GPC in China--Trip to Hang Zhou Part II: The photo to the left is the skyline of Hang Zhou taken from my room on the 13th floor of the Jian Feng Guest House. We thought it was funny that the hotels here have a 13th floor, but we didn't have any bad luck on our trip to Hang Zhou. When I first looked at the neon sign for our hotel, it looked to me as if its name meant "Wind of Construction." That would have been an apt moniker, considering all of the highways, highrises, condos, and overpasses that were under construction as far as the eye could see in Hang Zhou. In his critical study, S/Z, Roland Barthes explores the cultural relativity of concepts of beauty and exposes their arbitrary nature from an epistemological point-of-view. My experiences talking with Chinese people about Hang Zhou have suggested the extent to which beauty is a cultural construct, not necessarily grounded in an objective reality. Case in point: After I returned from Hang Zhou, many Chinese people asked me, "Wasn't it beautiful?" and if I had answered honestly, on the whole, I would have had to say, "No." But when I asked these same people if they had ever been to Hang Zhou, most of them also said, "No."This made me wonder why they thought Hang Zhou was beautiful if they had never been there themselves. When I inquired further about this, I learned that most of what they conceive to be the beauty of Hang Zhou is found in the poetry written about Hang Zhou in the pre-modern period. The world of Hang Zhou--of the poets and painters who lived, loved, and created art beside Hang Zhou's famous West Lake--still exists in the minds of Chinese people the way that, say, Shakespeare's London exists in the minds of Anglophiles. Modern Hang Zhou is an unfinished work--I'd like to come back and see how it is in 5 or 10 years. In it's current state, it is not nearly as green as the other cities we've visited--Beijing, Zhen Jiang, Nanjing, and SuZhou--that is, until you get outside of the city. Out on the periphery, the West Lake and the forested hills surrounding the city offer more than a hint of the ghosts of Hang Zhou's poetic past. But when you are in the in city center, they seem quite hidden away.