Hangzhou: Heaven on Earth

In this excerpt from A Thread of Sky, the family tour of China is half over, and Irene Shen is starting to give up the hope she’s harbored of finally reconnecting with her daughters, her sisters, and her mother in their ancestral home. As they travel from one must-see to the next, all six women have been consumed by personal secrets, family tensions, and the baggage they’ve tried to leave behind. Now, just when they arrive in the famed city of Hangzhou, said to be China’s most beautiful, they step off the tour bus into a torrential rainstorm.

*****

Hangzhou, said to be heaven on earth, was getting drenched with rain by its supposed counterpart. West Lake, the inspiration for classical poems and paintings, the setting for romantic myths and presidential retreats, was a giant gray pocked puddle. Irene’s sneakers were waterlogged, her socks cold sponges, her pants soaked to the knee.

The group moved as one blob under a hodgepodge shell of umbrellas toward a cave whose placard promised the famous sight of “a thread of sky.” Irene peered into the entrance—a swarm of jostling bodies and mucky shoes—and said she’d wait outside. Her mother and sister raised their eyebrows, the local guide pursed his lips; even her daughters’ expression deemed her behavior unseemly. Irene ignored them all and went to sit under a nearby pavilion, on a damp bench.

All around her, Chinese tourists eagerly hopped and skipped, pulling disposable slickers over their suits and dresses, tying plastic bags over their freshly permed hair and polished shoes, grinning and flashing peace signs. For them, traveling their own country was an unprecedented luxury, along with so much else in the new China, and they would not be thwarted by rain. Well, she wasn’t one of them. For her, in this age of hype, of globalization, of time being the only commodity that ran scarce, that promised to run out, she supposed the only true guarantee any tour could offer was disillusionment.

A bolt of lightning, the sky cracking open, a searing, blinding flare. It mended itself almost instantly, even before the thunder crashed hard, triggering a collective cower, scattered screams.

Irene scurried into the cave. A thread of sky—she mouthed it to herself. Light radiating through a pinhole in the cave ceiling. She pictured an undulating line, alive and fine against the dark. The kind of thing you couldn’t help but reach for, knowing there was nothing to grasp.
She scanned the ceiling, the walls, the corners. She couldn’t see it. Every time she spotted a glow, it turned out to be the flash of a camera. Her own group was on the opposite side, separated from her by several other tour groups.

Jostling forward, she found herself trapped behind two tall strangers.

“Do you see it?”

“Where?”

“There.”

“I don’t see it.”

“Right there.”

“That? Is that it?”

“I can’t see what you’re seeing.”

She craned higher, focused harder, and finally saw a faint glimmer, up high and constant. She nearly tapped the first stranger to ask, Is that it? Could it be? All that, for this? She would’ve humbled herself to ask Tommy or the local guide, but they’d exited. Was she looking from the wrong angle? Standing too far, too close? Maybe the weather was wrong—the sky too gray, the cave too damp. Maybe the light was getting blotted out by all the tourists and their picture-taking. Keeping her own camera zipped in her purse, Irene gazed at the glimmer until it seemed imprinted. The moment she stepped outside, she could no longer see it, except when she closed her eyes.

Hangzhou image by Deanna Fei