windows to a dream

• While taking in the river from John's fifth-story window some days ago, I watched as a young Chinese student clambered upon a rock beneath the wall that separates the back courtyard from the water. It was night and she surely felt alone. She threw a folded piece of paper over the wall, and shouted inaudibly over the waves. Its jejune babbling appeared indifferent to her swallowed cries. In 2046, we are told

  Do you know what people did in the old days when they had a secret? They would climb a mountain and find a tree. They would carve a hole in the tree and whisper the secret into the hole, which they would pack with mud so no one would ever hear it.

• Friday afternoon I shared a taxi to Kangding with a young and modern Tibetan woman. When she realized I could basically understand her Sichuanese, she invited me to go for beers. I didn't meet her until Sunday, determined to make good on her challenge to outdrink me in spite of the school night. I caught a car in the rain, and as we approached Guza a techno song repeated the chorus, "I don't want no small dick boys." I saw her waiting through the window. She had a face like a wolf and, as I discovered when the evening drew to a close, a boyfriend.
  

• Using a volleyball and a basketball last week in my tutorials, I demonstrated how the tilt of the Earth's axis relative to the sun gives cause to the seasons. I also explained the reason different hemispheres and seasons see different stars, and why the moon waxes and wanes though the face of the man (or rabbit) never changes. For kicks, I showed them Google images of the relative size of the moon to the Earth, the Earth to the sun, the sun to the Milky Way (Silver River), and the Milky Way to the "rest" of the universe. After they took in the pictures, I drew the curtains for dramatic effect to reveal towering mountains and a swollen river. In Thursday's group, Karma Sonam exclaimed

  Oohh! Life really is a dream!

  
  

Practising British English

Please excuse the following, as it is an intentionally pretentious downer written to salvage my mood.

The water of the Dadu River, the sonorous flowing of which outside my window puts me to rest each evening, has risen considerably in the last week. The water has swallowed a number of large boulders, ingesting all but an impressionist's stroke of swirl and eddy.

In Kangding this weekend, Tenzin read to me a CNN Asia story about a pair of mudslides in Ganzi Prefecture, where we reside. Soon he discovered that rains along the swollen Dadu had caused the mudslides. In Shimian, a county a couple of hundred kilometers downriver,

rains caused a rock to tumble down a hillside and slam into a bus, knocking the vehicle off the road and killing nine people.

People have related stories to me before about encountering blood-soaked buses crushed by falling rocks. I've only witnessed such automotive fragility in its less natural form: leaving Chengdu a queue of bus passengers milled about looking dazed; a hundred yards away one the form of the driver hung twisted and exposed from the mangled chassis of his small car.

This evening due to a certain ennui and latent frustration I left my flat before the usual suspects from my class came to accompany me to a dinner of egg and tomato noodles in the canteen. I walked to Sunshine Island, a nearby restaurant, with Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls in my hand.

They served my beer cold in a fluted glass, which almost allowed me to ignore the derivative flavor of the hop-less rice appellation. I chuckled through passages, Gogol's humour carrying through (though certainly diminished) though it must have been impossibly difficult to translate. I am finding this satire to be a sarcastic respite, though it's strangely difficult to point to a specifically funny passage. The first of a trilogy to rival Dante's The Divine Comedy, Dead Souls held the place of Inferno. Gogol burned the text corresponding to Purgatory in a fit of insanity. Before he could write the companion to Paradise, he died in spiritual asceticism shouting, "A ladder! Quick, a ladder!"

The book has been my only cause to smile today, save the four Tibetan girls to whom I explained why we observe seasons. A volleyball represented the Sun, and a basketball the Earth, the bisecting black lines of which lent itself to a facile illustration of the way in which the Northern Hemisphere leans away from our star in winter.

As I ate fried potatoes and braised tofu (the final day of the Saka Dawa fast is Thursday), I beckoned to a black cat facing away from me. As it turned, I realized what I believed to be a child's toy in its mouth was indeed the soulless remains of a lizard. Small pink sacs bulged from beneath its tail. My students don't understand why Christians believe animals have no souls.

That image and a number of others--cacti budding among sheer cliffs, the warm dry wind of the valley, a crude stone edifice nearby concealing a pisser--coaxed my memory to dwell on New Mexican summers past, a sentimental trope to which my idle mind has resorted for the latter third of my life. Even as a child some remarked on the curious way that I stare at nothing when consumed by thought or fantasy or the mind's bare qualia (if such a thing were possible), dissociated from the stimuli of an observable world.

I do consider myself a patient man. Travelling for days on a bus or plane or train is not so terrible, and I've been known to forget to leave the house for days. Accordingly, the knowledge of everything that must be done before I finish teaching in five weeks has not so much made me anxious but has merely broken my will. I feel a little dishonest wishing to be in another place in the future, wasting my ever limited time and knowing that I will miss this place once gone.

If you have read this far, please accept my sincerest apologies. In truth I've been rather happy of late, though busy, perhaps you could say happily busy. I felt so bloody pleased with myself the other day that I reread Shelley's Ode to the West Wind and fitted it to my own fancy. I have also thought of seeing you again at the end of the summer, not with broken will, but with the pleasant satisfaction that we are yet too young to refuse the dares of our coy world.

There's always more to be said, but words are ghosts and we are not.

Catching Patois

My class and a group of second-year students in Yushu have been penpals since last term. One of their teachers is a guy who taught here at Kangding Teacher's College three years ago. Jon and his girlfriend were congratulating Tenzin and Maowei on their marriage when I met him at the Hemp House in Chengdu.


Jon taught here with Tenzin (who is now in Kangding proper) and Satina, whose picture is prominent two posts below. Jon kept an exquisitely eclectic website while he was here. Among other things, he writes heavily about the unique language derivations of this area on the aptly titled Catching Patois

[Patois / pronounced patwa / n. (pl. same / pawaz) regional dialect, differing from the literary language].

I found the notable following:

• Thanka Painting
  
• Beyond Good and Evil
• Jon's firsthand account of a street protest in Chengdu
• a weird story by a certain Wez Mond about eating pot
• a Post-Colonialist reduction of the Orientalism of The Dao of Pooh
  

and such incisive prose as

sun got big 'gain today. warm enough to go without the long underwear that's been on everyday all day for some four months, and so the cool noon breeze rolls in through my sweater and loose button-up. a sweet feeling; like that time planting trees and awoke in mid-night, stumbled down in darkness to the cold lake, undressed and dove in. and the water rushed over my body and balls and in between the toes.

and

There is a realm of cannibal spirits, where ogres wander about feeding on each other. And there are Buddhas with wide eyes, fire in their hair and skulls tied round the neck. I find comfort in the thought that these are gods too and might sometimes have their time, and better days are not far away.

and

Tom and Jerry speak Sichuanese too, and right lively like. And children crowd around a tv on the street to see the show and hear the words they use at home, and in their dreams and with their pets. And the older generations enjoy it too; there are few other television programs in a language that many of them understand.

At the top of July I hope to visit Jon in Yushu, where he pulls his water from a well each morning and has holidays to allow the nomads to dig the medicinal fungal hosts of dead caterpillars.

When July ends I will be celebrating my older brother's Golden Birthday in New Orleans. I intend to be sopping with Abita-laced sweat.

Good Idea, Bad Idea

• Good Idea

I met Satina Anziano a number of weeks ago, though I first heard of her from a community publication in McLeod Ganj last summer. Satina used to be a teacher out here, and had written an article about life in occupied Kham for the English language Indian rag put out by the Louisiana Himalaya Association. She returned to Sichuan to aid with the natural home-birth of the half-Tibetan daughter of a mutual friend from Colorado, also a former teacher.


Experienced in the area in which I live, Satina has written a fascinating and beautiful account of the birth titled, "An Ex-Pat Birth Experience: Having a Child in Rural China."

• Bad Idea

A friend pointed me to a travel journal written by a young Christian missionary somewhere in Tibet. The young author and his companions misunderstand and willfully belittle the native religion of the local people, who seem to be nothing more than good hosts for the travelers.

The third building we went to was the most satanic sight I have ever seen. We entered while one monk was in a ritualistic chant banging on a metal cylinder and we walked around the room about the size of a 2000 square foot house. What we saw was again hard to put in words but without freaking you out too much we saw pictures of bodies split in half, eyeballs popping out of eyes, blood streaming out of flesh, creatures with multiple heads, men with bodies of animals and the entire time the boy that was with us was saying what peaceful God's he worships (sorry might have freaked you out). Man how blinded these people are. I have never been in more intense prayer in my life.

To be honest, he has freaked me out.

V

We can but hope he's in a heaven of his own design.

When I finished 1984 in 1997, my heart was seared by an unpredictable world of overwhelming cruelty and indifference. Some years later, the ending of The Sirens of Titan taught me to triumph in spite of that world, and healed a scorched heart.

$0.35 in 1959, First Edition

Dad's copy, which I read

MCTenz Gives Tibetan Teens a Dose of Authentic Hip-Hop

Cath Marsh, the New Zealander who taught my class last year, has been trying out her new English learning materials on the students on the weekend. Following from her conviction that language must be learned in context and with interesting content, the module she is currently testing is on hip-hop.

In Kangding she bumped into a vacationing Tenzin Gyaltsen, a half-Tibetan from California (not to be confused with my colleague Tenzin Mullin, who is not Tibetan). He is an MC in Chengdu performing around China, and is a director of Pro-Motion Solutions, working to expand the hip-hop and DJ scene in Asia. He blogs at MCTenz.com.

She invited him up to give the class his views on hip-hop and a first-hand example of MCing, with Sacsha on the beat-box. It was classic (don't miss Tenzin's lecture notes on the board). Even if you're in a rush, watch this video. It's about the sweetest thing I've seen since being in New Orleans or India (you know I wouldn't lie to you):



Update: here's the URL for the Youtube video in case the embed becomes corrupt.

Tenzin has a few pictures of some break dancers in Kangding and his version of the experience on his blog.

I got pretty fired up during his explanation of hip-hop culture, and the students were definitely into it. He stressed that the theme of struggle in hip-hop stems in part from the oppression of minorities in the Bronx in the late Sixties and Seventies. "Struggle, Revolution, Growth." I asked him if the emphasis on cutting down rivals in MC Battles, out-flexing other B-Boys in a face-off, and throwing up the best bombs and tags was a way of getting one's opponent to be the best they can be. He didn't think so, but agreed that that was a result.

At that time my moustache was freshly crafted, and I was a little paranoid that they'd think I was a redneck winger from Louisiana. I couldn't get Deltron's words outta my head:

A lot of white boys like the style and copy
Dig in something deeper and you'll peep that were not free
It's not about the separation its about the population

Word. I've been trying to reconcile the opposing ideas that hip-hop is about individual power and that it is about community. At some point last week when reading about something unrelated, I stumbled across this story in WireTap: The Political Power of the Midwest. In spite of the title, this post is about how progressive urban grassroots organizers use hip-hop to mold the characters of inner-city youth, in community centers like Elementz and Urban Underground. "Our central theme is respect. We don't have the typical metal detectors and security guards. Instead, we focus on letting young people in on nearly all of the decision-making."

On DailyKos I also came across an interesting diary when I was doing a little research on grassroots hunger initiatives. The Politics of Hip-Hop reads like a manifesto constructed from hip-hop flows, arguing that the nature of hip-hop is political, oriented towards the class struggle of the common man and woman (not necessarily the black man and woman) and based on revolution. I know it sounds Socialistic but it grow up. When I began looking, I found similar sentiments. One diary encourages us to "peep" an email from Nasty Nes, who lists the links for the Hip-Hop League of Voter's local voting guides and give a heads up on common practices of disenfranchisement. Young Voters are still makin' it happen... introduces the Hip-Hop Summit and its relationship to the Youth Movement.

Finally, wu ming asks is political hip-hop dead? I think you'll see from the comments that the answer is fuck no it ain't dead. The comments are also a sure spot to score some downloading ideas for your personal library of underground hip-hop.

Let's get one thing straight, though. I'm a Northern European mutt raised in a professional class family in Central Louisiana. I'm a white boy who "likes the style," but I don't copy. I didn't get into hip-hop until I was in college, when I realized the musical eclecticism of Handsome Boy Modeling School samples, the lyrical deftness of Kool Keith, and the powerful simplicity of the politics of Digable Planets. These are the same reasons I listen to independent music (not emo, Chris and Mike) like Pink Mountaintops, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Silver Jews.

I draw power from this music not because of my race or my extra-curricular habits, but because it inspires me and has the potential to focus the revolutionary fervor of my peers. We're not the MTV Generation, we're not Generation Y, we aren't the Generation of Social Values or the Millennial Generation or the Nine-Eleven Generation (maybe the Generation of the Federal Flood, just maybe). I'm not sure what we are, together, though I am certain of one thing: most of us know shit when we smell it.

A Union of Dunces

This post is a continuation of a recent post titled "Confederacy of Dunces." I know the line spacing is FUBAR but I'm too lazy to go through the HTML to find the problem.

I've done a bit more digging into the opinions on MyDD and DailyKos as to whether the South should be important to the national progressive movement. What I've found amounts to a full-blown debate. Simply glancing at the list of diaries tagged "The South" will give you an idea of what I mean.

In 2005, Tom Schaller wrote a book titled Whistling Past Dixie, in which he argues that national Democrats should ignore the South and build a permanent majority coalition by solidifying gains in the West and Mid-west. Though they often give lip-service to Howard Dean's Fifty-State Strategy, I feel that the primary contributors of DailyKos and MyDD generally agree with Schaller's thesis. I often read MyDD and Kos, and usually like their views (these sites allow members to sign up for free and write diaries. The best diaries on DailyKos are highlighted on the main page. Members and editors frequently make comments to further discussion).

For example, take the DailyKos diary "The South: Democrats Don't Get It" by someone called The Poet Laureate. In response to a different diary in which someone presents a stereotyped list of Southern white males, The Poet Laureate makes the following point in response to the stereotype of Southerners as gun-enthusiasts: "We do need to understand both the cultural relevance of guns in the South, however. We also need to understand that the South maintains the awareness of a distinct cultural identity in many respects, and Southerners are wary of "outsiders'" attempts to assimilate them to another culture. I suspect this is at the root of the Civil War obsession down here; it has less to do with resisting change and social progress than maintaining a unique identity."

National progressive's unwillingness to engage with the South comes from their ignorance of the South, and a selective memory that focuses on segregation and forgets the roots of American Populism.

Another diary, pico's "Kos is Wrong on Louisiana," does a nice job of summarizing the decline of recent pro-choice legislators in our great state. I quite like the way she finishes her piece:

We don't agree because we acknowledge that strongholds only become strongholds when the other side has allowed its presence to dwindle. That's the essence of Dean's strategy, and the contempt it received from Begala is not entirely different than the contempt some people have shown for the state of Louisiana.

So my question for the community is this: do we take the Dean route, roll up our sleeves, and get to work building grassroots efforts in Louisiana, or do we take the Begala route and avoid Louisiana completely?

Either way, let's give some respect to the liberals who have stayed behind, who are sitting on their porches in New Orleans, angry that the state around them has veered hard Right, frightened that violent crime has taken a sudden upswing, depressed that large chunks of the city are still in shambles, and uncertain as hell about the future. The last thing they need is to be dismissed by the rest of us. They need a bit of our support right now, if you can spare it.

I have given this a fair amount of thought, and while I remember a lot of right-wing reactionaries and fence-sitting politicians from my youth, I also have this vague feeling that Alexandria was nonetheless home to many a closeted progressive.

Another diary pointed me to the excellent article, "The Way Down South," on the subject at The Nation. I highly recommend reading this for those who are interested. One highlight includes this quote:

"Today the Democratic Party stands between two great forces.... On one side stand the corporate interests of the nation, its moneyed institutions, its aggregations of wealth and capital, imperious, arrogant, compassionless.... On the other side stands the unnumbered throng which gave a name to the Democratic Party and for which it has presumed to speak. Work-worn and dust-begrimed, they make their mute appeal, and too often find their cry for help beat in vain against the outer walls."

These words were spoken 114 years ago by William Jennings Bryan. Again, I'd like to copy the closing remarks of the essay:

And yet a stubborn belief in the poor, backward, reactionary cracker South of myth still shapes and distorts American politics. By surrendering the region, Democrats have simultaneously abandoned the old hope of a durable national progressive majority. They have passively allowed right-wingers to build a mighty fortress for the defense of free-market excess in a region that is home to almost half--47 percent--of the Americans who call themselves populists. They have allowed economic, racial and cultural divisions to fester. And now, even with the Republicans' Southern strategy wearing thin, they are lurching toward an even more dramatic break with the South.

It ain't wise, and it ain't right. I can't say it better than Chris Kromm, director of the liberal Institute for Southern Studies in Durham, North Carolina. "For Democrats to turn their back on a region that half of all African-Americans and a growing number of Latinos call home, a place devastated by Hurricane Katrina, plant closings, poverty and other indignities--in short, for progressives to give up on the very place where they could argue they are needed most--would rightfully be viewed as a historic retreat from the party's commitment to justice for all."

There are many reasons to be committed to either national political party. For me, I don't want Democrats to regain popularity in Louisiana because I don't like the GOP. I also don't like the idea of a national party having too much power in a place like Louisiana, where locals must have the ability to determine our own future. I'd like to see real progressives in our state because we desperately need innovative social policy and economic populism.

This weekend the transparently biased Dead Pelican linked to this opinion piece at the DailyKos about the challenges that Mary Landrieu will face in her upcoming election: "Why Mary Landrieu is the Most Endangered Democrat up for Reelection Next Year." The comments section is especially telling if you'd like to get a feel how the national liberal blogosphere feels about our Senator. Most think that she isn't progressive at all and a slave to our oil industry. Much of the debate is driven by ignorance of our local politics and a desire to recast our state in the mold of northern-style liberalism.

These are my people, yet they don't understand me at all.

Confederacy of Dunces

I'm a daily reader of the political blog My Direct Democracy. They first got my attention when they raised the money for Tim Tagaris to cover the most recent attempt to unseat William Jefferson. I find the analysis of MyDD to be generally very interesting, and not quite as annoying as DailyKos can sometimes be.

Recently, though, a couple of posts have uncovered the way in which the South is viewed by the representatives of the current American progressive movement (the Gunbelt refers to the production of weapons in the Military Industrial Complex, of which most factories are located in the South):

What is clear though is that we need to begin to understand economic policies and tax structures as tools in remapping America. There is a moment for the next ten years, during which a non-Southern culture controls the political machinery of the Federal government and the South's veto can be overcome with a brutal series of threats to the region's excessive Federal subsidies and reliance on socialist corporate welfare. If we're smart, we can puncture the institutional architecture that allows the Gunbelt to thrive and build a new America along the networked rule-based freedom-enhancing tolerant lines that exist in the bulwark areas of Blue America.

And in a different post:

The electoral landscape has as its governing party a coalition that has cut out the authoritarian South. And long-term, the authoritarian South can now be tamed, since its dependence on Federal subsidies has grown to become a serious addiction.

I wrote a pretty had criticism of the way the South had been characterized in the comments, but it wasn't nearly as thought out as one that was posted shortly thereafter by someone names Chris. Here's a highlight:

It's telling that you claim labor in the 30s was the only "real" progressive movement in our country. I've been active in the labor movement to have no problem with that. Others might point to the Populists or the black freedom movement, which of course were largely based in the South. But that wouldn't fit your world-view that the South is a bastion of reaction, would it?

Word, Chris. I'm really becoming committed to "progressive politics," and the left-wind (not left-handed) tendencies I used to dismiss as youthfully naive I now am convinced will be with me my whole life. But it's going to be frustrating if I continue to have to rub up against prejudiced Northerners who are still patting themselves on the back for the Civil War and are convinced that every Southerner is a gun-toting inbred. When I try to explain why people in the South still get upset when they perceive the Federal Government to be meddling in state affairs I usually get pegged as a racist.

If Progressives finally wrest the White House from Republicans or Conservative Democrats, is it any use to the redheaded stepchildren down South if all we get is this same sad story?

The silver lining is that Chris left the website address for a Progressive Southern blog, called Facing South. At least I don't feel so alone anymore.

[I hope to post later this week on some software I've heard about that could be used for the new Cenlamar. I have also been lent a digital camera for the week, and at some point I'll have some pictures of my life and the students. Here's a teaser, from today's lunchtime tutorial in my apartment.]

Hip-hop theolo-G

As I was researching liberation theology, which argues that the poor and marginalized are special before Jesus and that the highest moral aim is fighting for them, I stumbled across the Indian theologian Sebastian Kappen.


Kappen (who incidentally looks like a beardless Indian version of my father), published Jesus and Freedom in 1977. The book drew heavily from the Latin American priests and theologians who were experimenting with liberation theology. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, of which Cardinal Ratzinger (da' Pope) was a member, rejected Kappen's book and liberation theology as a whole because of the movement's Marxist sympathies and investigation of spiritual matters informed by materialism. Kappen wrote the pamphlet Censorship and the Future of Asian Theology as a reply. I slowly read the following:

Moreover, if God is alive and speaks to humans of all places and cultures, there is no basis for a censorship that evaluates all theology by the standard of one theology, I mean, by the standard of the dogmas and concepts developed in the western historical-cultural context. The traditional mode of thinking in the West is representational.
[...]
As Asians, our mode of thinking is unitive rather than analytic, experiential rather than representational, existentialist rather than essentialist. The dichotomies western thought has thrown up — matter and spirit, faith and reason, nature and grace, temporal and eternal, human and divine, and the like — are foreign to us. For us thinking is communing, not conquering; is being present to what presents itself, not re-presenting it through concepts; is being one with the oneness of all, not exploding the one into the manifold. Our ancient seers would have questioned even the 'and' in the customary formulation, God and man, if taken in the additive, disjunctive sense ; so finely attuned were they to the underlying oneness of the many. These cultural specificities are ignored by the church when she compels us, Asians, to think as do people in the West. What is this but cultural imperialism and colonisation of the mind?

The primary locus of theology, therefore, cannot be the closed community of Christians but the open community of all those who hunger and thirst for justice and freedom.* And if the theology that emerges out of dialogue with the Lord of history bursts the old wineskins of tradition, none need shed a tear over it except the makers of old wineskins!**

Word, Baba Kappen-G. Before I made it to the word "manifold," the prophetic words of Deltron Z's Madness stood up in my mind:

The universe is one and I can see what rap can be glorious
Put in the Smithsonium my podiums for holy hymns
But you see who's controlling them
Fuck myself off cuz of the egotistical mode I'm in
[...]
I'm trapped in a bottle
My music's gettin hollow
That's what happens when humanity you follow
Where every leak or info is hard to swallow
Sell your Marlboros and car insurance
Put niggas on the moon and can't pay your burdens
I smoke herb and rock a turban
Meditate on the world and whats occurrin
A lot of white boys like the style and copy
Dig in something deeper and you'll peep that were not free
It's not about the separation its about the population
[...]
When all paths are intersections
It all depends on the persons perception
[...]
I believe you held something back for too long
It grew strong
And energy has its own will
And people think they make music still
But music is there with out you or me we just manipulate
For better or worse so let it situate
[...]
I'm glad I love music and life
cuz it's easy to see the pain and strife
and end it all tonight.

Exactly like an Aeolian Harp, which "is played not by human hands, but by the wind. Its melodies and harmonies are not those that we have chosen. They are the improvisation of nature itself."

(the remainder of this entry has been moved to immutablefruit.livejournal.com)

柔中有刚

So it's been over six months since I first began this job in Kangding County. I realized recently that I've never related exactly the inside-out turn of events that led me here. I promise I'll keep it short.

It begins back in late August. After the teachings in McLeod Ganj in Himachal Pradesh, Mike and I traveled for a week with Neil Guidry and his group of Tulane social work graduate students. In addition to the two of us, we were accompanied by a Jordanian woman and a girl from Rochester, NY. The winding jeep rides through the bright Himalayan foothills were filled with idle chatter. Neil sat in the front with the driver (in case his Thai "Press Pass" was needed to bypass toll stops), Mike, Nada, and Meg occupied the bench seat, and yours truly, the wannabe minstrel, strummed his miniature backpacking guitar in the rear.

As many of you know I returned to Asia without much of a plan, chasing a dream that I wasn't sure existed. I just wanted to get back to China to practice my Mandarin, and to hopefully work for an NGO doing something that could help me feel like I was moving in a direction, any direction. Teaching English would be something to fall back on. I hadn't made any real progress, though I met a couple of the right people at the temple in McLeod, and before I left I bounced ideas off of the requisite professors and friends.

While lamenting the lameness of English instruction, one of those friends, Olivia, mentioned that she did enjoy meeting the teachers of a group called the Bridge Fund. They didn't have to put up with run of the mill Chinese classes, which are notorious for rote learning, apathy, and poor spoken English. Moreover, they worked with Tibetans in some of the more remote areas of Greater Tibet.

When allowing my mouth to wander through the list of half-baked job ideas I had created, I mentioned the Bridge Fund to Meg and the others. Meg immediately mentioned that she was personal friends with the founder and director of the organization, a woman named Monica. Meg lives deep in Qinghai, a province that borders the Tibetan Autonomous Region in the PRC. She teaches some small children in order to pursue her practice in her lama's hometown.

Splitting from the others, Meg, Mike and I traveled to Bir so that he could make good on an invitation to meet the Neten Chokling Rinpoche and his consort Tenzin in their home. That evening Meg showed me photos from her computer of the deep green valleys of Qinghai in the summertime. Tiny Tibetan children swam freely in the rivers. She informed me that not far from there, in a town called Jyegu (Yushu), a Bridge Fund school had been established.

The following day we both emailed Monica. I didn't send a formal resume, only a description of my experience and my reasons for wanting to work with Tibetans. A short time later I received an email that the NGO needed a position filled in Dartsedo (Kangding), and that I was to email the China Director of the Bridge Fund to work out the details of the job. Two weeks (and a number of visa-related headaches) later, I found myself completely unqualified in front of an eager group of twenty-nine high school juniors.

I found out from the class's previous English instructor some time later that she had gone through an extensive hiring process. A man named Carlos had been hired to the job, but dropped out unexpectedly weeks before the term was to begin. Via a notable chain of coincidences the Bridge Fund hired me to my current job. It felt effortless. Some have called it karma. For once in my life, I trusted Fate and She delivered. Not until around Thanksgiving did I fully realize my good fortune.

Since then I mentioned to a close friend that I hope to move through life without effort. He was somewhat put off: becoming successful or achieving one's goals often requires a great deal of effort. I'm forced to agree with him, for fear of becoming passive and reactionary and unable to act to improve my life. On the other hand, I can't see the future. I find that in the periods that feel the most certain, things are changing the fastest. How does one live progressively and flexibly without worrying about what lies ahead?

Three and a half years ago I spent a long week of all-day martial arts training in Dali in Yunnan Province. The smooth motions of kungfu are powerful indeed, but they must be lithe and tempered with grace and flexibility. I still remember what the martial artist traced in the dust of the exercise yard to hammer this point home:

柔中有刚

Amidst Yielding Lies Strength

p.s.: Today is the Ides of March. For my American audience, I offer a warning. Because I am thirteen hours ahead, as I publish this you are enjoying that memorable set of strange dreams that delights us before we begin the day. I have all but finished my day. I awoke to a message from an old friend pointing out my shortcomings: inconsiderate carelessness on my part translated into a mark of deep disrespect and betrayal. Though I know I am basically self-centered and exhibit a number of pig-like tendencies, when it becomes obvious to others my ego can't help but be burned. All day long. Please tread with caution on this, the day of Caesar's death.

Journey to an End

This morning I am posting quickly from Tenzin Mullin's apartment in Kangding. He just left for his first class of the new term; I begin on Monday. For the previous two weeks I have visited a number of students on the rolling Kham plateau, bringing in the Lunar New Year in high style with the families of my favorite student nomads. A good story is there to tell, though I have a semester's worth of planning to do before I can relax and describe those ersatz adventures in the clumsy and jejune prose so characteristic of this blog.

Last night, we ate homemade Cantonese and Sichuanese sausage and roast chicken, and drank wine and Chinese sherry to celebrate the resignation of our close friend, John from Michigan. He had finally told his boss that he would not renew his contract as the Education Director of Kham Aid. As I know well, quitting one's job is certainly an occasion for alcohol and the eating of meat. We were joined by Maowei, Tenzin's new bride from Emei Shan. Although Tenzin is a decade my senior, I consider him my brother due to his playful recklessness.

Tenzin and Maowei decided to get married a week before they left New Zealand on his annual vacation to visit his family. It was her first time outside of China, and other than missing Sichuanese spice (which I find to be a bit ordinary--no jalapeno, tabasco, or cayenne to be found anywhere) she rather enjoyed herself. I sat through five albums of photos.

John returned to the office to sleep, as he has to work this morning. The remaining three of us decided to walk home through the crisp Kangding evening. Spring is approaching; the moon will be full in a day or two, signifying the end of New Year celebrations. Tenzin affectionately chided her for her caution on crossing the road (rather unusual for a native Chinese woman), and she got on the subject of her father who was killed in a motorcycle accident some twenty years ago.

She said that she and her mother were no longer sad about the incident. The choose to remember him for his humor and benevolence. Though English is her second language, I felt she still described him in the words of a seven year-old. She remembered the way other children and adults talked about her as if she was so unfortunate growing up, being without a father, though she always felt his presence any time something good happened to her.

She wondered why people must always gossip about others. Tenzin, after recounting his childish obliviousness to his parent's divorce, remarked that people just need something to talk about. In truth, when people talk about others, they are really only talking about themselves.

I immediately thought of this blog.

[RIP,T.R.]

Back in the PRoC

"Back in the PRoC.
No one's as lucky as me, yeah.
Back in the PRo
Back in the PRo
Back in the PRoC."

Well, I made it back to Chengdu without any hassle. The streets of China actually appear clean and orderly compared to those of Kathmandu and Nepal. My opinion of Chinese traffic sanity has come full circle in a meager three years. The fashion has changed considerably in that time, shifting from fifties conservatism to eighties kitcsh, though my opinion of it hasn't: Chinese people categorically haven't known how to dress themselves since the middle of the Qing Dynasty or thereabouts. I love it here, of course.

My previous post gave light to a bit of angst I've had over the last short period of time, and it was going to be three separate posts but I felt that there were some undercurrents uniting my disparate thoughts and feelings about the last year. On the whole, I feel really good about the way things are going right now. In fact, the real question is whether to renew my contract for another year this spring.

To put it simply, I feel as if I've totally "changed my life" in the last year. I quit my two part-time jobs in Houston at the end of 2005. I feel like I spent most of the end of that year in Houston hospitals, what with Jay and Nath and Sonny (RIP). At our cousin Holly's wedding in PA Michael convinced me to move to New Orleans. Chris had already decided to leave Portland. I made arrangements and was there before February 2006.

I cut my hair and shaved my beard, and then cut my hair again. Between the Mardi Gras season and starting a good (read "decently paying") job in New Orleans and Mardi Gras, I kept myself quite distracted from what leaving Houston had meant for me. It turned out to be completely essential to leaving behind college and making the transition from that life and lifestyle to a more responsible (read "adult situations") one. It was all a matter of perception, of course, the change in physical space allowing for a new psychological space bereft of the baggage of finishing university. Leaving was doing something, and I had been treading water for eight months.

Some of those bags--the people with whom I lived and loved (though I was a coward to admit it, even to myself)--have found their ways into my dreams, though rarely my reality. I miss them, and I have been mostly unable to feel as though I didn't let them each down in different ways, and that has kept me from even contacting some of them.

As spring became summer in the difficult new Big Easy, I began to feel as if I was again stagnating. Waiting tables, like other types of indentured servitude, has the special property of breaking the will of the waiter. Mike left for Asia, and our idyllic months living together in an economical double shotgun came to a close. I moved near work, living with Chris's longtime friend Bjorn, a tiler from Baton Rouge. Bjorn tosses and heaves a baseball bat in exactly the same fashion as the axe-wielding Neil Cassady described by Tom Wolfe in Acid Test [edit 1/29 with picture]. Shuchin had returned to New Orleans from Houston. Lamar had begun doing well for himself in Alexandria. I embraced Louisiana with a clean heart after almost five years in Texas, but yet it was not enough.

I grew back my beard and decided to return to Asia too, again following Mike but this time to Delhi and Kathmandu. Crossing the globe did more this time than open up new psychological space, it made me feel like a new person again in a way I hadn't experienced since I was nineteen in that period between working the Rayado backpacking program in New Mexico and leaving for China the first time. I didn't have a plan but I had money from the restaurant, and the more I relied on luck or letting it be or karma the clearer things became. I effortlessly found myself in front of an amazing group of students by mid-September, two weeks late by their academic calendar but fifteen months late by mine.

Then it took until Thanksgiving to appreciate that luck, and considering that I still had 1800 Nepali rupees left in my wallet from the summer I headed back to Kathmandu to reunite with my brothers.

I tend to think about periods of my life as discrete units, at least since the time that I decided to leave Alexandria Senior High to attend the Louisiana School. Usually this directs my memory, but I've found it affects the way I make future plans as well. I have been breaking up my postgraduate future into different years, spending this much hypothetical time in China, and that much in Louisiana, and then this much in graduate school until I'm like thirty or something. Only time to time have I remembered how it feels to have the future open, gaping, almost bleeding in my face with possibility and the horrible pleasure that comes with the irresponsibility of living deliberately.

I don't feel that now though I'd like to, but I'm afraid not to have everything planned out in advance and yet somehow scared of committing to anything.

I'm also pretty uncertain as to what I'll be doing for the next couple of weeks. An Australian guy in my hostel dorm room is up for a bar, so at least I have tonight planned. My ill-timed return to Chengdu has left me without local friends who aren't sick or totally out of pocket. My buddy Drako is already back at his home in Amdo, which is the logically next stop on my trip but I hadn't planned on being there for two weeks. I may go up early and then return to Chengdu in a week or so, to reunite with some American friends. It doesn't matter to me all that much, and you, of course, don't give a shit either.

With love,

Denied!

I had hoped to take a jeep trip across southern Tibet to Lhasa next week. Going from Kathmandu back to Kham strictly over land is challenging but possible: from Lhasa the new train goes through Xining to Lanzhou, where buses occasionally head south into Amdo (upper Sichuan) and over to Kham at Luhou.

In order to enter Tibet from Nepal, the Chinese government requires foreign travelers to have a Tibet Permit in addition to a special group tourist visa. I currently have an unlimited entry business visa with a residence permit until July 20, and did not foresee any major visa difficulties as I figured it would be valid for the TAR as well.

The Chinese Embassy, however, has informed me that my work visa will be cancelled upon entering Tibet at the border, and there's a chance it will be cancelled if I enter Lhasa by plane. In order to get the Lhasa permit, which can only be arranged by a travel agent, I'd need to sign up for a tourist package, the cheapest of which costs $125 and includes two hotel nights, airport pickup, and the permit. The extra connection from Lhasa to Chengdu was only an extra $75.

I've opted to simply return to Chengdu via Air China to avoid the possibility of losing my visa and being unable to return to work without again leaving China. This is somewhat of a personal defeat. As the Geshe who stays with the Khari Rinpoche explained to me last week, an opportunity to visit the Potala and Jokhang in Lhasa is not the result of personal planning, but due to karma. Now that I have encountered such an obstacle, the implications are glaring. How does this differ from viewing the events of one's life as God's Will, unfolding according to reason but with causes too vast and compounded for a simple mortal to comprehend?

Perhaps it's no different than calling it simple bad luck. Nevertheless, I'm in denial about being denied.

Chris should have arrived in New Orleans sometime today. Hanging out with him here had been most excellent. I'm glad I was able to see him learn to wrap his tongue around a bit of Nepali. His composure was mad righteous for being abroad for the first time, and his years of living out of bags between Louisiana and Oregon gave him the endurance and street sensibility necessary to brush off the hassles of traveling in Asia. He says he'll come back next year.

I had missed both of my brothers tremendously since leaving New Orleans in August, which seems oh so short a time ago. I enjoyed our time together, though one can never have as good time as one remembers having hoped for. It's coming up on a year since I left Houston. I left a life behind, which has made me hurt. I miss the people and the love, and I got exactly what I had hoped for.

[The other morning in a lonely pre-dawn I roll over on my stomach, my arms crossed beneath me, clinging to sensation of the hard mattress on my stomach and hard pillow on my face until my shoulders and neck become cramped and I must roll to my side to massage them out. From then I had Neutral Milk Hotel's Life is Neverending in my head most of the morning:

"But I know that life is neverending.
Sometimes the miles can cut you down to size.
But I had a love,
She was my anchor,
She held me down,
And saved my soul.
So take the blood
You never gave her
And let it go."

and went to bed soloing Perfect Day by Lou Reed:

"You're gonna reap,
Just what you sow..."]

This photos is from the Shivapuri trip I wrote about a few posts down.

I hope that Chris, Mike and I can make a trip from West China over Tibet, ending in Kathmandu. Michael and I could share our cultural and linguistic knowledge, with my experience in China and Kham slowly giving way to his felicity with Tibet and Nepal. I hope we can make this trip in the summer of 2008, when the half of the world that still gives a rat about the Olympics will be fixated on the Chinese capital. It will be the time of my students' graduation. I could visit them then, though

there is the growing possibility that I will choose to remain in Kham for another year. The knowledge that remaining to teach my students in their final year will be my difficult choice to make has slowly settled in the rear of my brain. If Tenzin, the more experienced instructor for the Bridge Fund in Kangding doesn't offer to teach them and prepare them for the Chinese Government Exam and the High Educational Exam, how will I be comfortable in abandoning them to another instructor? My skills are still green but in what ways would I regret turning my back on them after only one year,

which means nothing compared to two years. I could live an easy life in Louisiana. I could handle up on the GRE and LSAT, save some money, and pick a law school or a grad program for international development methodology (the current pet fantasy).

I will definately return to Louisiana in late July, before Chris's birthday.

Speaking of the more immediate future, after Chengdu I'll probably head north into Amdo to see a friend and a student, both from nomad families, in the cold town of Hongyuan. It should be easy to make it to Luhou before nomad Losar (Tibetan New Year) unfolds. I'll be back at the Teacher's College before March, to lesson plan like mad before the start of the spring semester.

Time

A little birdie reminded me that I have been neglecting updating this journal for some time. I apologize that those of you interested have had to suffer through the crushing eroticism of my previous post.

That said, Merry Christmas. I had mashed potatoes ("potato mud" in Chinese) and roast chicken for dinner with a couple of Americans and a couple of New Zealanders. I've enjoyed getting close to a few other people who also teach English, some of whom are quite experienced and, I daresay, wise about the whole thing.

Around Thanksgiving I realized how lucky I am as a recent graduate teaching without oversight to a group of scholarship Tibetan students. More recently I've begun to appreciate the significance of being a high school English teacher. Half of the people I know rate their high school English teachers as one of the most important adults in their lives before university. Although I teach English as a foreign language, this job is the most rewarding thing I've done, ever, including those summers I spent as a backpacking guide in New Mexico.

Critical thinking, debate, active questioning: these are the things my students have begun to explore with the least bit of prodding from me. They open up to me in their diaries like no American student would dare, and share the traumatic and ecstatic generously. Life is short, they say, or life is long. We must do good to help Tibetans, they explain, to prepare us for our next lives. Why do half of Tibetans seem uninterested in learning the Tibetan language, they ask without answer, and how should they feel about the Government and Party? Is there an intangible cost to redeveloping their hometowns to industry and tourism?

They haven't the vocabulary or grammar to express these ideas in such terms, but they are showing signs of real creative thinking, albeit tenuously. While I don't have anyone directly evaluating my progress or observing my class, I still tread a fairly fine line when it comes to shaping their debates and opinions about some pretty heavy issues.

And these issues don't have clear answers, of course, and I'm particularly glad to have first had a familiarity and affinity for China and Chinese before being confronted with the reality here. The Tibetan Buddhism is thick, but the people of Kham are rough and most are far from saintly.

My student is informing me that the power will be cut off shortly. On Wednesday I will go to Chengdu, and from their head to Kathmandu on Saturday. I will head back to Sichuan via Tibet over land in buses and trains. If you think I have been lazy updating this blog now, just wait.

I will ring in the New Year with my two brothers in Kittymandu. I can't believe I even just wrote that sentence. I've been so stressed recently and now I am seeing light. The winter holiday lasts for two months here. By the time I teach again, I will be 24, it will be the fire year of the boar, the year of my own zodiac sign, purportedly an unlucky year for me. We will be through another Mardi Gras as well.

Time.

Patrul and Ad.z.m R's

[Desmond Dekker, Rude Boy Ska]

I've been intermittently reading Patrul Rinpoche's The Words of My Perfect Teacher, lent to me by Lisa, a lay attendant to Ad.z.m R. She's also friends with my pal, Olivia Bartlett (who met her while studying in there). On his way, he'll be stopping in Chengdu for a day after leaving his monastery in Chamdo, and I hope to meet him in the city. I've been trying to get through Words, a commentary on the preliminary practices of a Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism, before I leave. In my brother's words, the book "contains everything you need to know to become enlightened."

I recently stumbled across a mention of the town Dartsedo, the Tibetan (and proper) name for Kangding, the city half an hour from the college. The context in which Patrul Rinpoche brings it up reminded me of a number of things, which I'll get to after sharing the passage with you:

Where tea is grown, in China, the number of small creatures that are killed while it is planted, while the leaves are being picked, and so on, would be impossible to count. The tea is then carried as far as Dartsedo by porters. Each porter carries a load of twelve six-brick packs, taking the weight on a band around his forehead which wears away his skin. But even when his skull shows through, al white, he carries on. From Dotok onwards, dzo, yaks and mules take over, their backs breaking, their bellies perforated with cuts, patches of their hair chafed away. They suffer terribly from their servitude. Bartering the tea involves nothing but a series of broken promises, cheating and argument, until finally the tea changes hands, usually in exchange for animal products like wool and lambskins. Now wool, in summer before shearing, is crawling with fleas, ticks and other small creatures as numerous as the strands of wool themselves. During shearing, most of those insects are decapitated, cut in two or disembowelled. Those not killed remain stuck in the wool and suffocate. All of this can only lead to lower rebirths. As for lambskins, remember that new-born lambs have all their organs of sense, and they feel pleasure and pain. Just as they are enjoying their first instants of life, in perfect health, they are killed. Perhaps they are only stupid animals, but nevertheless they do not want to die--the love life and suffer as they are tortured and slaughtered. As for the ewes whose little ones have been killed, they are a living example of the sorrow experienced by a mother who loses her only child. So when we think about the production and trade of such products, we can understand that even a single sip of tea cannot but contribute to rebirth in the lower realms.

I used to think about these kinds of things quite a bit during the summer of 2001, my first stint guiding in New Mexican woodlands. That was when I stopped eating meat for two years. At the time I felt that there was a way to reduce the suffering of animals, at least, little by little. The wheel of death could be slowed in time, eventually halting, upon all ills would be undone.

The following summer significant areas of the ranch for which I guided suffered from forest fire. Alternatively hiking through restricted blackened areas and places that hadn't seen a fire for half a century provided stark contrast. Neither represented especially healthy forests; the under-burned areas were chillingly grey and orange from the accumulating largess of fallen tress and their resulting decay. I found a certain peace, however, in the face of such destruction, which relieved any guilt about my hand in death.

I disagree with some literalist Christians that believe that Man's divinely imparted stewardship over the animals gives him carte blanche when it comes to ecology. On the other hand, there can be no Absolute Zero with respect to the food chain and the natural events of birth and death. The process can never grind to a halt. Perfect equilibriums never last in natural systems. I'm reminded that when I was a child I thought that the Theory of Relativity meant that if the Earth ceased moving and spinning, Time would also stop. I'm not sure if that's wrong, but it certainly is absolutist.

Contrary to what you may think, the above passage by Patrul Rinpoche does not necessitate vegetarianism. His aim in pointing out the resulting carnage of such a mundane and basic activity is to remind the reader of the suffering that is everywhere in life. In Buddhism, we are held accountable for even the above actions via karma. I find the transmigration of souls to be at best irrelevant, though, and at worst empty threats to encourage moral action.

This does not mean we can hope to completely stop the chain of good and evil that tethers our mind to the conventional phenomenology of this world. It does mean that there are causes to our every action. It also suggests a way out; by taking responsibility for results of the things we do, and recognizing their impact on our way of thinking and our attitudes, we can discover the antidotes to our misdeeds to effectively become liberated from ourselves.

Sorry for sounding preachy. I'm really only trying to convince myself.

[Mountain Goats, Nine Black Poppies]

Self-Aggrandizement

On Halloween, I read a letter on Salon's advice column that struck a rather familiar chord. In the letter, a 23 year-old Yale graduated describes returning home to care for her dying father. After he passed, she found herself "stuck" in her small hometown, in a relationship with a local doctor and consumed by the malaise of her situation. She wants to travel and pursue her career. I empathized with her because her situation seems to be precisely the opposite of mine.

[By the way, has everyone upgraded to Firefox 2.0 yet? I think the new version is great!]

I decided to post a response to the letter. At the time, I was the second person to post a comment, thanks in large part to having opposite hours as America. They've received about 30 letters since then, and the columnist Cary Tennis picked five to be Editor's Choices, one of which was mine (hence the red star). I wanted to share with you my opinions on her situation:

Perennial Movement

The moon is always changing, yet it returns to where it was with a regular rhythm. There are many small arcs in our lives, yet our life is also one large arc with a pattern reflected in the lives of the rest of us. It's easy to know that this has all happened before, but difficult to accept that it will only happen to you once.

I'm also 23, and fortunately a number of years ago my father dodged prostate cancer. He beat it with surgery, and now he recently retired from psychiatry. He sends emails about how his joints hurt, and he feels hungover in the morning when he doesn't drink the night before. His writing style has changed from reading my brother's and my travel blogs.

I'm from a small(ish) town. I think fifty thousand people in the middle of Louisiana counts, though it's probably bigger than where you're from. I went to Rice, and I spent my summers alone in the New Mexican mountains. Houston certainly felt like the whole world compared to where I grew up. That is, before I went to Beijing.

We are similar in many ways, but I feel we are on opposite trajectories. Now I am teaching in Western China, near Tibet. I wish I was home with my family. I want to be stuck in my hometown, piddling away the afternoons in a canoe or writing for our two-bit paper.

Cary is right. Take your time. You can't speed up the hurt, and sometimes it will hurt less before it hurts more again. Dostoevsky says it will become the dull pain of joy. In Swingers, Ron Livingston says one day you will wake up and miss the pain when it's gone.

I feel the pressure to run back to school, too. I can't justify why I want to help people on the other side of the planet when there is so much pain near my home. I lived in New Orleans for the first half of 2006. It was a painful joy. My grades say I should search for the top. My heart tells me to dig my toes between the roots.

After being at Yale, must you get back to the centre of the world? Is there a way to bridge the gap? Cary composed a small fiction of your life. In your stories, I can see the fiction of my own.

Yours,

Daniel Smith

dantsmith@gmail.com, khamabiding.blogspot.com

"Your past joys and sorrows are like drawings on water: No trace of them remains. Don't run after them!...

Your future projects and plans are like nets cast in a dry riverbed: They'll never bring what you want. Limit your desires and aspirations!..."

-Gyalse Rinpoche, 14th Century