ALOESWOOD INCENSE
The First Brazier
Go AND fetch, will you please, a copper incense brazier, a family heirloom gorgeously encrusted now with moldy green, and light in it some pungent chips of aloeswood. Listen while I tell a Hong Kong tale, from before the war. When your incense has burned out, my story too will be over.
The story starts with Ge Weilong, a very ordinary Shanghai girl, standing on the veranda of a hillside mansion and gazing vacantly at the garden. Although Weilong had lived in Hong Kong for two years now, she was still unfamiliar with this wealthy residential district in the Hong Kong hills: this was her first visit to her aunt's house. The garden itself was little more than a rectangular grass lawn, framed by a low wall of white, swastika-shaped blocks, beyond which lay a stretch of rough hillside. This garden was like a gold-lacquered serving tray lifted high amid the wild hills: one row of carefully pruned evergreens; two beds of fine, well-spaced English roses-the whole arrangement severely perfect, not a hair out of place, as if the tray had been deftly adorned with a lavish painting in the fine-line style. In one corner of the lawn, a small azalea was in flower, its pink petals, touched with yellow, a bright shrimp-pink.
Still, inside that wall, spring was only puttering about. When it flashed into flame, it could leap out, scorching everything. Already, beyond the wall, a roar of wild azaleas was blooming across the hill, the fiery red stomping through brittle grass, blazing down the mountainside. On the far side of the azaleas lay the deep blue sea, with big white boats bobbing in it.
But these glaring color clashes were not the only reason why the viewer felt such a dizzying sense of unreality. There were contrasts everywhere: all kinds of discordant settings and jumbled periods had been jammed together, making a strange, illusory domain.
The white house in the dip of the hills was smooth and streamlined-geometric like an ultramodern movie theater. The roof, however, was covered with the traditional glazed tiles of emerald green. The windowpanes were also green, their chicken-fat yellow frames trimmed with red; the window grates, with their fancy ironwork, had been sprayed the same chicken-fat yellow. A wide, red brick veranda circled the house, with monumental white stone columns that were nearly thirty feet tall-this went back to the American Old South.
From the veranda, glass doors opened onto a living room. The furniture and the arrangement were basically Western, touched up with some unexceptionable Chinese bric-a-brac. An ivory bodhisattva stood on the mantel of the fireplace, along with snuff bottles made of emerald-green jade; a small screen with a bamboo motif curved around the sofa. These Oriental touches had been put there, it was clear, for the benefit of foreigners. The English come from so far to see China-one has to give them something of China to see. But this was China as Westerners imagine it: exquisite, illogical, very entertaining.
The First Brazier
Go AND fetch, will you please, a copper incense brazier, a family heirloom gorgeously encrusted now with moldy green, and light in it some pungent chips of aloeswood. Listen while I tell a Hong Kong tale, from before the war. When your incense has burned out, my story too will be over.
The story starts with Ge Weilong, a very ordinary Shanghai girl, standing on the veranda of a hillside mansion and gazing vacantly at the garden. Although Weilong had lived in Hong Kong for two years now, she was still unfamiliar with this wealthy residential district in the Hong Kong hills: this was her first visit to her aunt's house. The garden itself was little more than a rectangular grass lawn, framed by a low wall of white, swastika-shaped blocks, beyond which lay a stretch of rough hillside. This garden was like a gold-lacquered serving tray lifted high amid the wild hills: one row of carefully pruned evergreens; two beds of fine, well-spaced English roses-the whole arrangement severely perfect, not a hair out of place, as if the tray had been deftly adorned with a lavish painting in the fine-line style. In one corner of the lawn, a small azalea was in flower, its pink petals, touched with yellow, a bright shrimp-pink.
Still, inside that wall, spring was only puttering about. When it flashed into flame, it could leap out, scorching everything. Already, beyond the wall, a roar of wild azaleas was blooming across the hill, the fiery red stomping through brittle grass, blazing down the mountainside. On the far side of the azaleas lay the deep blue sea, with big white boats bobbing in it.
But these glaring color clashes were not the only reason why the viewer felt such a dizzying sense of unreality. There were contrasts everywhere: all kinds of discordant settings and jumbled periods had been jammed together, making a strange, illusory domain.
The white house in the dip of the hills was smooth and streamlined-geometric like an ultramodern movie theater. The roof, however, was covered with the traditional glazed tiles of emerald green. The windowpanes were also green, their chicken-fat yellow frames trimmed with red; the window grates, with their fancy ironwork, had been sprayed the same chicken-fat yellow. A wide, red brick veranda circled the house, with monumental white stone columns that were nearly thirty feet tall-this went back to the American Old South.
From the veranda, glass doors opened onto a living room. The furniture and the arrangement were basically Western, touched up with some unexceptionable Chinese bric-a-brac. An ivory bodhisattva stood on the mantel of the fireplace, along with snuff bottles made of emerald-green jade; a small screen with a bamboo motif curved around the sofa. These Oriental touches had been put there, it was clear, for the benefit of foreigners. The English come from so far to see China-one has to give them something of China to see. But this was China as Westerners imagine it: exquisite, illogical, very entertaining.
