Smallness In a Small Space

An authentic garden in China might be only one city block but will seem much larger to the visitor. This is accomplished by using walls and plants to divide the space into different sections, each of which will evoke a different natural setting. For instance, walking on a frozen river, or strolling in the mountains, or viewing the lake from a bridge or boat. The effect is a feeling of vastness in a small space, a feeling that Alice might have felt as she stopped tumbling down the rabbit hole and opened her eyes.

This illusion of vastness in a small space is supported by the imaginative usage of plants to screen those elements of the garden that tell the viewer that he's in a small space. Thus, a thick stand of trees and bushes is deliberately left "over grown" so as to hide the wall that is behind the plants, allowing the viewer to imagine woods that stretch forever, rather than being bounded by a wall.

Stands of trees and bushes can also hide an upcoming view so as to function as a dividing element, thereby increasing the number of experiences and the feeling of plenitude. And as the viewer moves along, the suspense builds and increases the feeling of surprise and freshness as the new view is finally presented.

It is evident then that pruning or removing plants that perform a screening function would destroy the viewer's feeling of vastness in a small space. Evident, that is, unless you're the gardeners at the Portland Chinese Garden. Pruning and removal of plants have magically conjured away the vast pageant of nature and made the space into a former parking lot/tourist trap. In a kind of reverse alchemy, the gardeners have turned Alice's wonderland back into a rabbit hole.

Just Ignore it. Everybody Else Does

One of the essential skills required to get through the day without going insane is ignoring what's going on around you. That transient sprawled in the MAX train? Dream on! Those green wired lights strangling downtown's trees in the spirit of Christmas commercialism? Fugedaboutit! That fire hydrant decked out in graffiti? Piss on it!

And so it goes - an endless pageant of ugliness that registers not a whit upon our Teflon senses. Get wired to an i device and your iPod, iPhone, iWhatever, not only protects you from the real world but transports you to a better one.

The people doing their jobs at the Portland Chinese Garden are also products of the modern world and expert in ignoring the ugliness of their world. Thus, the construction lights and electrical cords left in the plant beds long after the party is over, the numerous rat poison boxes and electrical outlets in plain view after the gardeners have done their pruning, the red fire extinguisher left next to the Ming dynasty furniture after the heat lamps are cold. And so it goes at the Chinese Garden - an endless pageant of modern ugliness that almost every one who works there ignores.

Pity the poor visitor who actually believes that he is leaving behind a sea of ugliness when he enters the garden and can engage his senses and relax, confident that he won't be assaulted by the ugliness of the modern world, only to be jolted by the sight of an air conditioning unit behind the paper bush. What a disturbing combination - yellow fragrant flowers and a humming, blowing machine.

Ah well, he can always do what everyone else does and ignore it. But then, what's the point?

Nothing To Hide

When I invite people over to my place, I know that there are some things they would rather not see. So although I have learned to live with dirty clothes strewn over the carpet. dirty dishes in the sink, and a stovetop that looks like the floor of an ogre's cave, I wipe away the dirt and put the rest away. I do this not just to keep visitors from puking but to ensure that the next time I invite them they won't blanch and splutter about being out of town.

The gardeners at the Chinese Garden, however, are more laid back and don't mind baring all. How else to account for their removal and pruning of plants that previously hid their tool shed, utility corner, and trash area?

The utility corner resides on the corner of Everett and 2nd and can be seen from the street by looking through the leak windows in the wall. A potential visitor can see wheelbarrows, ladders, orange cones, shelving, tarps - all the things that a visitor would find ugly, which is why the Chinese designer planted deep green bamboos in back of the windows to keep people from seeing inside.

But that was rather uptight of her, wasn't it? Americans don't have anything to hide. You either like it or lump it. And if the utility corner doesn't need to be hidden, then the tool shed next to the waterfall doesn't need to be hidden. And if the tool shed doesn't need to be hidden, then the trash area doesn't either. So it's prune away the screening trees and bamboo to reveal the tool shed and utility area. And prune the camellia in the Phoenix Rest courtyard to reveal the trash and recycling area.

So to all you effetes who protest that this is ugly: Get Over It! This is America, even if it is called the Chinese Garden.

Chicken Chow Mein Garden

Forty years ago, westerners with a hankering for good ole Chinese food slid into a red booth at a joint called "Fragrant Palace", and titillated their taste buds with the No. 1 combo - Chicken Chow Mein, Pork Fried Rice, egg roll, and almond cookies for dessert. At the end of this exotic meal, they could say that Chinese food wasn't that different, not like eating innards. Unbeknownst to them, they were chowing down on stuff Chinese people wouldn't have paid money for and would have eaten only under duress. Indeed, when the white devils were gone, the cooks and waiters dug into fare like snails, pig's feet, tripe, and whole fish with eyeballs that could be sucked like . . . well . . . like eyeballs.

Today, westerners know that chicken chow mein is not authentic, but they have yet to learn what authentic Chinese gardening is. As long as someone convincingly tells them that a bunch of plants is Chinese gardening, they'll lap it up as eagerly as their ancestors lapped up chow mein.

The first stumbling block to understanding a Chinese garden is that it is not a garden as a westerner understands gardens. A westerner knows a garden as a bunch of plants grown for food or beauty. Each plant is distinct from every other plant and from any structures nearby. If a plant is not performing, just rip it out and replace it with a better one. If a better plant is not found, just leave bare dirt. The viewer's enjoyment of the plants that are left is theoretically not diminished by the absence of the banished plant.

All the elements in a western garden are tightly controlled. All plants should be pruned to evoke orderliness and symmetry. They should not be touching their neighbors so that they have room to grow and so that they can be completely seen. All weeds and debris should be removed, leaving pristine dirt to give an impression of cleanliness. It's a wonderful system for keeping gardeners employed but it's the opposite of the system that should be employed in a classical Chinese garden, which has as its purpose to evoke in the visitor a feeling of walking in nature.

Unfortunately for visitors to the Portland Chinese Garden who want authentic Chinese gardening, the landscape design is the result of western gardening principles and is no longer authentic. But because visitors don't realize that what they are seeing is not authentic, they walk away with the impression that there's no difference between western and Chinese gardening. For them, Chinese gardening is just as sterile and boring and not worth a second trip.

Let's explore how the classical Chinese looked at a garden. They saw the garden as an organism, a community of plants, stones, architecture, and poetry, that presented an idealized world in which man lived in harmony with nature. The plants softened the hardness of the buildings and stones, but in a natural way. The plants were arranged in communities and allowed to grow so as to appear as if they had sprouted there naturally. Any pruning or relocation was done only after informed deliberation about the effect on the viewer. Did it enhance or destroy the viewer's feeling of being in nature? Only if the feeling was enhanced was the change made. Truly one had to be more artist and poet than horticulturalist to be a good gardener in the Chinese style.

If done right, Chinese gardening is deeply moving, rather than sensational, and anything but sterile and boring. Like a great painting, nothing seems incongruous. The plants appear as if they have been growing in harmony with their neighbors all their lives. Plants screen the necessary but ugly indications of the modern world. Bare dirt, a sure sign of human disturbance, is not seen. Moss grows freely. Vines, creepers, and branches dangle in the viewer's face, offering the sniff of a flower, the feathery touch of tendrils and leaves, and the bling of fruits. There are deep shadows and impenetrable tangles that mystify the viewer and allow him to imagine deep forests in the middle of the city. As he moves along he is surprised by sudden openings that reveal beautiful vistas. All of nature's splendors, both the secretive and the open, are evoked in a proper Chinese garden.

After ten years of tinkering by western gardeners, does the Chinese Garden in Portland evoke nature's splendors? Take a look at the two pictures above. Which evokes nature and which evokes control? The leftside picture is in the Chinese Garden. The rightside picture is a sidewalk tree well across the street. The tree well evokes nature better than the Chinese Garden!

When the Portland Chinese Garden first opened, it was authentic. Now, it is as similar to an authentic garden as a poodle is to a wolf. The poodle is pretty, smells good, has no fleas, and has a shot at the blue ribbon at Westminster, but he won't arrest your attention the way a wolf will. Like the wolf, an authentic Chinese garden will remind you that you are a part of nature, not its lord and master.

Anyone visiting the Portland Chinese Garden will get the poodle, not the wolf. Expecting authentic Chinese, he gets chicken chow mein.

Lan Su Who?

So let's say you aren't as popular as you think you should be. Your name isn't on every body's lips. Googling the universe just demonstrates that you're a nobody. In fact, when your name is mentioned, people confuse you with your cousin. What do you do? If you're the Portland Classical Chinese Garden, you just change your name!

If it worked for Muhammad Ali, formerly Cassius Clay, and Altria, formerly known as Philip Morris, and Prince, formerly known as a wacky symbol, formerly Prince, then a name change should catapult the garden into the celebrasphere.

After enjoying the services of a consultant, and much marketing and intercultural mumbo jumbo, management has decided that in order to honor the Chineseness of the garden and to make sure that people who don't speak Chinese still know what the hoopla is about, the place formerly known as the Portland Classical Chinese Garden AKA Portland Chinese Garden AKA Lan Su Yuan AKA Garden of Awakening Orchids, will ring in the new year as. . . Lan Su Chinese Garden! Hooray for multiculturalism!

The initial reception to this linguistic Frankenstein's monster has been somewhat deflating. For those people who love the subtlety, harmony, and pure aesthetic beauty of written and spoken Chinese, having to read and listen to the clash of Chinese and English in "Lan Su Chinese Garden" is akin to seeing a plate of noodles and rice all mixed together and then having to actually eat it. As the French would say, if they were being multicultural : Quelle horrors, mon pardner.

As for those hicks with no knowledge of Chinese, they just scratch their heads and wonder, "Who's Lan Su?" What a missed opportunity! If management is going to name the garden after Lan Su, they could at least have made him pay for it.

Serenity Springs a Leak

Like the urban gardens in China, the Chinese garden in Portland is surrounded by a white wall. The exterior wall around a Chinese garden blocks the views and noises of the busy city, allowing the naturalistic landscape in the garden to magically lull the visitor into believing he's in the midst of nature. Serenity follows. Any glimpse or hint of the unnatural will spoil this mood, which is why the wall is traditionally solid and its top edge is higher than a person's head.

The wall around Portland's Chinese garden, however, is perforated by openings called leak windows. City code dictated that pedestrians could not be subjected to the sight of a block-long blank wall. Thus, if you are a pedestrian you can look into a leak window and see a bit of nature. But if you paid money to experience nature, you would look out of a leak window and see the street, parking meters, street lights, cars, and learn that you can have monthly parking in the garage across the street for only $144. You might wonder why you paid money to see this while the pedestrian gets it for free.

Lest you think that the Chinese designer was an idiot for agreeing to install these leak windows, keep in mind that the designer planted trees, vines, and bamboos in front of and behind these windows to keep the city from intruding. Using plants as a screen was an elegant and effective solution that worked until the present gardeners started beavering away, "tidying up" and "opening up" the "plant material", especially those pesky plants blocking the exterior leak windows.

It is now almost impossible to find a place in the garden that does not offer at least a glimpse of old town/Chinatown, its grimy streets, and the buses, cars, and denizens that ply them. With the waterfall not working, the city noises add to the atmosphere of nature under siege. How ironic that the marketing materials enticing people into the garden promise to deliver on that wistful observation by an ancient Chinese poet that "most cherished in this mundane world is a place free from traffic."

Volunteers Get a Dose of Safeness

It costs money to enter the Chinese Garden. Eight dollars and fifty cents, to be exact, if you're not in a special category allowing you to mooch off of the hale, hearty, and productive. For your money you get a ticket that's potent until the greeter at the entrance castrates it by ripping off its stub. Neutered, it's just a bookmark, for anyone who still reads books.

But as you should know by now, nothing's quite normal at the Chinese Garden. If you were to present your ticket to the greeter today, it would be looked at hungrily but would be allowed to pass without castration. The greeters have been instructed to not rip the stub or even touch the ticket. Instead of ending up with a bookmark, you now have a ticket that is good for another day! And another day. And another, etc. Not that management is worried about anyone taking advantage of that fact. Any rumpled tickets will naturally be rejected by the greeter.

The official reason for management's strange directive is ... swine flu! The greeter won't get the flu from the ticket holder if the greeter doesn't touch the ticket . . . unless he touches the recycled visitor's guides, or the railings, or the faucets in the bathroom, or any number of surfaces found in the real world, which management doesn't seem to inhabit.

So what's the real reason? It's to strenuously impress upon the volunteer corp that management CARES about their health. REALLY, they do!

Fooey on Foo Dogs

The entrance to a Chinese dwelling is a special place. As the gateway to the outside, an entrance must serve two functions - to attract and retain good fortune, and to keep out bad fortune.

To attract good fortune, an entrance should be clean and free of trash and clutter. To scare away bad fortune, a foo dog should be posted on both sides of an entrance. A foo dog is a dog/lion hybrid made of stone or metal, that bad fortune cannot tell is fake, like those plastic owls found in pigeon infested areas. Luckily for humans, bad fortune is not as smart as a pigeon.

Like bouncers in front of a nightclub, foo dogs let in the good, beautiful, and profitable, but intimidate the bad, ugly, and destitute. Each foo dog has a job - the male protects the house and the female protects the family.

Seeing two fierce foo dogs at the door, visitors and guests to the dwelling know that they will be entering a space filled with good fortune and comfort. Maybe they'll make a profit to boot. Any evil spirits tagging along will be left behind.

Visitors to the Chinese Garden in Portland are greeted by two large metal trash cans, squatting where the foo dogs should be. Ignorant of the evil spirits rooting around in the alluring trash cans, visitors blithely step through the garden's entrance, bad fortune drafting in their wake. Just so the evil spirits don't starve, there are two more trash cans by the back door.

Fruits of the Fall

One of the joys of the holiday season is seeing the ripening fruits of fall. The Chinese Garden, as a participant in this natural cycle, is displaying several fruits. There's the fairy swarms of crab apples dangling from slender stalks. The pomegranates with their blotchy leathery skins. And who could miss the massive triple D persimmons, bursting like supernovas?

But the fruit that only the Chinese Garden can boast of having is not to be found on the branches of a tree or a bush but on the trunks of people. Indeed, the process of pollination and maturation requires special conditions.

The flower appears only in years of declining revenue and increasing costs. The pollinator is a certain hyperactive species of marketer. Maturation occurs when the desperation level is high enough to saturate the atmosphere.

And then like scarlet mushroom buttons after a rain, the fruits appear full blown on the chests of volunteers and staff, bearing a message for its target animal species, Homo Seekus Dealus. The message is seductive and bypasses the reasoning faculties of its prey - "Visit Free All Year. Ask me how!" Free, free, free! The call draws them in.

But the stars in their eyes turn to cinders as the bargain hunters learn that it's free only after they buy a membership. Alas, they have tasted of the fruit of knowledge: tis useful, but so bitter.

Safeness Blocks the Way

How do you know it's flu season? Is it the sniffling people weaving through your space like a horde of zombies? The dreaded call from the school nurse that explodes your well laid plans? The feeling when walking into an elevator that you're being swallowed by a pulsing amoeba of viral contagion? Those are all indicators, but the sure sign of flu season is the proliferating presence of Purell squirt bottles. Even the Chinese Garden is not immune to this harbinger of mucus and paranoia.

Like a gnome perched on a giant porcini mushroom, the Garden's Purell sits on a brown cabinet hulking in the garden's entrance. Sphinx-like, it dares you with its deadly riddle: "Do you feel lucky ... punk? Well if you do, then walk on by without a squirt."

Most people do walk on by, and they, along with their germs, survive.

Colors of the Fall

Autumn has come to the Portland Classical Chinese Garden and the maples aren't the only things turning red. Welcoming you into the entrance courtyard are two signs, blood red with white letters, hanging like slabs of new butchered meat. The "Garden Shop" sign is new and the "Ticket Booth" sign replaces a sign that was tastefully subdued, like the Garden itself.

Seems that "tastefully subdued" wasn't jazzy enough to make people notice. Seemingly taking a cue from Target, Coca Cola, and the Dept. of Transportation, management decided red and white would do the trick, like the rouged lips of a lady of the street.

Too bad the insensitive people that the new color scheme was supposed to hit over the head have harder heads than expected and continue to actually trouble the staff to enquire about where to buy tickets and knick knacks for the folks back on the farm. As for those sensitive people who schlep to the garden to meditate, unblock their chi, and smell the flowers, the effect of the new signs is galvanizing. Mouths open, eyes wide, toes rigid in their Birks, they can only stare and wonder.