‘It’s not the money.’
‘What, then?’ He’s got his sunglasses on and I can’t see his eyes but he sounds annoyed.
‘Sightseeing?’ I say. It seems wrong, skewed. I’m perilously close to tears. I turn away from him, arms crossed, stare at the rows of scooters in the car park.
‘Hey,’ Tom says, ‘it’s just a break. We’re not meeting Shona until three. You go back, if you like. Sit in your room for the next couple of hours.’
I shrug. ‘I’ll come.’
Inside the park, on a small stage, a masked man is dressed in flowing coloured robes, thick with embroidery. Music plays, quick and jangly. The mask, surrounded by a headdress, is stylized, vivid swirls of solid colour, green and white and black and red. He jumps into the air, and twirls, kicks his legs, then strikes a pose. He opens a large fan and swipes it across his face. A clash of cymbals, and the mask disappears, replaced by another, red and black with jagged eyebrows, angry-looking. The man feints to the left, then the right. A scissor kick, another cymbal clash, and a new face.
We buy our tickets for the paying area. I read the leaflet. The park is dedicated to an ancient poet, Xue Tao. There are statues of her among the trees and her grave is here. I shiver in the heat. I don’t want to see any graves.
The path leads into an open area ringed with pavilions, landscaped with large stones, statuary and planting. Forest trees provide pools of shade. A standing stone we pass has characters carved into it, painted green. In the borders around the buildings, grasses and flowering shrubs are planted among bonsai pines. Pinnacles of rock remind me of the dribbled sand we would use to make sculptures at the beach.
Signs point to different attractions – the bamboo museum, the brocade-washing pavilion, the river-viewing tower. The tower itself is beautiful, a soaring four-storey pagoda, richly carved from deep red wood. The sculptures and fretwork are decorated with exquisite colours: white and red, green, yellow and blue.
While Tom goes exploring, I find a bench to sit on below a pergola, alongside the river. Across the murk of the water is the cityscape, the bristling ranks of skyscrapers.
The red stone balustrade at the edge of the water is ornately carved with flowers and repeated block patterns. Seed has been left along the tops of the walls and tiny birds with rusty red heads and fantails flit to peck at the grains, and fly away again. White butterflies dance in the grass.
