village was an irony that was not lost on the rest of us.

The notion of Wuzhen as a place in which to idle the days by was further reinforced by two gentle old men we met. Obviously old friends, they had been ambling along ahead of us, lightly heckling each other over which way to go, when we caught with them. Regarding us young ‘uns, one of them smiled and exclaimed in his crackling voice:

“慢慢走！乌镇很大！” (“Walk slowly! Wuzhen is big!”)

And in the tradition of the sayings of wise old men, it could not have been any more astute and true.

(My Flickr set of Wuzhen is here)