Trees to Hide the Horror

In the steaming Shanghai morning, my boss leans over in the cab

as we wind through layers of highway stacked throughout the city,

past dizzying round towers and crumbling concrete, over the river

whose mottled water is full of ships and slicks like a child’s finished bath.

“When foreign officers came to visit,” he says, “Mao would plant trees

to hide how thin the people looked, how poor and broken the land.”

Later that day, on the broad bright highway in Shaanxi, we drive by

dozens of white billboards casting shadows on the powdered earth.

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Shining factories and fabs rise from the plain like high-tech mirages,

enticing wanderers with their promise of vast, deranged progress.

We stop at the high arched gates separating Xi’an’s commercial zones.

The sun is relentless.  Men and women crouch in the soil by the road,

chipping at the wiry weeds, shifting the landscape to one of lushness

and prosperity.  In the distance, dozens of half-done concrete towers

loom over the plain, ready to house the workers who will pour in

from the provinces.  My boss leaves the van and snaps endless photos.

That night we eat rice-crusted short ribs in a theater where the actors

blow fire from behind green and gold masks.  Poised at the curtain,

the silks of their costumes changes like magic, red to purple and blue,

but I see the stagehand snatching the garments off from behind,

layer by layer.  I think of trees in trucks, forests razed here and raised

there, factories built and words printed with sheaves of paper money.