the pearl gray sky. There was just something about this landscape that touched her beyond words, and she suddenly understood how over the centuries all the great Chinese poets and artists were inspired by the West Lake.
As the boat drifted slowly under one of the romantic stone bridges, Rachel asked the boatman, “When were these bridges built?”
“There’s no telling, miss. Hangzhou was the favored retreat of the emperors for five thousand years—Marco Polo called it the City of Heaven,” he replied.
“I would have to agree with him,” Rachel said, taking another long, slow sip of the freshly roasted Longjing tea that the boatman had prepared for her. As the boat drifted through a watery grove of wild lotuses, the girls caught sight of a small kingfisher perched on the tip of a lotus stalk, waiting for the right moment to strike.
“I wish Nick could see this,” Rachel said wistfully.
“Me too! But you’ll be back with him before too long. I think you’ve been bitten by the Hangzhou bug, haven’t you?”
“Jesus, I wish I’d come sooner! When you first told me this place was China’s answer to Lake Como, I had my doubts, but after visiting that glorious tea plantation yesterday, followed by the amazing dinner at the mountaintop temple, I’m completely sold.”
“And here I thought I needed to arrange for George Clooney to pop up from under those willows over there,” Peik Lin quipped.
Arriving back at the elegant wooden dock of the Four Seasons Hangzhou, they climbed out of the boat slowly, still lulled by the sybaritic boat ride. “Just in time for our spa appointments. Get ready, this place is going to rock your world,” Peik Lin said excitedly as they walked along the pathway to the palatial gray-walled villa that housed the resort’s spa. “Which treatment did you end up scheduling first?”
“I thought I’d start the day with the Jade and Lotus massage,” Rachel answered.
Peik Lin raised an eyebrow. “Hmm…what parts of your body are they massaging, exactly?”
“Oh, stop! Apparently they buff your body with lotus seeds and crushed jade and then give you an intensive deep-tissue rubdown. What are you getting?”
“My favorite—the Imperial Consorts and Concubines Perfumed Water Ritual. It’s inspired by the bathing ritual that was reserved for whichever woman the emperor chose to spend the night with. You’re immersed in a perfumed bath of orange blossoms and gardenia, followed by a gentle pressure-point massage. Then they do this awesome body scrub with crushed pearls and almonds, before cocooning you in a white-china-clay body wrap. It all ends with a long nap in a private steam room. I tell you, I always come out of it feeling a decade younger.”
“Oooh. Maybe I’ll do that one tonight. Oh wait, I think I scheduled the luxury caviar facial tonight. Shoot, we don’t have enough days for all the treatments I want to try!”
“Wait a minute, when did Rachel Chu, who wouldn’t even go for a pedicure back in her college days, become a spa whore?”
Rachel grinned. “It’s all the time I’ve been spending with those Shanghai girls—I think it’s catching.”
• • •
After several hours of pampering treatments, Rachel and Peik Lin met for lunch at the resort’s restaurant. Naturally, they were shown to one of the private dining rooms, which were in pagoda-style structures overlooking a serene lagoon. Admiring the massive Murano glass chandelier that hovered over their lacquered walnut table, Rachel mused, “After this trip, New York is going to seem like a dump. Every place I go to in China seems to be more luxurious than the last. Who would have ever guessed? Remember when I was teaching in Chengdu in 2002? The place where I roomed had one communal indoor toilet, and that was considered a luxury.”
“Ha! You wouldn’t recognize Chengdu now. It’s become the Silicon Valley of China—one fifth of the world’s computers are made there,” Peik Lin said.
Rachel shook her head in wonder. “I just can’t get over it—all these megacities springing up overnight, this nonstop economic boom. The economist in me wants to say ‘This can’t last,’ but then I’ll see something that totally blows my mind. The other day in Shanghai, Nick and I were trying to get back to our hotel from Xintiandi. All the taxis had their signs lit up, but we couldn’t figure out why they wouldn’t stop for us. Finally, this Australian girl standing on the corner said to us, ‘Don’t you have the taxi app?’ We were like, The what? Turns out there’s an app you