Yangcheng Lake radiates towards horizonlessness, with slim shispers of low slung buildings faintly delineating the distant rim. The upper edges of the black cages of fish farms offer the only distinct lines protruding from the stilled surface. Perhaps they contain the hairy crabs, famous for being a regional delicacy. Although we had missed crab season, we were treated to a late lunch of lake fish, tiny shrimps, and crinkled back fungus, wet as sea weed.
Outside a shallow dark wooden boat containing two stooped textile-fattened figures drifted slowly alongside the cages. On the land the figures multiplied as a multitude of small elderly workers, orbiting each other calmly, tracing the measured lines of an orrery around the task in hand. They tended small fields and planted young trees, each wrapped to their knees with coils of rope, and supported by four metal poles that buttress them against ice and seasonal winds.
Even in April sunshine the women's heads are wrapped like Matryoshkas to the brink of faces leathered as bogwood, their clothing fiercely polychrome. They ride identical black bicycles, which creak along highways burdened with crags built of bundles and frayed cardboard.
On the lakeshore a five star hotel complex has appeared, engulfing them into a pastoral scene flanked by the manicured tendrils of lawns and crisp cut pathways. It frames sunsets through large windows, while in the lobby a fountain bubbles from venetian glass lilies resting on black marble.
The hotel offers impossible luxury, and produces these people, suddenly, as a museum of rare specimens, bright as beetles. They carry the lengths of cut bamboo that forms the exoskeleton of encroaching construction, as if they are the long pins that will fix them in time, as memories.
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