The 800-Year-Old Beauty - Lijiang Old Town

A Typical Lane in Lijiang Old Town

I saw a friend’s Facebook status the other day, and it went like this, “Two friends: one lives in Beijing, the other lives in Lijiang. One is making a hundred thousand a year, can’t afford to buy a house, rents a tiny apartment, has a 9 to 5 job, takes bus to work, breathing car exhaust, working like a dog trying to climb the corporate ladder; the other is a freelance photographer, no fixed income, lives in an old traditional Chinese courtyard house by the lake, sleeps until noon, drinks tea all day in the sunshine, watching clouds float by snow-capped mountains. One thinks the other has no ambition. The other thinks he doesn’t know to enjoy life.”

Which one would I rather be?

I think I’m moving from the former to the latter. Slowly. In transition.

Especially now that I’m in Lijiang, I fully intend to do some tea drinking and sunbathing and cloud watching.

Lijiang is the reason I came to Yunnan.

I saw it in a movie 10 years ago, and have wanted to visit ever since. It’s love at first sight. The old town of Lijiang is 800 years old, and it takes you back in time the moment you walk in.

Red lanterns, willow trees, bluestone streets, narrow and winding lanes, 350 little bridges, wood houses, lush gardens, green ponds, brilliant gold fish, it captures your eyes like a beautiful woman, and your heart like a lovely soul (too cheesy?, but that’s really how I felt. It’s like a woman who’s got the face the body and the depth). The air is intoxicating. Everywhere you look is a picture perfect scene for an ancient love story. It amazes me that so much visual interest and architectural variety can be neatly crammed into 900 acres of land. It’s like a decadent chocolate cake. You cut it open and then realize how many layers of flavor are hidden inside. I felt like I don’t have enough eyes to take it all in. Every corner you turn, you discover something new that tickles your interest. It’s a book you never tire of reading. A dish you never weary of eating. It’s like aged Pu Er Tea, you can wash it, steep it endless times and it’s still full of fragrant flavor. It’s a town you walk away from and miss right away.

In addition to this entire sensory overload, there’s something very sensual and poetic about Lijiang.

I think it’s the presence of water that lends it that feeling. Water is the spirit and soul of the old town. Lijiang, literally means “beautiful waterway”. Some people call it Oriental Venice. It used to be the “palace” of the local ruler, who must have hired an excellent irrigation engineer, with the skills and brilliance way ahead of his time, when he designed this place. I’ll explain in a bit.

Downtown Lijiang is called Si Fang Jie (Four Square Street). It’s a square shaped open space, paved with stone, connecting four major streets in different directions. Then in a spider web formation, smaller lanes radiate from the four main streets, reaching every corner of town. The main water source from Black Dragon Pool divides into hundreds of little streams running in parallel with these stone lanes, reaching every household.

In each house, there are three pools the water flows through. The top pool is used for drinking and cooking, the middle pool for cleaning fruits and vegetables, and the third pool, the bottom pool, is used for washing clothes. See what I mean by excellent irrigation engineer? Such efficient use of water all designed from 800 years ago.

Three different pools for drinking, cleaning vegetables, and washing clothes.

Streets are paved with local bluestone, which are neither muddy in the rainy season nor dusty in the dry season. At night the sluice at the center is opened and the resulting water current flushes the town to keep it clean.

Houses are made of timber and tiles, mostly two stories tall with a courtyard garden and engraved figures of people and animals on windows and doors, perfect environment for sipping afternoon tea and watching the clouds float by. (No wonder that freelance photographer never wanted to leave.)

The old town is quaint, intriguing, and mysterious. It’s ancient scientific wisdom married charmingly with ethnic minority multiculturalism. I could spend all day piling on all of my favourite words to describe her, and it doesn’t even begin to illustrate how in awe and in love I am with it all. When standing in her presence, in her eternal embrace of charm and beauty and grace, I feel some ancient, famous love story must have happened here.

How could you not want to fall in love here? The air itself smells like sweet romance.

Unfortunately, the only story I’ve heard about the place has nothing to do with love. It’s about why the old town doesn’t have a city wall.

Not to despair, young travelers make up for it with modern reenactments of Romeo and Juliet, or more commonly known as - “what happens in Lijiang stays in Lijiang”.

At night, the town is so well-known for intimate encounters that some pubs have it advertised on a carved wooden board hung proudly outside the door, and some tourists would walk into the pub and order an “intimate encounter” like a dish on the menu. To which the hostess would politely respond with a smile, “Gentlemen, please follow me to the bar, where you’ll be most strategically positioned for meeting pretty ladies who walk in. And … good luck!”

The board says, "Lijiang Intimate Encounters"

I also had my little share of “intimate encounters” in Lijiang.

Well, not exactly.

The Tipping Point

Oftentimes we need a catalyst to initiate change.

Grandma’s 90th birthday was exactly that, the life-saving straw to pull me out of this life stuck in second gear. The decision to take 3 months off work was a gradual process, kind of like the way Canada gained its independence. I didn’t just wake up one day and rushed into my boss’ office to tell her I wanted a 3 month vacation. We probably all secretly wish for it, but when it comes to time for action, need a logical reason, a sound excuse, to pursue dreams that seem to give us no tangible benefits other than pure pleasure, as if the pursuit of happiness isn’t good enough of a reason.

Of course, I am acutely aware, especially with constant reminders from grandma and my loving Chinese parents, that another major contributor to happiness is - love. And I need to find that too.

My love life has been more or less, a blank one for the past few years. That is not to say, I haven’t been trying to meet people. The dating scene in Vancouver offers quite a bit of multicultural diversity. If you wanted to date an Indian, or Korean, or Chinese, or European in Vancouver, it is as easy as going to any of the above listed restaurants. And with this diversity comes quite a wide range of interpretations of what it means to be a gentleman. If it is still cool to be a gentleman. (Some believe chivalry is dead, and act like it is.) And equally importantly, what do the men want? Do they want the Asian face but none of the Asian values and habits that come with the face? I’ve been struggling with this fusion (or perhaps more accurately, confusion) of identity. Do I want an Asian boyfriend or a non-Asian one? Just exactly how Chinese am I? Sometimes I feel like I connect with the locals better, other times I feel like there’s a big part of me, the Chinese part of me, that they can’t understand and don’t care to know. What do I want and what can I realistically expect from the dating scene here? How much of it is cultural and how much of it is individual? Is the reason I haven’t had much luck because I’ve been looking for oranges among a pile of apples?

Maybe I’ll find some oranges in China…

For the past few years, grandma’s been not-so-subtly hinting that she would like to have everyone come back to China for her 90^th birthday. In Chinese culture, obeying your parents, grandparents, and respecting your elders is number one in the rules of proper moral conduct. So my dad and I from Canada, uncle from Japan, and cousin from the US, we all book our flights to go back to Tianjin, China, to celebrate this important day with her.

I am lucky in the sense that I work in the consulting business, where it’s possible to even take a year of unpaid leave-of-absence if you ever felt like you needed to volunteer in Africa. The firm will simply not staff you onto new projects. So I book one month off in my work calendar, notifying my HR rep and career counselor. But when it came time to booking flights, I thought about all the places I wanted to see in China, which would take at least 2 months to cover. Why not book the return flight two months out, and ask for an extension once I’m in China? If the firm insists on having me back, I could change the date, or quit.

And then, almost as an afterthought: since I’m already in China, why not go to Bali, live by the beach and experiment with my dream for a month? Could living my dream, however temporary it may be, be this close to reality? Great idea! I give myself a pat on the back and change return date from June 10^th to July 10^th - three whole months of freedom. I click confirm, and the flights are booked. I sit back into my chair, and relished for a moment, the sweetness of having to decide between Window or Aisle?

This was how I gained my independence, a gradual process.