Back in the Classroom

Yesterday I was stuck in terrible traffic caused by a terrible fatal three-car accident caused by someone who was driving the wrong way on the freeway at 4 in the morning--sounds hard to do, but happens with more frequency than you might expect. The freeway was closed for investigation over several exits, or entrances; apparently the difference is not clear to some. The traffic delay gave me a chance to contemplate the meaning of life even before the teddy bears and plastic flowers are placed on the roadside at the scene: once I discovered why the traffic wasn't moving, I was in a spot where I couldn't change my course and go home to wait it out even if I'd wanted to.

It was the first time I've driven myself to work in over a month, commuting as I have been with the Wizard. Traveling together in his car has given me opportunity to gawk around and use mobile devices with impunity. A passive partner in the passenger seat, I've been listening to HIS Teaching Company lectures, so far learning rather dreary biographical information about Mozart, Mahler, Shostakovich, and Churchill. We have an informal agreement that the driver gets to choose the audio. (I'd rather listen to Mahler than hear about his personal misery, to say nothing of Shostakovich.)

But yesterday, because the Wizard is on the mainland, I had the opportunity to resume my own Teaching Company lessons in my own hot little car (his big car has air-con)--literally, The Meaning of Life, Perspectives from the World's Great Intellectual Traditions.* I had left off the lectures before leaving for China in May, and then there was another sound system glitch that needed attention. It took some recollection, but I'd stopped just after Zen, and just before Hume--Lecture 22, Taking Stock of the Classical World. Since yesterday morning, I have quickly progressed from Hume to Kant to Mill to Nietzsche, with a little side trip into Tolstoy.

Who knew that The Death of Ivan Ilych could be interpreted as a Taoist fable? All through this journey into modernity and beyond, I was struck by ancient Taoist themes, usually just before the lecturer said, "Now this may remind you of the Taoists... ." Eastern thought is discussed far more --14 out of 36 TC lectures** --in this course than in any of the survey courses like this I took in college. In fact, I don't think Eastern thought was EVER included in my classic liberal arts humanities curriculum. Well, maybe once in a comparative religion class. In any case, I never would have expected to be listening to a lecture on "Nietzsche--Achieving Authenticity" some 40 years later in a traffic jam in Hawaii. Some eight o'clock class!

And now I'm looking forward to the drive home: moving on to Gandhi, Lame Deer, and the Dalai Lama, before the concluding lecture, "So, What Is the Meaning of Life?"

I just can't wait to find out. But it's a question I'll likely be asking until I die.

*The Wizard and I are both fans of The Teaching Company. I should point out that the prices cited on the the site are never what we pay; I can't imagine that anyone would...the ongoing "sales" are far more reasonable, and we expect to donate our collected curriculum to the university we both work at or pass them on to persons in need of education.

**And counting two lectures on Lame Deer, the Lakota Sioux medicine man, I think it adds up to a pretty nice balance of East and West, indigenous and European thinkers.

A Brush with Ambivalence

I've been spending some quiet time recently on my lanai studio with my brushes and ink, and studying some Chinese painting manuals. I picked up a couple of interesting volumes in a bookshop in the Beijing airport on my way home last month: very fine "How To" manuals of landscape, and bird and flower painting, the two major genres in Chinese painting, along with figure painting, which I don't do or have much interest in other than looking at. Although, one of my favorite paintings, the figure of a herbalist, at right, probably a copy of some classic, hangs in the window in a Chinese pharmacy in Chinatown, and I own a similar scroll of a literati guy with some ducks. But the style I am most attracted to is shan shui (mountain and water) landscape. My teacher is bird and flower painter, but she is tolerant of my interest and more than proficient to teach the techniques of landscape.

Though a teacher is essential, manuals are an interesting element in Chinese culture studies. Wuxia stories often involve the search for some esoteric lost martial arts manual that has the final secret to some ultimate power. Likewise painting manuals describe technique and offer background into the philosophy and techniques, very interesting once one has had the foundational guidance of a teacher. Similarly qigong videos and books are useful and informative to someone once they have been initiated into the basic techniques. You can't reliably learn these any of things just from a book, but once you have been taught, the books are of value.

In this frame of mind, I scrolled through an article in the New Yorker about the purchase of a painting we all surely know (if you studied English literature in high school--I thought the artwork was called "Thanantopsis"; it always illustrated the poem) and its recent destination in a new art gallery in Arkansas. Kindred Spirits, to which I alluded in reference to my own painting exercise not so long ago, was acquired in 2005 for some $35 million by Alice Walton, the middle daughter of Sam Walton (as in Wal-Mart, not that depression-era TV series), and something like the second or third wealthiest woman in the world. She's been buying lot of American art (not infrequently by cell phone while riding a horse) to display in a museum in her home town in Arkansas which boasts a bigger endowment than the Whitney. The dynasty's outlet --or at least its related philanthropic foundation --where I got a photo for my last Chinese visa is financing a major collection of American art. She is apparently not a shabby collector, but it is something of an affront--or surprise-- to the art establishment that her acquisitions will find a home in an obscure town in the Ozarks, as an economic boon to a heartland community.

Justifying her purchase of Kindred Spirits, she said of the previous owner, "They needed the money." I'd be glad to have her give me $350...even $35...for my little "kindred spirits" echo. Why not? It's in the Chinese style, but by an American. Sort of a reverse Wal-Mart tradition.

Live and Laugh at It All

The Wizard made a grocery run today, and despite returning home with an excess of plastic bags, he somewhat redeemed himself with a surprise: the first of the season's Rainier cherries, for which I budget a sizable guiltless amount of dough (and I don't mean pastry) while the things are in season. Not yet as sweet as I hope they will be --who knows what the weather in the Northwest has done to my favorite fruit--but a sign of better things to come. And maybe I can train the family shopper to take reusable bags, which he resists, convinced that they are "germy" and maybe not as eco-friendly as purported. I need to edit the plastic bag stash; I have a friend who has a dog that's bigger than she is and she always needs more poop bags, which is creepy to think about, but there it is.

Well, as the song goes:

Life is just a bowl of cherries
Don't take it serious,
Life's too mysterious
You work,
You save,
You worry so
But you can't take your dough
When you go, go, go

So keep repeating "It's the berries."
The strongest oak must fall
The sweet things in life
To you were just loaned
So how can you lose
What you've never owned

Life is just a bowl of cherries
So live and laugh, aha!
Laugh and love
Live and laugh,
Laugh and love,
Live and laugh at it all!

Sun and Moon Obsessions

Although the Summer Solstice came and went, marked largely by my beginning a new job...auspicious for me, I guess, but no one else, I note today, once again, that it is the mid-point, the yin/yang pivot really, of the Gregorian year, as many days ahead as behind. Just past new and dark, the moon begins to wax today (wax on/wax off). This weekend, a chance to regulate my breath, contemplate the cycles of my life, clean a closet, make a painting, get a haircut, finish the intriguing A New Interpretation of Chinese Taoist Philosophy - An Anthropological/Psychological View, by You-Sheng Li, Ph.D. (2005).

I acquired this volume of apparently self-published essays (which I recommend to fellow Tao-seekers and persons interested in Chinese cultural studies) almost two years ago, but it only just recently jumped off my shelf, after my return from Wudang Pilgrimage IV (吴朝圣四). In it Dr. Li hangs many of his arguments on an anthropological distinction between primary and secondary society (echoing the pre-heaven and post-heaven Taoist concepts). In an essay called "The South and The North," in a subsection "Social Power and Talented Culture are Separate," he writes (in a somewhat Aristotelian way):

Industry is near the military side, while education and academics are near the basic human nature side. ... Universities and academic institutions are places where human talents are concentrated. ... Military power is measurable and material stuff is measurable but human nature is not measurable.

Now I understand why I may be happier, in a Taoist way, in an academic institution (even though doing essentially the same things, managing proposals) than I was in a high-tech firm that did network security R&D for the DoD. I became frustrated at the over-emphasis on metrics and processes, at the expense of human nature, that seemed unrelated to the actual good we might have been accomplishing. To articulate this at this pivotal moment in the annual cycle seems significant to me. Tao manifests itself in my life in the most surprising ways.

Ah, now to that haircut....

Changes

Gosh, ten days go by, and it's almost July. I think I said the same thing just a year ago.

My brain is a little full and fuzzy (blame the Spam?), still in some kind of recovery from China, a couple weeks at home alone, and now a new job in a new milieu.

It took the new personnel department to point out that my driver's license was six months overdue for renewal and insist that I update it if I want to park my car on campus. Actually I knew it, but that's the sort of thing you can ignore...or I can...and anyway, I've been carrying my passport with its interesting China visas to prove my identity. I'd been putting off the delayed renewal because I didn't want to take a test, written or on-the-road. And as it turned out, I didn't have to. I just had to pay 20 bucks extra "for being so punctual," as the license clerk put it. (Amortized over seven years, the extra $20 on top of the $24 renewal doesn't seem so bad; the license would have expired on the same date even if I renewed it on time six months ago.)

I was a little shamed because I'd just read an item about women in Saudi Arabia for whom driving is something of a revolutionary act, a symbol of freedom. (A burqa-clad woman carries basic toiletries and a prayer rug with her in case she is caught and incarcerated for being behind the wheel of her SUV.) I was willing to risk being pulled over with an expired license; these women are risking being pulled over simply for DRIVING. I was looking at a fine; they are looking at serious jail time. But now, I'm street-legal until December 2018, by which time it is conceivable that I will make that 286,000 fly-me-to-the-moon milestone with TAO 61.

And in other women-and-work news, I noticed after reading Factory Girls, about female migrant workers in China, that the new trend is for the factories to relocate in the interior provinces like Sichuan, the source of many migrants...because labor is cheaper there. And China is outsourcing for the same reason, to Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and India. Just when you think you have figured out China politics and economics, it all changes by the time the book goes to paperback. In time, in some kind of economic taiji turn, I expect labor to become cheaper in the U.S. ...when some Laotian entrepreneur decides to set up a factory in Arkansas.

Back to Work

I arrived home from my pilgrimage to enjoy a vacation; I sent an email of resignation to my office from Beijing, certainly a first for the HR department. It was the earliest I could have done it, not having the new position quite lined up until Bob Dylan's 70th birthday, an auspicious day to quit. After using the hotel's 20-yuan-an-hour computer, I went back to my room and listened to Maggie's Farm on my iPod 61 times. (Well, not quite, but it is a ritual I observe when I quit a job.)

I have allowed myself a gentle re-entry: minor transitional activities out of the job and some lunches with friends, but mostly just ignoring housework and recovering from the nasty respiratory souvenir I brought from China. (One of China's major exports is phlegm. Since there is an ongoing campaign against spitting, I think they just send all the crud home with visitors.) Reading, writing, painting, watching DVDs, and practicing the new qigong routines--my days have been ordered by these activities. (I have failed to do any planned serious housecleaning and tomorrow I MUST renew my drivers license before returning to the work-world on Tuesday.)

I will miss the luxury of lying in bed half the day to read. I finished Peter Hessler's third China book, Country Driving, which I began before I left. I'd read both of his previous books, and always enjoyed (and envied) his pieces for the New Yorker about life in China. Towards the end, it seemed to point to the next book in my to-read pile, Factory Girls, by Leslie T. Chang, where it had been languishing since it came out in 2008. I did not know that the author is Peter Hessler's wife; they wrote the two books at the same time, together in Colorado. This seems very romantic.

Country Driving was a terrific re-entry read...I could feel vividly all the craziness of his highway and interpersonal adventures in China, but Factory Girls was the real surprise, about the most current cultural revolution in China, the huge migration of rural workers to the cities, where they find jobs gluing together shoes and punching machine parts, manufacturing all the things we don't anymore in the U.S. Even though the book relates the author's observations as much as a decade earlier in China, it still is timely; who hasn't heard the recent stories of suicides in Shenzhen sweatshops? (Oddly, my guide/interpreter wants me to acquire an iPad for her because it's cheaper in the U.S. But they make them there!)

Factory Girls gives my own transition from one job to another an odd perspective. The factory girls of Chang's book leave their village homes, holding up their half of the sky, and transform themselves in the city, with boyfriends, fashion, and an unexpected determination to better themselves. They never go back home except during that newsworthy annual trek at Chinese New Year, taking gifts and cash back to village families who have no clue what the girls are actually doing in the factory cities.

Chang confines her story mainly to the young women, and gives it an interesting twist: an interwoven family memoir about her own family's immigration from China in the '50s. It is good to understand one's own micro-history against the larger story of current events. Family events and personalities become integrated, make sense in a way they might not seen in isolation. There are lots of personal stories about and by refugees and victims of the turmoil of China's recent history (i.e., the past century or so), but Chang finds parallels to the current internal migration in the country. What could easily have been two books, is a marvelously integrated whole, which explains something about the Chinese mentality and character, and sheds a new, bright light on China that defies the usual stereotypes held by Americans who don't seem to realize that Mao is dead and a puzzling new New China has risen. (In some ways of course, Mao is not dead, in the same way that Qin, Han, Tang, and Qing emperors are not dead...that 5,000 years of Chinese civilization.)

I am wallowing in a historical moment of my own...I would really rather be retiring than just switching to a new office position. (But like lots of boomers of what used to be retirement age, not working isn't quite the option just yet. We're that 10 years younger generation I mentioned previously.) I'm thinking of these determined factory girls who claim their independence (from family, if not work), entrepreneurial spirits who will never live the life of their mothers. I cannot imagine the intolerable conditions of the factory--well actually I can. For a few weeks after my freshman year in college, I did a stint in a shirt laundry, working with mangles and hangars to process piles of wet dress shirts. It was mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausting. Unknown to me, the laundry had gone bankrupt and I never got paid, but I did have an experience among some people with whom I had absolutely nothing in common except slaving for money. An old woman with grotesquely burn-scarred arms, a tough girl who told stories of beating up her boyfriend or her mother the night before, men who had maintained the equipment and kept the steam flowing for years.

"Why are you going to college," the tough bitch asked. I couldn't give her an answer she understood, I'm not sure I even knew then, but I did know I would not spend more than a few weeks in a truly sweaty shop. (Now I might answer, "To have the luxury to move from one office job to another with a trip to China in between.") I also did a brief stint in retail, selling wedding gowns in another between real-jobs moment, and after reading Factory Girls, I am certain they would have made higher commissions than I ever did, possibly ending up owning the shop. But quite frankly, I don't know if I ever have had their determination to create their own new futures. I was protected, pampered and lucky. I grew up in the U.S. My parents got through the Great Depression and WWII. And then I came along. And that was it.

Leaping Forward in Time

One of the questions routinely asked of foreign visitors in China is "How old are you?" I usually got amazed looks when I was honest with strangers and cute massage therapists: "Wo liushisan sui." Despite short sage-silver hair that looks like I may have abandoned a nunnery just weeks ago, but with a relatively unlined, unwrinkled, even, moist complexion (which I attribute to living in a mild humid climate, good sun-blocking moisturizers, and retin-A), people always thought I was younger than I am. Chinese femmes du certain age liked to pose for pictures with me. I must look like a sturdy energetic immortal who does not choose to dye her hair black. (I should open a retin-A franchise; it would be more effective for youth-preservation than the ubiquitous Chinese skin-whitening products.)

Still, I am unnerved by the revelation in China Daily that the Bee Taoist is only 76. (I am unnerved that I might think anyone is "only 76".) I would have put him a decade beyond than that. And once, while strolling in a park on the morning of my arrival in Beijing, two women with a little one in a stroller proudly pointed to the bent old ye ye following with a walker. "He is 80!" I would have sworn he was 90 or even pushing 100, although 80 is a respectable age in China.

Then it occurred to me. There is a time warp in China, and it was caused by Mao Zedong. I think Baby Boomers and their parents -- that is to say, everyone still alive and born before 1966 -- have actually physically aged 10 years, if not chronologically. The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution cost all those folks decades of their youth, like a debit account; in the effort to move China ahead, the effect was just to make everyone appear older than they really are.

In contrast, it seems that all those coming of age or born post-Mao, after 1976, actually seem younger than their chronological age. I was surprised that the master who taught me Five Animals was 45; he looked mid-30s. Other "young people" well into their 30s seemed to me to be just coming out of their 20s. I credit the Taoist practices for longevity and immortality for the physical youth of the masters and teachers in the mountains; but I suppose the economic revolution since Deng Xiao Ping has served to keep the beneficiary generation young. (I see that in the U.S. as well...the narcissism of the "Me Generation" and material comforts keep one from aging as expected, or as demonstrated by the generation who lived through the Great Depression and the stifling '50s. And then there's cigarettes.)

In the Chinese TV serial drama I just completed, The Shadow of Empress Wu, which featured the Five Animals as a plot point about health, there is a curious bit of philosophy quoted, twice.

"People in their 60s count down their death by years; people in their 70s count down their death by months; people in their 80s will die without any sign." Anything after that is considered immortality. In his weird way, I guess Mao--who was preoccupied with his own longevity-- just pushed people closer to immortality.