Saturday, October 4, 2008
Saturday, September 20, 2008
9/13 to Beijing. last post.
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.
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.
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.
Friday, August 29, 2008
more line breaks
[I added one more piece to my collection of student work]
8/25 - followup on my first weekend alone here: Lamma Island; Kung Fu Corner @ Tsim Sha Tsui, and various paint galleries
Chinese harmonica player playing a western blues by the mid-levels escalator, and making little profit from it:
harp of melted coin
finds its home below the bridge
far-off melody
A caricature artist at the Central Pier drew me as a Beijing pop star in shorts. The resemblance was not even remote, but I paid the petty cash and nodded my thanks anyway because of the obvious joy he took in this sideline job. This is proof of how difficult it is to be understood. $30 for a mirror of some other guy stuffed into my bag.
The little white boy Zachary with his Londoner family at the dock was another reflection. He hit his sister with a rolled-up tourist brochure (at that age, everything is either a sword or food) and made her cry. His apology was a sudden, forceful hug, but she planted her feet and pushed him to the ground like a real Taiji push-hands master. So Zachary hugged his father, who only pushed him back to complete his apology to the freckled girl. She cold-shouldered him and watched the waves. The boy's last resort by then was to start hitting poeple again. He, too, only wanted to be understood.
seasick
signs bobbing up and down:
Mind Your Heartd
Having spent time on both sides of the globe, I find myself less and les impressed by the cultural phenomenon of sex appeal. The media will turn this world into a renaissance of mannequins. Cheep, cheap.
Beauty is eye contact. Like the peach blossom, I am a captive of communication.
Meanwhile, the meals here are getting more and more lonely. Activity amidst a crowd is another illusion. How many names have I learned along the road in all this time?
across the view--
apartment lights blink off
like televisions
8/26
Morning. To live your life and act according to someone else's design, simply because they told you to do so, is acceptable on occasion. But if no one is watching and you are not doing this for survival, then your work sure as hell better have a meaning or significance equal to that of survival. Going through the motions is a necessary method only for the second-handers.
8/27
Tonight, coming home and glancing out the window at the phallic view of high-rises in Central, I had that moment of sharpening, of shifting clarities. For the first time in a while, I sort of realized where I am and how far I've traveled to get here.
I can see the flashing lights of televisions through windows half a mile from here. I can see shadows through curtains, people walking across small bedrooms and shutting off for the night. Lately, I have hardly even noticed the smoke; my lungs are full of this place, and I probably won't exhale the last remnants of it until after I die.
Along the mid-levels escalators where the wealthy and largely Caucasian go for drinks, one of the old Chinese men pasing out flyers and coupons was telling his partner, "Well, you go to school, ok, but even then you can't find a job..." I think I'll be alright, wherever I am, as long as I come home every night to a place with pen and paper and space for kata. I listened as I passed by, and I watched the uneven line between rich and poor, and then I continued ascending up the stairs with a bag full of fruit for which I don't know the name.
late weeknight
a man's private affair...
frozen delights
8/28
So much food today. I'll start with the snake soup.
Three generations ago,
your family learned to dry
tangerine peels and float them
like chrysanthemum petals along
this fragrant soup of lemon-
grass, brown mushrooms, shredded chicken,
and most of all the slips of snake
that made this restaurant famous.
But your grandfather is long gone
and now your father's passed. I have seen
the store in Sheung Wan where the snakes
are kept in cages, listless and crooked,
and suffocating in corridors' worth
of hand-carved boxes, and churning
at the bottom of wine bottles. I
know the insides of this meat.
Now, you sit behind the glass
of your restaurant, a woman
alone with an expensive legacy, watching
the lunch crowd passing by, counting
the coins expiring in their pockets.
After that, V showed me a little bakery famous for its "egg puffs," or sha yong. "Sand" something, the second word the same as lou yong, used in writing to name the elderly. But these single-coin desserts are only good for a couple hours, at which point they collapse and the oil leaks out, no longer held together.
She also pointed out the streetstand where, years ago, milk tea originated by the specific process of dual filtering. Besides these places where you can watch them make it, the best restaurant to order hot milk-tea is C-:d-:C-:. It's cheaper from 2-6pm: tea time, a concept inherited from the British.
The cooks wear hats now
and cover their mouths like bandits
or surgeons, but even the fluorescent lights
do not hide the roasted animals on hooks
and the bowl-curved cutting board of
older days. Even in this air-conditioned
generation and the fast-food lines,
a tea master exists
to inspect the temperature and flavor of a
simple drink. Even today, they safeguard
the sweetness of things.
And all the wholesellers of nests made from the saliva of swallows. These are collected from homes left behind in flight, then dried and packaged for $2k a plate. Women pay these prices and boil the nests in water for 45 minutes at home to eat for the softness of their skin, for the transulence of youth.
imagine
us
chasing
shadows
of free
r
birds
Tonight, at the base of the mid-levels escalator, I passed the man who lives on one of the benches, who has no personal belongings beyond the cloths wraped around his hands. He is dressed in a thick armor of rags, held together by needles and staples, glinting cheap silver in the darkness. I am unmoved to approach him and find out his story, afraid of the commitment saying hello would imply. For once, I am the have, and he is the have-not, and this space between us is a river of deep silence. From just the street above comes the sound of Soho: pulsing bass, posturing laughter. Men of old would carry birds with them in wooden cages, crossing bridges and passing under trees to sit in sweaty restaurants. The chirping bird from a distance would be at once a sign of great wealth and a telltale fear of lonelines. In modern times, the sound has changed but the song remains the same.
-
I've had Brubaker's Creative Curriculum Leadership on my bedside stand for a couple weeks but haven't touched it because it seemed too intellectual and tedious for a quick read, not immediate enough. Boy was I ever wrong. For two weeks, it has been nigh time to turn off the television. If I didn't have work in the morning, I would read until the sun came back in a fiery glow. This book is already changing the way I think.
I'm wondering now if there is anywhere else that could get me closer to the heart of human people and their interactions than in the literature and practice of education and all the substudies that revolve around it. This is the center of the social vehicle that drives the world today. All the contradictions and frustrations of the teaching profession need not be anything less than struggle towards hope and understanding.
Stealing books is something I have done on occasion and without qualm since I was nine. For once, though, there is a slew of books I own and which I would like to own, which I am leaving behind at this volatile company because I believe someone will read them and make positive, if not minor revolutionary, change for these kids and this boss while there is still time. What a wonder, that there is still time to change.
8/29
$16 near Lan Kwai Fong will get you a bowl of nodles with three prawn wontons. No napkins, no water, no backs to the chairs. Frugality is an end in itself sometimes, but other times the hunger will follow you all the way back home.
Michelle and I finished construction-papering the bulletin boards and posted our staff profiles/pictures in the style of the Visa ads [mine below]. The stigma of the old office and its politics is fading fast now. All this arts + crafts and the building/exploring of the new environment together has been key to the feeling of cohesion, of working towards something. I can begin to have faith in what this woman could accomplish with a team like this if she can just trust us. But I don't forgive so easily, and I will always look carefully at the provenance of simple behaviors.
My name: Henry W. Leung
childhood ambition: cartoonist
fondest memory: Bennington, Vermont, in the rain
literary read: Rachel Elizabeth Richardson
soundtrack: Little Wing
retreat: home in Palolo Valley, Hawaii
proudest moment: first martial arts medal, 1999
biggest challenge: simple gratitudes
alarm clock: 7:28
perfect day: every return home
first job: Creative Writing substitute in high school
indulgence: myself
last purchase: bread and water
favorite movie: Serenity
inspiration: the wind
My life: an epic poem
My passion: pineapple buns
My Life. My Passion. [signature and company logo]
8/25 - followup on my first weekend alone here: Lamma Island; Kung Fu Corner @ Tsim Sha Tsui, and various paint galleries
Chinese harmonica player playing a western blues by the mid-levels escalator, and making little profit from it:
harp of melted coin
finds its home below the bridge
far-off melody
A caricature artist at the Central Pier drew me as a Beijing pop star in shorts. The resemblance was not even remote, but I paid the petty cash and nodded my thanks anyway because of the obvious joy he took in this sideline job. This is proof of how difficult it is to be understood. $30 for a mirror of some other guy stuffed into my bag.
The little white boy Zachary with his Londoner family at the dock was another reflection. He hit his sister with a rolled-up tourist brochure (at that age, everything is either a sword or food) and made her cry. His apology was a sudden, forceful hug, but she planted her feet and pushed him to the ground like a real Taiji push-hands master. So Zachary hugged his father, who only pushed him back to complete his apology to the freckled girl. She cold-shouldered him and watched the waves. The boy's last resort by then was to start hitting poeple again. He, too, only wanted to be understood.
seasick
signs bobbing up and down:
Mind Your Hea
Having spent time on both sides of the globe, I find myself less and les impressed by the cultural phenomenon of sex appeal. The media will turn this world into a renaissance of mannequins. Cheep, cheap.
Beauty is eye contact. Like the peach blossom, I am a captive of communication.
Meanwhile, the meals here are getting more and more lonely. Activity amidst a crowd is another illusion. How many names have I learned along the road in all this time?
across the view--
apartment lights blink off
like televisions
8/26
Morning. To live your life and act according to someone else's design, simply because they told you to do so, is acceptable on occasion. But if no one is watching and you are not doing this for survival, then your work sure as hell better have a meaning or significance equal to that of survival. Going through the motions is a necessary method only for the second-handers.
8/27
Tonight, coming home and glancing out the window at the phallic view of high-rises in Central, I had that moment of sharpening, of shifting clarities. For the first time in a while, I sort of realized where I am and how far I've traveled to get here.
I can see the flashing lights of televisions through windows half a mile from here. I can see shadows through curtains, people walking across small bedrooms and shutting off for the night. Lately, I have hardly even noticed the smoke; my lungs are full of this place, and I probably won't exhale the last remnants of it until after I die.
Along the mid-levels escalators where the wealthy and largely Caucasian go for drinks, one of the old Chinese men pasing out flyers and coupons was telling his partner, "Well, you go to school, ok, but even then you can't find a job..." I think I'll be alright, wherever I am, as long as I come home every night to a place with pen and paper and space for kata. I listened as I passed by, and I watched the uneven line between rich and poor, and then I continued ascending up the stairs with a bag full of fruit for which I don't know the name.
late weeknight
a man's private affair...
frozen delights
8/28
So much food today. I'll start with the snake soup.
Three generations ago,
your family learned to dry
tangerine peels and float them
like chrysanthemum petals along
this fragrant soup of lemon-
grass, brown mushrooms, shredded chicken,
and most of all the slips of snake
that made this restaurant famous.
But your grandfather is long gone
and now your father's passed. I have seen
the store in Sheung Wan where the snakes
are kept in cages, listless and crooked,
and suffocating in corridors' worth
of hand-carved boxes, and churning
at the bottom of wine bottles. I
know the insides of this meat.
Now, you sit behind the glass
of your restaurant, a woman
alone with an expensive legacy, watching
the lunch crowd passing by, counting
the coins expiring in their pockets.
After that, V showed me a little bakery famous for its "egg puffs," or sha yong. "Sand" something, the second word the same as lou yong, used in writing to name the elderly. But these single-coin desserts are only good for a couple hours, at which point they collapse and the oil leaks out, no longer held together.
She also pointed out the streetstand where, years ago, milk tea originated by the specific process of dual filtering. Besides these places where you can watch them make it, the best restaurant to order hot milk-tea is C-:d-:C-:. It's cheaper from 2-6pm: tea time, a concept inherited from the British.
The cooks wear hats now
and cover their mouths like bandits
or surgeons, but even the fluorescent lights
do not hide the roasted animals on hooks
and the bowl-curved cutting board of
older days. Even in this air-conditioned
generation and the fast-food lines,
a tea master exists
to inspect the temperature and flavor of a
simple drink. Even today, they safeguard
the sweetness of things.
And all the wholesellers of nests made from the saliva of swallows. These are collected from homes left behind in flight, then dried and packaged for $2k a plate. Women pay these prices and boil the nests in water for 45 minutes at home to eat for the softness of their skin, for the transulence of youth.
imagine
us
chasing
shadows
of free
r
birds
Tonight, at the base of the mid-levels escalator, I passed the man who lives on one of the benches, who has no personal belongings beyond the cloths wraped around his hands. He is dressed in a thick armor of rags, held together by needles and staples, glinting cheap silver in the darkness. I am unmoved to approach him and find out his story, afraid of the commitment saying hello would imply. For once, I am the have, and he is the have-not, and this space between us is a river of deep silence. From just the street above comes the sound of Soho: pulsing bass, posturing laughter. Men of old would carry birds with them in wooden cages, crossing bridges and passing under trees to sit in sweaty restaurants. The chirping bird from a distance would be at once a sign of great wealth and a telltale fear of lonelines. In modern times, the sound has changed but the song remains the same.
-
I've had Brubaker's Creative Curriculum Leadership on my bedside stand for a couple weeks but haven't touched it because it seemed too intellectual and tedious for a quick read, not immediate enough. Boy was I ever wrong. For two weeks, it has been nigh time to turn off the television. If I didn't have work in the morning, I would read until the sun came back in a fiery glow. This book is already changing the way I think.
I'm wondering now if there is anywhere else that could get me closer to the heart of human people and their interactions than in the literature and practice of education and all the substudies that revolve around it. This is the center of the social vehicle that drives the world today. All the contradictions and frustrations of the teaching profession need not be anything less than struggle towards hope and understanding.
Stealing books is something I have done on occasion and without qualm since I was nine. For once, though, there is a slew of books I own and which I would like to own, which I am leaving behind at this volatile company because I believe someone will read them and make positive, if not minor revolutionary, change for these kids and this boss while there is still time. What a wonder, that there is still time to change.
8/29
$16 near Lan Kwai Fong will get you a bowl of nodles with three prawn wontons. No napkins, no water, no backs to the chairs. Frugality is an end in itself sometimes, but other times the hunger will follow you all the way back home.
Michelle and I finished construction-papering the bulletin boards and posted our staff profiles/pictures in the style of the Visa ads [mine below]. The stigma of the old office and its politics is fading fast now. All this arts + crafts and the building/exploring of the new environment together has been key to the feeling of cohesion, of working towards something. I can begin to have faith in what this woman could accomplish with a team like this if she can just trust us. But I don't forgive so easily, and I will always look carefully at the provenance of simple behaviors.
My name: Henry W. Leung
childhood ambition: cartoonist
fondest memory: Bennington, Vermont, in the rain
literary read: Rachel Elizabeth Richardson
soundtrack: Little Wing
retreat: home in Palolo Valley, Hawaii
proudest moment: first martial arts medal, 1999
biggest challenge: simple gratitudes
alarm clock: 7:28
perfect day: every return home
first job: Creative Writing substitute in high school
indulgence: myself
last purchase: bread and water
favorite movie: Serenity
inspiration: the wind
My life: an epic poem
My passion: pineapple buns
My Life. My Passion. [signature and company logo]
Sunday, August 24, 2008
poetry update
Done! The best of the poems I collected and stole from my students (no, I made copies, I wouldn't do that to them) are typed and uploaded. It was a hard decision whether or not to make grammar corrections for them as I went along, since they didn't get a chance to do revisions and the errors in their writing are not so reflective of the way they speak or think. But I ended up coming down on the plainest form of authenticity and typing it the way they wrote it.
Some are funny, some are beautiful, some are both, and some are neither. I look at this as a nonrevisionist exploration into language. These poems are at the heart of the muse.
All names (I hope; I do make mistakes) have been protected, including the name of my boss, which is also the name of this company.
http://seedverse.blogspot.com/
Some are funny, some are beautiful, some are both, and some are neither. I look at this as a nonrevisionist exploration into language. These poems are at the heart of the muse.
All names (I hope; I do make mistakes) have been protected, including the name of my boss, which is also the name of this company.
http://seedverse.blogspot.com/
Friday, August 22, 2008
reconstructions (8/18-23)
8/18 - my menu for the day
- leftover rice, chicken wings, bak sin fish, frog legs
- roast duck & bbq pork fast-food noodles @ C-: d-: C-:
- handfuls of free Snickers from the office
- Hello Kitty cup noodles
8/19
Dreamt I was Spider-Man, but in a more realistic world of goofy foul-ups and dusty walls of buildings which are not so easy to cling to. Also, I had a younger sister who was constantly in real danger because of my alter ego. I will not forget how scary it was taking such leaps, and the difficulty of acquiring the proper angle and momentum for web-slinging.
In the next episode of my heroic tale, I had evaded most of my nemeses and snuck into a train to a remote island near Hong Kong to hide with my (actual) older sister. SHe was too busy with work to join me in going undercover to a grand gala, so I met instead with H, who in my dream has a British accent and is the older brother of Justina from my SSAT clas. And before things can get stranger on the train, I wake up.
The thing about dream visits from people you don't know too well is that they linger about you the rest of the waking day. You feel closer and more intimate, but these feelings are figments which do not come from any real interaction, so it is also deeply dissatisfying. It becomes an ambivalent awakening.
-
Alvin's mom came in to ask about his progress and receive advice on how to improve his concentration and articulation in writing. Somehow along the way I had actually forgotten with this kid that something of import had to be learned, and it wasn't just about the call-and-answer of classroom behavior or being anarchists to the school system. Most parents who pay such high prices for our classes don't have the time to give a damn. But Alvin's mom was so earnest that it woke me up to my call and responsibility as a teacher.
There are many roles to consider. The teacher who is passionate about sharing a subject or craft; the teacher who wants to connect with kids in their lives; the teacher who needs to teach kids to survive in the tests of our standardized society; the kid who wants to do well and also have fun; the parents who have a genuine investment in their kid's future; the society that wants to use the kids fully.
Something tells me that all these questions and uncertainties I have about being a teacher will never go away, but they can only lessen and cause fewer hauntings if I follow the path fully. I don't really want to. I'd rather loaf a while.
"What is the point of any art?" still haunts me. Martial arts, writing, painting, teaching. I think now that any pursuit in life is meant to be an exercise. This might be about presence, or detail, or charisma, or great passion, or all or some at the same time. And what is the point of attaining these temporary, transient qualities? To perform better in life; to appreciate and enjoy it as a creator and not a victim. But what is the point of that, in the long run? What is at the end of the lawns we keep crossing just to say that it's greener on the other side?
It could be that the answer is merely in the answering. We accomplish more to find out how much more there is to accomplish; we live to find out how to live. Like Sir Edmund Hillary said, once you get to a certain point on Mount Everest, continuing to go up will take just as much effort as going back down. If we can choose between growing and dying, we might as well find out how much steeper the view can get. It seems to me that the heart of practice is just practice.
If nobody is watching and you do what you need--in your heart--to do, great things may begin blazing.
8/20 - Pizza Milano Roof Top Beer Garden
One customer, two mosquitoes
and dim bar lighting that blocks
out the sun. The course of
daydreams, uninterrupted. Slow
sound of dish washing.
Metal fork against a china plate:
a tap, a toll. Notes on the wall
like a dry erase board. Answers.
Service; a building; passage, leadup
for one more goodbye unheard.
8/22 - typhoon 9 and massive illness
no desire--
rainwater, forever sounding
down the drain
8/23 - sick day from work
While still gagging and resisting throwing up in my sleep, I dreamt myself into a virtual Chinatown with a bunch of students and a big riddle before us. For the sake of not retching, I gave away most of the answers. A few just took the answer and left. Others, though, stayed behind with me to solve the problem themselves. Some did it for my sake, in deep concern; and some did it for themselves, for the sake of earnestness. Even admist my nightmares I have faith in the goodness of people.
Waiting
For a slanted rain
To fall straight again,
Hands at our chests,
We mushroom ourselves
Into the bright backs of our umbrellas,
Feet sticking out underneath
And traveling forward. Everywhere,
More umbrellas, broken at the spine,
Bent, turning like tassels
Along street gutters.
The signal hoisted,
Streetsigns blowing
Apart at the seams.
And all of us, all of us leaning
Backwards, waiting to be
Picked up like angels
Or debris in the wind.
- leftover rice, chicken wings, bak sin fish, frog legs
- roast duck & bbq pork fast-food noodles @ C-: d-: C-:
- handfuls of free Snickers from the office
- Hello Kitty cup noodles
8/19
Dreamt I was Spider-Man, but in a more realistic world of goofy foul-ups and dusty walls of buildings which are not so easy to cling to. Also, I had a younger sister who was constantly in real danger because of my alter ego. I will not forget how scary it was taking such leaps, and the difficulty of acquiring the proper angle and momentum for web-slinging.
In the next episode of my heroic tale, I had evaded most of my nemeses and snuck into a train to a remote island near Hong Kong to hide with my (actual) older sister. SHe was too busy with work to join me in going undercover to a grand gala, so I met instead with H, who in my dream has a British accent and is the older brother of Justina from my SSAT clas. And before things can get stranger on the train, I wake up.
The thing about dream visits from people you don't know too well is that they linger about you the rest of the waking day. You feel closer and more intimate, but these feelings are figments which do not come from any real interaction, so it is also deeply dissatisfying. It becomes an ambivalent awakening.
-
Alvin's mom came in to ask about his progress and receive advice on how to improve his concentration and articulation in writing. Somehow along the way I had actually forgotten with this kid that something of import had to be learned, and it wasn't just about the call-and-answer of classroom behavior or being anarchists to the school system. Most parents who pay such high prices for our classes don't have the time to give a damn. But Alvin's mom was so earnest that it woke me up to my call and responsibility as a teacher.
There are many roles to consider. The teacher who is passionate about sharing a subject or craft; the teacher who wants to connect with kids in their lives; the teacher who needs to teach kids to survive in the tests of our standardized society; the kid who wants to do well and also have fun; the parents who have a genuine investment in their kid's future; the society that wants to use the kids fully.
Something tells me that all these questions and uncertainties I have about being a teacher will never go away, but they can only lessen and cause fewer hauntings if I follow the path fully. I don't really want to. I'd rather loaf a while.
"What is the point of any art?" still haunts me. Martial arts, writing, painting, teaching. I think now that any pursuit in life is meant to be an exercise. This might be about presence, or detail, or charisma, or great passion, or all or some at the same time. And what is the point of attaining these temporary, transient qualities? To perform better in life; to appreciate and enjoy it as a creator and not a victim. But what is the point of that, in the long run? What is at the end of the lawns we keep crossing just to say that it's greener on the other side?
It could be that the answer is merely in the answering. We accomplish more to find out how much more there is to accomplish; we live to find out how to live. Like Sir Edmund Hillary said, once you get to a certain point on Mount Everest, continuing to go up will take just as much effort as going back down. If we can choose between growing and dying, we might as well find out how much steeper the view can get. It seems to me that the heart of practice is just practice.
If nobody is watching and you do what you need--in your heart--to do, great things may begin blazing.
8/20 - Pizza Milano Roof Top Beer Garden
One customer, two mosquitoes
and dim bar lighting that blocks
out the sun. The course of
daydreams, uninterrupted. Slow
sound of dish washing.
Metal fork against a china plate:
a tap, a toll. Notes on the wall
like a dry erase board. Answers.
Service; a building; passage, leadup
for one more goodbye unheard.
8/22 - typhoon 9 and massive illness
no desire--
rainwater, forever sounding
down the drain
8/23 - sick day from work
While still gagging and resisting throwing up in my sleep, I dreamt myself into a virtual Chinatown with a bunch of students and a big riddle before us. For the sake of not retching, I gave away most of the answers. A few just took the answer and left. Others, though, stayed behind with me to solve the problem themselves. Some did it for my sake, in deep concern; and some did it for themselves, for the sake of earnestness. Even admist my nightmares I have faith in the goodness of people.
Waiting
For a slanted rain
To fall straight again,
Hands at our chests,
We mushroom ourselves
Into the bright backs of our umbrellas,
Feet sticking out underneath
And traveling forward. Everywhere,
More umbrellas, broken at the spine,
Bent, turning like tassels
Along street gutters.
The signal hoisted,
Streetsigns blowing
Apart at the seams.
And all of us, all of us leaning
Backwards, waiting to be
Picked up like angels
Or debris in the wind.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
poetry update
http://seedverse.blogspot.com/
Typhoon 8 on the way. If the boss doesn't force me to go to work, more poems to come tomorrow.
Typhoon 8 on the way. If the boss doesn't force me to go to work, more poems to come tomorrow.
Monday, August 18, 2008
ill (8/14-16)
8/14 - sick with a cold, and therefore alive
What a day of sweat and snot, all over town.
At last, though, with a water kettle and some tea for my throat, I can sit and tou yut ha. The Chinese idioms are so poignant sometimes. To mean "take a break" you'd say, "breathe a while." Take care or take it easy is man man lei: "get here slowly."
I'm reading more of these books on education we have in the library. I believe so much in teaching and making chane in the way we raise our future. But the reality of being a teacher within the system is so overwhelming and overpowering. I don't think I could ever get past it. I can't continue to be brave for these kids and muster up energy while the boss is making swift judgments behind my back, while so much money is being exchanged and worried over. I can't pretend to just be teaching kids, when clearly that is not even remotely the point of the enterprise of schools. I see now how tremendous a difference ACLC was, so far beyond the petty bureaucracy of other systems. It had nothing to do with its philosophy or its structure; the timing and the teachers were just right. I wonder what it might be like to go back and work under Lora, to teach and learn from people I actually admire.
I know in my spare time at work now I miss the vibrancy of the classroom interaction, even if it was failing miserably. Like I told L today about getting the kids to at least imitate poems rather than sit there and get nowhere with it, it's always better to have bad material to work with than to have nothing at all. And I think I'd rather not take some high-paying job that lets me work alone and have time to work on my art, because I'd get so sick of myself so soon. I am interested in stories not my own, stories that tell me about myself and keep me far away at the same time.
remnants
of a family tree:
Frog Poopopo
C, H, W, and I had dinner today. It felt good to be honest with people.
H is still in some trouble with his family, but it sounds like he has been for some time. C is looking for a new job; the bus driver idea is out since it's illegal to have her friends come along and chat while she drives, and the interview she had today to be a recruiter was more disillusion (for me at least) about the sketchiness of people in power. W's working from home now and only coming in for classes because her mom's out of the hospital now. What this means, though, is that the doctors can't do any more for her cancer.
I want to ask why we can't just stay young, why we can't not work with such disappointment and such shackles, why we can't just paint and learn. But I understand this scheme of life. My only hope is that I continue to grow and hange, to never get trapped by anyone including myself, because stuckness could be the scariest thing of all.
steaming tea
with a clear reflection--
soon
8/15 - "moon / brush / restless night"
Unable to either close my eyes or keep them open. My meditation suffers from my calculations of time and the relationships which have transgressed these 8 weeks (or 4 class sessions). This is one long Pinsky-style poem waiting to be read aloud.
Bryan, SAT: I BSed with your mother on the phone awhile because she wants to set up private lessons with me. "You're doing very well for yourself," she said after finding out I'm still an undergrad. An hour lesson with me, discounted, is $1500. She must think I receive that in full. I get paid about $160 a day. This is all part of the system, and what your mom doesn't know is that I'm trying to teach you to escape the system in order to become a person.
Alvin, Inter-CW: You asked for my email today. Please don't send me pictures of Hitler or mutilated Elmos. If you do, I'll get very upset and also nostalgic for the folly of youth, and wonder when it was that properness and correction began to cage my own ideas. It is not so important to me that you continue to write, but that you write out loud and speak without fear. This is an investment in your grin.
Cordelia, Inter-CW: It is very important to me that you continue to write, perhaps because I know you will do so anyway. The only thing I've been able to teach you in this time is the function of the line break. This is a magic you will appreciate more with age.
Gina, Grammar: You complain I don't give you treats like a whole list of former teachers that were fired. Bless your sweet endurance. You applied and were accepted to our fall journalism class, to be editing and submitting to our Idea Burger Times. For your enthusiasm and young faith, I believe in K [...].
Jenny, Intro-CW: "I believe in K [...] if it makes me better at creative writing," went your Creed. And I never saw you again. But your stories carry on and as you live you write. This is one author's thesis.
Jonathan, Intro-CW: After the disappointment of being misled to think I'm teaching again this fall, you'll remember me and the work I put into drawing out your ideas. Great writers steal, so start pocketing memories now while nobody is watching.
Carol, Grammar: I see you playing Mario in the hall with excellent posture, and I miss teaching you English grammar from a Chinese point of view. I might have some sort of crush on you now for your eagerness to be a helpful part of this world, for the way your brother Hugo looks up to you. You'll wait together for the world to be ready for such goodness, just as you wait for each other's classes to end. You are both already full of ungrammatical grace.
Margaux, Intro-CW and Critical Reasoning: This crush you have on me is untimely. BUt my heart belongs to you all. I believe that one day we will all look up at smoky skies across the world and make wishes on one and the same star. Should it fall, we might recall each other and I'll wish again that we can meet again.
Frederick, Early Readers: Your brother and sister are but falling stars themselves. Keep sitting on people's laps and listening eagerly for stories: one day when it's too late you'll realize the meaning of youth.
Daniel, Intro-CW: You were so shy the first day of class when I began to lose my voice controlling the others. Is this what I was like, too, how I grew to tell whole tales from the depths of my lungs? If so, kudos, and suerte.
Anabel, Grammar: I found an Edgar Allen Poe poem this morning entitled "Annabel Lee." Maybe this was part of the gathering of your name. Maybe it is a part of mine as well. When I emailed your mother with a progress check of you and your sister, she said, "The girls haven't told me much about their classes, but I'm sure they learned something." I'm less sure. But I know I've learned a lot, and I thank you for it.
Many, many more. There's not enough night tonight for full remembrance.
What happens to the flapping sheets of paper my kids write poems on? Into which cosmic musical score go their pencil lines and my blue notes along the margins?
8/16 - visits to the elderly, with Gu Ma
We're all looking for some sot of addiction that will give this reality meaning.
[then I fell asleep]
8/17 - Portraits
While the four of us curdle
in the sun at Mos Burger, sketching
the details of this balcony
only artists could care about,
a brusque architect back in Central
has already unfolded his chair
before the building whose portrait
he will now try again.
Downstairs, boys wrestle
and giggle all the way
to the concrete: communication
by touch. Just like the women
in the MTR with burns
along their arms, or the Muslims
who picnic along the dry
sky bridges only on Sundays;
what straight lines give shape
to their balcony-window daydreams,
what great furnishings can show
their being disillusioned with their disillusions?
The toddler from Taiwan squeezes
his head between the bars
home, hoping for a
mouthful of chicken wings. Somewhere
later tonight, an old friend relieves his alcohol
poisoning in the backseat of a red taxi
and perhaps kneels along the floormats
again; more relatives buy
medicine, carrying on. But we
are not there yet, the four of us,
forging pencil marks in the sun, shading
as fast as we can before
things change again. The subject
has moved, the wind switches direction,
yet we make do with opened eyes
and imagine more color into these lines we've made.
What a day of sweat and snot, all over town.
At last, though, with a water kettle and some tea for my throat, I can sit and tou yut ha. The Chinese idioms are so poignant sometimes. To mean "take a break" you'd say, "breathe a while." Take care or take it easy is man man lei: "get here slowly."
I'm reading more of these books on education we have in the library. I believe so much in teaching and making chane in the way we raise our future. But the reality of being a teacher within the system is so overwhelming and overpowering. I don't think I could ever get past it. I can't continue to be brave for these kids and muster up energy while the boss is making swift judgments behind my back, while so much money is being exchanged and worried over. I can't pretend to just be teaching kids, when clearly that is not even remotely the point of the enterprise of schools. I see now how tremendous a difference ACLC was, so far beyond the petty bureaucracy of other systems. It had nothing to do with its philosophy or its structure; the timing and the teachers were just right. I wonder what it might be like to go back and work under Lora, to teach and learn from people I actually admire.
I know in my spare time at work now I miss the vibrancy of the classroom interaction, even if it was failing miserably. Like I told L today about getting the kids to at least imitate poems rather than sit there and get nowhere with it, it's always better to have bad material to work with than to have nothing at all. And I think I'd rather not take some high-paying job that lets me work alone and have time to work on my art, because I'd get so sick of myself so soon. I am interested in stories not my own, stories that tell me about myself and keep me far away at the same time.
remnants
of a family tree:
Frog Poopopo
C, H, W, and I had dinner today. It felt good to be honest with people.
H is still in some trouble with his family, but it sounds like he has been for some time. C is looking for a new job; the bus driver idea is out since it's illegal to have her friends come along and chat while she drives, and the interview she had today to be a recruiter was more disillusion (for me at least) about the sketchiness of people in power. W's working from home now and only coming in for classes because her mom's out of the hospital now. What this means, though, is that the doctors can't do any more for her cancer.
I want to ask why we can't just stay young, why we can't not work with such disappointment and such shackles, why we can't just paint and learn. But I understand this scheme of life. My only hope is that I continue to grow and hange, to never get trapped by anyone including myself, because stuckness could be the scariest thing of all.
steaming tea
with a clear reflection--
soon
8/15 - "moon / brush / restless night"
Unable to either close my eyes or keep them open. My meditation suffers from my calculations of time and the relationships which have transgressed these 8 weeks (or 4 class sessions). This is one long Pinsky-style poem waiting to be read aloud.
Bryan, SAT: I BSed with your mother on the phone awhile because she wants to set up private lessons with me. "You're doing very well for yourself," she said after finding out I'm still an undergrad. An hour lesson with me, discounted, is $1500. She must think I receive that in full. I get paid about $160 a day. This is all part of the system, and what your mom doesn't know is that I'm trying to teach you to escape the system in order to become a person.
Alvin, Inter-CW: You asked for my email today. Please don't send me pictures of Hitler or mutilated Elmos. If you do, I'll get very upset and also nostalgic for the folly of youth, and wonder when it was that properness and correction began to cage my own ideas. It is not so important to me that you continue to write, but that you write out loud and speak without fear. This is an investment in your grin.
Cordelia, Inter-CW: It is very important to me that you continue to write, perhaps because I know you will do so anyway. The only thing I've been able to teach you in this time is the function of the line break. This is a magic you will appreciate more with age.
Gina, Grammar: You complain I don't give you treats like a whole list of former teachers that were fired. Bless your sweet endurance. You applied and were accepted to our fall journalism class, to be editing and submitting to our Idea Burger Times. For your enthusiasm and young faith, I believe in K [...].
Jenny, Intro-CW: "I believe in K [...] if it makes me better at creative writing," went your Creed. And I never saw you again. But your stories carry on and as you live you write. This is one author's thesis.
Jonathan, Intro-CW: After the disappointment of being misled to think I'm teaching again this fall, you'll remember me and the work I put into drawing out your ideas. Great writers steal, so start pocketing memories now while nobody is watching.
Carol, Grammar: I see you playing Mario in the hall with excellent posture, and I miss teaching you English grammar from a Chinese point of view. I might have some sort of crush on you now for your eagerness to be a helpful part of this world, for the way your brother Hugo looks up to you. You'll wait together for the world to be ready for such goodness, just as you wait for each other's classes to end. You are both already full of ungrammatical grace.
Margaux, Intro-CW and Critical Reasoning: This crush you have on me is untimely. BUt my heart belongs to you all. I believe that one day we will all look up at smoky skies across the world and make wishes on one and the same star. Should it fall, we might recall each other and I'll wish again that we can meet again.
Frederick, Early Readers: Your brother and sister are but falling stars themselves. Keep sitting on people's laps and listening eagerly for stories: one day when it's too late you'll realize the meaning of youth.
Daniel, Intro-CW: You were so shy the first day of class when I began to lose my voice controlling the others. Is this what I was like, too, how I grew to tell whole tales from the depths of my lungs? If so, kudos, and suerte.
Anabel, Grammar: I found an Edgar Allen Poe poem this morning entitled "Annabel Lee." Maybe this was part of the gathering of your name. Maybe it is a part of mine as well. When I emailed your mother with a progress check of you and your sister, she said, "The girls haven't told me much about their classes, but I'm sure they learned something." I'm less sure. But I know I've learned a lot, and I thank you for it.
Many, many more. There's not enough night tonight for full remembrance.
What happens to the flapping sheets of paper my kids write poems on? Into which cosmic musical score go their pencil lines and my blue notes along the margins?
8/16 - visits to the elderly, with Gu Ma
We're all looking for some sot of addiction that will give this reality meaning.
[then I fell asleep]
8/17 - Portraits
While the four of us curdle
in the sun at Mos Burger, sketching
the details of this balcony
only artists could care about,
a brusque architect back in Central
has already unfolded his chair
before the building whose portrait
he will now try again.
Downstairs, boys wrestle
and giggle all the way
to the concrete: communication
by touch. Just like the women
in the MTR with burns
along their arms, or the Muslims
who picnic along the dry
sky bridges only on Sundays;
what straight lines give shape
to their balcony-window daydreams,
what great furnishings can show
their being disillusioned with their disillusions?
The toddler from Taiwan squeezes
his head between the bars
home, hoping for a
mouthful of chicken wings. Somewhere
later tonight, an old friend relieves his alcohol
poisoning in the backseat of a red taxi
and perhaps kneels along the floormats
again; more relatives buy
medicine, carrying on. But we
are not there yet, the four of us,
forging pencil marks in the sun, shading
as fast as we can before
things change again. The subject
has moved, the wind switches direction,
yet we make do with opened eyes
and imagine more color into these lines we've made.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
touche, touche (8/10-13)
8/10 - just back from Macau
Not until I heard, "Oh no, tell me that wasn't tempered glass" and the others came into the room did I realize I was still holding the metal door handle in both hands and that my arms were maps of blood. We had replaced the glass double doors in the new office, and I was helping one of David's people move the old ones. The sheet must have twisted as we picked it up; there's no other explanation for its sudden explosion and the shower of shards which thankfully left us both handsome. Like with all things, the hurting didn't come until later, after the echoing silence and the scrambling to understand that meager moment.
There was K, though, and her husband S, to the rescue. Suddenly 热情 like never before. The judgments I've made of her in the past still stand and showed clearly in the way she got upset at the wrong people and put the blame on little, unrelated things (I think this was my fault, if you want to call this something other than an amazing freak accident). But the difference now is that I know more than ever I had and have no right to be making judgments in the first place. Whatever she does right or wrong, her concern came through when it mattered, and that tells me her intentions are true. As the first premise of NLP goes, every single human actions is performed with the idea that it is the right or necessary or best thing that can be done. If her intentions are true in her heart, on some level part of that echoes true in my heart too.
I am alive and safe, which I easily could also not be given any number of factors. And I feel deep gratitude for that, and that is enough. If there is any one thign I flew across the world to discover, it is gratitude and grace, two lessons which I relearn constantly, which remind me of the true meaning of human existence and that this meaning is never all too far from home.
Later that night on the way to Macau, sitting with my ineffective hands in my lap, I was the child again, innocent (and not so innocent) and ready to understand the world a day at a time. There's nobody else I would like to be.
haiku
as a transition--
look out!
Casinos are crazy with people and their handfuls of chips and their dreams and disillusions of what it means to live better than they do now. I lost $220 HK in the slots and the dice games, and never plan to gamble again--I am one who owns very little and thus has a lot to lose. I sat for half an hour at the Blackjack table watching a lady put down 10k for every single hand. I might never comprehend the trappings here.
And my lungs have never been more full of smoke. The cigarettes curled all around me and there was nothing for me to do but breathe deep, letting this part of the world sink into my throat like black sand.
The best part of all my trips so far have been family. I saw Guk Goh for less than five minutes after almost a decade now, but seeing his changes and recognizing maybe bits of myself (or who I'd like to be) in that is a real kindness and blessing. The aunt and uncle and Ah Bun, too, were crucial to this gathering of my name, this charting of my roots. Their apartment is a crowded little thing, with bugs on the toilet and wood-solid beds. But Ah Bun, a few years younger than me maybe, works at McDonald's (Muk da nou) and says so with a smile. His father is an excellent cook. And their shower--the hole in the ground in the bathroom, more or less--is colored with brand names like Darlie and Pantene Pro-V. This is modern China, more real to me than any other place. Their bellies and their feet tell me a lot about honest life. The cars are craziest in Macau.
We went to Gongbuk 拱北 (a two-hour line on the way back through immigration because of the Olympics) to buy some stuff. Oh, how I wish I knew how to flirt with the girl I bought some Dragonball DVDs from, who gave an embarrassed smile when I tried to barter down from $10 to 5, and who wouldn't budge, but then gave me back $1 when I gave in for the $10. I'll never know her name, but I'll know that smile and I'll check for it again, years from now, when I come back and things have changed again.
I should be commenting on student work for classes in the morning, but as always I'm much more interested in writing for myself, and also in sleeping. They'll see my scars though, and I'll make up a great story, and they'll forgive me.
exchanging chips
for the money, but also
human contact
8/11 - first day teaching at the new office
Ate a cinnamon & peanut butter-stuffed waffle from a street vendor for dinner today, and walked a bit through a poet's kind of rain. Flipped through and organized our books. Worked out with some hard katas and soft Taiji. Called my mom. Went to bed below the black-and-white photo of me and my sister with our three cousins in Zhongsan. Unbandaged my hands, and noticed the healing now begun.
8/13 - K left for Beijing for the rest of the week!
I found all sorts of masks and toys in our storage today and walked around for a while wearing a chicken hat. The beginners' creative writing class calls me Chickenhead now, which was all sorts of fun until one of the parents heard and scolded her kid for being rude. The last thing young people need is to be punished without first being understood.
The triplets really like me, too, for whatever reason. They wanted me to teach them instead of M, but I'm no better at controlling them than she is. (For the record, I have never bribed them with candy; that seems to be a problem across the board with our younger students) I've been reading this book we have, How To Talk So Kids Will Listen And How to Listen So Kids Will Talk, and I turned their daily water-cup spillathon into a fun cleanup fest. And then they started playing with the lights, so I left them off and we told ghost stories. When it was time to go home, Natasha said, "I want to have you in my house."
They have glimpses of non-naughtiness. We wrote a story together on the board, but they kept writing about poop. Frog Poopopo in Popo Land. It wasn't until the end, when we were out of time and I told Natasha to finish the last sentence, that we came out with: "Sometimes he visits he's famlys."
We called the triplets' mother to tell her the situation and find out if it would be alright to separate them. She said, "I don't care what you do with them as long as you don't hit them. Unless they hit you first."
My intermediate creative writing (10-12) kids today each chose a character from their favorite story and embodied that character for collaborative dialogues. At one point, Wedgie Woman says to Captain Underpants: "Will u marry me?" and Captain Underpants responds, "Touche." So I explained how touche is supposed to be used, and one of the hunters coming for the wolf in Three Little Pigs says, "The wolf is too fatishly chubby, so it shall die." Naruto responds: "Touche."
And that's more or less what it's like to be teaching here, plus some policing of inappropriate things (the boys like to talk about raping people because it's game terminology, but they don't actually know the meaning of the word). The SAT class asked me to grade their essays today and be really strict about it. I haven't had to do any grading before this, and that changes just about everything.
The greatest discovery today has been the hidden backroads behind the mid-levels escalator to my place, full of streetside restaurants under tents and fresh fruit or poultry like Chinatown to the extreme. If only I had an actual pot for this kitchen, I'd be mad pro at cooking out here.
Edgar & friends
missing from the stairs now
the sun's back
Re: the severe wealth of these children. Without a parking garage for the new office, and with our fantastic new views, we can see the kids' personal drivers circling the block together while class goes on until they find a spot on the street. When class ends, they parade out together like a mafia of silver Mercedes and BMWs.
The Olympics on TV has been a nice distraction these few days, and so have the Dragonball DVDs I bought in Gongbei. But I am not interested in distractions. Today, in the stillness of this empty room, I found myself singing old church songs. If there is a God, I hope we can all take some time at some point in our lives to find out. Whether it's gospel or blues or The Pizza Song, we learn to speak and to share slowly, and somewhere along the way a common language is heard.
when the world
fades away, where
are you?
Not until I heard, "Oh no, tell me that wasn't tempered glass" and the others came into the room did I realize I was still holding the metal door handle in both hands and that my arms were maps of blood. We had replaced the glass double doors in the new office, and I was helping one of David's people move the old ones. The sheet must have twisted as we picked it up; there's no other explanation for its sudden explosion and the shower of shards which thankfully left us both handsome. Like with all things, the hurting didn't come until later, after the echoing silence and the scrambling to understand that meager moment.
There was K, though, and her husband S, to the rescue. Suddenly 热情 like never before. The judgments I've made of her in the past still stand and showed clearly in the way she got upset at the wrong people and put the blame on little, unrelated things (I think this was my fault, if you want to call this something other than an amazing freak accident). But the difference now is that I know more than ever I had and have no right to be making judgments in the first place. Whatever she does right or wrong, her concern came through when it mattered, and that tells me her intentions are true. As the first premise of NLP goes, every single human actions is performed with the idea that it is the right or necessary or best thing that can be done. If her intentions are true in her heart, on some level part of that echoes true in my heart too.
I am alive and safe, which I easily could also not be given any number of factors. And I feel deep gratitude for that, and that is enough. If there is any one thign I flew across the world to discover, it is gratitude and grace, two lessons which I relearn constantly, which remind me of the true meaning of human existence and that this meaning is never all too far from home.
Later that night on the way to Macau, sitting with my ineffective hands in my lap, I was the child again, innocent (and not so innocent) and ready to understand the world a day at a time. There's nobody else I would like to be.
haiku
as a transition--
look out!
Casinos are crazy with people and their handfuls of chips and their dreams and disillusions of what it means to live better than they do now. I lost $220 HK in the slots and the dice games, and never plan to gamble again--I am one who owns very little and thus has a lot to lose. I sat for half an hour at the Blackjack table watching a lady put down 10k for every single hand. I might never comprehend the trappings here.
And my lungs have never been more full of smoke. The cigarettes curled all around me and there was nothing for me to do but breathe deep, letting this part of the world sink into my throat like black sand.
The best part of all my trips so far have been family. I saw Guk Goh for less than five minutes after almost a decade now, but seeing his changes and recognizing maybe bits of myself (or who I'd like to be) in that is a real kindness and blessing. The aunt and uncle and Ah Bun, too, were crucial to this gathering of my name, this charting of my roots. Their apartment is a crowded little thing, with bugs on the toilet and wood-solid beds. But Ah Bun, a few years younger than me maybe, works at McDonald's (Muk da nou) and says so with a smile. His father is an excellent cook. And their shower--the hole in the ground in the bathroom, more or less--is colored with brand names like Darlie and Pantene Pro-V. This is modern China, more real to me than any other place. Their bellies and their feet tell me a lot about honest life. The cars are craziest in Macau.
We went to Gongbuk 拱北 (a two-hour line on the way back through immigration because of the Olympics) to buy some stuff. Oh, how I wish I knew how to flirt with the girl I bought some Dragonball DVDs from, who gave an embarrassed smile when I tried to barter down from $10 to 5, and who wouldn't budge, but then gave me back $1 when I gave in for the $10. I'll never know her name, but I'll know that smile and I'll check for it again, years from now, when I come back and things have changed again.
I should be commenting on student work for classes in the morning, but as always I'm much more interested in writing for myself, and also in sleeping. They'll see my scars though, and I'll make up a great story, and they'll forgive me.
exchanging chips
for the money, but also
human contact
8/11 - first day teaching at the new office
Ate a cinnamon & peanut butter-stuffed waffle from a street vendor for dinner today, and walked a bit through a poet's kind of rain. Flipped through and organized our books. Worked out with some hard katas and soft Taiji. Called my mom. Went to bed below the black-and-white photo of me and my sister with our three cousins in Zhongsan. Unbandaged my hands, and noticed the healing now begun.
8/13 - K left for Beijing for the rest of the week!
I found all sorts of masks and toys in our storage today and walked around for a while wearing a chicken hat. The beginners' creative writing class calls me Chickenhead now, which was all sorts of fun until one of the parents heard and scolded her kid for being rude. The last thing young people need is to be punished without first being understood.
The triplets really like me, too, for whatever reason. They wanted me to teach them instead of M, but I'm no better at controlling them than she is. (For the record, I have never bribed them with candy; that seems to be a problem across the board with our younger students) I've been reading this book we have, How To Talk So Kids Will Listen And How to Listen So Kids Will Talk, and I turned their daily water-cup spillathon into a fun cleanup fest. And then they started playing with the lights, so I left them off and we told ghost stories. When it was time to go home, Natasha said, "I want to have you in my house."
They have glimpses of non-naughtiness. We wrote a story together on the board, but they kept writing about poop. Frog Poopopo in Popo Land. It wasn't until the end, when we were out of time and I told Natasha to finish the last sentence, that we came out with: "Sometimes he visits he's famlys."
We called the triplets' mother to tell her the situation and find out if it would be alright to separate them. She said, "I don't care what you do with them as long as you don't hit them. Unless they hit you first."
My intermediate creative writing (10-12) kids today each chose a character from their favorite story and embodied that character for collaborative dialogues. At one point, Wedgie Woman says to Captain Underpants: "Will u marry me?" and Captain Underpants responds, "Touche." So I explained how touche is supposed to be used, and one of the hunters coming for the wolf in Three Little Pigs says, "The wolf is too fatishly chubby, so it shall die." Naruto responds: "Touche."
And that's more or less what it's like to be teaching here, plus some policing of inappropriate things (the boys like to talk about raping people because it's game terminology, but they don't actually know the meaning of the word). The SAT class asked me to grade their essays today and be really strict about it. I haven't had to do any grading before this, and that changes just about everything.
The greatest discovery today has been the hidden backroads behind the mid-levels escalator to my place, full of streetside restaurants under tents and fresh fruit or poultry like Chinatown to the extreme. If only I had an actual pot for this kitchen, I'd be mad pro at cooking out here.
Edgar & friends
missing from the stairs now
the sun's back
Re: the severe wealth of these children. Without a parking garage for the new office, and with our fantastic new views, we can see the kids' personal drivers circling the block together while class goes on until they find a spot on the street. When class ends, they parade out together like a mafia of silver Mercedes and BMWs.
The Olympics on TV has been a nice distraction these few days, and so have the Dragonball DVDs I bought in Gongbei. But I am not interested in distractions. Today, in the stillness of this empty room, I found myself singing old church songs. If there is a God, I hope we can all take some time at some point in our lives to find out. Whether it's gospel or blues or The Pizza Song, we learn to speak and to share slowly, and somewhere along the way a common language is heard.
when the world
fades away, where
are you?
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
a poem
8/5
In my dream, I take
my grammar class out for
an eavesdropping exercise,
taking notes on people
as they speak.
But by the time
we find a city
full of souls we
have gotten old and we,
by now, are the outspoken
and overheard. We tell
poems from the champagne
lightbeams to the shadows
on tiny roofs.
And we are listened to:
people gather round us
like old lemon trees to hear
old stories resonating
within fresh ribcages.
After waking, we go
nowhere and I teach nothing
of relevance: we merely
speak, and learn from it.
8/6 - called to work during typhoon 8
I very much like the idea of a society in which two coins in your back pocket ($10 HK each) can buy you a basic meal. During the typhoon, though, only the expensive restaurants are open. That and McDonald's. Those workers are the unfortunate saps like me who must work. Aside from us, the only fools left on the wily streets are the tourists who don't know what is happening and who, also like me, revel in the wind and the rain.
In McDonald's, a little Chinese girl blows into the straw of her smoothie--"Wa!" she exclaims as it bubbles over the cover and spills onto the table, as if she never saw it coming, as if it were a natural disaster: both fun and frightening to anybody not cleaning up the mess.
shy white girl:
do you feel at home here
among food?
I am grateful for this weather as a distraction from my growing city ennui. I am grateful for my aunt here: we are both lonely survivors.
suspended escalator:
Edgar Stairmaster's lounge...
city ennui
8/7 - visit to the embassy
Taught the triplets today. Frederick's great, but because of that Natasha and Sylvester team up against him. These are some nasty kids who could be so much better if they weren't spoiled and neglected. They were the catalyst for H being fired and C being suspended and quitting. And they know it. And they think it's a game.
But all this changes as soon as I stop trying to have them write and get out a book to read aloud. They knew a good number of the words in the book, but they wanted me to read. During Curious George, they become silent and ready. I have never done so many readings of poems and short stories as in these classes. It occurs to me that when we hold poetry readings as adults, it is only and exactly that: a reading. Not a listening, not really a sharing--it is just storytime. An ancient practice dating back to the beginnings of our lives.
Dear George:
your books tell us curiosity
is trouble. No.
My uncle tells me I need to stop dressing so cheesy, like an old person or an uncle. It's the reason I keep getting stopped by police officers for an ID check: with my bag, I look like zhong gok zhai, a mainland kid. I love it.
ABC
tourist in the crowd
looking Chinese
Went to Gum Ji Ging, the Forever Blooming Bauhinia, in Wan Chai after dealing with some visa stuff. A remarkable piece of recent history and a memento of the intentions for freedom of the HKSAR. But anything can be seen through rosy lenses in this post-typhoon dusk and cool. If I could be anywhere in the world for the rest of my life, I would be in the wind.
eager fishermen
hop over the wharf's railing;
temporary shade
8/8
After the rush hour, Hong Kong's workers give the pavement a rest for once. The Olympics began at 8:08:08. This is also 7/14 on the lunar calendar, an auspicious day. After the fireworks, my aunt asked what was so great about watching this. I pincered another prawn(?) with my chopsticks and remained quiet, waiting for the martial arts. "Chamga zhong gok yan, ah!" my uncle exclaimed. To celebrate the Chinese people, duh!
the world connected by TV screens--tonight
I took the Rodin's contemplative pose on the subway today. And time passed. I am so exhausted by this city's unlyrical speed.
In my dream, I take
my grammar class out for
an eavesdropping exercise,
taking notes on people
as they speak.
But by the time
we find a city
full of souls we
have gotten old and we,
by now, are the outspoken
and overheard. We tell
poems from the champagne
lightbeams to the shadows
on tiny roofs.
And we are listened to:
people gather round us
like old lemon trees to hear
old stories resonating
within fresh ribcages.
After waking, we go
nowhere and I teach nothing
of relevance: we merely
speak, and learn from it.
8/6 - called to work during typhoon 8
I very much like the idea of a society in which two coins in your back pocket ($10 HK each) can buy you a basic meal. During the typhoon, though, only the expensive restaurants are open. That and McDonald's. Those workers are the unfortunate saps like me who must work. Aside from us, the only fools left on the wily streets are the tourists who don't know what is happening and who, also like me, revel in the wind and the rain.
In McDonald's, a little Chinese girl blows into the straw of her smoothie--"Wa!" she exclaims as it bubbles over the cover and spills onto the table, as if she never saw it coming, as if it were a natural disaster: both fun and frightening to anybody not cleaning up the mess.
shy white girl:
do you feel at home here
among food?
I am grateful for this weather as a distraction from my growing city ennui. I am grateful for my aunt here: we are both lonely survivors.
suspended escalator:
Edgar Stairmaster's lounge...
city ennui
8/7 - visit to the embassy
Taught the triplets today. Frederick's great, but because of that Natasha and Sylvester team up against him. These are some nasty kids who could be so much better if they weren't spoiled and neglected. They were the catalyst for H being fired and C being suspended and quitting. And they know it. And they think it's a game.
But all this changes as soon as I stop trying to have them write and get out a book to read aloud. They knew a good number of the words in the book, but they wanted me to read. During Curious George, they become silent and ready. I have never done so many readings of poems and short stories as in these classes. It occurs to me that when we hold poetry readings as adults, it is only and exactly that: a reading. Not a listening, not really a sharing--it is just storytime. An ancient practice dating back to the beginnings of our lives.
Dear George:
your books tell us curiosity
is trouble. No.
My uncle tells me I need to stop dressing so cheesy, like an old person or an uncle. It's the reason I keep getting stopped by police officers for an ID check: with my bag, I look like zhong gok zhai, a mainland kid. I love it.
ABC
tourist in the crowd
looking Chinese
Went to Gum Ji Ging, the Forever Blooming Bauhinia, in Wan Chai after dealing with some visa stuff. A remarkable piece of recent history and a memento of the intentions for freedom of the HKSAR. But anything can be seen through rosy lenses in this post-typhoon dusk and cool. If I could be anywhere in the world for the rest of my life, I would be in the wind.
eager fishermen
hop over the wharf's railing;
temporary shade
8/8
After the rush hour, Hong Kong's workers give the pavement a rest for once. The Olympics began at 8:08:08. This is also 7/14 on the lunar calendar, an auspicious day. After the fireworks, my aunt asked what was so great about watching this. I pincered another prawn(?) with my chopsticks and remained quiet, waiting for the martial arts. "Chamga zhong gok yan, ah!" my uncle exclaimed. To celebrate the Chinese people, duh!
the world connected by TV screens--tonight
I took the Rodin's contemplative pose on the subway today. And time passed. I am so exhausted by this city's unlyrical speed.
through the clouds
7/31 - "Grief is the opposite of relief." -Esther U, intro cw
More gossip. I don't want to write it down because then that would be proof of all this happening. But I need to write it down, because it's proof of all this.
There was more I didn't know as H was being fired while I taught my classes. "I don't pay you to feel unwell," she apparently said to him. "You have no right to get sick on the job."
What ismore, she humiliated him in front of everybody else. C, H, and J took pictures with the triplets. K pointed out H and called him perverted. "What would you possibly want a picture of those kids for? You're disgusting. You disgust me. Can you just leave now? Get out of my sight."
Such a summer of loss. Within just the company, Kit was fired just before I arrived, Christine and Lone both quit; R's brother was hospitalized in England when a high-speed chase crashed through him, so R had to leave us not long after I started; E was hire to replace him as her first job and quickly fired for her mistakes; H just lost his job although he was planning to leave anyway, or at least I was working on convincing him to; C's going to quit now; W, who works full early days because her mother is in the hospital with cancer and visiting hours are only 5-8, doesn't plan to stay much longer either. Outside of that, C broke up with her boyfriend after 7 years together and talk of marriage; H's girlfriend broke up with him a month ago; and there's the messy business with my sister finally getting free as well. My grandfather, on bed rest after a car accident, died not long after he and my cousins wrote the letter to me asking me to come home and visit; Git Ming Goh and Git E Jie were also hit by a car while bicycling, and the fractures in Git E Jie's face are still being repaired. And of course the baby K lost.
one cloud, two cloud, ashy sky
only a pretty moon in sight
sometimes
But I watched Batman tonight, and it has been the best 2.5 hours I've spent in what seems like an incredibly long time. Because it is a captivating illusion, and an echo of the way we might be able to feel about this world if we were brave heroes too. We're supposed to disregard literature and art in the face of reality, but I feel just the opposite. It is stories that makes us who we are and can become, much more than the pressures of life and circumstance. We choose the lens we see by, and I choose faith in people, faith in hard work, faith in things to just work out because life is a basically good thing. There is a basic goodness to be rediscovered in all of us here.
the poem
about ascending moon to moon...
I wrote that
waiting for language to save me... no,
saving myself--with language this time
=====
8/4 - first day of session 4, zhongsan & samherng over the weekend
I put away some things in my suitcase and noticed this nasty plaid shirt I bought at Walmart, but it's ugly and heavy and much too thick for a Hong Kong summer. I knew it was unattractive, but I remember thinking that now that I'm working, now that I'm out of America, I can dress boring and not even care, that at last the folly of appearances we get so wrapped up in as teenagers wil be no more. Well, I fooled myself for a small while, but the guile and disguise of the American life is indeed the human life. We might never stop caring about things we shouldn't care about.
view of grandeur
from this window: straight
into other windows
Some more gossip, and then no more. H filed a lawsuit against K--well within reason and jurisdiction. C quit early, after breaking down and crying over the abuse she was receiving for the rest of her 6-week advance notice. L, the sweet semi-British woman applying for the teacher's position, whom K insulted because she was too standardized and "too experienced," is back to fill C's spot. "It's good," K told me, "because she has a lot of experience. Yes." H's vendetta against K now includes formal complaints filed against the company for fire, health, business, education, and safety regulations. K has also been bringing in her maids and their friends to fill in some more work for us.
My final disparaging remark about K before I shut my mouth and be obedient because I now realize this apartment she is paying for that I am staying in is not at all mentioned in my contract (although working overtime without pay, sadly, is), so I am living here purely by her bloody grace, is: She will never learn. She will make a horrendous mother without her (much, much older) husband's stronger sense of reason and compassion. I overheard when she made C cry by belittling her ineptness in administrative work (which is not at all her job) and saying she wasn't anywhere near worth her salary (only a week after suggesting she become senior partner of the Hong Kong office when K moves to Singapore). Out of nowhere, she broke into, "I'm not doing this because I hate you, I'm doing this because I LOVE you!" Yeah, not really. I realized then she must be resounding, echoing from her own mother, who seemed nice enough from the pictures at first but I know too well now about everyday deceptions. No child really wants to succeed by going to university at 13, not for their own sake. It is for someone else's blood, and someone else's money. Same with her kid Eliot, with whom she was pregnant before she actually married S. Her whole life has been an accident of outside pressures. Now I begin to understand this madness. I can perhaps afford some small compassion.
But H's without a home now, staying at various friends' places, because his parents kicked him out for making this extreme attack on K. Damn. That's enough for me now. I want to open this journal one day in the future and find happy things. That's the point of memories. Oh, and to learn from mistakes, yes.
leaves flipping open
with truths too clearly written--
wind
My trip home to Zhongsan again this weekend was calming, and full of all sorts of belonging. As an old kid and as a writer, I appreciate character more than anything else now. My family is so full of character.
I remember my first trip back here, and thinking how rude people were when driving, honking left and right. But no, these are passing honks, like the bell on a bicycle. This is a society of old-school people, the laobaixing--the old hundred names--with necessary gadgets and technology. They work and they rest, and they are money conscious in terms of saving rather than ading. I might never come back to Hong Kong again and that'll be fine. I like me some tourist cities, but not such an international money-grabber's suite. But mainland might be another story. Or it might be the same story, by the time I'm two months into Beijing as well.
But now, I feel like I have a home in mainland China, something closer to a father than I've felt in all these years, and cousins who call me "little brother" in our beautiful language that I have such real need for.
soft city night
explaining my entire life
要中文说
I've been irrational and unwilling to articulate for much of my life. Well, no, just recently, maybe. But I walked through a park today, and followed a breeze; a fountain's spray blew in my face and I let it. A leaf fell. I felt that too. Sometimes this is enough. Sometimes, this is enough.
More gossip. I don't want to write it down because then that would be proof of all this happening. But I need to write it down, because it's proof of all this.
There was more I didn't know as H was being fired while I taught my classes. "I don't pay you to feel unwell," she apparently said to him. "You have no right to get sick on the job."
What ismore, she humiliated him in front of everybody else. C, H, and J took pictures with the triplets. K pointed out H and called him perverted. "What would you possibly want a picture of those kids for? You're disgusting. You disgust me. Can you just leave now? Get out of my sight."
Such a summer of loss. Within just the company, Kit was fired just before I arrived, Christine and Lone both quit; R's brother was hospitalized in England when a high-speed chase crashed through him, so R had to leave us not long after I started; E was hire to replace him as her first job and quickly fired for her mistakes; H just lost his job although he was planning to leave anyway, or at least I was working on convincing him to; C's going to quit now; W, who works full early days because her mother is in the hospital with cancer and visiting hours are only 5-8, doesn't plan to stay much longer either. Outside of that, C broke up with her boyfriend after 7 years together and talk of marriage; H's girlfriend broke up with him a month ago; and there's the messy business with my sister finally getting free as well. My grandfather, on bed rest after a car accident, died not long after he and my cousins wrote the letter to me asking me to come home and visit; Git Ming Goh and Git E Jie were also hit by a car while bicycling, and the fractures in Git E Jie's face are still being repaired. And of course the baby K lost.
one cloud, two cloud, ashy sky
only a pretty moon in sight
sometimes
But I watched Batman tonight, and it has been the best 2.5 hours I've spent in what seems like an incredibly long time. Because it is a captivating illusion, and an echo of the way we might be able to feel about this world if we were brave heroes too. We're supposed to disregard literature and art in the face of reality, but I feel just the opposite. It is stories that makes us who we are and can become, much more than the pressures of life and circumstance. We choose the lens we see by, and I choose faith in people, faith in hard work, faith in things to just work out because life is a basically good thing. There is a basic goodness to be rediscovered in all of us here.
the poem
about ascending moon to moon...
I wrote that
waiting for language to save me... no,
saving myself--with language this time
=====
8/4 - first day of session 4, zhongsan & samherng over the weekend
I put away some things in my suitcase and noticed this nasty plaid shirt I bought at Walmart, but it's ugly and heavy and much too thick for a Hong Kong summer. I knew it was unattractive, but I remember thinking that now that I'm working, now that I'm out of America, I can dress boring and not even care, that at last the folly of appearances we get so wrapped up in as teenagers wil be no more. Well, I fooled myself for a small while, but the guile and disguise of the American life is indeed the human life. We might never stop caring about things we shouldn't care about.
view of grandeur
from this window: straight
into other windows
Some more gossip, and then no more. H filed a lawsuit against K--well within reason and jurisdiction. C quit early, after breaking down and crying over the abuse she was receiving for the rest of her 6-week advance notice. L, the sweet semi-British woman applying for the teacher's position, whom K insulted because she was too standardized and "too experienced," is back to fill C's spot. "It's good," K told me, "because she has a lot of experience. Yes." H's vendetta against K now includes formal complaints filed against the company for fire, health, business, education, and safety regulations. K has also been bringing in her maids and their friends to fill in some more work for us.
My final disparaging remark about K before I shut my mouth and be obedient because I now realize this apartment she is paying for that I am staying in is not at all mentioned in my contract (although working overtime without pay, sadly, is), so I am living here purely by her bloody grace, is: She will never learn. She will make a horrendous mother without her (much, much older) husband's stronger sense of reason and compassion. I overheard when she made C cry by belittling her ineptness in administrative work (which is not at all her job) and saying she wasn't anywhere near worth her salary (only a week after suggesting she become senior partner of the Hong Kong office when K moves to Singapore). Out of nowhere, she broke into, "I'm not doing this because I hate you, I'm doing this because I LOVE you!" Yeah, not really. I realized then she must be resounding, echoing from her own mother, who seemed nice enough from the pictures at first but I know too well now about everyday deceptions. No child really wants to succeed by going to university at 13, not for their own sake. It is for someone else's blood, and someone else's money. Same with her kid Eliot, with whom she was pregnant before she actually married S. Her whole life has been an accident of outside pressures. Now I begin to understand this madness. I can perhaps afford some small compassion.
But H's without a home now, staying at various friends' places, because his parents kicked him out for making this extreme attack on K. Damn. That's enough for me now. I want to open this journal one day in the future and find happy things. That's the point of memories. Oh, and to learn from mistakes, yes.
leaves flipping open
with truths too clearly written--
wind
My trip home to Zhongsan again this weekend was calming, and full of all sorts of belonging. As an old kid and as a writer, I appreciate character more than anything else now. My family is so full of character.
I remember my first trip back here, and thinking how rude people were when driving, honking left and right. But no, these are passing honks, like the bell on a bicycle. This is a society of old-school people, the laobaixing--the old hundred names--with necessary gadgets and technology. They work and they rest, and they are money conscious in terms of saving rather than ading. I might never come back to Hong Kong again and that'll be fine. I like me some tourist cities, but not such an international money-grabber's suite. But mainland might be another story. Or it might be the same story, by the time I'm two months into Beijing as well.
But now, I feel like I have a home in mainland China, something closer to a father than I've felt in all these years, and cousins who call me "little brother" in our beautiful language that I have such real need for.
soft city night
explaining my entire life
要中文说
I've been irrational and unwilling to articulate for much of my life. Well, no, just recently, maybe. But I walked through a park today, and followed a breeze; a fountain's spray blew in my face and I let it. A leaf fell. I felt that too. Sometimes this is enough. Sometimes, this is enough.
(2 of 2) read this slowly too and have another peach
7/22 - Avenue of Stars, Tsim Sha Tsui
Too many days since I have had access to this journal. Tuesday. Already four days since the big return to Zhongsan, the move to Mosque St, the start of a new session. Already the memories have evaporated into other memories, alike in their distance. Writing just small moments, like photographing little pictures rather than touristy panoramas, is key to the codifying of feeling.
fleeting
like every poem
I've been
The new place: tremendous. But perhaps something of a bribe as well. At this point I am not certain I will ever return to Hong Kong or to this company, no matter how much I love these kids. I'd much rather work for an idealist than for a capitalist. But that is quite a capitalistic thing of me to say, as if we all really picked and chose these roads we walk.
air-con
burning through the silence
of wealth
Zhongsan was incredible. Indelibly ome. So many things I wish I had taken pictures of, so many things I've forgotten by now. The gate of our village; the gigantic tree and its cemented base in the center of Chou Bien, which my grandfather used to sit under as a boy; the pandas under the television where grandma lives alone; the photos of us from America she keeps that I hardly recognize.
What will I remember? The slow turning of things as I recognized people from six years ago. That my grandfather loved to collect paintings and calligraphy. The breeze on the rooftop. The empty rooms of beds taken apart and out of use. The small cups of tea. The incense I lit first thing.
The plants outside. THe neighbor's dog with it shuge, dangling bladder that distracted from its ferocity. The white cat sitting perfectly in posture on someone's porch, blocking the door and watching us, m ore at home on the concrete than I'll ever be. The impressive simplicity of lychee and a small breeze. THe little baby who stole tangerines from trees every time her mother carried her past one, only to bite right into the biter skin and sour flesh just to drop it, make an unforgettable face, and steal another one.
babies
and grandparents--summer
benediction
And my deep apologies for not being able to stay longer, not being able to have something more resembling a conversation with my grandmother because I certainl have the heart but not the words. Before we left for the 4-hour trip back home, she gave me a bunch of fruit without a word and a bag of small cloths, perhaps to wash my face with. THese are small gifts that maybe neither one of us has the language to express.
where I was born:
incense, grass shoots, choco-pies,
open hands
To get back to the Avenue of Stars, I just have to find the ferry at the bottom of the escalators, past Wellcome. I'll follow the sound of the water, but it probably won't bring me home. In too many places now I Belong and don't belong. Just folow the sound and smell of things to find the way to where I've been.
=====
7/23
at last
I am a resident--
buying bananas
=====
7/24
K found out this morning that she lost her baby--its heart had stopped beating weeks ago, even before the bleeding and the bed rest and her refusal to take a break from work. What I hate most about this is that I cannot stop thinking this is her own fault, she had so many warnings. BUt it was not my child and this is not my grief. Only in small part.
back to work--
still carrying the child
that used to be
Arlene (the helper) took it hardest when she found out, and cried on the couch in the office. C explained to me later that Arlene herself is unable to have kids; it's why she loves Eliot so much and fights with the aunt for his attention.
bubbles over
tottling toward friends--
one son
It is a hard topic, of the dead and the unborn, the shells of opportunities which hautn us. K used to have that article on her wall, comparing her success to the ultimate degradation of someone else who entered university at such an early age. I don't think, emotionally, hiding her feelings behind work and humor, she has done much better. But neither has any of us, perhaps, working constantly for one life but falling into another. We are most of us much too young for the real world. This is why we live in such tremendous deception.
hello, goodbye--
waving our hands
lower today
I went to the Peak tonight, alone, and took some pictures. Sightseeing is a tiring business, and all over the world it offers the same facades of marvel and a televised sort of quietude. From a distance and with our cameras in hand, wallets stuffed full of traveling/splurging cash, we get to pick and choose which lies to see in the city before us. This is the adult world of moving forward, if only to keep moving.
I won't forget the little girl, though, who examined the random Mcdull pig stamp stand with me and asked in that tilting child's tone and her Guangdong accent, "Zhe syi syen mo?" The look in her eyes was so serious, so very ready to understand this world. "Bu zhidao," I said with a smile. When I figured it out and stamped my moleskine for the hell of it, she came running back from her parents' side to try herself. I wish I stayed longer to speak in Mandarin with her. I wish I could spend more time with children that remind me of how we could all still be. I'd like to teach them all, and be taught by them. We're all just oing time and filling space here, like Kennedy said. Even as I teach, the goal is not the curriculum but the time slot and the experience contained within it. The parents would have me fired for the money they're paying (all but pennies to them, however), if they heard me talk like this. But I believe we could all do well to fill this time by learning anew some of that old wonder and tenderness. One of my reative writing kids wrote, "I wish we can all live simple life." Me too, me too. That is a sentry bird in the making.
a sunset
along all the grandeur...
mosquito
=====
7/25 - "Sorrow is comely." -Michael Smith, 10, from my 1st session grammar/vocab exquisite corpse exercise
I'm tired of teaching now. I'm so sick of yelling and keeping these kids in order. I much prefer the idea of tutoring and mentoring. I am not here to babysit.
As for asking for a raise, I'm still undecided. We can sure as hell afford it, considering that last SAT class I taught was $700 per class per student. But when I emailed Hubert today, who lost his job just before this summer, I realized how important it is to be grateful, to have small joys and hard work. Like my students all were writing, I wish I could just live simple and not let this turn into a matter of greed and want, want, want. I'm not afraid to ask for help. But I am not one to request anything, I am not able to measue what I deserve. Maybe I'm just afraid.
Is this the function of television? Is this numbing and brainless spacing out fundamental to the surival of the working world? To moel myself after the martial arts heroes I have learned from, to be fully present, I must ask for a raise. This non-action is a sorry business unsuited for a warrior.
even here--
still looking inward
for stillness (silence)
Edgar Stairmaster, escalator cat--
how much do you ask for monthly?
=====
7/26 - Cheung Chau (Chang Zhou) (where the Ping An Bao is translated to "Bun Festival")
schoolboys and farmers
on the stone steps waiting
for their ice cream to melt
by the dock
island girl
sweating behind the post
daily
dry sun
fruit frozen on skewers--
tourists turning pink
stomach turning
with the waves; each roll
a counted dollar
the price of knowledge
of home: sacrifice...
the price of knowledge
to train... or live free:
a decision made and not made
in the moment
One day I'll understand the histories that have brought us all to this place, the sacrifices and deaths that carry hollow stares like the statues of the greats we've never met. And I'll be able to live fully, mindfully, and in wisdom of the wishes my friends, teachers, and family have for me. Debts and responsibility, yes. But also my own life and happines. Ping on, right. This balance is a bridge over neon waters, rocky and tepid all at once, calm and disruptive, soft and thunderous. Mindfulness is a chaos of color.
=====
7/27 - Wong Dai Sin, Chi Lin Nunnery
How many young people, today,
kneeling before the statues, incense held
to their foreheads, the solstice sun
reflecting off their wristwatches?
How many of their parents,
chanting in a crowd of leaves
history's songs and sutras?
How many other children
would have handed me their incense
because they couldn't reach up
to plant them? How many slow-burning sticks
dissolve into wind tonight,
telling of wishes? How many of us
went home, smelling of a common flame?
How many leaves came loose in
the sudden summer storm,
gu lou gatherings of dust and breath,
spinning to the floor like thin
slices of paper for the dead... hey,
is it autumn yet?
Can we fall now?
Are we ready
to let go
again?
=====
7/29 - karaoke & snooker last night
no more judging K
until I stop hiding my own vices
no heroics for my family
until I can help myself
self-understanding the only virtue
cultivation the only life's work
what can be seen does not concern me
only xin li de zhuan ye (the heart's purpose)
-
This is the worker's life, tiring and blindsided, always asking for more, more. And always pushing orward to have the last word. I hate that. Can we live with less? Can we have faith in one another? If this, then, is the real world, I am sorely disappointed and unimpressed. I should go now and find that fishing village, to live hard but honest.
Dear Fati:
Hell with this world. Pack some books and let's run away together somewhere, and we'll write poems with bad grammar, living like true blobs who think too much. If you can hear me now, send some rain and thunder this way; I'll take that as your answer. I know you can. I know we are more than just this.
=====
7/30 - morning dusk
No, I won't ask for a raise or whine any longer about the personal perceived injustices against me. I am young and humble and from small-town America, raised on the favors and blessings of my family. My aunt in Hong Kong works in the hours before taking me sightseeing by cleaning at odd places for the price of one good meal per hour. It is meant to be hard, and it is meant to be hard. This is work and work's survival. There shall be no dreams of perfection here. If I complain too loud, my ancestors will know the ingratitude spreading like vines and gripping my heart, and my life will all be for naught. I am a poet of benediction, a martial artist for light and positive thought, a son and a brother and a teacher and one day a father to a child whom I hope will learn too these lessons of living respectfully, living mindfully, and living well.
--evening dusk
Walking through the zoo tonight, no longer such a soothing thing. THe orangutans no longer languorous so much as trapped, their big hands softened and wrinkling in the rapid aging. I saw the flamingoes in their sanguine-red puddles of water, living what lives they've been given. Two bit at each other's necks, snapping and twisting with uncertain hunger. I couldn't be sure if they were lovers or enemies, and maybe it's both, maybe it's not something you can label until it's done with.
mist, or city smog--
even the perched parrot keenly
not speaking
H was fired today and C suspended from teaching. In the four-year-old triplets' private lesson yesterday, which is always cute but troublesome because they refuse to write unless it's really engaging, they saw H eating lunch with the new trainee. After about thirty minutes of them chanting, "H's got a girlfriend," C had them write a letter to her. The problem, though, was when they wrote, "Do you kiss her mouth every day?"
"Dangerous," was K's reasoning as she threw away the paper in front of us, breathing heavy. "This is a lawsuit for sexual harrassment waiting to happen."
I said nothing to her then and I say nothing now, because she's a five-aces woman and I'm trapped in this job and this apartment she owns for at least another month and a half.
"What is the bravest thing you've ever done?" was my warmup for the creative writing class today. Nothing. Nothing at all lately. But the hardest thing I've done is be silent, keep my judgments to myself, and think positive. This is not my territory and not a fight for me to start. I want to see the person in K, fragile and lonely and full of unanswerable questions. I want to see past the shell I am afraid to become. I understand too well why and how we make mistakes. I want to love people who spread their salt across the fields, and I also don't.
a voyeur--
through apartment windows
dreaming alone
Too many days since I have had access to this journal. Tuesday. Already four days since the big return to Zhongsan, the move to Mosque St, the start of a new session. Already the memories have evaporated into other memories, alike in their distance. Writing just small moments, like photographing little pictures rather than touristy panoramas, is key to the codifying of feeling.
fleeting
like every poem
I've been
The new place: tremendous. But perhaps something of a bribe as well. At this point I am not certain I will ever return to Hong Kong or to this company, no matter how much I love these kids. I'd much rather work for an idealist than for a capitalist. But that is quite a capitalistic thing of me to say, as if we all really picked and chose these roads we walk.
air-con
burning through the silence
of wealth
Zhongsan was incredible. Indelibly ome. So many things I wish I had taken pictures of, so many things I've forgotten by now. The gate of our village; the gigantic tree and its cemented base in the center of Chou Bien, which my grandfather used to sit under as a boy; the pandas under the television where grandma lives alone; the photos of us from America she keeps that I hardly recognize.
What will I remember? The slow turning of things as I recognized people from six years ago. That my grandfather loved to collect paintings and calligraphy. The breeze on the rooftop. The empty rooms of beds taken apart and out of use. The small cups of tea. The incense I lit first thing.
The plants outside. THe neighbor's dog with it shuge, dangling bladder that distracted from its ferocity. The white cat sitting perfectly in posture on someone's porch, blocking the door and watching us, m ore at home on the concrete than I'll ever be. The impressive simplicity of lychee and a small breeze. THe little baby who stole tangerines from trees every time her mother carried her past one, only to bite right into the biter skin and sour flesh just to drop it, make an unforgettable face, and steal another one.
babies
and grandparents--summer
benediction
And my deep apologies for not being able to stay longer, not being able to have something more resembling a conversation with my grandmother because I certainl have the heart but not the words. Before we left for the 4-hour trip back home, she gave me a bunch of fruit without a word and a bag of small cloths, perhaps to wash my face with. THese are small gifts that maybe neither one of us has the language to express.
where I was born:
incense, grass shoots, choco-pies,
open hands
To get back to the Avenue of Stars, I just have to find the ferry at the bottom of the escalators, past Wellcome. I'll follow the sound of the water, but it probably won't bring me home. In too many places now I Belong and don't belong. Just folow the sound and smell of things to find the way to where I've been.
=====
7/23
at last
I am a resident--
buying bananas
=====
7/24
K found out this morning that she lost her baby--its heart had stopped beating weeks ago, even before the bleeding and the bed rest and her refusal to take a break from work. What I hate most about this is that I cannot stop thinking this is her own fault, she had so many warnings. BUt it was not my child and this is not my grief. Only in small part.
back to work--
still carrying the child
that used to be
Arlene (the helper) took it hardest when she found out, and cried on the couch in the office. C explained to me later that Arlene herself is unable to have kids; it's why she loves Eliot so much and fights with the aunt for his attention.
bubbles over
tottling toward friends--
one son
It is a hard topic, of the dead and the unborn, the shells of opportunities which hautn us. K used to have that article on her wall, comparing her success to the ultimate degradation of someone else who entered university at such an early age. I don't think, emotionally, hiding her feelings behind work and humor, she has done much better. But neither has any of us, perhaps, working constantly for one life but falling into another. We are most of us much too young for the real world. This is why we live in such tremendous deception.
hello, goodbye--
waving our hands
lower today
I went to the Peak tonight, alone, and took some pictures. Sightseeing is a tiring business, and all over the world it offers the same facades of marvel and a televised sort of quietude. From a distance and with our cameras in hand, wallets stuffed full of traveling/splurging cash, we get to pick and choose which lies to see in the city before us. This is the adult world of moving forward, if only to keep moving.
I won't forget the little girl, though, who examined the random Mcdull pig stamp stand with me and asked in that tilting child's tone and her Guangdong accent, "Zhe syi syen mo?" The look in her eyes was so serious, so very ready to understand this world. "Bu zhidao," I said with a smile. When I figured it out and stamped my moleskine for the hell of it, she came running back from her parents' side to try herself. I wish I stayed longer to speak in Mandarin with her. I wish I could spend more time with children that remind me of how we could all still be. I'd like to teach them all, and be taught by them. We're all just oing time and filling space here, like Kennedy said. Even as I teach, the goal is not the curriculum but the time slot and the experience contained within it. The parents would have me fired for the money they're paying (all but pennies to them, however), if they heard me talk like this. But I believe we could all do well to fill this time by learning anew some of that old wonder and tenderness. One of my reative writing kids wrote, "I wish we can all live simple life." Me too, me too. That is a sentry bird in the making.
a sunset
along all the grandeur...
mosquito
=====
7/25 - "Sorrow is comely." -Michael Smith, 10, from my 1st session grammar/vocab exquisite corpse exercise
I'm tired of teaching now. I'm so sick of yelling and keeping these kids in order. I much prefer the idea of tutoring and mentoring. I am not here to babysit.
As for asking for a raise, I'm still undecided. We can sure as hell afford it, considering that last SAT class I taught was $700 per class per student. But when I emailed Hubert today, who lost his job just before this summer, I realized how important it is to be grateful, to have small joys and hard work. Like my students all were writing, I wish I could just live simple and not let this turn into a matter of greed and want, want, want. I'm not afraid to ask for help. But I am not one to request anything, I am not able to measue what I deserve. Maybe I'm just afraid.
Is this the function of television? Is this numbing and brainless spacing out fundamental to the surival of the working world? To moel myself after the martial arts heroes I have learned from, to be fully present, I must ask for a raise. This non-action is a sorry business unsuited for a warrior.
even here--
still looking inward
for stillness (silence)
Edgar Stairmaster, escalator cat--
how much do you ask for monthly?
=====
7/26 - Cheung Chau (Chang Zhou) (where the Ping An Bao is translated to "Bun Festival")
schoolboys and farmers
on the stone steps waiting
for their ice cream to melt
by the dock
island girl
sweating behind the post
daily
dry sun
fruit frozen on skewers--
tourists turning pink
stomach turning
with the waves; each roll
a counted dollar
the price of knowledge
of home: sacrifice...
the price of knowledge
to train... or live free:
a decision made and not made
in the moment
One day I'll understand the histories that have brought us all to this place, the sacrifices and deaths that carry hollow stares like the statues of the greats we've never met. And I'll be able to live fully, mindfully, and in wisdom of the wishes my friends, teachers, and family have for me. Debts and responsibility, yes. But also my own life and happines. Ping on, right. This balance is a bridge over neon waters, rocky and tepid all at once, calm and disruptive, soft and thunderous. Mindfulness is a chaos of color.
=====
7/27 - Wong Dai Sin, Chi Lin Nunnery
How many young people, today,
kneeling before the statues, incense held
to their foreheads, the solstice sun
reflecting off their wristwatches?
How many of their parents,
chanting in a crowd of leaves
history's songs and sutras?
How many other children
would have handed me their incense
because they couldn't reach up
to plant them? How many slow-burning sticks
dissolve into wind tonight,
telling of wishes? How many of us
went home, smelling of a common flame?
How many leaves came loose in
the sudden summer storm,
gu lou gatherings of dust and breath,
spinning to the floor like thin
slices of paper for the dead... hey,
is it autumn yet?
Can we fall now?
Are we ready
to let go
again?
=====
7/29 - karaoke & snooker last night
no more judging K
until I stop hiding my own vices
no heroics for my family
until I can help myself
self-understanding the only virtue
cultivation the only life's work
what can be seen does not concern me
only xin li de zhuan ye (the heart's purpose)
-
This is the worker's life, tiring and blindsided, always asking for more, more. And always pushing orward to have the last word. I hate that. Can we live with less? Can we have faith in one another? If this, then, is the real world, I am sorely disappointed and unimpressed. I should go now and find that fishing village, to live hard but honest.
Dear Fati:
Hell with this world. Pack some books and let's run away together somewhere, and we'll write poems with bad grammar, living like true blobs who think too much. If you can hear me now, send some rain and thunder this way; I'll take that as your answer. I know you can. I know we are more than just this.
=====
7/30 - morning dusk
No, I won't ask for a raise or whine any longer about the personal perceived injustices against me. I am young and humble and from small-town America, raised on the favors and blessings of my family. My aunt in Hong Kong works in the hours before taking me sightseeing by cleaning at odd places for the price of one good meal per hour. It is meant to be hard, and it is meant to be hard. This is work and work's survival. There shall be no dreams of perfection here. If I complain too loud, my ancestors will know the ingratitude spreading like vines and gripping my heart, and my life will all be for naught. I am a poet of benediction, a martial artist for light and positive thought, a son and a brother and a teacher and one day a father to a child whom I hope will learn too these lessons of living respectfully, living mindfully, and living well.
--evening dusk
Walking through the zoo tonight, no longer such a soothing thing. THe orangutans no longer languorous so much as trapped, their big hands softened and wrinkling in the rapid aging. I saw the flamingoes in their sanguine-red puddles of water, living what lives they've been given. Two bit at each other's necks, snapping and twisting with uncertain hunger. I couldn't be sure if they were lovers or enemies, and maybe it's both, maybe it's not something you can label until it's done with.
mist, or city smog--
even the perched parrot keenly
not speaking
H was fired today and C suspended from teaching. In the four-year-old triplets' private lesson yesterday, which is always cute but troublesome because they refuse to write unless it's really engaging, they saw H eating lunch with the new trainee. After about thirty minutes of them chanting, "H's got a girlfriend," C had them write a letter to her. The problem, though, was when they wrote, "Do you kiss her mouth every day?"
"Dangerous," was K's reasoning as she threw away the paper in front of us, breathing heavy. "This is a lawsuit for sexual harrassment waiting to happen."
I said nothing to her then and I say nothing now, because she's a five-aces woman and I'm trapped in this job and this apartment she owns for at least another month and a half.
"What is the bravest thing you've ever done?" was my warmup for the creative writing class today. Nothing. Nothing at all lately. But the hardest thing I've done is be silent, keep my judgments to myself, and think positive. This is not my territory and not a fight for me to start. I want to see the person in K, fragile and lonely and full of unanswerable questions. I want to see past the shell I am afraid to become. I understand too well why and how we make mistakes. I want to love people who spread their salt across the fields, and I also don't.
a voyeur--
through apartment windows
dreaming alone
(1 of 2) first half of July-- eat a peach and read me slowly
7/2 - "I used to be a drop of water, but now I'm rain." -Paul L, 9yrs
Her shirt says IT'S NEVER LATE TO HAVE HAPPY CHILDHOOD, and I reread it with a quick smile every time she looks down at her paper so I won't call on her. I hate teaching sometimes, but not when the look in a kid's eyes is so open, when there is no water to bridge but our equal eagerness to understand this moment.
a shy smile
in exchange for questions
Anabel
(grammar/vocab 10-12)
Angeline, too, who leans her elbows on the table and grabs her pigtails to hide her face. She scratches her head while pursing her lips, or sighs with such levity her ribs must be afloat. And I wonder: where, at 6 years old, has she learned such depths?
*Im so shine.*
she writes, and I thank God
for pencils.
(beginners' creative writing 6-7)
These other boys, who tell me they're not afraid of anything anymore. What fear, and its consequences, have led to such illusion?
pencil theft and
pillow fights to hide
their poetry
(intro to creative writing 8-10)
For the SSAT kids (12-15), brilliant and willing, my prayers on a summer wind. May you find freedom from the system through the system.
laughing together we learn something
Kevin is a good man, honest and in this wold at the same time, willing to forget about things. The bottle to his lips is a small forgiveness so long as we all survive this place.
our cheeks flush red instead of the night sky
If this place can bring me back to a modern Chinese self, C will be my torch. She has been a lesson, already, in friendship and its values, care without strings. No matter what she or I say about marriage and family, her children one day will be full of benediction for such an honest heritage.
looking for "real people" -- long ripples
=====
7/3 - "a lot of food" -Audrey's found-poem title
I am sorry to my mother and my aunt
whose great care I keep brushing
aside like a curtain hiding something better;
I am ashamed of this
desperation for freedom, while earlier
this morning a toddler boy in
a passing stroller tilted his eyes around
his visor at me as if waiting
to hear something important
and I had no words--
for all this teaching and this journeying
I am no less young than I have been,
still learning and tripping over people
and only sometimes remembering,
oh, this is another country, oh, this
is a new opportunity,
oh, thank you for these small birthings.
=====
7/4 - half-day Friday
In one dream the bruised cat on my knee
where I fell keeps making me flinch
away from a girl who wants us
to be closer. The metaphor might be
that my past injuries are an obstacle to love,
but what of my other dreams of convoluted story arcs?
Waking between two illusions,
I choose them both
and oversleep in a foreign place.
It's the end of session 1 already. We did teacher/course evaluations fo the MWF classes today. It pleases me to know these kids actually like me (I choose to ignore that they are perhaps pressured to write good things) and to learn that their behavior or "citizenship" is very much unrelated to their learning and capacity to learn as well as their relationship to me. Jenny K and Anabel L, who are my best students, suffer through much time wasted for chastising and recaptivating the boys in my classes. But I must remind myself of what Ms Shah told me once: that school's real function is to learn and practice social skills, spending time with other people. From Grammar and Vocabulary to Creative Writing to SSAT, we are all just learning what it is to be human and to live with one another on this planet. I'm sorry to see Cameron go if he doesn't return for another session; on his evaluation he wrote "(very kind)" next to my name and gave me a 10+ for how much he liked me until the other kids embarrassed him into changing everything into a +. I don't give a damn about the current school system and its inescapable factory model. But if we're in this system anyway at least I'll be here a while to give something else for these kids. I remember some of my teachers, not for the material but for who they ere. I believe in an inherent personality in eacho f us that precedes all language or barriers, and in these classrooms we learn much more from discovering that about one another and about ourselves. We are filling time, yes, but we are able to pick out the values we need.
duck, duck,
duck--each of us
hoping for goose
=====
7/5 - last day of session 1
More goodbyes, some promises to meet again, many futures I won't know. I truly wish them all well and hope for them the best. That is all I can do.
wondering what happens next--a season's wind
Also, BSing a conversation with the guy behind the desk downstairs, fumbling with boiling my utensils at the restaurant I ate at, and switching to English when I didn't know how to apologize and answer otherwise to the girl at the theater asking for the time--all this causing me to wonder how I will be remembered, even in passing. I embrace my difference everywhere but I also want to be simply at home, among similar people.
among the crowd a foreigner--smiling
I sort of love Hong Kong. This is a good, hard, honest life without the pretense or exclusion of America. THe people are not always outgoing or friendly, but to be able to speak in my native language among other Chinese is a blessing and a comfort I've not yet known. I deny none of my roots. HK is perhaps the perfect international center to be both American and Chinese and young. I don't know if I'm in love with this place yet; not the way Honolulu calls back to me always. The smoke of this city might suffocate me.
cloud-smoke in the mother sky--everywhere home
=====
7/6 - Shenzhen for Lai Sook's 16th anniversary
this down-to-earth
parlor; my kind masseuse
who smelled like feet
after wine and money, this world
still raining in similar places
=====
7/7 - first day of session 2
"The way I figure it, if it takes you a hundred years to get over it, then take the hundred years--it's just time, right? We all just doing our time on this planet anyways. Got a right to do it the way you need to." -Kennedy, in Behind You p59
reading a book--
poet's rain outside
in every time zone
I'd rather be a writer than write. What I'm talking about is that connectivity, that oneness with the human heart which lets us open to experience, that leads to true bravery and the warrior's path. The act of writing is part of that, but it is largely functional as proof of our heritage, proof of this heart of practice. Awareness of love is the only prerequisite to time not wasted.
daydreaming in China--
more phone calls
intercepted by wind
I'm going to teach from Jackie's Behind You on Wednesday. It might be beyond my kids. But I pray and I believe that they will recognize that passion, even if they don't understand it yet. I resolve myself to forgive the kids I bore.
the subway crowd--
one open umbrella
reflecting
=====
7/8
a morning storm
cigarette smoke through the rain--
my heart in new york
then, peals of thunder like a drum:
the gods must be different in this place
To Rachel: only when I started emailing some friends back home did I slow my thoughts down enough to describe what I am doing here, and when I write of my independence (more or less) in Hong Kong and of the fact that I'm teaching creative writing to kids, it sounds pretty damn good. But it's never that simple. As Meg Kearney put it so well, language couldn't save me. Because there are no words for what this is like; there are only stories. There are only poems. It's a double-edged sword, this writer's mind; only in these idle silences do I narrate my life as good or bad.
a rose
by any other name--
untimely
Walking to the subway station after my 12-hour workday, a couple of older ladies who had just gotten off work too (10pm!) asked me if this road would take them to the subway in Central. So I led the way, trekking down the hill through the shortcut Robet showed me (the HK Zoological Park past two churches), with the ladies talking quietly behind me. It was a beautiful quiet night, less crowded than usual, but no moon in sight--just tall, bright buildings.
four grapes on the subway station floor--immaculate for now
I'm thinking about careers and stuff. And I always say with a cocky smile that no matter what I end up doing or where, I know myself enough to know that I'll still be writing and still be doing my martial arts. But that, in fact, is not a real answer to the question of what I want to be or do. I asked my first SSAT class for the icebreaker to tell me where they would be or what they would do with their lives if they had a magic wand. Most of them said travel.
Yeah, me too, sort of. But I'd get very bored and end upin the same places I always make sure I go to anyway. If I had a magic wand, I'd be back in Bennington, because that finiteness, that firefly magic, is irreplaceable. We were students, but not in the typical way. We were writing, but not with the weight of what a lifetime of that woul dmean. We were meeting new people, but this to was different. I wonder if anything will ever agin bring me closer to Heaven than NBF Camp did.
fireflies singing--this'll be the day that I'd die
=====
7/10 - thunderstorm morning
Dreamt of yesterday.
I understand now why Eric John Grau taught one year, loved it, then didn't teach again. We are those finite kind, who live and move on but perhaps never let go.
The giant 12-student class is great fun and keeps me present in a way that Bok-Fu group classes did (teaching, I mean). And the small 2-person classes are wonderful too. But I couldn't do it forever. I do it for this time in my life and for these kids. Like I told Jessie Korich, I don't know how many times I can say goodbye to a group of kids and never know if I mattered in the long run.
(later that evening, after the government inspection of the company, and talking to the door guard from Zhongsan who always has som eopinion on the food I bring up for the next morning, after watching part of My Blueberry Nights and for once feeling like these halls are comfortable and a place to live rather than a place to sleep, and oh of course after they changed my sheets to make the room prettier immediately after we called to reconfirm my cancellation, an after calling my mom for once rather than her calling me)
But now that I think about it, I love the vacuum of the classroom. There is so much to consider about the education system and society and these kids' lives outside, but once I close that door then I'm on. It's like doing a kata or demonstration. There are some amazing successes and some incredible failures too, but it is a tremendous presence and often enough it is vitality. For a block of time, the world is left outside and there is no name for what goes on inside--you could call it teaching, you could call it learning, but I'll call it communication for now. I can't think of a more positive wor for these kins of moments.
I wish I could take a picture of these lessons. But it isn't something you can capture and carry with you. It's more like something that changes you from the inside and which you don't really see until years later, when it's time at last to learn more.
=====
7/11 - fruitless walk in search of a poet's sort of place
Friday night. The McDonald's is packed full with groups and pairings, young and old.
I'm starting to think that the more I think in ENglish the more complicated I will come to be. THe virtue would be to latch on to sayings of the Chinese here, to echo the work and workings of my people, heark, heark.
At the bourgeoise mall of rich people smelling like Starbucks on my way to the subway station, I saw two guys run into each other for the first time in years. Serendipity. And then, "Where you working now?" a statement so charming in its honest normalcy and yet so sad in its societal trappings. Like Johnson + Jackson were saying earlier today (age 10): "the Constipation of Independence."
I rediscovered music on Youtube on the company laptop tonight until the battery died, after finishing My Blueberry Nights. It seems every song is a tribute to the history of songs, and that cuts right to the heart. That i a just-right phrase, because there is so much joy and pain in marvel, in true celebration.
But it is all so forgettable as well. Is this the value of writing? Slowing ourselves down enough only to be sure we don't flood our own lives with the rest of our own lives? It all washes away so clean--there is a marvelous and dark truth to this.
And later, with the television blurring in its steady snow, I open a drawer and reach for one small choco-pie, packaged neatly and inspected by workers whose names I'll never know, and I begin to unwrap it, strange and necessary in this new sort of silence.
Although I miss school
I am happy that school's over
But I still miss it
-Anabel L, 8yrs
=====
7/12 - Shenzhen, at Yi Fun Jie's
I hadn't even imagined such beauty, and such undiluted balance between simplicity and luxury. There is no illusion in this place.
Even the taxi smelled different from Hong Kong. And of course the cars are back on the right side of the road now.
the line between writing and living
syncopated by full sleep--
sound of cars, and clock
=====
7/13 - long day at Shenzhen, then long night in Causeway Bay
After we live this life and its little moments, honestly we just go on living some more. If I leave out the details of the guitarist I watched on an inner street of Causeway Bay, and the whole little story of the boy who wanted his pick and the ELvis rendition of "Lucille" that made me want to dance, yes in Hong Kong, and the police officer that made him leave (or at least move down the street past their jurisdiction), if I leave out the poem I'd lose sleep for tonight trying to write the deeper truth of that illusory sort of curtain of sound, that well of imagination that takes us away from reality and the rest of the crowd and oh, a rooftop ledge that's been dripping on your shirt--if I leave all that out, I'd be fine and either remember or forget but I'd still live and ask the same questions.
His name was Jameson.
My kids were right, on their SSAT practice essay, to argue that knowledge trumps imagination. THere is a semantic fallacy in the prompt we could argue forever, but the basic idea was there: live, don't write. Because what I can not leave out is Yi Fun Jie and the entire day she spent with me, in absolute love and dedication, and I can't believe she fell last week and injured herself, that of all the times I've crossed the street here and felt the reality of how much these drivers do not care, of all the people crossing the street in this country, Git Ming Goh and Git E Jie had to get hurt, my father's father had to pass slowly after a fast crash. These are real things--they are not only stories. These are reminders to not just live but to live mindfully, gracefully, and as a brother and son and teacher and student to every face I recognize something of my family in. To not just write, but to write for my happiness and for the connectedness of people.
I don't give a damn about on and giri, because those are someone else's words and someone else's teaching. But I am a part of this family and I feel the chords of our resonance, the hum of our overlapping. And taht is a song which does weigh more than mountains, which does run deeper than rivers.
latent raindrops
over every home I've seen--
look there's heaven
=====
7/15 - Man Fut Sze (Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery)
soaked from the climb--
waiting for a clear breeze
through the smoke
black birds flaping in a wire cage--
or burned paper in an incense chimney
one for my father
grandpa, grandma, grandpa in order--
borrowed incense sticks
after bowing uncomfortably I descend,
my fingers softened, smelling of ash
white girl in flip flops
who snaps a quick picture and leaves:
do you pray alone, too?
grasshopper on the temple steps: now
a feast for ants, a photo to take home
=====
7/16 - packing up, moving out to Ryan Mansion
still clinging
to all this luggage
I think is mine
=====
7/17 - at a high rise, waiting in an office with a view that could feed a village
"It's a banana!" - Justina, the 12-year-old in my SSAT class with the most appealing English accent and a cute braces-smile. They find out my age and it discredits me, puts a new obstacle between us. THere are constant differences which we cannot but acknowledge, reflections and egos that inform too much of our conversations.
If we could judge each other less--on both sides of it--a change would be bound to happen.
a boat dragging surf
behind the builing--peaceful
water without stillness
=====
7/18 - last day of session 2 MWF
I asked if they knew what 9/11 was, these kids in my Grammar/Vocab class, and they gave little embarrassed smiles and shook their heads. Bless them.
Saw Emiline crossing a street in Tong Loh Wan tonight, after she was only fired last week. Doesn't seem like much change, but this is not something anyone can see in a glance. I hope she's well, but honestly I'm not particularly moved to care. Pehraps it bothers me that I am not bothered.
a face in the crowd
another face in the crowd
a glimpse--forgotten
I miss my Intro Creative Writing kids dearly, already, even though two of the best are continuing to session 3. The last class was perfect once the size became more manageable and certain of the kids were gone...
passing on their scripts
to write themselves out of childhood;
remembering my own
And I'll miss Anabel so much. I truly hope I made a difference in her life. Her sister, it turns out, is Justina. This is the one she did the ten smells about, who taught her how to swim. And the baby talk from that narrative--spectacular work! I wish these EXCELLENT stamps I have could actually express how proud I am. No, I don't understand how Pablo's sister could be so firm in saying she never wants to have kids.
watching blossoms
in slow, hungry sunlight--
no, even better
I don't care if they liked me or not, or whether I'll be remembered (well, I care a little), bcause I know that I'll remember and I can grow from it. This is the cyclical love story of my life as a writer. I just wish I could somehow leave my contact information without being sketchy, because I know I've tried to get in touch with old teachers who made a difference to me and who would be happy to know how I've ended up. But I might never find or speak to them again, and they'll never know they mattered deeply to at least one student.
And lastly, my final goodbyes to this place, this drippy, sweaty, chic, and expensive Fashion Walk of Causeway Bay, as I finish my packing to move to an even more expensive and even more bourgeoise bachelor suite in Soho. I know, many months from now, when I return to the states, that I will miss Chinese fast food in all its elegant Chineseness. No joke. Rush lines and anonymity, yet still I feel I belong and nobody notices my differences. I hope I don't forget the sensation of entering the air conditioning of Dai Ga Gok (or Cafe de Coral or C-: d-: C-:), and sitting with a stranger at the overcrowde tables, eating my BBQ pork and soya chicken over rice (instantly!), then walking back up the stairs into the city heat of reality like a real working bloke.
dinnertime--bachelor
waiting for friends, watching
the crumbs fall
To my neighbor whom I've never seen but I surely know too well by now by the smell of his smoke and the blasting pop music mixed between Cantonese and English, who is separated from me by a wall that doesn't even fully close to the end: adieu, goodbye, joi gin.
To the Portuguese woman who cleaned my room every week and upgraded it with a small rug and a toilet-cleaning the first time we called to cancel my reservation, and then upgraded my dirty sheets to elegant CITYLOFT sheets the second time we called to confirm the cancellation, and then downgraded the sheets by the time it was clear I'd be moving out: I wish a lot of things these days, one of them being that in this fast city more of the hundreds of faces I squeeze past every day would have names and stories attached to them, stories for me to share with a small audience of strangers who coul quite possibly care deeply.
sunt lacrimae rerum--these are the tears of things
et mortalia tangunt--our mortality cuts to the heart
joi gin, joi gin, hei mong joi gin
Addendum! (which will certainly ruin the flow of this entry, but appropriately) Darren W, who didn't know my last name and kept calling me Henry Chow, who pays attention because there is no other choice but resists learning anyway and interjects with all sorts of irrelevant stories I wish I could remember. I talked about the weight of words today, how shorter sentences are more dramatic because each word has to count. Those sentences are heavy, I said, and asked if they understood what I meant by that. "A watermelon!" he said. "Oh! Cows!" Like Scott Roeder in my senior seminar class in 2005, who, when we were calling out examples of onomatopoeia, yelled out "Orange!" with great delight and smugness, feling for once that he had a correctness which had outsmarted us all. I would give tulips for that sort of thing, but all I've got is stamps.
-
For whatever reason, this is a tremendous night for me, sleepless, mind racing. More than the night before my flight. It might be the moving. It might be the last SSAT class, with Tiffany and Justina and Nicola. It might mos tlikely be the return to Zhongsan. Somehow, it pulls at the very roots of me; it is undeniably home and the very cornerstone of my own history.
heartbeat
restless moon as well,
somewhere
Her shirt says IT'S NEVER LATE TO HAVE HAPPY CHILDHOOD, and I reread it with a quick smile every time she looks down at her paper so I won't call on her. I hate teaching sometimes, but not when the look in a kid's eyes is so open, when there is no water to bridge but our equal eagerness to understand this moment.
a shy smile
in exchange for questions
Anabel
(grammar/vocab 10-12)
Angeline, too, who leans her elbows on the table and grabs her pigtails to hide her face. She scratches her head while pursing her lips, or sighs with such levity her ribs must be afloat. And I wonder: where, at 6 years old, has she learned such depths?
*Im so shine.*
she writes, and I thank God
for pencils.
(beginners' creative writing 6-7)
These other boys, who tell me they're not afraid of anything anymore. What fear, and its consequences, have led to such illusion?
pencil theft and
pillow fights to hide
their poetry
(intro to creative writing 8-10)
For the SSAT kids (12-15), brilliant and willing, my prayers on a summer wind. May you find freedom from the system through the system.
laughing together we learn something
Kevin is a good man, honest and in this wold at the same time, willing to forget about things. The bottle to his lips is a small forgiveness so long as we all survive this place.
our cheeks flush red instead of the night sky
If this place can bring me back to a modern Chinese self, C will be my torch. She has been a lesson, already, in friendship and its values, care without strings. No matter what she or I say about marriage and family, her children one day will be full of benediction for such an honest heritage.
looking for "real people" -- long ripples
=====
7/3 - "a lot of food" -Audrey's found-poem title
I am sorry to my mother and my aunt
whose great care I keep brushing
aside like a curtain hiding something better;
I am ashamed of this
desperation for freedom, while earlier
this morning a toddler boy in
a passing stroller tilted his eyes around
his visor at me as if waiting
to hear something important
and I had no words--
for all this teaching and this journeying
I am no less young than I have been,
still learning and tripping over people
and only sometimes remembering,
oh, this is another country, oh, this
is a new opportunity,
oh, thank you for these small birthings.
=====
7/4 - half-day Friday
In one dream the bruised cat on my knee
where I fell keeps making me flinch
away from a girl who wants us
to be closer. The metaphor might be
that my past injuries are an obstacle to love,
but what of my other dreams of convoluted story arcs?
Waking between two illusions,
I choose them both
and oversleep in a foreign place.
It's the end of session 1 already. We did teacher/course evaluations fo the MWF classes today. It pleases me to know these kids actually like me (I choose to ignore that they are perhaps pressured to write good things) and to learn that their behavior or "citizenship" is very much unrelated to their learning and capacity to learn as well as their relationship to me. Jenny K and Anabel L, who are my best students, suffer through much time wasted for chastising and recaptivating the boys in my classes. But I must remind myself of what Ms Shah told me once: that school's real function is to learn and practice social skills, spending time with other people. From Grammar and Vocabulary to Creative Writing to SSAT, we are all just learning what it is to be human and to live with one another on this planet. I'm sorry to see Cameron go if he doesn't return for another session; on his evaluation he wrote "(very kind)" next to my name and gave me a 10+ for how much he liked me until the other kids embarrassed him into changing everything into a +. I don't give a damn about the current school system and its inescapable factory model. But if we're in this system anyway at least I'll be here a while to give something else for these kids. I remember some of my teachers, not for the material but for who they ere. I believe in an inherent personality in eacho f us that precedes all language or barriers, and in these classrooms we learn much more from discovering that about one another and about ourselves. We are filling time, yes, but we are able to pick out the values we need.
duck, duck,
duck--each of us
hoping for goose
=====
7/5 - last day of session 1
More goodbyes, some promises to meet again, many futures I won't know. I truly wish them all well and hope for them the best. That is all I can do.
wondering what happens next--a season's wind
Also, BSing a conversation with the guy behind the desk downstairs, fumbling with boiling my utensils at the restaurant I ate at, and switching to English when I didn't know how to apologize and answer otherwise to the girl at the theater asking for the time--all this causing me to wonder how I will be remembered, even in passing. I embrace my difference everywhere but I also want to be simply at home, among similar people.
among the crowd a foreigner--smiling
I sort of love Hong Kong. This is a good, hard, honest life without the pretense or exclusion of America. THe people are not always outgoing or friendly, but to be able to speak in my native language among other Chinese is a blessing and a comfort I've not yet known. I deny none of my roots. HK is perhaps the perfect international center to be both American and Chinese and young. I don't know if I'm in love with this place yet; not the way Honolulu calls back to me always. The smoke of this city might suffocate me.
cloud-smoke in the mother sky--everywhere home
=====
7/6 - Shenzhen for Lai Sook's 16th anniversary
this down-to-earth
parlor; my kind masseuse
who smelled like feet
after wine and money, this world
still raining in similar places
=====
7/7 - first day of session 2
"The way I figure it, if it takes you a hundred years to get over it, then take the hundred years--it's just time, right? We all just doing our time on this planet anyways. Got a right to do it the way you need to." -Kennedy, in Behind You p59
reading a book--
poet's rain outside
in every time zone
I'd rather be a writer than write. What I'm talking about is that connectivity, that oneness with the human heart which lets us open to experience, that leads to true bravery and the warrior's path. The act of writing is part of that, but it is largely functional as proof of our heritage, proof of this heart of practice. Awareness of love is the only prerequisite to time not wasted.
daydreaming in China--
more phone calls
intercepted by wind
I'm going to teach from Jackie's Behind You on Wednesday. It might be beyond my kids. But I pray and I believe that they will recognize that passion, even if they don't understand it yet. I resolve myself to forgive the kids I bore.
the subway crowd--
one open umbrella
reflecting
=====
7/8
a morning storm
cigarette smoke through the rain--
my heart in new york
then, peals of thunder like a drum:
the gods must be different in this place
To Rachel: only when I started emailing some friends back home did I slow my thoughts down enough to describe what I am doing here, and when I write of my independence (more or less) in Hong Kong and of the fact that I'm teaching creative writing to kids, it sounds pretty damn good. But it's never that simple. As Meg Kearney put it so well, language couldn't save me. Because there are no words for what this is like; there are only stories. There are only poems. It's a double-edged sword, this writer's mind; only in these idle silences do I narrate my life as good or bad.
a rose
by any other name--
untimely
Walking to the subway station after my 12-hour workday, a couple of older ladies who had just gotten off work too (10pm!) asked me if this road would take them to the subway in Central. So I led the way, trekking down the hill through the shortcut Robet showed me (the HK Zoological Park past two churches), with the ladies talking quietly behind me. It was a beautiful quiet night, less crowded than usual, but no moon in sight--just tall, bright buildings.
four grapes on the subway station floor--immaculate for now
I'm thinking about careers and stuff. And I always say with a cocky smile that no matter what I end up doing or where, I know myself enough to know that I'll still be writing and still be doing my martial arts. But that, in fact, is not a real answer to the question of what I want to be or do. I asked my first SSAT class for the icebreaker to tell me where they would be or what they would do with their lives if they had a magic wand. Most of them said travel.
Yeah, me too, sort of. But I'd get very bored and end upin the same places I always make sure I go to anyway. If I had a magic wand, I'd be back in Bennington, because that finiteness, that firefly magic, is irreplaceable. We were students, but not in the typical way. We were writing, but not with the weight of what a lifetime of that woul dmean. We were meeting new people, but this to was different. I wonder if anything will ever agin bring me closer to Heaven than NBF Camp did.
fireflies singing--this'll be the day that I'd die
=====
7/10 - thunderstorm morning
Dreamt of yesterday.
I understand now why Eric John Grau taught one year, loved it, then didn't teach again. We are those finite kind, who live and move on but perhaps never let go.
The giant 12-student class is great fun and keeps me present in a way that Bok-Fu group classes did (teaching, I mean). And the small 2-person classes are wonderful too. But I couldn't do it forever. I do it for this time in my life and for these kids. Like I told Jessie Korich, I don't know how many times I can say goodbye to a group of kids and never know if I mattered in the long run.
(later that evening, after the government inspection of the company, and talking to the door guard from Zhongsan who always has som eopinion on the food I bring up for the next morning, after watching part of My Blueberry Nights and for once feeling like these halls are comfortable and a place to live rather than a place to sleep, and oh of course after they changed my sheets to make the room prettier immediately after we called to reconfirm my cancellation, an after calling my mom for once rather than her calling me)
But now that I think about it, I love the vacuum of the classroom. There is so much to consider about the education system and society and these kids' lives outside, but once I close that door then I'm on. It's like doing a kata or demonstration. There are some amazing successes and some incredible failures too, but it is a tremendous presence and often enough it is vitality. For a block of time, the world is left outside and there is no name for what goes on inside--you could call it teaching, you could call it learning, but I'll call it communication for now. I can't think of a more positive wor for these kins of moments.
I wish I could take a picture of these lessons. But it isn't something you can capture and carry with you. It's more like something that changes you from the inside and which you don't really see until years later, when it's time at last to learn more.
=====
7/11 - fruitless walk in search of a poet's sort of place
Friday night. The McDonald's is packed full with groups and pairings, young and old.
I'm starting to think that the more I think in ENglish the more complicated I will come to be. THe virtue would be to latch on to sayings of the Chinese here, to echo the work and workings of my people, heark, heark.
At the bourgeoise mall of rich people smelling like Starbucks on my way to the subway station, I saw two guys run into each other for the first time in years. Serendipity. And then, "Where you working now?" a statement so charming in its honest normalcy and yet so sad in its societal trappings. Like Johnson + Jackson were saying earlier today (age 10): "the Constipation of Independence."
I rediscovered music on Youtube on the company laptop tonight until the battery died, after finishing My Blueberry Nights. It seems every song is a tribute to the history of songs, and that cuts right to the heart. That i a just-right phrase, because there is so much joy and pain in marvel, in true celebration.
But it is all so forgettable as well. Is this the value of writing? Slowing ourselves down enough only to be sure we don't flood our own lives with the rest of our own lives? It all washes away so clean--there is a marvelous and dark truth to this.
And later, with the television blurring in its steady snow, I open a drawer and reach for one small choco-pie, packaged neatly and inspected by workers whose names I'll never know, and I begin to unwrap it, strange and necessary in this new sort of silence.
Although I miss school
I am happy that school's over
But I still miss it
-Anabel L, 8yrs
=====
7/12 - Shenzhen, at Yi Fun Jie's
I hadn't even imagined such beauty, and such undiluted balance between simplicity and luxury. There is no illusion in this place.
Even the taxi smelled different from Hong Kong. And of course the cars are back on the right side of the road now.
the line between writing and living
syncopated by full sleep--
sound of cars, and clock
=====
7/13 - long day at Shenzhen, then long night in Causeway Bay
After we live this life and its little moments, honestly we just go on living some more. If I leave out the details of the guitarist I watched on an inner street of Causeway Bay, and the whole little story of the boy who wanted his pick and the ELvis rendition of "Lucille" that made me want to dance, yes in Hong Kong, and the police officer that made him leave (or at least move down the street past their jurisdiction), if I leave out the poem I'd lose sleep for tonight trying to write the deeper truth of that illusory sort of curtain of sound, that well of imagination that takes us away from reality and the rest of the crowd and oh, a rooftop ledge that's been dripping on your shirt--if I leave all that out, I'd be fine and either remember or forget but I'd still live and ask the same questions.
His name was Jameson.
My kids were right, on their SSAT practice essay, to argue that knowledge trumps imagination. THere is a semantic fallacy in the prompt we could argue forever, but the basic idea was there: live, don't write. Because what I can not leave out is Yi Fun Jie and the entire day she spent with me, in absolute love and dedication, and I can't believe she fell last week and injured herself, that of all the times I've crossed the street here and felt the reality of how much these drivers do not care, of all the people crossing the street in this country, Git Ming Goh and Git E Jie had to get hurt, my father's father had to pass slowly after a fast crash. These are real things--they are not only stories. These are reminders to not just live but to live mindfully, gracefully, and as a brother and son and teacher and student to every face I recognize something of my family in. To not just write, but to write for my happiness and for the connectedness of people.
I don't give a damn about on and giri, because those are someone else's words and someone else's teaching. But I am a part of this family and I feel the chords of our resonance, the hum of our overlapping. And taht is a song which does weigh more than mountains, which does run deeper than rivers.
latent raindrops
over every home I've seen--
look there's heaven
=====
7/15 - Man Fut Sze (Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery)
soaked from the climb--
waiting for a clear breeze
through the smoke
black birds flaping in a wire cage--
or burned paper in an incense chimney
one for my father
grandpa, grandma, grandpa in order--
borrowed incense sticks
after bowing uncomfortably I descend,
my fingers softened, smelling of ash
white girl in flip flops
who snaps a quick picture and leaves:
do you pray alone, too?
grasshopper on the temple steps: now
a feast for ants, a photo to take home
=====
7/16 - packing up, moving out to Ryan Mansion
still clinging
to all this luggage
I think is mine
=====
7/17 - at a high rise, waiting in an office with a view that could feed a village
"It's a banana!" - Justina, the 12-year-old in my SSAT class with the most appealing English accent and a cute braces-smile. They find out my age and it discredits me, puts a new obstacle between us. THere are constant differences which we cannot but acknowledge, reflections and egos that inform too much of our conversations.
If we could judge each other less--on both sides of it--a change would be bound to happen.
a boat dragging surf
behind the builing--peaceful
water without stillness
=====
7/18 - last day of session 2 MWF
I asked if they knew what 9/11 was, these kids in my Grammar/Vocab class, and they gave little embarrassed smiles and shook their heads. Bless them.
Saw Emiline crossing a street in Tong Loh Wan tonight, after she was only fired last week. Doesn't seem like much change, but this is not something anyone can see in a glance. I hope she's well, but honestly I'm not particularly moved to care. Pehraps it bothers me that I am not bothered.
a face in the crowd
another face in the crowd
a glimpse--forgotten
I miss my Intro Creative Writing kids dearly, already, even though two of the best are continuing to session 3. The last class was perfect once the size became more manageable and certain of the kids were gone...
passing on their scripts
to write themselves out of childhood;
remembering my own
And I'll miss Anabel so much. I truly hope I made a difference in her life. Her sister, it turns out, is Justina. This is the one she did the ten smells about, who taught her how to swim. And the baby talk from that narrative--spectacular work! I wish these EXCELLENT stamps I have could actually express how proud I am. No, I don't understand how Pablo's sister could be so firm in saying she never wants to have kids.
watching blossoms
in slow, hungry sunlight--
no, even better
I don't care if they liked me or not, or whether I'll be remembered (well, I care a little), bcause I know that I'll remember and I can grow from it. This is the cyclical love story of my life as a writer. I just wish I could somehow leave my contact information without being sketchy, because I know I've tried to get in touch with old teachers who made a difference to me and who would be happy to know how I've ended up. But I might never find or speak to them again, and they'll never know they mattered deeply to at least one student.
And lastly, my final goodbyes to this place, this drippy, sweaty, chic, and expensive Fashion Walk of Causeway Bay, as I finish my packing to move to an even more expensive and even more bourgeoise bachelor suite in Soho. I know, many months from now, when I return to the states, that I will miss Chinese fast food in all its elegant Chineseness. No joke. Rush lines and anonymity, yet still I feel I belong and nobody notices my differences. I hope I don't forget the sensation of entering the air conditioning of Dai Ga Gok (or Cafe de Coral or C-: d-: C-:), and sitting with a stranger at the overcrowde tables, eating my BBQ pork and soya chicken over rice (instantly!), then walking back up the stairs into the city heat of reality like a real working bloke.
dinnertime--bachelor
waiting for friends, watching
the crumbs fall
To my neighbor whom I've never seen but I surely know too well by now by the smell of his smoke and the blasting pop music mixed between Cantonese and English, who is separated from me by a wall that doesn't even fully close to the end: adieu, goodbye, joi gin.
To the Portuguese woman who cleaned my room every week and upgraded it with a small rug and a toilet-cleaning the first time we called to cancel my reservation, and then upgraded my dirty sheets to elegant CITYLOFT sheets the second time we called to confirm the cancellation, and then downgraded the sheets by the time it was clear I'd be moving out: I wish a lot of things these days, one of them being that in this fast city more of the hundreds of faces I squeeze past every day would have names and stories attached to them, stories for me to share with a small audience of strangers who coul quite possibly care deeply.
sunt lacrimae rerum--these are the tears of things
et mortalia tangunt--our mortality cuts to the heart
joi gin, joi gin, hei mong joi gin
Addendum! (which will certainly ruin the flow of this entry, but appropriately) Darren W, who didn't know my last name and kept calling me Henry Chow, who pays attention because there is no other choice but resists learning anyway and interjects with all sorts of irrelevant stories I wish I could remember. I talked about the weight of words today, how shorter sentences are more dramatic because each word has to count. Those sentences are heavy, I said, and asked if they understood what I meant by that. "A watermelon!" he said. "Oh! Cows!" Like Scott Roeder in my senior seminar class in 2005, who, when we were calling out examples of onomatopoeia, yelled out "Orange!" with great delight and smugness, feling for once that he had a correctness which had outsmarted us all. I would give tulips for that sort of thing, but all I've got is stamps.
-
For whatever reason, this is a tremendous night for me, sleepless, mind racing. More than the night before my flight. It might be the moving. It might be the last SSAT class, with Tiffany and Justina and Nicola. It might mos tlikely be the return to Zhongsan. Somehow, it pulls at the very roots of me; it is undeniably home and the very cornerstone of my own history.
heartbeat
restless moon as well,
somewhere
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