Romancing the Stone

Shortly after I arrived in Shanghai in the winter of 1989, a naive language student with minimal understanding of China´s culture, I was taken to a garden and shown, with great pride: a pile of rocks. They were special rocks, I was told, Taihu rocks collected by an illustrious scholar of yore. Then I went to Suzhou, "the Venice of China," and saw: more rocks. In the "Lingering Garden," I was informed the rocks resembled auspicious clouds and in the Lion Grove Garden I was told they looked like – what else? - lions. But, try as I might, I saw neither clouds nor lions – just jumbled piles of veined, chalky grey and white rocks with Swiss cheese-style holes in them. Secretly, I even wondered if they were really rocks – they looked more like concrete-coated coral, or giant petrified fungi.