This is China! BLOG

Isthmus Season

The last time I drove out onto an isthmus of note was back in the mid-90s, from Boston to Provincetown, at the tip of Rhode Island. All during the Labor Day traffic jam into the city I entertained myself with thoughts of outdoor bands playing rock hits from the 70s and 80s, stalls crammed with racks of bland suburban art, and of eating too much fatty fried foods at open-air diners. By the time I actually arrived at the motel at which I would be staying the couple days, I was instead tired, dirty and irritable. It took me a few hours walking around the carnival-like streets and eating an ice cream cone to restore my sensibilities.

The first weekend in June this year found me in very much the same sort of disposition during a long and at times tortuous drive from Suzhou to the Tai Lake (Tai Hu) isthmus of West Mountain (Xi Shan). The evening before a Chinese friend told me she wanted to join her sister, who was traveling to Xi Shan to pick pi pa with her former classmates. Pi pa are a small, yellow fruit with a sweet flesh and sticky juice that is refreshing without being cloying. This was apparently the Pi Pa Picking season in the region. The best I understood (from the locals, of course) was that pi pa are available only in the Tai Hu area.

What sounded like a good idea to the four of us (another sister joined in as well) turned into gridlock that would take us more nearly an hour and a half to break through. Everyone and his mother chose that overcast Sunday to travel to the narrow isthmus of Xi Shan, a lovely cove of hump-backed islands conducted by imperious, low-lying hotels.

Easily the thing that stuck with me most during what eventually turned out to be a delightful afternoon was the traffic. At points along the highway two lanes became five lanes – relatively easy to do because there was little oncoming traffic. We traced license plates from Suzhou, Shanghai, Wuxi and even Nanjing. The traffic congestion was only worsened by the propensity of Chinese drivers to sometimes stop in the middle of the road – or pull off a bit, in some cases – and begin bargaining with the pi pa sellers at the side of the road. The vendors literally littered the roadside with their plastic buckets of the fruit, which they would hoard under umbrellas on rickety wooden tables.

We eventually met the former classmates, a group of excited twenty-somethings that had started their journey at eight o’clock in the morning. We started ours at 10am. Which meant that when we arrived, they were just on their way out. Hungry – and not dismissive of the idea of a bit of fried fatty food (which, of course, was nowhere to be found) – we settled on two restaurants at which to try some locally flavored fried rice, vegetables and fish. Each threw us out in succession after seating us. Business was booming and we clearly were not ordering enough food to keep their attention. Chinese love to travel in big groups; that day many traveled in groups as large as 10. Four was just not large enough. We eventually settle on a bowls of soup noodles for each in a dirty, noisy open-air garage facing a forested hill. We all agreed the soup noodles were actually what the day required to set it back on track.

Sated, we set out to pick pi pa. There were none to be found. The surrounding hills had all been picked out. We were too late. A combination of swarms of city folks and enterprising farmers had already picked the trees clean. “The only places that have pi pa are high in the hills and high in the trees, where you’ll need a ladder to get at the last ones,” one old woman told us. She was squatting on a wooden stool at a great stone gate that framed the gray of the Lake. Two buckets of pi pa rested at her ankles, as inert as our interest to buy them from her.

Eventually, we relented. We accepted that we, too, like so many of the hordes that had driven out for the Pi Pa Picking Season were having to pull off the road and haggle down the outrageous prices the sellers were asking. Nearly out of the Xi Shan reserve, our driver fixed on the idea of ensuring we had the best quality pi pa; we very nearly left the area with no fruit at all. After the driver’s fruitless driving around for the best buys, I finally told him pull off at the next stall and let the others buy as many fruit as their hearts desired.

When we eventually arrived home I reflected on just how much technology – especially the automobile – had amplified cultural habits as much as normalized them. Just years before the countryside had had to come to the city by overburdened truck to offload its produce; now, the city came to the countryside by the carload.

Who needs locusts in China when you have the automobile packed with hungry families?