12.2 to 12.7 - a week of wind

12.2 - "回答" by 北岛

卑鄙是卑鄙者的通行证，

高尚是高尚者的墓志铭，

看吧，在那镀金的天空中，

飘满了死者弯曲的倒影。



冰川纪过去了，

为什么到处都是冰凌？

好望角发现了，

为什么死海里千帆相竞？


我来到这个世界上，

只带着纸、绳索和身影，

为了在审判前，

宣读那些被判决的声音。


告诉你吧，
世界
我--不--相--信！

纵使你脚下有一千名挑战者，

那就把我算作第一千零一名。


我不相信天是蓝的，

我不相信雷的回声，

我不相信梦是假的，
我不相信死无报应。


如果海洋注定要决堤，

就让所有的苦水都注入我心中，

如果陆地注定要上升，

就让人类重新选择生存的峰顶。



新的转机和闪闪星斗，

正在缀满没有遮拦的天空。

那是五千年的象形文字，

那是未来人们凝视的眼睛。

"Reply" by Beidao

Contempt is the contemptible's pathway,
virtue is the virtuous' epitaph,
look--on the gilded plates of heaven
float crooked reflections of the dead.

If the ice age is over,
why are there still icycles everywhere?
If the Cape of Good Hope has been found,
why do a thousand sails compete on the Dead Sea?

I came to this earth
carrying paper, rope, and my silhouette
to, before the great trial comes,
read aloud the sounds of judgment.

I'll tell you, world:
I--don't--believe--you!
Even if you've got a thousand challengers underfoot,
then make my name one thousand and one.

I'm not convinced by blue skies,
the echoes of a thunderstorm,
I'm not convinced that dreams are false,
that we can die without retribution.

If the seas and oceans are doomed to flood,
let the bitter waters empty into me,
if the land is doomed to rise,
let our people choose a new crest to live upon.

New change and flickering stars
are stitching the empty sky--
that's five thousand years of pictographs
that's our future of people's staring eyes


12.3 - the train station

Waiting to go back to Henan, first to stop at Shaolin on my own, then to meet with Sara and head to Wugang where the kids are. I haven't traveled in a month. This waiting and external motion are, once again, so freeing.

The only difference this time is I've made really good friends by now that I didn't get to say goodbye to. It's only for a weekend, but I feel a different sort of loneliness now mixing together with the old one.

train-stop cafe
familiar broken seat
rockin'

I don't have time to go "South of the Clouds" next week, but this quarter abroad is ending perfectly. At the farewell dinner, each Chinese class is doing some sort of performance. My class is singing "Beijing Welcomes You." I got to Hong Kong scared to death of karaoke, and came to Beijing saying that by the end, I would be able to sing one song in Mandarin. I can't even describe how happy it makes me to be singing this song with a group of people I feel so comfortable with.

These next two weeks in China I'm doing everything I need to do, getting my house in order as I prepare to go home. Fati told me six months ago to expect for nothing to have changed, for the whole other side of my life to not recognize the distance I have traveled. I plan for life to go on and persist in a massive unnoticeableness. But my being Chinese in China has not been some temporary matter to be forgotten or even to be clung to.

I told Michelle the other day that I recognize the barriers in all teacher-student relationships, that the formality of the system is a structural necessity and that nearly all the work that goes into lesson planning never communicates from point A to point B. But, I said, it's all worth it, if you work with a group of kids for weeks and have one, small, star-blink moment in which both sides relax, some sort of understanding bridges that empty space, and you suddenly become two people just existing and learning from one another. And then you get back to the blind face of structured life again. But that moment remains, like an air bubble just pressed against the surface of an ice cube until it all melts into one flow.

The same goes for my awakenings in this country.


12.5 - midnight at the Luoyang train station

No time for sleep today. Not even a seat available on this four-hour train I'm taking to Luohe. No comment on my feelings.

Also, not enough clothes either. The solstice is on the 21st, but winter must have really started today. I have never felt such a dramatic turnaround in weather, nor have I ever been so cold that my feet froze over in the tour bus.

Saw the sun rise from the train as it arrived, and the sunset from the bus on the way back from Shaolin. It was a Buddhist tour, stopping at a lot of sites like the residence and burial ground of Xuanzang (the monk in Journey to the West), who brought the scriptures from India to China. The small tour group had some fun old people who got really excited about drinking water from Xuanzang's well and taking pictures with some trees. One brave New Zealander who had just graduated and was traveling in China for three weeks, and didn't speak a word of Chinese, was with us. I did my best at translating, learning things in the process like why we put our tour stickers on the gate-wall of one temple to form 福寿 with it.

When people ask me now, "你是哪里人?" I don't ever say "美国人" anymore. I answer, "广东人" and explain the rest slowly. One woman from Hunan spun this sort of Australian accent on her speech, saying things like "Baiyjing" for 北京. They're all curious, and find the fun in meeting people, and we never exchange names or say goodbye to cheapen the shortest of time.

I got conned into my first strange cult-like experience. At I think the 白马寺, we all entered a room where a Buddhist priest gave a small lecture and sang hymns for us, then called us each up individually to bless us, sprinkle some powder, and hand us a candle. Then we went to the back room behind the deep red curtain, where they were asking for donations for priests to continue praying in our names. I wrote my name, then "全家平安," and gave up 99元 because I kept telling the guy I didn't understand but he wouldn't let me leave. In a non-religious place, I would just hit people and run and keep my cash (not really (well, maybe)). I hope my family feels the blessing as it comes.

Shaolin is culturally important because it was the first stop of Bodhidharma, who brought a new discipline to the Buddhist teachings and started Zen (禅 in Chinese). The pure martial arts come from religious principle and training. After all the burnings of the temples, it was reopened in the last century by government sponsorship in response to media portrayals of it as the birthplace of martial arts.

We saw some kids put on a show/demo, which they probably do every day, to the background music of songs like those from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which just makes obvious how contradictory the situation was, how very misinformed these people are. I was impressed by their coming out into the cold and taking off their windbreakers to do useless flips on the stage. They also showed some 气功 feats, which were genuine but also standard show-fare. I wish those kids freedom from this place one day, and understanding and cultivation for their own sakes and no one else's.

The two best moments of this day. First, sitting in the windy sun outside a small temple by a potted fire, eating noodles with these old ladies selling trinkets. The quiet of that table has been more real than the introductions of the tours. Second, the path from Shaolin to the Pagoda Forest (the prettiest tombs I've ever seen, in the sandy sunlight), where the martial arts kids were horsing around or playing soccer. The grass is so green, the mountain haze is so layered.

Oh, the tour guide was cool, too. She spit after every paragraph of explanation, and kept asking for my camera to take pictures of me. I don't think it's cause she liked me, just that she was dissatisfied with how little I smiled in the cold.

second floor
curious eyes; late train
a wind


12.7 - at the 漯河 McDonald's with Sara, studying for our final tomorrow and waiting for a train ride home to Beijing

Christmas music is playing in this overheated haven of western novelty. We made Christmas cards with the youngest students today. We've been singing "Silent Night" and "O Holy Night" in the intermittent moments of reflection this weekend. It is about that time, isn't it.

There has been nothing in my life so tragically beautiful as this town in the mid-east of China and its 不可思议 kids. We've been noticing the oddly placed, short palm trees scattered through the city, which everyone we've asked knows is imported from a warmer-weather location, yet their innocent smiles about the simple prettiness of the trees tell a novel's worth of story.

We played frisbee with shy kids at the kindergarten. We climbed the highest mountain in town and held class at the top. We went to the home of two new students, who live in a big recycling yard, and when we asked the boy Toby which room was his, he pointed to the bed in the corner with a curtain covering it. We played with their dogs and harvested some vegetables in the super-green-for-wintertime fields nearby. We taught our host family to make pizza with those greens as toppings. We played mahjong, chess, and checkers (all Chinese) together.

I talked a lot with 安老师 about education here, and the polar opposite experiences between him and Victoria as they grew up in schools here, the former hardly ever having had classes and just playing in the village, the latter never learning to play because she coudl only study. We talked about our dreams for education and for the kids here, and the problems with the system and the authorities within the system and all the money problems that make this all very much real.

In my final speech for Chinese class last week I said that these kids helped me to understand exactly what my life could ahve been like if I had grown up here instead of immigrating. The most valuable moment of this weekend and the one I'll probably memorize the most in my heart was this late afternoon walking to the bus from the bottom of the mountain, only Kate left with us, wearing her orange backpack and eatin gher endless supply of healthy snacks. She's my favorite after Jasmine, so precise but so youthful in the way she speaks. She doesn't understand me too clearly when I talk though, so we just walked side by side in silence for a while.

The moment I'll never forget is seeing her split off from us to catch a different bus, walking alone into the late sunlight on this open city street. It was an open reflection into the pure sort of quietude and familiar adventurousness I remember from that age, taking buses to school and to the dojo, walking alone in the sunlight and city shadows. I'll never forget that moment's reminder of hope and loneliness, that profundity as we passed by Kate later and I saw her pull a bottle of juice from her backpack, no particular expression on her face but just being herself, and completely herself.

I don't know if I can write poems anymore; instead, I just see them everywhere I go.

-

On the train now, the two of us in side-by-side bottom-bunk beds, some strange sort of culmination of comfort for my last train ride in China for I don't know how long. The sound of strangers--which somehow always means mothers and fathers and uncles and aunties here--throughout the car makes me wonder about the shock of returning to the states, of not having that city-wide sense of family just from the sound and tone of people's voices.

The train from Luoyang to Luohe on Thursday midnight was an enlightening nightmare. I could only get a standing-space ticket on the four-hour train from 1am to 5am. But that's not an accurate name for it; the ticket itself said 无座, which is "no seat," or "no designated space" I stood on about a leg and a half for the whole time in the conductor's doorway and inhaled everybody's smoke; the girl beside me threw up in the first hour; in the last leg of the ride, the conductor opened up the furnace beside us and shoveled in the coal, washing off the floor by splattering black water with a straw broom. Conditions were perfect for me to experience the most ground-level transportation and the most ground-level people: I wasn't sick, or queasy, had little luggage, and nobody with me to consider or worry about. I'm grateful for that. But never again.