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From a cart, we bought two rou jia mo, large flat biscuits stuffed with pork and onions
and peppers. In the cold air of winter, devouring my sandwich, I decided it was the most
delicious thing I had ever eaten.
Next to us was a large sign with a picture of the Hua Gate, a sort of oversize Arc de
Triomphe. ONE OF THE FIFTY MOST WORTHY PLACES FOR FOREIGNERS TO VISIT, the sign read.
NATIONAL AAAA TOURISM SCENERY.
Good enough for me. We started toward the far end of the mall, passing carnival games
and rides, hangers-on from a Spring Festival installation that gave the whole place a Coney
Island feel. We stopped for a bit to explore a large, concrete relief map of China, its
crumpled mountains reaching halfway to my knee. We stomped over the earth, leaping
from one stone section of the mini-Great Wall to the next, clearing entire river systems at
a stride. I happened upon Sichuan, the home province of the Han family, and from on high
peered down on its rosy surface, the paint coming up in flakes.
At the far end of the boulevard was the Hua Gate. Only a few years old, it was the largest
gate in the world, a man told us. But it could only generously be called a gate.
“If it's a gate, you should be able to drive through it, or something,” Cecily said.
But the Hua Gate's purpose was not to be driven through. Instead it was some kind of
Chinese national bicep for the flexing, the gaudy ornament of a nation newly confident of
its dominion. It was a monumentally ornate, gate-like building, its vast doors closed off
with walls of glass. Inside we walked across its marble floors and past its huge, colored pil-
lars to find the stairs. Three stories up, under colored LED lights that gave the place a def-
inite Vegas sheen, we encountered a Hall of Great Chinese, with thirty-two gilded statues
of this emperor or that navigator or that inventor, all of them ancient, dating to an era some-
where between history and mythology.
In the center of the room was a translucent hemisphere with the outlines of what looked
like seven continents floating on its glass surface. It took me a while to realize that they
were not the seven continents but rather seven different iterations of China, the outlines of
seven different dynasties through the ages, now floating free across the globe, unimpeded
by other land.
The next hall up hosted the statues of thirty-two famous Chinese women. They floated
in the moody, blue-pink light. Cecily's eyes went from one to the next, wondering if
someday there might be room for her.
Lying in the middle of the room, twenty feet tall if she had stood up, was the grandly
naked figure of Nu Kua, the goddess who first created human beings. The humans she had
created frolicked all around her: freaky little golden babies that looked to me like they were
up to no good.
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