A dance for Su Zhuo

A dance dedicated to my dear friends Charlie Brown and Lucy who so generously allowed me to enter their lives for a week as an ever present Snoopy.

Su Zhuo is famous for its bridges. More bridges than any other city in China, even the elderly are apt to declare to you that they have walked more bridges than your foolish feet have walked streets. They probably have. Bridges just burst forth from the ground for no particular reason in Su Zhuo.

I arrived smelling acutely like two days on a train from Lhasa. I felt as though I had arrived on a spaceship from another planet; baffled immediately by the
cleanliness, beauty, and quaintness of the town-esque city I had arrived in. Ancient but with hot water. Like a fairy tale. Hobbled streets and hobbled people. Slanting roof tiles and water stains. Stone canals outlined with neon lights. The cacophony of shopping malls and the delicate twitter of birds. Flaky pastry eaten with chopsticks. Gardens, pagodas, buses, shallow boats on lazy rivers, and ragged old men selling roasted sweet potatoes from blackened ovens on wheels.

In my bowl of soup I found a fish so slender and translucent I would have thought it was an egg white save for the tiny black eyes. In my temporary residence in the Chinese student dorms I found two quilts and an electric hot water bottle I would have considered fearsome weapons had I been the ice cold draft filling the room. In my spirit I found scabby wounds I would have
thought beyond healing had I found them in any other place. In my Chinese friends I found friendship that is recognizable only to them, and now, to me as well.

We idled away our days walking through parks, taking pictures, finding places to eat, peeling oranges, escaping into heated shopping malls, chatting, wandering around, joining tour groups, trying on boots, staying warm. The places are nearly a blur to me as one day ran into the next and I learned the art of warmth from a glass jar filled with boiling water and a leak
proof lid. The sounds of that city are diluted to me because they were distinct from one another only in our pauses for breath between laughter. During my time there I learned the dance that is required for the body to receive rest, for the mind to receive peace, and for the soul to receive joy. A dance that looks like a bridge.

Some bridges are extravagant, some utilitarian, but most are simply modest. There was a bridge that was so humble one might have walked over it without ever guessing the impossibility of the walk had the bridge not been there. It was composed of two slabs of stone hardly two meters long grown old and stained permanent side by side. So many feet had trod there, so many
shoe scuffs and bike tire treads, yet the stones bore no slippery smoothness. The sludgy green water underneath it moved at the pace of a whisper or fog from a breath on a cold morning which was every morning there. We must have passed over that bridge more than two dozen times. One of many, nothing more.

A bridge takes you places you would not otherwise go. It connects two things which, by default, are not connected. A bridge uplifts, a bridge quickens, a bridge joins. All my weary semester what I've needed most is such a bridge, such a dance.

My week in Su Zhuo was a dance, it was a bridge. A bridge between a tortured yesterday and a hopeful tomorrow constructed out of beautiful scenes and dear friends without which I may have never gotten to this other side.

A dance of bridges.