* * = italics
The Wedding
Emma is the sweetest cousin. I'm glad
she married at last and seems
happy. The missed wedding's
on DVD. Security lets me in
to the gated block. You can see
for miles from her flat,
almost as far as the Yangtze
while inside white leather sofas
fold round a screen, broad as a car bonnet.
Photographs of bride and groom
flash forwards from childhood,
cross paths like planets. Clothes change
from revolutionary to Western
when they're twenty. But the wedding's
traditional. She wears auspicious red
and the groom outside
shows a red envelope as her friends
question him, "How much is in it?"
She takes a cup of green tea
to each of her new parents.
It's perfectly filmed. Not a wobble
or a dropped shot of someone's feet
or a child pressing one big, beady,
out-of-focus eye against the screen.
The view West is a park, big
as the Gobi. Emma sees me scan it
and we go. Once there, we pay to get in.
No litter, graffiti or inauspicious thugs,
just gardeners for a few jiao an hour
the philosopher Sun zi in stone robes
and a virtuous governor from the Qin.
Emma slows half way but I don't mention
the apple curve of her waist. Come September
the park will be out of bounds.
"Nice to see old things kept.
at your wedding. Weren't they lost?
How did you know what to do?"
but she grins and says
it was managed and the manager knew.
*"Tradition's popular.but still,
our hearts were in it. We love each other,
after all", but she pauses,
"My husband is away too much
with work and is often drawn
to the daughter from his first marriage.*
"It's a lot to take on," I reply,
and we continue round the park's hidden paths in silence
till she says:
*"You've been here before. You don't remember
how it was. The old houses are gone,
but the place where you and I walked
is this spot - fond times - along
streets so narrow and crowded
that we went at a gentle pace,
past doorways where people sat
on summer evenings and spooned
the flesh of melons. Generations
in a single house. "Mellow"
you'd said. Eight hundred thousand,
my family with them, were moved
to the suburbs, this ground flattened,
grass unrolled like a carpet
and these tall trees brought in,
to be planted and watered
where they stand now."*
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