The View from Orange Islet
In 1938, a colossal man-made fire demolished most of Changsha. Following the orders of the General Chiang Kai-shek, who predicted that the Japanese army would seize the city, Nationalist soldiers preemptively set the fire to ensure that the Japanese would gain nothing from their takeover but smoke and cinders. Some accounts report as much as 90% of the city going up in flames. Records have also quantified the magnitude of destruction as the loss of fifty thousand buildings, the ends of thirty thousand lives, and one billion dollars in damages. Eye-witness testimonies describe residents desperately clamoring to escape, causing boat accidents on the river and other smaller disasters against the backdrop of the relentless burning. With every additional detail, the velocity and vastness of the wreckage become increasingly difficult to imagine. Over the course of five nights, a city that had stood since China’s first dynasty vanished in a hot gray haze.
Consequently, almost nothing in today’s Changsha, the city in which I teach and breathe, predates the 1940s. It was rebuilt in a hurry, judging by the mismatched architecture lining my walk to the subway station on this February afternoon. Which is to say, the inconsistencies of this city are evident even in passing, made clear in how long it takes to glance around at one’s surroundings. I pass a space-age skyscraper with vibrant cerulean windows that reflect the city as a glossy undersea dream, bluish and half-remembered. It stands shoulder-to-shoulder with a neoclassical edifice, complete with ornate friezes carved into its columns. If it were not for the pairs of guardian lion statues flanking their entrances, a visitor might lose their sense of place while surveying this row of towers. I occasionally stumble on the uneven cement slabs that comprise the city’s narrow sidewalks and gloomy underpasses. There is a distinct feeling of cobbled-togetherness that strikes me even after six months living here.
At eye level, a far more comprehensible altitude compared to the fog-swallowed tops of buildings, the scenery shape-shifts to the rhythm of the market. Storefronts come and go on a more or less monthly schedule, without warning. In twenty days, a coffeehouse becomes a dumpling restaurant. In an even briefer period, a convenience store becomes a fruit stand. Sometimes it happens so quickly that I don’t even notice the construction — one thing appears to seamlessly and instantly become another. The pace at which these transitions occur seems almost inconsiderate to an outsider like myself. Which is to say that there is no empty storefront in front of which ex-patrons can stroll past and sigh wistfully, as if looking at a photograph of a childhood treehouse. If I were to return to Changsha in a few years, the block of businesses outside my school’s gate that I frequent every day would probably be unrecognizable.
On the subway, I notice a young girl sitting between her two grandparents. She has straight-across bangs, like many Chinese girls of her age, and wears glasses with translucent frames. To her right, her salt-and-peppered grandfather loudly informs the person on the other end of his phone call that he is on his way to Orange Islet, where I am also headed. The girl alternates between insistently shushing her grandfather for practically announcing their afternoon plans to everyone else in the subway car and burying her face in her grandmother’s windbreaker out of embarrassment. He pays her no mind. She probably doesn’t realize that the mobile phone service isn’t great on the subway. But perhaps during her lifetime, that will no longer be the case. The breakneck pace of technological advancement in China has astonished observers for decades and will undoubtedly continue to do so. An example of this is the very subway we’re riding, Changsha’s first, that only took four years to construct from nothing. And now it is a completely ordinary fixture of this girl’s life.
I’m often curious about how Chinese people of her grandfather’s age have processed China’s incredible and terrifying transformation since their own childhoods. This man couldn’t be more than five years older than my father, whose anecdote of choice about his youth in rural China was that he helped build his own schoolhouse with mud and bricks. But even if I could converse with him fluently, it could nonetheless be an uncomfortable subject to broach. Chinese people of his age grew up amidst the confusion and violence of the militantly populist Cultural Revolution, only to be told that ‘to get rich is no sin’ ten years later. Most people do not speak out about the distress of living through such a jagged societal transition, especially not to a foreign stranger. Even with my family members, it’s not something that feels appropriate to discuss. From what I’ve read, therapy in China has helped people process their traumatic memories related to the ideological ricochet of the past half-century, albeit on a very small scale. But for most, to dwell on the past too intently may turn out to be agonizing and fruitless, particularly when everyone else is looking forward.
Orange Islet is a five kilometer-long strip of land on the Xiangjiang River in Changsha. Orange trees, the oblong park’s namesake, plentifully line the path from the subway entrance on one end to the mountainous relief of Mao on the other. Think Mount Rushmore, except instead of four stodgy old white men, there is only one face and it is that of a young Mao with windswept hair. Changsha, after all, was the birthplace of his socialist intellectual development. And so that is how this depiction remembers him: before he fell twenty percent short. This eternally young Mao gazes at the city, watching as it grows older and newer. To those who lived through the Changsha fire, seeing the city incinerated to the ground in five days must have struck them as horrific and instantaneous. Perhaps that feeling consumes this enormous stony ghost of Mao as he silently witnesses malls packed with Western brands and luxury apartment buildings sprout from the ground of Changsha. It must be like watching a film that he finds both unfathomable and nightmarish. Or perhaps he saw it coming, though so few people do when it comes to predicting China’s future.
I usually get tired of walking before I can make it all the way to the other side of the islet. This day in particular is unusually warm and sunny for February, so the park is crowded with families trying to enjoy this burst of sunshine and blue sky before the weather turns sullen again. Based on my conversations with students and other teachers at my school, it seems like most people do not object to China’s drastic transition. My students treasure the exposure to American culture it affords them, particularly when it comes to American cuisine and the NBA. The only exception that I’ve consistently noticed is opinions on the weather and on a broader scale, the environment. As I mentioned earlier, a sunny day like this one is a once-a-month rarity. I’ve heard a lot of complaints about the smog and air quality during my time in China that I didn’t pick up on when I visited with my family ten or fifteen years ago. But people always voice them so nonchalantly, as if they’ve made peace with the inevitable.
From Orange Islet, I survey the most bustling and sky-scraping city I’ve ever lived in hurtle forward. I’ve noticed that many other foreign teachers in Changsha have been rather quick to pass judgment on the city, characterizing behavior like people spitting on streets as backwards while they sip imported beer at a Western bar. I’ve often wondered how they could make such absolute, sweeping determinations about a city that seems constantly shape-shifting out of generalizations. Not only do their remarks seem to gloss over what is truly interesting about living in China, but they also grow more dated and irrelevant with each sip. From where I stand, I see cranes crown building tops as they perform a deliberate, yellow balancing act against the unusually blue sky. Things move here, at least to me, unquestionably forward, into something obscured by fog.
