……A Nigerian student walks through Xiaoying Lane and finds a different answer to a question his own country is still asking.
There were old women sitting around a wooden table when I walked in,not waiting, not idle, working, their hands moved through thread and shell with a quiet confidence that comes from years of doing something the same way, and they were laughing, not performing happiness for the visitors but actually laughing, in the middle of the afternoon, in a room that had been built specifically for them in a neighbourhood that had decided they mattered.
I had arrived at Xiaoying Lane in Hangzhou’s Shangcheng District expecting to take notes on governance but I left thinking about what it means for a place to actually care for its people, and what it costs a country when it doesn’t.
International students from ZUST at the Hangzhou Center for Practicing Whole-Process
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