9/13. I've been in Beijing two days now. It feels, briefly and intermittently, as though I have actually left Hong Kong and said goodbye to my family in Zhongsan for however many years it will be. I feel the churnings of the new beginning in this place and the tremendous difference of North from South (South is totally better). But there have been no endings as yet: it's all just been time well-spent with family, just time and passage.
My last day in Hong Kong, Sook Mu explained to Lai Sook how I felt about leaving, and he interjected to sum it up for me: "Stupid boss, tough schedules, good food." Yes.
Git E Jie told me the week before that spending Mid-Autumn Festival with me and the rest of the family would be the happiest time of her life. I don't know about that, but it was unforgettable and genuinely kai xin.
Chinese barbeque is so much better than American bbq; it has more depth, and fish. The neighbors lit the same kinds of paper lanterns on their rooftops and barbequed through the night as well. There was no explicit greeting or ignoring of each other; this celebration is simply natural: zi ran. We also melted wax and played with the candles, and for once I didn't tell the melted-wax-fire story to try to impress people.
Living in Hong Kong for three months, the first time I ever saw the moon was on my last weekend, the night of the festival.
It was a fun disaster, too, when a sudden wind blasted through us and slowly picked up the picnic-table umbrella from its post to crash into the TV antenna and land on the other side of the house. Meanwhile, while our attention was diverted, the lanterns caught fire and started a small blaze along the line.
I learned to play Chinese chess (jerng keih) with my little cousin Simmy. That night, I heard him mumbling in his sleep: "Ngo jerng ni goh gwun. Jerng ni gwun." (Checkmate, checkmate). It's just a game, but these were the sorts of things that got me thinking a lot in my youth, the little obsessions which were sowed seeds.
We spent all of the next day being dominated and bankrupted by Git E Jie in the HK version of Monopoly. We didn't go out very much the whole weekend--my idea of a vacation and family gathering.
The day before I left I had lunch with C and R, which was very appropriate seeing as they were the first two I met in Hong Kong. Our lives are cast in motion.
We shared some final gossip and passed some judgments, had some profound things to say about education, and and did a tarot card reading. I got a reaffirming answer to my question about a very particular girl, but the issue of faith in these sorts of things (or perhaps faith at all) does not leave me feeling any more or less certain. On the plane, I realized I should've asked about my martial arts, but I also realized right away that some decisions are not meant to be
advised or informed by any outside force. I leave with good wishes and all the same questions.
-
Beijing is much more foreign. But the dorms we're in have a rustiness and a woodenness which remind me of camp in Bennington. That is an encouraging, if not lonely, start.
9/19. I had just about forgotten the extra consideration required when sharing a bathroom. And what it is like to have a table to write on.
Yesterday we all met and had lunch and a three-hour tour of the campus, stopping along the way to watch the cats and talk about the history of East and West, atomic bombs, memorial ashes. I took the evening to myself to walk out the East Gate and find the subway system.
At a mall along the Xizhimen station, a young woman selling two pianos and three Chinese lutes (I'm not quite sure how; it wasn't even a stall along the walkway, just the instruments and a cash register) sat down at one piano with her back to passersby to play a while. I stopped at the railing overlooking the bottom six floors and listened to the sweet, slow melodies filter through distant pop and hip hop.
On the way back, I sat on the sidewalk beside a teen who reminds me of Tommy Sanchez, playing some smooth rock and singing in Mandarin. It is this sort of quiet moment, this sort of loitering, that lets me make a home out of a place.
My favorite spot nearby is not the prince's garden on campus, but a simple and unpresuming park across from the West Gate. The front presents two regular old men playing chess in shorts
and smoking. Every single person who walks by stops and forms a crowd of spectators. I will challenge them by the end of my stay.
There are also ping pong tables for the public, some with a line of bricks for a net.
In the center of the park is a big concrete circle/plaza. I took pictures of an elderly man running toward the wind to uplift his kite; a younger man on one of those two-part skateboards, going slowly in a circle to learn his balance; and a woman knitting winter slippers on a bench. The picture is terrible, but I will paint this one day and memorialize these tiny moments.
I also saw an old lady at the playground using a spinning-pad as exercise. And barbers on the edge of the park working from their carts; it would seem the tree with the most bundles of hair at its roots represents the most business.
The greatest thing has been calling family with my new SIM card. It is much more comfortable speaking in Guangdonghua, and much less lonely. My family has expanded tremendously in these few months. It sets a new tone on my path in life.
-
Midnight. Amidst my trying to flirt with my language partner Lindsay, who wants to teach Chinese in America to find a better life for herself; trying to speak Cantonese with Kim, who's from Hong Kong and represents a lot that I am clinging to; playing Chinese chess with Ben, who spent the last year in Taibei and the summer as an intern for Microsoft; and talking basic psychology with my Austrian roommate Max over Tsingtao, who declares himself as a diplomatic linguist; I realize all over again that we are all just looking for something comfortable and familiar, we are all just worrying in secret about our futures and wondering what life on the other side could really be. We are all scared and curious alike.
=====
A new album for my photos in Beijing: http://s464.photobucket.com/albums/rr2/muskido2/
I haven't decided yet if I'll blog the next three months. I might just paint it all.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
9/5-13. tidying up
From a cafe in Sheung Wan, I watch a bunch of shirtless old men and one motherly woman in shorts play hackey-sack with a weighted birdy in an open plaza. My head flashes to the business opportunity of selling such birdies in the states, but mostly I feel the homeliness of it, the sense that I will miss this coloration of skin when I return home, and the certainty that were I to approach them in my hesitant accent, these strangers would invite me into their game without points. Such a wonder, to be in this place with every excuse not to speak, and every excuse to speak just to speak.
I don't want to leave this cafe and its vacuum of noise, the silence of cars passing outside, the movement of people through all their lives, the dusk fading, fading, and who will notice I am gone, who will say goodbye for me?
The old man with bristling white hair who stopped in front of the window menu to squint for a while before pursing his lips and whirling away with better things in mind: I want to know him.
Something makes Chinese people so much more expressive in their faces and bodies, their simple sense of humor--or perhaps it is something which I recognize merely as a racial familiarity. Maybe it is this food and medicine in the veins, or the cartoons of this culture, or the humor indicated by the HK game show in which people try to jump through cardboard cutouts in ridiculous poses. I just like it, and what it could do for my own ren.
-
By teaching, I spend a lifetime getting to know myself and others. What could be more important?
Let it be read now: I will be a school teacher. Though it may fade again, I know now that this conviction resides within me. I want to remind myself never to give up, even when any positive change in this world seems impossible, because hope and understanding do exist in people, literature, and experiences, just waiting to be discovered and given meaning. Bank the fire with coals; keep it warm until the morning.
9/6 - open house; last day before classes start
Something about this sense of finiteness and time coming to a close leads to a certain bravery that otherwise would not arise. Or perhaps it merely lends an excuse to not consider minute consequences.
Every evening on the way back to Ryan Mansion, I pass by this wine store that advertises free wine tasting daily after six. I've never done a wine tasting before and entering doorways for first experiences is always an awkward thing alone. But I learned today that you can let yourself become anyone you need to when the moment is right: you can be the tourist, the connoisseur, the local, the deaf or the mute. Life is acting. Failure is charm.
Also, I drank the quarter-glass of wine, because the multilingual host, who reminds me of many clowner teenage friends, thinks the practice of spitting is wasteful. I could feel the South African white wine trickle down inside me as though a stream among rocks, leaving a swelling within my lungs as it passed. There is no place for the wine in me, but it always has time. Perhaps it's proper that I began and end this summer with a bit of alcohol--the first time with strangers, and this second time alone, even stranger.
Mr Juul, Li, Kimoi, and Pollock(?) all got their black belts last Saturday. It sounded very everyday, but obviously I'm not over there so I don't know how it went or felt. I wrote in my notepad this morning: "Maybe I'm not afraid of the black belt but of failure, and of commitment." But you have to fail, tremendously and inexorably, in order to succeed. Muska is teaching me this with her bravery. It doesn't even have to be about success: you have to fail in order to grow, to laugh, to learn. The best things in life are almost always mistakes.
And I won't forget the moment (though I cannot remember the source) when I read this quotation from a book (on Taiji, or spirituality, or Buddhism, or I don't know maybe history) that went something like: "Every single thing we learn becomes disputed or contradicted or nullified at some point. So they have no inherent value. But if there is anything at all of real worth in this world, it is lifelong commitment, and the lessons gained from it." I just butchered my memory of the quote. But I am still learning it too.
stagnating
raisin in the elevator:
morning bao
KW explained to me today over some very fragrant pho that until recently, Hong Kong had a lot of its own livestock. Then SARS happened, which I heard about briefly in the states, but it was never mentioned again after we realized there was no threat to the West. But its reverberations still ring within ribcages here.
One of the nurses from KW's church was the first willing to sacrifice herself with exposure to patients, inspiring other doctors and nurses to do the same. Her own son had passed away a year before, and her deeds were the way she understood the value of life as a forward step.
Imagine streets full of children wearing those surgical masks because schools closed off and they had nowhere to go. Everything smelling like chloride, and the concrete dampening with daily hosings of buildings to wash off the smell, to cleanse the city of whatever crime it committed to deserve such a thing.
He is full of stories like these. We are all storytellers at heart, at once watchers and askers, working to be understanders.
We also discussed small talk in Cantonese.
First comes: Nei zhou bin hong? What is your profession, or walk of life?
Then you'll ask: Nei pingsi zhou mut ya? What do you do in your peaceful (free) time? This one is less important, though, because HK people just don't have much free time.
After that the conversation will turn to food. Everybody loves to eat. You might mention a restaurant you tried in Macau, and the other person will recognize that sort of style in the southeastern part of HK island, and you might have a relative in that area with this or that opinion. Everyone loves to eat.
And if you really want or if you're fairly familiar by now, you can ask: Nei you mou pak toh? Are you in a relationship. The character for toh shows two people holding hands. But the topic is much more sensitive here than in the West. it is not so casual, it seems, or meant for fleeting strangers.
Lastly, he taught me a very important phrase that is of a much higher level than the standard degrees of thanks: gum gig -> inspired to gratitude. I'd like to tattoo these characters to the air I breathe.
Before I forget, his name is Wong Chun Yue: one who will shake the universe. He says its meaning is not true. He just doens't know or believe it yet. My name is something to do with prosperity and light. Maybe I am the one who sees, and carries it forth.
skyline view, lights off
mistaken shadows, spirits...
silent city night
9/7 - voting day in Hong Kong
Morning. Reading over what I've written here, I realize that nothing is ever always true; in fact, seldom is anything even entirely true. I heard Brandy's "Have You Ever" on someone's iPod yesterday and for a moment missed a lot of Western things. I connect deeply to a lot of the Chineseness here, but I am naive to measure at all which side of the globe is better or worse. Judgment is a matter of the indolent,and the insecure. It ought to be enough to experience, and to do what is called for.
-
Mistress is an appropriate word for lovers not headed toward marriage and family. It is not a glorified thing.
-
There is no "should." Only what is and what you want.
-
Noon. Carried luggage across the islands to Soi Yi's place. I hate baggage.
Lunch. Homemade, vaguely familial--how many of these in Beijing?
Monkey Mt. Missed it; misunderstood the bus stop.
Chinese University of HK. Visited the campus instead. Well, not a whole lot of the campus because I couldn't find a directory and had little time. What I visited, then, was the beautiful little pond behind the sports fields nearest the train station. Two couples were getting their wedding photos taken. Other photographers meandered and pondered. One student in heels and a purple dress had an entourage of half a dozen guys setting up a photoshoot for her too.
Lastly, I watched a seven-year-old boy atop one of the bridges dropping bread crumbs to the koi below. It wasn't that he fed them; he wondered at them, and it sustained them both.
Mostly I just sat and watched and listened to the sweet susurrus, trying to not memorize the peace but just be part of it.
sunstream: birds'
flight through the shade--ah!
mosquito bite
Shek Lei Pui Reservoir, aka Golden Hill, aka Monkey Mt. On the way back. This was a staircase moment (when you travel a long while up a banal flight of stairs until reaching the singular point near the top where each step reveals the sky, then the upper horizon, then the view, then ah! this is what it's all about). Getting off the bus, I looked around in all directions, unsure which way to go. Then a monkey leapt upon a sign post. And then another, and another.
As I followed the concrete road along this beautiful, classic landscape (the word shanshui is perfect for this), the monkeys loafed along the side and sometimes lied right in the path. Big, small, red-faced, clear-eyed, timid, angry-looking, curious, territorial, hungry--here was a whole village of personality. Mothers walked by me with two and sometimes three young clinging to the underside of her belly and her teats. One monkey lay on his stomach as though reading a good book while another combed meticulously through his ass-fur for fleas. I watched monkeys cracking peanut shells and snacking, and I watched monkeys eye my bottle of water, probably for the brightness of its green cap. I sat across from one on the ledge of a bridge. I looked out at the still lake, and he watched the sun set behind verdant mountainsides.
Wild dogslooked over us from a calm ledge. I saw in them characters and personalities I formerly thought was limited to inane movies.
One Westerner tried to feed gum to a monkey. A car drove along the road behind him, and a woman inside taunted some monkeys with some red fruit through the window as I passed along the side One monkey--let's call him Earl--stopped me and snarled. I took a step back, broke eye contact, and he jumped up at me. With a howl, he scratched my arm, and I let him. It was only a misunderstanding, and that saddens me more than anything else. Just bad timing, and an old peach.
But I think I understand now the Dane Cook joke.
9/8 - first day of classes, fall
Talking with M has broadened my perspective a bit about: K's character, how things could be worse in my relationship with my family (and conversely how ti could be better too), and what we can or maybe are meant to accomplish with our lives.
But I think the most we can do with any of this is to take it a day at a time, bird by bird. Missions and visions, yes, but dinner and bites of rice, too, small legacies like the memory of a good wind.
Nothing is ever what it at first seems to be. This must be why Creeds and poetry are so powerful. The writing is not about the way things "are" or even shoul dbe, but simply the way we see things. Voice and vision start from the self.
I like to let myself think now that I am leaving this company to people who believe in it, who feel good about what they are doing. There's a coin of a chance that this is entirely untrue, but I feel somehow responsible as I make my departure and so I let myself believe in that lie.
9/9 - farewell dinner = drinking with the boss
So much Circean deception in this world! Two things are certain here.
First, I just don't feel comfortable in front of people with a guitar unless we're singing church songs together. This is how I started and just how I understand music.
Second, nothing is certain. I feel gratitude now to K for the whole fact of this experience, and I begin to think now that the times she lashed out at me or anyone else must certainly have been followed by some regret which politically needed t remain unspoken. I am so much like her in ways that frighten me. Maybe this is why we can't get along.
I have seen her at her worst and also during some of her best. I saw her almost push V, her administrative right hand, to quit again. And I have seen her barefoot in her tremendously comfortable home, a grinning baby ignorant of everything at her side.
Ultimately, our ideas of teaching and goals with children are vastly incompatible. I'd like to let all the interpersonal stuff be left to gravy.
But good drinks, good food, good laughs--none of that can save any of us. It is simply not feasible to justify anybody or any action in the world either way. You can only either have faith in it or not. When the moment comes, you're all in or all out. I leave this place with a genuine smile and honest best wishes for all, even K, I hope you find what you are looking for, I hope we all do. The bitterness I release as ashes in the wind, and with it my earliest rosy-eyed faith in what I thought I saw And the rest is memory.
My only wish here, as always, is that I made more eye contact and connective moments of silence, and made the parting a part of every day. A lot of things are too late to change now. So much was wasted, but surely so much of that was necessary.
"I never got to say goodbye, he
said, and I said I don't believe
in goodbyes." -Meg Kearney, "Creed"
9/11 - two more days
It's best not to write everything down. Some memories, like plants, need space to grow.
9/13
My last night alone (it almost feels like I should say it's my last night being single, but it's quite the opposite) in Cenral, Hong Kong, I bought a pineapple-flavored Krispy Kreme donut at the posh little donut cafe I pass daily on the escalators. No metaphor here. Just a thing to do.
I felt the love my last day at the office. KW, whom I've known less than a month now, said in his line-breaky accent: "I'll miss / you, my / friend." How often do we even address our friends as friends these days?
K gave me her exit interview about the work I've done and how impressed she--a person not easily impressed--was. No malice. She also gave her last words on the drama this summer. She is right to point out that I am impressionable, that my taking sides (however subversively on my part) was not helpful to her stress or to the company. I accept that. I also note that even to the last word she has not once spoken to me about the progress of my students, or about the actual education and educating we are supposed to be about.
A warning to all my friends. I know now that when I say, "Thank you, that means a lot," and glance away, it actually does not mean a lot to me. I am just surviving.
The final verdict on K: articulate, persuasive, earnest [on 9/18 I changed this to "articulate, subversive, volatile]; ultimately a mother, which is a role inherently full of deceit; and in the end, a good person making bad choices in the tide of circumstances. We are all of us in this world liable for her acts of malice; we are all of us in this world fallible.
M has a picaresque and a sort of idyllic relationship with Kinson, 7, in their private lessons. What I mean is, he's really cute and never wants to write, and she works really hard coming up with ideas each week that go out the window because he doesn't want to write. It comes to be a lesson in which M just slumps down--"I'm tired..."--and Kinson sighs, "Me, too." I have this intense and perhaps unreasonable faith in them learning and growing together tremendously from the experience. Today the only writing he was willing to do was write a letter to me together.
[M] Dear Henry, Sept. 13, 2008
[K] Hope you will come back.
[M] We will all miss you very much, especially M and chickenhead.
[K] I like you because you are a chickenhead.
[M] Have lots of fun in Beijing and go watch some paraolympic games!
[K] Be save.
[M] Hope to see you soon,
[K] M and Kinson.
And then a drawing of me with a combover and some Playdoh on my head. Or a chicken.
W's mother is moving into a hospice. She's going to be on a lot of morphine. She'll be losing consciousness in a few weeks, and then after that we know what happens. I ask everyone reading this to pray for her, not because of god or religion or mysticisms, but because of collective goodwill, the power of shared wishes, and the more people we can have believing in and hoping for good things the more we can begin to do for each other. A year ago, when this all began for W, she followed the Daoist way of giving up one daily thing in the hope of getting something back in return. Sacrifices teach us; I wonder now if they can heal us too.
C is heading home to Vancouver soon. R is back in Central doing advertising.
Yi Fun Jie just bought her new house: she's getting married in January. I have a photo of us as kids, so prophetic of who we are today, that tells the size of this growing up. And I have more photos of this place, which are bookmarks to revisit one day.
I don't want to leave this cafe and its vacuum of noise, the silence of cars passing outside, the movement of people through all their lives, the dusk fading, fading, and who will notice I am gone, who will say goodbye for me?
The old man with bristling white hair who stopped in front of the window menu to squint for a while before pursing his lips and whirling away with better things in mind: I want to know him.
Something makes Chinese people so much more expressive in their faces and bodies, their simple sense of humor--or perhaps it is something which I recognize merely as a racial familiarity. Maybe it is this food and medicine in the veins, or the cartoons of this culture, or the humor indicated by the HK game show in which people try to jump through cardboard cutouts in ridiculous poses. I just like it, and what it could do for my own ren.
-
By teaching, I spend a lifetime getting to know myself and others. What could be more important?
Let it be read now: I will be a school teacher. Though it may fade again, I know now that this conviction resides within me. I want to remind myself never to give up, even when any positive change in this world seems impossible, because hope and understanding do exist in people, literature, and experiences, just waiting to be discovered and given meaning. Bank the fire with coals; keep it warm until the morning.
9/6 - open house; last day before classes start
Something about this sense of finiteness and time coming to a close leads to a certain bravery that otherwise would not arise. Or perhaps it merely lends an excuse to not consider minute consequences.
Every evening on the way back to Ryan Mansion, I pass by this wine store that advertises free wine tasting daily after six. I've never done a wine tasting before and entering doorways for first experiences is always an awkward thing alone. But I learned today that you can let yourself become anyone you need to when the moment is right: you can be the tourist, the connoisseur, the local, the deaf or the mute. Life is acting. Failure is charm.
Also, I drank the quarter-glass of wine, because the multilingual host, who reminds me of many clowner teenage friends, thinks the practice of spitting is wasteful. I could feel the South African white wine trickle down inside me as though a stream among rocks, leaving a swelling within my lungs as it passed. There is no place for the wine in me, but it always has time. Perhaps it's proper that I began and end this summer with a bit of alcohol--the first time with strangers, and this second time alone, even stranger.
Mr Juul, Li, Kimoi, and Pollock(?) all got their black belts last Saturday. It sounded very everyday, but obviously I'm not over there so I don't know how it went or felt. I wrote in my notepad this morning: "Maybe I'm not afraid of the black belt but of failure, and of commitment." But you have to fail, tremendously and inexorably, in order to succeed. Muska is teaching me this with her bravery. It doesn't even have to be about success: you have to fail in order to grow, to laugh, to learn. The best things in life are almost always mistakes.
And I won't forget the moment (though I cannot remember the source) when I read this quotation from a book (on Taiji, or spirituality, or Buddhism, or I don't know maybe history) that went something like: "Every single thing we learn becomes disputed or contradicted or nullified at some point. So they have no inherent value. But if there is anything at all of real worth in this world, it is lifelong commitment, and the lessons gained from it." I just butchered my memory of the quote. But I am still learning it too.
stagnating
raisin in the elevator:
morning bao
KW explained to me today over some very fragrant pho that until recently, Hong Kong had a lot of its own livestock. Then SARS happened, which I heard about briefly in the states, but it was never mentioned again after we realized there was no threat to the West. But its reverberations still ring within ribcages here.
One of the nurses from KW's church was the first willing to sacrifice herself with exposure to patients, inspiring other doctors and nurses to do the same. Her own son had passed away a year before, and her deeds were the way she understood the value of life as a forward step.
Imagine streets full of children wearing those surgical masks because schools closed off and they had nowhere to go. Everything smelling like chloride, and the concrete dampening with daily hosings of buildings to wash off the smell, to cleanse the city of whatever crime it committed to deserve such a thing.
He is full of stories like these. We are all storytellers at heart, at once watchers and askers, working to be understanders.
We also discussed small talk in Cantonese.
First comes: Nei zhou bin hong? What is your profession, or walk of life?
Then you'll ask: Nei pingsi zhou mut ya? What do you do in your peaceful (free) time? This one is less important, though, because HK people just don't have much free time.
After that the conversation will turn to food. Everybody loves to eat. You might mention a restaurant you tried in Macau, and the other person will recognize that sort of style in the southeastern part of HK island, and you might have a relative in that area with this or that opinion. Everyone loves to eat.
And if you really want or if you're fairly familiar by now, you can ask: Nei you mou pak toh? Are you in a relationship. The character for toh shows two people holding hands. But the topic is much more sensitive here than in the West. it is not so casual, it seems, or meant for fleeting strangers.
Lastly, he taught me a very important phrase that is of a much higher level than the standard degrees of thanks: gum gig -> inspired to gratitude. I'd like to tattoo these characters to the air I breathe.
Before I forget, his name is Wong Chun Yue: one who will shake the universe. He says its meaning is not true. He just doens't know or believe it yet. My name is something to do with prosperity and light. Maybe I am the one who sees, and carries it forth.
skyline view, lights off
mistaken shadows, spirits...
silent city night
9/7 - voting day in Hong Kong
Morning. Reading over what I've written here, I realize that nothing is ever always true; in fact, seldom is anything even entirely true. I heard Brandy's "Have You Ever" on someone's iPod yesterday and for a moment missed a lot of Western things. I connect deeply to a lot of the Chineseness here, but I am naive to measure at all which side of the globe is better or worse. Judgment is a matter of the indolent,and the insecure. It ought to be enough to experience, and to do what is called for.
-
Mistress is an appropriate word for lovers not headed toward marriage and family. It is not a glorified thing.
-
There is no "should." Only what is and what you want.
-
Noon. Carried luggage across the islands to Soi Yi's place. I hate baggage.
Lunch. Homemade, vaguely familial--how many of these in Beijing?
Monkey Mt. Missed it; misunderstood the bus stop.
Chinese University of HK. Visited the campus instead. Well, not a whole lot of the campus because I couldn't find a directory and had little time. What I visited, then, was the beautiful little pond behind the sports fields nearest the train station. Two couples were getting their wedding photos taken. Other photographers meandered and pondered. One student in heels and a purple dress had an entourage of half a dozen guys setting up a photoshoot for her too.
Lastly, I watched a seven-year-old boy atop one of the bridges dropping bread crumbs to the koi below. It wasn't that he fed them; he wondered at them, and it sustained them both.
Mostly I just sat and watched and listened to the sweet susurrus, trying to not memorize the peace but just be part of it.
sunstream: birds'
flight through the shade--ah!
mosquito bite
Shek Lei Pui Reservoir, aka Golden Hill, aka Monkey Mt. On the way back. This was a staircase moment (when you travel a long while up a banal flight of stairs until reaching the singular point near the top where each step reveals the sky, then the upper horizon, then the view, then ah! this is what it's all about). Getting off the bus, I looked around in all directions, unsure which way to go. Then a monkey leapt upon a sign post. And then another, and another.
As I followed the concrete road along this beautiful, classic landscape (the word shanshui is perfect for this), the monkeys loafed along the side and sometimes lied right in the path. Big, small, red-faced, clear-eyed, timid, angry-looking, curious, territorial, hungry--here was a whole village of personality. Mothers walked by me with two and sometimes three young clinging to the underside of her belly and her teats. One monkey lay on his stomach as though reading a good book while another combed meticulously through his ass-fur for fleas. I watched monkeys cracking peanut shells and snacking, and I watched monkeys eye my bottle of water, probably for the brightness of its green cap. I sat across from one on the ledge of a bridge. I looked out at the still lake, and he watched the sun set behind verdant mountainsides.
Wild dogslooked over us from a calm ledge. I saw in them characters and personalities I formerly thought was limited to inane movies.
One Westerner tried to feed gum to a monkey. A car drove along the road behind him, and a woman inside taunted some monkeys with some red fruit through the window as I passed along the side One monkey--let's call him Earl--stopped me and snarled. I took a step back, broke eye contact, and he jumped up at me. With a howl, he scratched my arm, and I let him. It was only a misunderstanding, and that saddens me more than anything else. Just bad timing, and an old peach.
But I think I understand now the Dane Cook joke.
9/8 - first day of classes, fall
Talking with M has broadened my perspective a bit about: K's character, how things could be worse in my relationship with my family (and conversely how ti could be better too), and what we can or maybe are meant to accomplish with our lives.
But I think the most we can do with any of this is to take it a day at a time, bird by bird. Missions and visions, yes, but dinner and bites of rice, too, small legacies like the memory of a good wind.
Nothing is ever what it at first seems to be. This must be why Creeds and poetry are so powerful. The writing is not about the way things "are" or even shoul dbe, but simply the way we see things. Voice and vision start from the self.
I like to let myself think now that I am leaving this company to people who believe in it, who feel good about what they are doing. There's a coin of a chance that this is entirely untrue, but I feel somehow responsible as I make my departure and so I let myself believe in that lie.
9/9 - farewell dinner = drinking with the boss
So much Circean deception in this world! Two things are certain here.
First, I just don't feel comfortable in front of people with a guitar unless we're singing church songs together. This is how I started and just how I understand music.
Second, nothing is certain. I feel gratitude now to K for the whole fact of this experience, and I begin to think now that the times she lashed out at me or anyone else must certainly have been followed by some regret which politically needed t remain unspoken. I am so much like her in ways that frighten me. Maybe this is why we can't get along.
I have seen her at her worst and also during some of her best. I saw her almost push V, her administrative right hand, to quit again. And I have seen her barefoot in her tremendously comfortable home, a grinning baby ignorant of everything at her side.
Ultimately, our ideas of teaching and goals with children are vastly incompatible. I'd like to let all the interpersonal stuff be left to gravy.
But good drinks, good food, good laughs--none of that can save any of us. It is simply not feasible to justify anybody or any action in the world either way. You can only either have faith in it or not. When the moment comes, you're all in or all out. I leave this place with a genuine smile and honest best wishes for all, even K, I hope you find what you are looking for, I hope we all do. The bitterness I release as ashes in the wind, and with it my earliest rosy-eyed faith in what I thought I saw And the rest is memory.
My only wish here, as always, is that I made more eye contact and connective moments of silence, and made the parting a part of every day. A lot of things are too late to change now. So much was wasted, but surely so much of that was necessary.
"I never got to say goodbye, he
said, and I said I don't believe
in goodbyes." -Meg Kearney, "Creed"
9/11 - two more days
It's best not to write everything down. Some memories, like plants, need space to grow.
9/13
My last night alone (it almost feels like I should say it's my last night being single, but it's quite the opposite) in Cenral, Hong Kong, I bought a pineapple-flavored Krispy Kreme donut at the posh little donut cafe I pass daily on the escalators. No metaphor here. Just a thing to do.
I felt the love my last day at the office. KW, whom I've known less than a month now, said in his line-breaky accent: "I'll miss / you, my / friend." How often do we even address our friends as friends these days?
K gave me her exit interview about the work I've done and how impressed she--a person not easily impressed--was. No malice. She also gave her last words on the drama this summer. She is right to point out that I am impressionable, that my taking sides (however subversively on my part) was not helpful to her stress or to the company. I accept that. I also note that even to the last word she has not once spoken to me about the progress of my students, or about the actual education and educating we are supposed to be about.
A warning to all my friends. I know now that when I say, "Thank you, that means a lot," and glance away, it actually does not mean a lot to me. I am just surviving.
The final verdict on K: articulate, persuasive, earnest [on 9/18 I changed this to "articulate, subversive, volatile]; ultimately a mother, which is a role inherently full of deceit; and in the end, a good person making bad choices in the tide of circumstances. We are all of us in this world liable for her acts of malice; we are all of us in this world fallible.
M has a picaresque and a sort of idyllic relationship with Kinson, 7, in their private lessons. What I mean is, he's really cute and never wants to write, and she works really hard coming up with ideas each week that go out the window because he doesn't want to write. It comes to be a lesson in which M just slumps down--"I'm tired..."--and Kinson sighs, "Me, too." I have this intense and perhaps unreasonable faith in them learning and growing together tremendously from the experience. Today the only writing he was willing to do was write a letter to me together.
[M] Dear Henry, Sept. 13, 2008
[K] Hope you will come back.
[M] We will all miss you very much, especially M and chickenhead.
[K] I like you because you are a chickenhead.
[M] Have lots of fun in Beijing and go watch some paraolympic games!
[K] Be save.
[M] Hope to see you soon,
[K] M and Kinson.
And then a drawing of me with a combover and some Playdoh on my head. Or a chicken.
W's mother is moving into a hospice. She's going to be on a lot of morphine. She'll be losing consciousness in a few weeks, and then after that we know what happens. I ask everyone reading this to pray for her, not because of god or religion or mysticisms, but because of collective goodwill, the power of shared wishes, and the more people we can have believing in and hoping for good things the more we can begin to do for each other. A year ago, when this all began for W, she followed the Daoist way of giving up one daily thing in the hope of getting something back in return. Sacrifices teach us; I wonder now if they can heal us too.
C is heading home to Vancouver soon. R is back in Central doing advertising.
Yi Fun Jie just bought her new house: she's getting married in January. I have a photo of us as kids, so prophetic of who we are today, that tells the size of this growing up. And I have more photos of this place, which are bookmarks to revisit one day.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
last udpate for a while (9/2 - ??)
9/2 - "I think is okay as long as you have a life." -KW
My last weekend abroad from Hong Kong spent exhausted in Guangzhou. I carried two boxes of mooncakes across the border, one for grandma, and one for my uncle's family. They sent me back with a couple more handfuls of mooncakes for myself. I don't even really like these cakes, especially alone, but I eat them for breakfast, for the metaphor.
On the mainland I am reminded, for some reason, of the buildings at home in Honolulu.
-
I had lunch with KW, the new assistant, another I'd like to warn off from this volatile working environment. A parent came in to complain about all the turnover evident in our brochures, because she has enrolled her kid in past years and has seen even more of the teachers leave than I have.
So I explained to KW who was fired and who quit and more or less why. He seemed unmoved by it all. Then our food came, and he prayed ove rit, and said to me, "If I am fired, then I don't mind because I am doing my best job. If it is not sufficient, then it is K's decision for the good of the company. I think she is doing very important works." What a difference to speak with someone who still has faith in the reverence and propriety of authority.
K gives him a lot of bitch work (like picking up diapers from Wellcome) because his accent causes her to dislike and undervalue him. I feel like the provenance here is just misunderstanding. One night, while doing this tedious job of unpackaging our brochures (which were packaged by the maids in our own little factory line), he told me about the special education kids he used to work with who would do stuff like this to hopefully and eventually get out of school. He would see them on the sidewalk later, entirely at ease, without judgment, living the lives they are given to live and doing the work they are asked to do. It's just a matter of perspective.
He's planning to ultimately work with disabled kids like that, but in the meanwhile, he and his mother both work to make a basic living. He explained with a peaceful smile that he didn't do well enough in school to do the work he wants to do yet. It's such a difference between West and East (or maybe I'm just looking at privileged and unprivileged people) in the way people see education. American kids don't give a damn about their schools but end up learning anyway, and reap the gains of it. But the people I've met here care deeply about education and what it offers, but are unable to learn sufficiently and take advantage of it.
"Eventually," he was saying, "You have to go back to what you value."
What do I value? Waiting for the bus to Guangzhou on Saturday morning, the three of us sat on a curb facing two noodle stands. The sun rose softly across from us, and the unblemished sounds and smells of blemished city people rose around us too. I value moments like these.
I've been watching people as they walk calmly among strangers in this fast city. There are many illusions here, and delusions as well. The bus attendant with the perfect dimples, for one, eating her noodles during the traffic and reading her book; I imagine her life as always going, going, from destination to destination and back, but she never really goes anywhere. But hers is not my story to tell.
The waiter I saw through a kitchen window is another one, taking a nap with a rice bowl as his makeshift pillow. Or the homeless guy eating his lunchbox in a plastic bag along the escalators.
"Is okay as long as you have a life." Wise words. We all want so many things. But what I've learned for certain is that all we really want, at the very heart, is to live. And to live well, if we are allowed such wishful thinking.
Two weeks to go. What do I want to make sure I won't regret not doing after I've left? (a better way to phrase that: these are regrets from Hong Kong I do not want to have)
- not speaking more Chinese
- not making the awkward efforts to fully thank my family here
- not going to Monkey Mountain near Mei Foo
- not spending time in some jazz clubs
- not getting in touch with some students
- not working harder for the good of this company, which is volatile but is also tugging at many young lives
- not finishing oil painting with C
- not keeping an eye out for things to bring home to people
- not collecting HK-specific little desk tools for starting a fringe export business
- not looking into the recycling system here and setting foundations for improvement
- not owning up my to my own mistakes and the plank in my own eye
- not making something of a home here, so I can return and grow and be a part of people's lives
- not being myself
- not being grateful
- not buying the Ah Chung rain painting for myself
- leaving with a tone of riddance ratehr than gladness
9/3 - waiting in line at the China Embassy
The other day I saw a small puddle of spit on one of the subway station steps: a heresy in such a regulated city. But I realized that nothing in this world is illegal until someone notices and cares. By the same token, nothing in this world matters until someone notices, and then cares. A tree falling makes a sound only if we hear it, or perhaps hear the echo if it much later.
cool breeze
car engines blast by...
hot breeze
-
On Heartfulness (for Christy Sh[scribble])
Two weeks ago when I came to the gallery
to return $200 I found in the bag
you put my paintings in, you
opened your mouth in surprise and a
genuine sort of expressiveness I have seen
among hard workers here, and you
thanked me, and wrote down my name
and number, just in case
the money belonged to neither of us.
Today I came back as part of my
checklist of things to do: buy the painting
of a man smiling beneath his umbrella
with the calligraphy explaining why
this is okay sometimes; and you wrote
my last name on the receipt, and
recognized it instantly, and your boss,
on the other side of the room, heard it
too and then passed this warm, un-standardized
gratitude between the three of us; then you
had that same expression of real surprise
when your boss said to give me one
painting free as a gift, and you looked at me
from out of the ordinariness of your day
and made small celebrities of each of us
to each of us.
Tomorrow I will forget
a lot of our conversation, my
stumbling over our language, my
thanking you for thanking me, but I
will recall your boss's words, that his son
is not much older than me and that
there are fewer and fewer honest people
and mm saih hark hei; goh jou hai
ngo dei go sum lei: "Don't hestitate;
this is our heart's intent."
This is not about the money,
of which there will always be more;
or the paintings, the ink of which merely darkens then fades then sets;
or the moral, which does not belong to me;
or even the look in your eyes that tells me
you are the first stranger here I have
really connected with, as short as our time is;
no, this is about stories again,
the small and extraordinary within the ordinary
which doesn't make up a good raconteur
but abides within the heart's intent.
I apologize for this messy poem for
making this into anything less than
your stories and
my story
connected.
These little sparks remind me how lonely it is living in this world after all. It's so very hard to connect to people.
After dealing with stuff at the embassy, I found myself on a bus to Hong Kong University. The smell and age of the buildings remind me so much of Honolulu: a messy coloration, an urbanity, at one with the nature it is built on.
You can tell so much about a school from its bookstore. I also spied on one of the classrooms, which employed Youtube in its lecture. I really like the unpretentious and non-posturing walk of people here--as well as the snacks and drinks they carry, which I relate to via my local Wellcome. It's way too early to make any such judgment, but I feel like these are a local, modern village-style generation of youth with a global education. Or I'm probably making that up, or stealing it from some other line of propaganda. All I know is I'm coming back here one day.
student corner:
moss, old wood, vending machines,
lennon's "Imagine"
9/4 - tin gaih bou zai faan tong serng hoi chan
some nights
the quest for language:
supererogatory
buttered Danish bread
another Chinese morning
meditating
three working-class months
without a moon
9/5
Something KW told me the other day is resonating with something Hebron once said, long ago when I had my first talk with him about my being no longer Christian. It is not about the wondering, they seem to say, or the finding of purpose in life. It is in the knowing of purpose. That is faith.
Getting ready to pack again, maybe the third time in so many months, I begin to feel the cost of levity, this transience and groundlessness. I am in the process of asking many big questions about where I'll end up in the long run, and I know, like I told Bryan in our last SAT class, that it matters, sure, in that pragmatic sense, but it doesn't really matter. At this age, we are so favonian, just elements of a western wind.
I want to keep learning. For once, I can say that from my own words rather than from the wishy-washy textbooks of school. But leraning doesn't have to mean studying, or teaching, or anything from the fabrications of this society.
I also want to remain familiar. Walking back from a Shanghai-style restaurant last night, I realized my penchant for the Cantonese language is twofold. First, it is the sound of family, a tremendous difference from the exclusions of English as I grew up. Second, it is the true common speech here, the inherent slang of the earnest working class. I know that too well.
What do I want to do with my life? What is my purpose, my contribution? This probably isn't something to be answered until the day I die. Like Todd told me before about people having kids too late in life or not at all because they spend too long preparing for it, financially or otherwise, there will never be a point at which I can say I'm perfect, I'm ready to teach or write or what may be, because the best preparation is in the actual doing. You can't taste something without eating it too.
And so, years after saying no to a god that would reserve a hell just for people like my ancestors, I find myself needing to be grounded again, looking for some permanence or fountainhead in this dewdrop world.
Things I am sure to do:
- take my black belt test
- write a book and change at least one person's life
- teach, formally or not
- paint my painting of religion
- have faith in something other than myself
"But maybe it's up in the hills under the leaves or in a ditch somewhere. Maybe it's never found. But what you find, whatever you find, is always only part of the missing, and writing is the way the poet finds out what it is he found." -Paul Engle.
My last weekend abroad from Hong Kong spent exhausted in Guangzhou. I carried two boxes of mooncakes across the border, one for grandma, and one for my uncle's family. They sent me back with a couple more handfuls of mooncakes for myself. I don't even really like these cakes, especially alone, but I eat them for breakfast, for the metaphor.
On the mainland I am reminded, for some reason, of the buildings at home in Honolulu.
-
I had lunch with KW, the new assistant, another I'd like to warn off from this volatile working environment. A parent came in to complain about all the turnover evident in our brochures, because she has enrolled her kid in past years and has seen even more of the teachers leave than I have.
So I explained to KW who was fired and who quit and more or less why. He seemed unmoved by it all. Then our food came, and he prayed ove rit, and said to me, "If I am fired, then I don't mind because I am doing my best job. If it is not sufficient, then it is K's decision for the good of the company. I think she is doing very important works." What a difference to speak with someone who still has faith in the reverence and propriety of authority.
K gives him a lot of bitch work (like picking up diapers from Wellcome) because his accent causes her to dislike and undervalue him. I feel like the provenance here is just misunderstanding. One night, while doing this tedious job of unpackaging our brochures (which were packaged by the maids in our own little factory line), he told me about the special education kids he used to work with who would do stuff like this to hopefully and eventually get out of school. He would see them on the sidewalk later, entirely at ease, without judgment, living the lives they are given to live and doing the work they are asked to do. It's just a matter of perspective.
He's planning to ultimately work with disabled kids like that, but in the meanwhile, he and his mother both work to make a basic living. He explained with a peaceful smile that he didn't do well enough in school to do the work he wants to do yet. It's such a difference between West and East (or maybe I'm just looking at privileged and unprivileged people) in the way people see education. American kids don't give a damn about their schools but end up learning anyway, and reap the gains of it. But the people I've met here care deeply about education and what it offers, but are unable to learn sufficiently and take advantage of it.
"Eventually," he was saying, "You have to go back to what you value."
What do I value? Waiting for the bus to Guangzhou on Saturday morning, the three of us sat on a curb facing two noodle stands. The sun rose softly across from us, and the unblemished sounds and smells of blemished city people rose around us too. I value moments like these.
I've been watching people as they walk calmly among strangers in this fast city. There are many illusions here, and delusions as well. The bus attendant with the perfect dimples, for one, eating her noodles during the traffic and reading her book; I imagine her life as always going, going, from destination to destination and back, but she never really goes anywhere. But hers is not my story to tell.
The waiter I saw through a kitchen window is another one, taking a nap with a rice bowl as his makeshift pillow. Or the homeless guy eating his lunchbox in a plastic bag along the escalators.
"Is okay as long as you have a life." Wise words. We all want so many things. But what I've learned for certain is that all we really want, at the very heart, is to live. And to live well, if we are allowed such wishful thinking.
Two weeks to go. What do I want to make sure I won't regret not doing after I've left? (a better way to phrase that: these are regrets from Hong Kong I do not want to have)
- not speaking more Chinese
- not making the awkward efforts to fully thank my family here
- not going to Monkey Mountain near Mei Foo
- not spending time in some jazz clubs
- not getting in touch with some students
- not working harder for the good of this company, which is volatile but is also tugging at many young lives
- not finishing oil painting with C
- not keeping an eye out for things to bring home to people
- not collecting HK-specific little desk tools for starting a fringe export business
- not looking into the recycling system here and setting foundations for improvement
- not owning up my to my own mistakes and the plank in my own eye
- not making something of a home here, so I can return and grow and be a part of people's lives
- not being myself
- not being grateful
- not buying the Ah Chung rain painting for myself
- leaving with a tone of riddance ratehr than gladness
9/3 - waiting in line at the China Embassy
The other day I saw a small puddle of spit on one of the subway station steps: a heresy in such a regulated city. But I realized that nothing in this world is illegal until someone notices and cares. By the same token, nothing in this world matters until someone notices, and then cares. A tree falling makes a sound only if we hear it, or perhaps hear the echo if it much later.
cool breeze
car engines blast by...
hot breeze
-
On Heartfulness (for Christy Sh[scribble])
Two weeks ago when I came to the gallery
to return $200 I found in the bag
you put my paintings in, you
opened your mouth in surprise and a
genuine sort of expressiveness I have seen
among hard workers here, and you
thanked me, and wrote down my name
and number, just in case
the money belonged to neither of us.
Today I came back as part of my
checklist of things to do: buy the painting
of a man smiling beneath his umbrella
with the calligraphy explaining why
this is okay sometimes; and you wrote
my last name on the receipt, and
recognized it instantly, and your boss,
on the other side of the room, heard it
too and then passed this warm, un-standardized
gratitude between the three of us; then you
had that same expression of real surprise
when your boss said to give me one
painting free as a gift, and you looked at me
from out of the ordinariness of your day
and made small celebrities of each of us
to each of us.
Tomorrow I will forget
a lot of our conversation, my
stumbling over our language, my
thanking you for thanking me, but I
will recall your boss's words, that his son
is not much older than me and that
there are fewer and fewer honest people
and mm saih hark hei; goh jou hai
ngo dei go sum lei: "Don't hestitate;
this is our heart's intent."
This is not about the money,
of which there will always be more;
or the paintings, the ink of which merely darkens then fades then sets;
or the moral, which does not belong to me;
or even the look in your eyes that tells me
you are the first stranger here I have
really connected with, as short as our time is;
no, this is about stories again,
the small and extraordinary within the ordinary
which doesn't make up a good raconteur
but abides within the heart's intent.
I apologize for this messy poem for
making this into anything less than
your stories and
my story
connected.
These little sparks remind me how lonely it is living in this world after all. It's so very hard to connect to people.
After dealing with stuff at the embassy, I found myself on a bus to Hong Kong University. The smell and age of the buildings remind me so much of Honolulu: a messy coloration, an urbanity, at one with the nature it is built on.
You can tell so much about a school from its bookstore. I also spied on one of the classrooms, which employed Youtube in its lecture. I really like the unpretentious and non-posturing walk of people here--as well as the snacks and drinks they carry, which I relate to via my local Wellcome. It's way too early to make any such judgment, but I feel like these are a local, modern village-style generation of youth with a global education. Or I'm probably making that up, or stealing it from some other line of propaganda. All I know is I'm coming back here one day.
student corner:
moss, old wood, vending machines,
lennon's "Imagine"
9/4 - tin gaih bou zai faan tong serng hoi chan
some nights
the quest for language:
supererogatory
buttered Danish bread
another Chinese morning
meditating
three working-class months
without a moon
9/5
Something KW told me the other day is resonating with something Hebron once said, long ago when I had my first talk with him about my being no longer Christian. It is not about the wondering, they seem to say, or the finding of purpose in life. It is in the knowing of purpose. That is faith.
Getting ready to pack again, maybe the third time in so many months, I begin to feel the cost of levity, this transience and groundlessness. I am in the process of asking many big questions about where I'll end up in the long run, and I know, like I told Bryan in our last SAT class, that it matters, sure, in that pragmatic sense, but it doesn't really matter. At this age, we are so favonian, just elements of a western wind.
I want to keep learning. For once, I can say that from my own words rather than from the wishy-washy textbooks of school. But leraning doesn't have to mean studying, or teaching, or anything from the fabrications of this society.
I also want to remain familiar. Walking back from a Shanghai-style restaurant last night, I realized my penchant for the Cantonese language is twofold. First, it is the sound of family, a tremendous difference from the exclusions of English as I grew up. Second, it is the true common speech here, the inherent slang of the earnest working class. I know that too well.
What do I want to do with my life? What is my purpose, my contribution? This probably isn't something to be answered until the day I die. Like Todd told me before about people having kids too late in life or not at all because they spend too long preparing for it, financially or otherwise, there will never be a point at which I can say I'm perfect, I'm ready to teach or write or what may be, because the best preparation is in the actual doing. You can't taste something without eating it too.
And so, years after saying no to a god that would reserve a hell just for people like my ancestors, I find myself needing to be grounded again, looking for some permanence or fountainhead in this dewdrop world.
Things I am sure to do:
- take my black belt test
- write a book and change at least one person's life
- teach, formally or not
- paint my painting of religion
- have faith in something other than myself
"But maybe it's up in the hills under the leaves or in a ditch somewhere. Maybe it's never found. But what you find, whatever you find, is always only part of the missing, and writing is the way the poet finds out what it is he found." -Paul Engle.
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