Groucho Guidebook

This week visitors to Lan Su Chinese Garden AKA Portland Chinese Garden will get in for free. With a new name and touting its tenth anniversary, the garden will seem as if it's just opened. Think of the excitement, the crowds, the opportunities for free publicity and donor development.

Of course, the reality is that the garden is still the same garden, except worse than before. That's why management had to drop the price, way low, to get more people to visit. Hey, it's less work than actually producing a garden that people might want to visit again and tell other people about.

Integral to management's strategy to make people believe that the garden is authentic and beautiful when it isn't is to use the new guidebook to mold visitors' perception of reality. This modestly sized, tea-green booklet is sprinkled with Chinese profundities. stunning photos, and serene Chinese painting motifs. It is absolutely slick in its non-slickness, a quality that could only have come from big bucks and creative minds schooled in consumer tastes and psychology. It's the PF Chang's of guidebooks, promising way more than it can deliver.

Let's tour its earnest and spiritual claims about Lan Su Chinese Garden and test them against what visitors really see and experience.

"It is considered the most authentic Chinese Garden outside China." Who says? Knowledgeable people know it has turned into a plant farm/ tourist trap.

"Hear the distant rushing water." Because the waterfall is shut off and stagnant water doesn't make a sound, the visitor hears the canned music being broadcast over the outdoor speakers.

"Lan Su is a special place in the midst of the city where we can escape traffic...." Then why does the visitor see buses passing by leak windows that used to be screened by plants?

"Enter the Wonderland." With so much ugliness on display, it's a wonder anyone would pay to see it.

Given the utter failure of the guide to describe reality, it must have been management's fervent hope that marketing will triumph over the inconvenient facts. That faced with believing their organic green tea guidebook or your lying eyes that you will do what many consumers do, which is to go in with eyes open but mind unseeing. Perhaps you'll be satisfied with an idea of authenticity, delivered in a truly beautiful guidebook. Let's hope.