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.