Sit-Down Comedy: A Running Gag (Part One)

A couple of Wudang Tao study trips ago, in one of our little class sessions, our teacher made reference to the necessity of having "good intentions" in practice. (We've all heard this, especially among those pesky Buddhists.)  One of our group misheard this as "you must have good intestines."  No surprise, since most of us were having serious gastro-intestinal issues, blockages, and guts "being like water," all sorts of internal chaos.

Once again, this year in Wudang, I was initially suffering from blockages. Two years of office work, hours and hours cramped in planes and trains, and changed diet, left me quite constipated.  It's very hard to sit and meditate well with that kind of blockage.

I finally succumbed to a little artificial help to create genuine movement and suddenly felt the overwhelming urge to relieve myself when we were all gathered at a temple to do tai chi practice.

Wudang Tai Chi class in Nanyan Temple courtyard.

I wasn't really participating in that anyway, a little plantar's fasciitis and a gimpy hip from all that previous office and plane sitting,  rendering me the spitting image of Tie Guai Li, (Iron Crutch Li).  I would go nowhere without my trusty green Coleman walking stick and red Camelbak water bottle.  Still, I wanted to watch the tai chi practice, which was interrupted by a Hong Kong film crew who wanted to memorialize the foreigners paying respects in the temple and to film the master and his regular (in so many ways, I'm sure) students.

Good time to escape to a toilet. Cesuo zai nar?  I was directed back to the entrance to the temple, with fears of Yuan Dynasty squatters, but was pleasantly surprised to find renovation of the Temple facilities had resulted in perhaps the finest public restroom in China.  A huge flat screen television! A baby changing room! Sofas. And two rooms of toilets, one stall in which was clearly designated for me:

Disabled people, Tie Guai Li impersonators, and Westerners toilet.

Clean, comfortable, and only lacking toilet tissue.

I spent considerable time enjoying this facility, assuming that in Chinese, "disabled people" means "Westerners unable to squat."  I saw no one in wheelchairs at the temple, which otherwise was in no way handicapped accessible.  (Unless you hired porters with their bamboo sedan chairs.) The only thing missing in the stall was toilet tissue, an apparently precious commodity in China, so I completely used up one of my own precious portable packs of Wet Ones.

I felt bad throwing them into the wastebasket, which was decorated with a Wal-Mart happy face.  I had been advised back at our hotel to avoid putting toilet paper down the crapper, with vague reference to the use of night soil by the peasant farmers.  This was a very hard habit to break.  A few times, in a fit of ecological cooperation,  I actually retrieved my tissue from the toilet which barely filled with water, but my overall contribution to the fertilizer was probably not welcome. 


My hotel bathroom. I used that same towel for 18 days. Hotel policy.



This is not the first time I have been preoccupied with Chinese toilets, having had all sorts of primitive experiences over the past decades, in country latrines, restaurant stalls, and train potties. In cities, you develop a mental map of where the good toilets are.  You can google images of "Chinese toilets" for a hint of what I am not posting here: some things I don't photograph.  I did observe though, on our train journeys, the toilets, even in hard sleeper, were slightly improved.  You no longer could actually see the tracks rushing by below as you squatted over the hole. (You're not supposed to go when stopped in a station.)  This time however, on our return to Beijing, after having reluctantly visited the toilet in the middle of the night, I discovered in the morning that the sole of one of my shoes had peeled off.  I suspect the urine pool in the toilet dissolved the glue.  Ordinarily I would have taken them to my shoemaker, but couldn't bring myself to do that this time. 

But back to good intentions...I still laugh about the "good intestines."  But on reading a little booklet edited by one of the Tao teachers I have met on the mountain, I discovered the following tale about Zhang Sanfeng, legendary cultivator and alleged creator of Wudang Tai Chi Chuan, who behaved like an immortal.

"After hearing of his reputation, Emperor Chengzhu of the Ming Dynasty had a meeting with him. The emperor said, 'I would like to learn about Tao. What is the most enjoyable way?'  Zhang replied, 'Having a good appetite and smooth bowel movements is the most enjoyable way.'   The emperor regarded this reply as disrespectful and wanted to kill Zhang.  But at that point, the man disappeared all of a sudden.

"A few days later, Emperor Chengzu felt uncomfortable.  He was unable to eat and suffered from constipation.  Then he realized that what Zhang Sanfeng had said was correct.  Before long, Zhang met an envoy of the emperor on the road and asked the envoy to take a few Chinese alpine rushes to the emperor.  The emperor had them boiled down into a broth which he gulped down as Zhang suggested. All his troubles disappeared instantly.

"As Zhang had once lived on Mt. Wudang as a hermit, the imperial court began to build monasteries on this mountain.  Taoism on Mt. Wudang then began to flourish."

Which makes me begin to believe that what our teacher said was indeed, "You must have good intestines."  Tao cultivation is actually all about "gut feelings."



Lao Tzu recommends, "Take a load off."

So many meanings of "to sit."



Always Another Side

The other half of this perfect arc of a rainbow can be found over on the Yin Side. I actually stopped my car on the freeway Sept. 1 to take this shot, it was such a nice positive thing to see first thing in the morning. Half-and-half pictures because I don't have a wide angle lens on my little Casio Exilim, which for nearly five years has been faithfully doing duty not only for the everyday snapshots like this, but also on travel to the U.S. Mainland and China, at weddings and funerals, the ordination of an RC Bishop and the destruction of a sand mandala by Buddhist monks, recording my teacher's Chinese painting demonstrations and my own feeble efforts. The pocket digital workhorse is looking kind of beat up, but after all this time I am pretty adept with its controls. Only 5.0 megapixels, it seems obsolete, but, like my 20-year-old car, it still goes the distance. It does the one job it was designed for: no phone calls, no internet access, no calendar, just photography.

I only hope to become so adept with my new car radio...will it take four years? After I shot the rainbow, I managed to tune to the local NPR outlet to hear some news, some things to think about.

I learned from someone who runs some kind of "senior" home health care service that 7 out of 10 deaths in the growing population of folks 60+ are ultimately due to falls. I haven't been aware of being in such a demographic since the last time I was thought to be a "senior," the 45th anniversary of which condition is coming up next month. I won't make the high school reunion on the East Coast, but I have been thinking much about those of us on the leading edge of the Big Boom. I was so excited then to be a "senior," ascending the side of the rainbow leading to a wide open future; how quickly we reach the zenith and slide down the other. This melancholy thinking does remind me that I must step up my qigong exercises, one movement of which is called "past the rainbow." Qigong does promote balance, which I can always use more of, and thus, prevent falls.

Next news item was about affordable housing in Kaneohe. The state has spent $60 million on affordable studios and 2-bedroom units to rent to qualifying (poor) folks for ~$365-$865 a month. For perspective, my condo maintenance fee (which seems to be financing deforestation in my "woodland" complex) is just in the middle of that range.

As I was contemplating this, the next item had to do with affordable hotels in Makena, a Maui resort neighborhood adjacent to the ultra-pricey Wailea. The Makena development will feature rooms in the "affordable" $200-250 range, a value, I guess, if you can't pay the $400 to $500 nightly costs in Wailea. Such contrasts. I do hope that the folks in the cheap studios in Kaneohe have better manners than some of the Wailea guests. I have a friend who works in a dress shop there who has on more than one occasion found urine in the trash cans in the fitting rooms. Which just suggests that money doesn't buy decency.

After these curious news reports, I turned the radio off (having learned how to do that) to drive in silence (not counting the Miata's purr), contemplating the sun rising from behind the mauka cloud banks. Later that night, I watched the same sun set off my lanai. It gave me a sense of balance.

Still Learning

Well, I want to edit my last post, being an editor, and I can't get in; only a previous version is editable.

SO here's notes from the editor:

I know it's Sppery Fioor.

And the airport bidet...if you can't read the instructions on the image: it's:

Equipment to cleansing the buttocks with warm water.

Stopping: Rear washing stopped.

Washing: Washing the rear.

Water pressuer adjustment:  "Pressuer" gives it a little French ambience.

Flushing sound:  Press to play back flushing sound to muffle toilet sound.  (Why?)

Extra deodrizing: Increased absorption strength for removing odors.

 I'm reposting this image here, hope it looks better...I think the international symbols for "buttocks washing" are beyond comment.  But come to think of it, this beats a Chinese squat toilet any day! Deodrized indeed!

Accommodations and Plumbing

After three days, I have conquered jet lag with the help of my marvelous memory foam mattress. The things we take for granted at home: soft beds, toilets that don't smell of sewers, showers that drain through exterior plumbing. If you travel in China out of the mainstream, so to speak,  you learn to expect strange plumbing and beds. The beds in my experience, based on the kang, never made sense to me. Why have these marvelous cuddly fluffy cozy warm quilts on top of a bed that is rock hard, like a box spring with no mattress? Then I had a Taoist revelation: the quilt is Heaven, soft and yielding, and the bed is Earth, firm and unyielding. Man is trapped between.

But that doesn't explain the toilets. At this point in my life, I can't squat on the ground to do much of anything, let alone relieve myself. Most public toilets are strange affairs and require precisely this gymnastic approach to excretion (do a Google image search on "Chinese Toilets"; I couldn't bring myself to photograph them). So you either train your bladder and gut to wait (not easy when you're drinking a lot of tea and eating a lot of cabbage), or learn to squat. Actually it's easier on the trains, because at least there is a handle to balance youself while the carriage rocks and rolls.  And there has been an improvement there. When I rode a hard seat train in Beijing 20 years ago, I noted that the toilet opened directly to the underside of the carriage...you could watch the tracks going by as you did your business. Trains this time at least didn't give you a view of the ground going by, at least in our hard sleeper cars. As I recall, our soft sleeper last year had actual sit-on toilets. 

The train brought us to the toilets in our rooms at Camp Wudang. They had proper seats and flushed, but the whole bathroom reeked. I'm told there were no U pipes in the plumbing, so through four floors, the sewer gases just wafted up through the drains. (And we WERE eating a lot of cabbage.) The only solution was to flush frequently and keep the door to the bathroom closed at all times. One of our tour members took to burning incense in the bathroom, not for any spiritual purpose, but to combat the odor and burn off the methane.  

Then there are the showers. Both this year and last, I was puzzled at first by the funny drain stoppers in the shower stall. Why I even bothered to use them I don't know because the stall just emptied out onto a main drain into the middle of the floor.

And toilet paper. I won the favor of my housekeeper who left me increasingly generous fresh portions of tissue every day--not a whole new roll, but a portion which didn't always have perforations. You can buy tissue, if you can communicate sufficiently with the vendor. One of our group purchased some, but it came in huge tabloid sheets that you had to tear apart carefully (or maybe they were kitchen towels). I managed to buy a roll, avoiding the vendor I used last year. That time to suggest what I needed, lacking a phrase book, I did a pantomime, a talent that develops quickly when you can't speak the language. Aha, the vendor beamed, and brought me a pair of underpants. No, try again. This time she looked triumphant and compassionate and brought me sanitary napkins. Finally, third time, I got the TP. My act provided the rest of the village vendors much entertainment...they pointed and laughed whenever I came around and offered me toilet paper no matter what I was trying to buy. Amazing thing: she remembered me this year: I am the Mrs. Whipple of China.  I may have established a new martial art in Wudang. Wiping wu shu.

Going to the Middle Kingdom? Take lots of Wet Ones and maybe a roll of two of Charmin.

You'll be thrilled to get back to a real hotel in Beijing or Hong Kong...flush toilets! perforated toilet paper! (But watch out, you'll still have a rock-hard mattress.)  And curious warnings in the bathroom, like "Sperry fioor"...if you can't say the "L", just leave it out or use a capital "I".

And for true civilization?  Hats off -- or pants off--to the designers in Narita Airport where you can actually get a bidet bath.  I was so overwhelmed by the instructions I left a book bookmarked with my boarding pass in the stall. Fortunately I remembered it and dashed back to the bidet to retrieve it.