Unifying divides

I hear it coming. In a rare moment of stillness when the rickshaws sit idle, their drivers not compelled out of silence by company and an icy breeze carries idle chatter off over the water, the drag, heard from twenty meters away, seems amplified in the momentary tranquility. There’s a deep gurgling and finally an expulsion, the snapping sound of mucus hitting the cracked pavement.

It’s a sound that makes my stomach drop and my western sensibilities cause me to cower in disgust. I give a bewildered scan of my surroundings in search of the source of what is perhaps described best as a death-defying hack. The source of my horror had come from my left. As I wandered the narrow alleys, some less than a meter wide, I was magnetically drawn toward the winding canals on which the tiny, ancient town of Xitang is built. Curious Chinese faces peer from their dwellings, a group of men, laughing and smoking, tell in rapid Mandarin what I imagine to be great tales of conquest from their youth, though I’ll never know for sure.

I’m in a country of 1.3 billion people and few natives share my red hair, pale freckled skin, or height. I’m as much a mystery to them as they are to me, but I feel safe, away from the bright lights and surveillance, that has come to define Shanghai. In the faces of these villagers I see tolerance, wisdom and what I suspect is an excellent sense of humour.

Consumed by stores which double as houses, women preparing Chinese sweets and the yarners creating the scarves they’ll one day sell to the few foreign tourists who pass by their storefronts, I was surprised to find the source of my disgust came from a woman.

Barely five foot five, her Asian complexion offered little hint of her age and she busily scrubbed the final remnants of a stain from her cloth. Squatting by the canal with a well worn timber backed scrubbing brush, and the warm sun on her neck, she worked the brush back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, rinses, and repeats. Her work is ritualistic, and despite the wintry temperatures and icy water she perseveres, her brow furrowed while she scrubs with conviction.

The hacking is to date the most pervasive cultural divide I’ve encountered since first stumbling on to the streets of Shanghai, and one which has followed me two hours west to this picturesque water village. It is here, in the ever narrowing alleys of Xitang, where the villagers rinse their clothes and dry their foods by waterways which provide their livelihoods, where artists young and old come yearning to capture the essence of a town which has seen and felt more history than I am capable of comprehending, among the warm faces and timeless traditions, that I’ve caught my first glimpse of the China I’d envisioned in my Australian home, so far from the canal where I now stood.