Zhou Zhuang, A World Away

I was walking side by side with a small town's worth of people down the streets of Zhou Zhuang, shoulder to shoulder with an army of tourists. Down the alleys are models of authenticity, boats filled with camera-bearing tourists clogging up the traffic for the few old men still using the waterway anachronistically - carting around loads of broken bricks and dirt. The walls bleed rust, and scars of red brick in the concrete seperate generations of expanding families and historical neighbours. Every other corner is covered in people selling poorly translated goods (The Courilell Jeulerr selling suspicious coral jewellery), contrasting themselves with the gardens of barbed wire and laundry that speckle the homes behind. In the alleyways there are chickens, cats and dogs seemingly without owners. There are tigers on the walls adorning the entranceway to a concrete-brick box substituting for a home. In every corner of chipped mortar and personal agriculture is a beautiful scene of adversity. It seems to me that these people have lived here forever, occasionally updating but somehow impervious to change.

As I walk down the main street of the town, wrapping myself haphazardly around a network of canals and waterways, I almost forget that everyone is silently staring at me. Between my brother and myself, we are the only two Lao Wai for miles, and we are, as one Chinese man described us, “like caged animals in the zoo”. Without fail, every time we leave Shanghai we become a rare and exsquisite oddity. We are treated like a white orchid amidst a sea of green. In this town, I feel like a tourist attraction. With the camera cord dangling out of my pocket, my shirt wrapped around my waist and my eyes peeled for the next architectural photo-op, I realize that wherever I stand, cameras seem to be casually aimed in my direction. At times, I turn around to see a pointing finger quickly dash itself to the side, and two faces quickly turn away. From a distance, Chinese tourists are taking pictures of me as if I were part of the experience. Somehow, I have become more interesting than the town they came to see. It is as if I am just a modern addition to a quaint little water village, as worthy of a photograph as the canals, bridges, and ramshackle neighbourhoods. It makes me feel that the people around me don't even understand why they came here. It is as if they are looking for entertainment in all the wrong places. The city in itself is a historic masterpiece, glued together with a mix of cement and history, and yet the addition of a pair of foreigners is enough to blow it away.

I am a zebra, thousands of miles from home, wandering through a town forgotten by the people who populate its streets. Walking over a low bridge in Zhou Zhuang, you almost don't notice the boat pass below you, only in the corner of your eye exists the old man, carting his pile of dust around the city of stone.