Moon Madness

I awake at 6:30 before it is light, darker even than it was when I awoke earlier at 3 a.m. to the moonbeams shining through my window.  I wasn't aware it was the full moon (full dragon) as I went to the lanai to drink a bit of water.  It was raining, but the moon was shining bright through clouds; I could discern a misty clot of vapor in the the stream valley below.  Not up for moon cream meditation, I lingered a bit before returning to my warm bed with its fresh soft sheets and a cat who rearranged himself between my legs, purring.  We don't know what purring really means...is it happiness or submission?  I have come to see it as a sort of qigong device, like the kneading routine they go through before settling down.  The faint vibrations from his body to the back of my knee helped me drift off again.

I was feeling a little more relaxed anyway, having relieved myself of a burden...I have been blocked (probably stagnant liver qi) for the past few weeks, unable to complete a painting project to which I had committed myself.  I owed one more image to my friend to illustrate --as if it's necessary-- her collection of haiku.  But the dragon I envisioned just wouldn't come. I did a little Chinese New Year's sketch that had been taunting me on my table as I passed everyday, but I just couldn't finish it.  I confessed my blockage, but not to worry, she is not waiting on me, so some relief.  Perhaps now the dragon will come easily; it is hard to get the image out of my head and on to paper when there is an obligation involved.  It interferes with the spontaneity.  I am not professional or commercial enough (which simply means I'm not getting paid for it) to produce on demand.

On awakening in the dark --the moon has long set--I made a conscious effort to remember the dream I was having.  I was at an academic conference of some sort. I  went back to the dining hall to retrieve a missing shoe, a red stiletto. It was still under the table.  Attached to it was something like a bicycle chain, which on closer inspection turned out to be something like a tapeworm.  (In dreams things are always "something like.")  To the tapeworm was attached a card with instructions on how to ingest it, with special notes on how to take it camping.  I know there are people who use tapeworms as weight loss devices.  My reader who recently did a piece on her own dreams might explain what all this means.  Unblocking the liver qi?

Liu Ye

No, I suspect the dream is related to the surreal and shocking media I have been indulging in the past few days. Last week I watched a little film called Dark Matter, with Meryl Streep, Aidan Quinn and the extremely versatile Liu Ye.  I've enjoyed his eager, brooding style before in several films--Postmen in the Mountains, Purple Butterfly, Curse of the Golden Flower, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, and a couple of historical Chinese political propaganda epics. I've not been able to get this story out of my mind. Loosely based on an actual event, the plot concerns the trajectory of a brilliant young Chinese doctoral student in a western university--literally in the Rocky Mountains. Reviews suggest this was unappreciated by mainstream audiences, but I was blown away. Under the ineffective protection of Meryl Streep, who studies tai chi, mandarin and tea making, as part of her support of young Chinese students at the university, Liu Ye's character (Liu Xing) tries to adapt, but in an inappropriate way.  Liu Xing gets mixed messages all along the way.  He is encouraged to challenge his professor (Aidan Quinn) who advises him that his dissertation thesis is way over his head, (meaning way over his advisor's head and challenging his mentor's theory).  A staged western shootout in a tourist pioneer village is contrasted with his watching a wuxia film on pirated TV and foreshadows the disastrous end.  The film is accented by chapter divisions that follow the wu xing, a Chinese cosmological symbol which probably was not understood by most people who watched this film.  A patronizing cultural clash leads to a shocking conclusion.  Why I am discussing movies lately here on my yang side may indicate some integration of yin and yang.  (I wouldn't mind integrating a bit with Liu Ye, which Meryl Steep failed to do do in one sexually tense scene when the failed cosmology student, reduced to selling cosmetics, applies cream to her hands and face.)

At the same time, I am nearly at midpoint in 1Q84, Haruki Murakami's new big novel (925 pages).  I'm not sure why, but I need to finish it, hopefully without injury.  The last time I read a big book like this, that big Ken Follett book about gothic cathedral building, I did actual diagnosed arthritic damage to my wrist (which I have since overcome through qigong). 1Q84 has the pace of a long Korean drama with cliff-hanging chapters, with intense and possibly unnecessary physical descriptions of characters, especially the shapes of people's heads.  With even more bizarre sex scenes than Ken Follett's, set in contemporary Japan, it has a manga, Studio Ghibli feel, as if interpreted by John Irving. It's oddly compelling, but I'm not ready to say yet that it's really very good.  A few good lines to underline...in 925 pages one would hope.  Easy to read, but one wonders what might be lost in translation.  I have read some Murakami before, none of his novels, just short stories in the New Yorker.  Over the past several years I have ceased reading New Yorker fiction, and now I think I know why.

The sky is lightening, but not like it was at 3 a.m.  The world seems a little different today, though not as different as 1Q84's with TWO moons in the sky.  I must get ready for my day in my academic office.

Lost in the Cloud

This is how disasters happen I guess, not that this is much of one.  In the blink of an eye, the click of a "cancel", or was it an "okay",  I have inadvertently obliterated my bookshelf gadget here, where all of the books I have read over the past two or three years were chronologically listed, not for anyone else's benefit really, but more for a measure of my own study and entertainment, a personal diary of my reading. (Although, I was actually editing the list to add a new book, in the interest of promoting it, like another of which I recently read with more than a little personal interest.)

On the other hand, this is a little lesson in what is important. This list was not.  The deletion happened as I was about to add my first new book of the new year, and I probably will ("What I Read in 2012").  But was the list for my benefit (I still have the books on my shelves) or was it really to show other people?  You are what you read; this is me.  See how well read I am? You should read these books, too.  It would be like listing everything I've eaten in the past year. I am what I eat.  See how well fed I am.  Eat like me.

I just wonder where it went.  Can you recover things from the cloud?  (If someone knows how to do this, please let me know.) Or did I just free up some space on a server. I feel certain if it were a list of subversive contacts or activities, it would be out there in some NSA file to haunt me.  But does anyone care about my reading list but me?

POSTSCRIPT
Ah, all is not lost!  Search "recover blogger gadget" and the magic of "cached" is revealed. My list IS out there in the cloud, fortunately not too subversive.  Now safely saved as a Word file, for personal edification, I can refer to it whenever I want, and start the 2012 list afresh.  (Too much trouble to rebuild the history in the blog gadget, though.)  Lesson learned: no panic, no loss.  And nothing really ever disappears, it is just transformed (or hidden).  

Big Socialist Buddha

I just finished an intriguing little memoir, "Socialism Is Great!", by Lijia  Zhang, a Nanjing woman who came of age in post-Mao/pre-Tiananmen China, eventually escaping her iron rice bowl job, inherited from her own mother, as a "pressure gauge tester" at a missile factory, to become a successful journalist and commentator.  It's a good story, well worth reading, historically later than the important but depressing and ubiquitous Cultural Revolution memoirs.  I could relate to the characters and setting, having been in Beijing for a period the year before Tiananmen. The book is full of angst and courage (and surprisingly more than a little sex) and suggests what it was like in China in the '80s, when Deng Xiao Ping had given the people a new lease on their lives, or at least loosened the leash.

But what struck me most in the book was one of the photos among the requisite dozen pages of black and white testimony these memoirs almost always have.  The image was of Lijia, looking like the eager students I met in 1987, sporting a short denim skirt, casual white shirt and scarf, flesh-colored stockings to just below the hem (the style then), posing, pretty and perky, in a factory in front of a massive Buddha head with workers on scaffolding putting finishing touches on it.

"That Buddha looks familiar to me," I thought.  (Of course, all Buddhas look alike, but not really.  In the Temple of 10,0000 Buddhas in Hong Kong, not one of the images is the same.)

But I did know this Buddha. Lijia's ICBM factory had successfully won the bid to cast the giant statue to complete the "world's largest, outdoor, bronze, seated Buddha"(which it was up until 2007, according to Wikipedia; bigger better Buddhas just keep coming, but I'm not sure where this larger one is). It was to be delivered (FedEx? UPS? ICBM?) to Lantau Island in Hong Kong.  This was well before 1997. Despite a worldwide bid for the Tian Tan Buddha, the Nanjing military factory won it, with some reference to China's 3,000-year history of bronze casting work. (Fortunately it was not to be made of poured concrete.)

I had seen the development of the Buddha park over some years through the '80s in Hong Kong, when it had no political obligations to the motherland. Then even in anticipation of the 112-foot, 250-ton statue,  Po Lin monastery boasted the world's largest Buddha BASE. (Which sounds like some kind of instant tofu soup.) For a time you could walk up the 268 steps to the platform, sans Buddha, to gaze around the mountaintop area, sea to one side, temples and mountains to the other.

I enjoyed seeing the installed Buddha again a year and half ago, although I was not happy at the commercialization of the monastery area.

Big Big Buddha

We used to get to Po Lin on a bus that took a scary switchback road to the top of the mountain, like the bus to Wudangshan without the comfort of trees. This time we approached from the airport side of the island, on a gondola sky rail. (Yes, that's smog; I don't like to think about landing at Chek Lap Kok. Although I miss landing at Kai Tak. And check out another great landing. Apparently a lot of pilots on that run do too. A chance to really use skills. )

Some years ago, I walked down the trail from Po Lin to Tung Chung, which was then a sleepy village with the ruins of an old fort to explore.  I could see that they were shaving off the geological features of an island to make way for the new airport which would replace the much beloved, but obsolete Kai Tak, more or less in the middle of the city. Now, 20 years later, there is a full fledged city at Tung Chung to support the airport infrastructure with train terminals and a shopping center.

Trail to Tung Chung

I'm glad I took that hike back then. As I'm glad I had the opportunity to bicycle on Chang An Boulevard in Beijing in 1987, sharing the route with horse carts and other bicyclists. I didn't recognize that street in 2007 until I actually reached the Forbidden City and the infamous square. From Beijing to Hong Kong, change has been the constant.  We used to think of China as a backward country.  Now it seems like the Chinese invented development. And the irony of a Big Buddha produced in a missile factory, something that was lost on Lijia until she wrote her memoir.

Attention, Patience and Tradition

I was making panir (or paneer) last night and realized it's been a year almost since I first talked about this meditative cheesemaking exercise -- bringing a gallon of chilled milk just to a full boil without scorching or boiling over requires considerable attention and patience. It took me a long time last night but I didn't want to rush because that's what will cause the scorching. Gently stirring the pot feels like qigong, and the warm smell and consistency of steaming milk is comforting on a cool rainy night. After almost an hour of tending the pot, I added the lemon juice, and voila, it curdled perfectly. No scorching. So, tomorrow I will probably do spinach and panir. Not tonight though, I have my traditional Chinese painting class, another exercise in attention and patience.

I am making some small progress in this technique: in each painting, I accomplish one brush stroke or a tinted leaf that is almost right. Practice is required and it is the only creative thing I have ever done where copying is expected. (It is after all, Chinese.) This is hard: very often my first attempts at something are the best because they are concentrated but spontaneous; it is the duplication that is hard. When I used to play the piano, the first sight reading of a piece was often the best I ever did; the practice and perfection part was harder (boring really), and I never was very good at memorizing anything. And spontaneous "modern" sort of dancing is fun as well, without the difficulties of the precise choreography and perfection that qigong or t'ai chi demand. I should learn to apply my editing mentality when I do all these things.

I think we don't spend enough time in quiet attentive acts anymore. I finished Carpenter's old book on China, which ends with a discussion about Port Arthur, the bloody site of Russian/Japanese hostilities in Manchuria. He concludes the book:

"To day [~1925] Port Arthur is only a symbol of the tragic outcome of the clash between two great forces of the Far East. Its downfall marked the end of a chapter in the history of the struggle for supremacy in eastern Asia, and the next one is still unwritten. For me it marks the end of these travels, and I must leave it to others to tell the story of what is to come."

This kind of writing and commentary comes out of patient attention, and it makes me a little sad to realize he died not long after. And reading the book requires a little patience; it has a slowness of pace (and an early-20th-century American point-of-view) that suggests cozy evenings by a fire, cuddled under a lap robe, no TV, less radio, a book to pick up after you put down the evening paper. It's a quiet leisure that we have to consciously create today, with so much competing for our attention. Reading it was like stirring hot milk.

Holding on to History

How rich and interesting is the history of literature and publishing. I am thinking of this because a friend has just received her new Kindle, while I am reading an 83-year-old slightly worm-ridden book published in 1925 and having just ordered a Quality Paperback volume of the complete novels of Jane Austen. Another pound or so for my shelves, (to say nothing of the curious hard-to-find volume from 1988, so new, on Chinese brush painting I found on eBay.pn (Philippines) that I am having shipped, for something like 30 times my winning (and only) bid. Still, the total cost is about what I would have paid, had I been able to get it retail, except it was sold out. Two kilos from the Philippines costs a bundle. Bear in mind, I'm talking about a book.

Over the weekend I was sorting through my vast accumulated library of books about China and came upon a couple of tarnished gems, a travelogue from 1925,  discussed below,  and another from 1940, Through China's Wall by Graham Peck. I really must catalogue, or at least arrange, all these books by my own system...when there is sufficient accumulation, then a filing system makes sense. (I call it file by pile. I apply this system in my office as well. And when you have enough piles, some of them conveniently just go into the trash.) For my library, I have piles-- classifications and sub-categories-- of fiction, history, literature, art, language, culture, religion, philosophy, journalism, photography, travelogues, (Americans traveling in China, Chinese traveling in China), memoirs (of the Qing dynasty, of the Republic, of the Long March, of Westerners infatuated with the communist developments, of Liberation, of the Great Leap Forward, and those holocaust-like memoirs of the Cultural Revolution -- read two or three of those and you've read them all, and yet they all rightly demand to be heard).

One of the gems of my travelogues is China, by Frank G. Carpenter, (at right), an American who did a whole series of books, "Carpenter's World Travels," for turn-of-the-century armchair travelers. I had never read this 1926 volume, published just after he died and inherited from the Wizard's grandfather. With a sturdy binding embossed in gold with a proud steamship on the cover, it has 102 very fine black and white photographs with tales in a leisurely style that recall his several trips to China, over 40 years, from the demise of the Qing to the establishment and degradation of the early Republic. It's more than a little racist in that way of 1925: describing a visit to the "Drug Hall of Propitious Munificence," Hangchow's "drugstore like none other on earth," he discusses, and vaguely dismisses, Chinese medicine, commenting that, "On the whole, the Chinese are a healthy people...it is a fact that the Chinese are differently constituted physically from members of the white race, and are not nearly so sensitive to disease as we are...so adapted to their environment that they can survive living conditions and even disease that would bring illness and death in an American community." He uses the same arguments in commending the hardworking coolies and "jinrickisha" drivers, labourers "as good as can be found anywhere in the world."

Included also is the typical forecasting of the time -- China as awakening sleeping giant and market for the world, with a population of "400 million in a country that could easily accommodate 50 percent, or even 100 percent more than that" -- but he never foresaw SARS and bird flu, to say nothing of one-child policies and Mao's purges and reform-through-labor camps. Or the giant Wal-Mart in Beijing.

And yet, for all its turn-of-the-century mindset, it is much more sympathetic, and less narcissistic, if quaintly naive, than the currently popular Lost in Planet China or Nathan Gray's tale of walking the Great Wall, the style of travelogue that is all about "me." Carpenter loved China, he was not writing about himself, (although he frequently compares China with America for purposes of conveying an understanding of magnitude, politics or sociology). I suppose at the time, writing about a trip to China was sufficient; it didn't have to be about MY experiences in a strange land.

"I have often been asked," he writes, "what country I found the most interesting in all my travels over the globe. To me they are all interesting, and each has its own appeal, but regard for the truth has compelled me to answer 'China.' I have visited this Far Eastern land no less than five times, yet its fascination increases rather than grows less. It is a country with a most amazing past, and destined, I believe, to an even more amazing future." And such nice writing. No cursing.

Reading this musty old book is holding in one's hand a tangible, if subjective, interpretation of history. Of course, all interpretations are subjective. As Taoist Deng Ming-Dao says, "Everything is relative because we are each condemned to our own particular vantage points. Our minds know the world by constructing conclusions from the data of our senses." How lovely to have this book preserved, a conclusion from the data of Mr. Carpenter's senses. I don't know if it, or the Graham Peck which I plan to read next (or Jane Austen for that matter) would have the same appeal on a Kindle.