10.21

I am starting to reconsider my black belt all over again. "Today is always an exception." This just means any decisions here, in all my idleness, hold no value. I will only know the answer when the moment comes to speak and to do.

My frequent advice to others remains the same for myself: do what you feel you must.

I keep thinking that, despite the drama and the anxiety and the stuckness, Hong Kong was a much more earnest and valuable experience for growth than Beijing or even Dunhuang has been. Beijing for me as a student has been a bit mundane; Dunhuang was "gorgeously lonely," as Wendy has put it, but the trip was over-the-top extravagant. Maybe Hong Kong was just sooner in my journey and more solitary in living conditions.

Or maybe the fact that I was teaching just led to a frantic sort of quietude and sense of purpose. I wrote in my notepad then, on the same page I got my McDull On The Peak stamp: "If you treat teaching as art, then it may be possible I was born for it."

Shanghai was okay too, now that I think about it, because we were really on our own for that week, which was a bit frightening. It is always the outward frame of the poverty line of a place that most interests and enchants me. I can forget the search for the strip club and the bars, but deeply printed in my heart even now is the homeless man singing Tibetan hymns, his voice resonating through an underpass, otherworldly. I wish I had taken a picture of any number of communal water taps for running water that come out of a spigot along the sidewalk for washing bowls and utensils of personal use. I wish I could paint the dusty sight of a woman drawing water from an actual well in the city. There is a small community of artists on The Bund who draw amazing portraits of tourists for dirt cheap, each of them practicing and comparing with the one they call 大哥--big brother. It sounds romantic, and it does offer a spectacular sort of awareness of life; but then the poor grandmothers with crying babies come begging for money, and you realize the artists are only skilled workers, you realize we all have to learn to live somewhow, you realize the colors beneath this waterfront are not so clean after all.

There are so many beautiful distractions.