My great grandmother and I both hate our men in the summertime. And we hate to be touched in the heat. And I hate the shame of perspiration. And there is a virtue in madness that amounts to a radical refusal. Once in Beijing I was friends with a waitress who was really bad at her job in a great way and always talked about wanting to go to Hangzhou. One day, I came looking for her, and she had abandoned her job and gone to Hangzhou. Su Xiaoxiao is a poet who may or may not have existed in the Northern and Southern Kingdoms era who - some legends hold- had a terminal illness and committed her few years to writing magnificent poetry that would inspire future generations. The only poem actually attributed to her speaks of a man she longed for who rode a blue-white horse. The tomb beside Hangzhou’s West Lake that is attributed to this half-mythical existentialist hero was burned down in the tumult of the 20th Century’s refusals of what came before.