chinaodysseypd

Rapprochement

Mao_Zedong,_Zhang_Yufeng_et_Richard_Nixon By White House Photo Office (1969 – 1974) (White House Photo Office (1969 – 1974) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

In October, 1971, the United Nations recognized the Peoples Republic of China as the official representative government of China – and Taiwan was expelled.

Just a few months prior to that, the American ping pong team had been invited to China. This was the beginning of “ping-pong diplomacy,” which was soon followed up by Henry Kissinger taking a circuitous route through Pakistan to China to pave the way for President Richard Milhaus Nixon to travel to Beijing in 1972, where he met with Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou En Lai. From that trip, came the “Shanghai Communiqué,” where both China and the United States agreed that there is only one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. Although, the United States clearly asserted that it wanted a peaceful resolution to the “Taiwan Issue,” President Nixon also made it clear that he was not in favor of “Taiwan independence.”

Following their meeting, unofficial Liaison Offices were set up in both Beijing and Washington D.C. in 1973 while Taiwan continued to have it’s Chinese Embassy in Washington D.C. until it morphed into the Coordination Council for North American Affairs in 1979. Today, it is goes under the name, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States.

In Viet Nam, the Paris Peace Accords, officially called the Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam, was signed by representatives of the USA and Vietnam on January 27, 1973, but the war did not really end until the fall of Saigon in April of 1975.

In China, the Cultural Revolution officially ended in 1976 when the “Gang of 4” (四人幫Sì Rén Bāng) – which included Mao Zedong’s wife, 江青 Jiāng Qīng aka Madame Mao – were all tried and sent to prison only months after Mao’s death. Shortly after Mao died, Deng Xiaoping (邓小平 Dèng Xiǎopíng), a different kind of revolutionary leader emerged who understood that China needed to change in ways very different from those of Mao and that meant not only serious reforms in China’s economic policies, but the breaking down of the “bamboo curtain” and an opening of China to the world.

It was Polish-American National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski who served under President Jimmy Carter, chief negotiator Leonard Woodcock, and Deng Xiaoping, the Paramount Leader of China who crafted the agreement that would formalize diplomatic relations between China and the USA in 1978. In this agreement, the USA reaffirmed the “one China policy” and declared that Taiwan was a part of China. The USA also insisted that it be allowed to “maintain cultural, commericial, and other unofficial relations with the people of Taiwan.” The official “denormalization” announcement came on January 1, 1979. The Armed Force Radio Taiwan (renamed ICRT in 1979), the English radio station in Taiwan, suggested that Americans living in Taiwan should probably stay close to home for the next couple of days. To those of us living in Taiwan then, it came as a shock. Nobody knew quite how to react, so life pretty much carried on with very few incidents.

Chinese Odyssey 24

Instead, “Made in China”

was on every thing

from toys and clothing,

to music and rings.

China opened its doors

and we were invited;

the flame which had smoldered

had been re-ignited.

China and Wal-Mart

Made in China

When I was a kid, everything my family bought was made in the USA. It wasn’t because we were super patriotic. Foreign products were just out of our price range. I really don’t remember seeing “Made in America” or “Made in the U.S.A.” signs or labels. The first TV’s were RCA, G.E., or Zenith. Cars were Fords, Chevy’s and Plymouth’s. Coke, 7-Up, and Pepsi cost a dime in a pop machine, and if you needed some extra coin, you’d ride around on your bike picking up bottles and sell them back to Safeway’s for 2 cents a bottle. People would have called you crazy if you had told them that in 20 years, they would be spending two dollars for a small bottle of plain water from France.

The change was probably gradual but it seemed like it happened over night. Records morphed into cassette tapes and then into CD’s. VW bugs snuck into the American car market and were barely noticed, but Toyotas and Hondas became game changers. Japan started making the best cameras, TV’s, and stereos and the US manufacturers were rapidly getting priced out of the US market. American blue collar workers were scrambling to hold onto their jobs, their benefits, and, in some cases, their retirements.

As so often happens, the finger of blame was pointed at others. Instead of blaming greedy Americans for relocating their factories overseas to take advantage of lower wages and less expensive working conditions, Americans blamed the Chinese and Japanese for flooding our markets. Of course these countries wanted a piece of the American market. Who wouldn’t? America was a consumer’s paradise. And American retailers like Walmart and Target were making out like bandits. Like the illegal slave trade and the ongoing illicit drug trade, there have to be buyers for what “they” are selling and in America everyone seemed to want more.

In 1982, the backlash against Asians took a deadly turn when Hong Kong born American, Vincent Chin, was beaten to death with a baseball bat outside a Detroit bar by Ronald Ebens and his stepson Michael Nitz because they mistakenly thought that Vincent Chin was a Japanese car maker. Initially given 25 years on a second degree murder conviction, on appeal, that was later turned into a manslaughter three years probation. Ebens and Nitz never served a day.

Chinese Odyssey 23

America needed

a way to awaken —

something to stir us.

How could we be shaken?

It happened when shopping

in Wal-Mart one day.

Not one item said

“Made in US of A.”

Old men, young women, and mountains

When someone immigrates to the USA, the expectation of Americans is that the new immigrant will learn to speak English and will learn to behave in culturally appropriate ways. When a foreigner moves to China, the expectation of Chinese is that the new “resident” will not learn how to speak Chinese and will not learn to behave in culturally appropriate ways. Most foreigners I’ve met in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China have come planning to learn Chinese. In Hong Kong, most quickly discover that there is no need to learn Chinese since many Chinese in Hong Kong speak English well. In China and Taiwan, that’s not as often the case. Of the people who try to learn Chinese, the majority toss in the towel after a single course. Of those who continue, few become fluent, and only a handful become literate. I’ve been wondering if learning Chinese is like the mountain that will take generations to move.

The idiom is 愚公移山 Yúgōng yí shān (The foolish old man who moved the mountain.) Although not directly derived from the Dao De Jing, it is certainly Daoist in thought and dates back to at least the 5th century BCE.

There was an old man who had spent his life living in a house on the opposite side of a hill several hours from the nearby village. Having been to the top of the mountain many times, he knew that the distance between his house and the village was much shorter as the crow flies. So, when he grew old and his famly no longer needed him to work at home, he decided he would move the mountain. He started digging with a shovel, a bucket, and a hoe, and people wondered what he was doing. When he said he was going to move the mountain, everyone laughed and called him crazy.

But the “foolish” old man knew better and kept on digging. He understood that he would never be able to move the mountain by himself. His sons and his daughters would need to continue his work and their sons and daughters as well. It may take several generations, but in the end, the mountain would be moved.

Growing up in the USA, most people don’t have a “move the mountain” mentality. When planting a new lawn, most Americans want grass that is ready to roll around in, in a few months. We plant vegetables and fruit with the idea of harvesting at the end of one season, and plant trees that will provide shade in 5 years. In China, people plant trees and shrubs, and flowers that may take years or sometimes decades to mature.

China is not the mountain, Chinese is. Each bucket of earth represents understandings that keep non-Chinese speaking and culturally illiterate people walking around the mountain. The old man wasn’t foolish. Neither was he old. And neither was s(he) necessarily a man.

Chinese Odyssey 22

The US and China

were in this together

A curious friendship,

some interesting weather.

Kids all over China

learned English with zest.

The same was not happening

here in the West.

Learning Chinese in America

Dodge Foundation 1984

You can take the cowboy out of China, but you can’t take China out of the cowboy. In Spring, 1979, I needed to go back to Oklahoma. My sister’s kidneys were failing from Type 1 diabetes. She needed a kidney transplant. After prelimary tests at Taipei’s Veteran’s Hospital 臺北榮民總醫院, Táiběi Róngmín Zǒngyīyuàn, and a follow up consultation with the head of the Nephrology department at UCLA, I was good to go. No kidneying.

Everything worked out well. During my recuperation, I received a note from H.J. Green, the Principal of Booker T. Washington High School, in Tulsa. BTW was a magnet school located in the heart of north Tulsa. Even before it became an official “magnet” for the Tulsa Public Schools, Booker T. had been a magnet for Tulsa’s Black community. When it opened its doors to students from all over Tulsa, to purposely promote racial integration, it did so with the promise of combining a stellar athletic program with an academic curriculum which was second to none. We were home to Tulsa’s 1^stever International Bacculaureate program and students from all over Tulsa wanted in. HJ Green was a visionary and he really wanted a Chinese language program at Booker T. Even after I confessed that I had never taught Chinese before, HJ was willing to give me a try.

Before the 1980’s, there weren’t a lot of Chinese Language programs in the USA. Two of the early intensive programs were the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center at the Presidio in Monterey, California, and the LDS Missionary Training Center in Utah, but they both had pretty specific agendas and clientele. Universities like Harvard, Stanford, and Yale had developed Chinese language programs in the US, and also had well established programs in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. But all of these programs were for adults who had graduated from high school.

The earliest initiative in secondary school education that I’m aware of in the US was from the Carnegie Foundation in the early 1960’s. There were 230 high schools involved. But by the end of the 1960’s, when the funding stopped, so did most of the programs. By the 1980’s few of the programs which had been seeded by the Carnegie Foundation were still in existence. The second wave came with the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. From 1982, the Dodge foundation helped start and fund 60 high school programs in the US.

In 1982, I was at the right place at the right time. In Tulsa, Nancy McDonald wrote a grant proposal to the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and Timothy Light from Ohio State University was sent to check us out. I was fortunate to meet and to learn from amazing people like Dr. Light, T.T. Ch’en and Zhou Zhi Ping from Princeton, Perry Link from UCLA, Ron Walton from the University of Maryland, and John Berninghausen from Middlebury College. Nearly every summer in the 1980’s, secondary school Chinese language teachers from all over America met and helped one another become better teachers of Chinese. One summer 20 of us converged at the Beijing Language and Culture University (at that time called 北京语言学院 Běijīng Yǔyán Xuéyuàn) to learn together with 20 Chinese language teachers from all over China.

Chinese Odyssey 21

So I boarded the plane

and headed due west.

I had more great teachers.

My Chinese progressed

Then one day while watching

my clothes tumble dry

a voice called out softly

“Get ready to fly.”

The I Ching Metaphor

Ba Gua — BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, from Wikimedia Commons

It was the end of the summer of 1970. A good friend had written me a letter saying that she was going to have to beg out on our open ended and barely planned adventure to Mexico in the Fall. She had thrown the coins and the I Ching had responded. Like many college students in the ‘60’s, I had also read the I Ching and somehow her choice made perfect sense. The Vietnam War Draft lottery had taken place on December 1, 1969 and my number was 256. I went back to the University of Montana and enrolled in the U of M’s first ever Chinese Language class.

The earliest of China’s “Classics” and the source for much of what is observed and practiced in many Chinese temples today is the I Ching, aka 易經 Yì Jīng, aka The Book of Changes. The I Ching dates back to at least the beginning of Zhou Dynasty 1000 BCE, and parts may predate the Zhou by hundreds of years. It is a book of cosmology and divination.

The most basic of the building blocks of the I Ching are the two lines. They are a solid line (一) representing the yang and a broken line (- –) representing the yin. The yin (陰 yīn) is represented by dark or the feminine. Other attributes and characteristics of yin include earth, receptive, water, and the negative. The yang (陽 yáng) is represented by light or the masculine. Other attributes and characteristics of yang include heaven, active, fire, and the positive. An interesting observation is that there is a bit of yin in all of yang and a bit of yang in every yin.

There are only 8 possible ways that these two lines can be put together in groups of three, and those eight trigrams most commonly appear in a symbol known as the Ba Gua (八卦 Bāguà) or the 8 Trigrams. The 8 trigrams in the Ba Gua surround the symbol for the Yin and the Yang. Each of the trigrams have a name representing 8 forces of nature. These are Heaven or sky (creativity), lake or marsh, fire, mountain, thunder, wind, water, and Earth (receptivity.)

By combining two sets from these 8 trigrams, there are sixty-four possible hexagrams. Each of these hexagrams has a number and a name. They also have a description. After that description, each of the lines is explained. Like the poems in the Kau Cim, the lines and descriptions are open to multiple interpretations. But for me or anyone else with such a cursory understanding of the I Ching to attempt to interpret those lines completely out of context is ludicrous.

I thought of the I Ching on my plane ride back to America. My knowledge and understanding of the I Ching was similar to my understanding of China. I had a very basic knowledge of the pieces, but I was a long way from understanding how they all fit together.

Chinese Odyssey 20

I’d had my first taste

but I yearned to see more

Taiwan and Hong Kong were

too far from the core.

Sacred mountains awaited,

great cities, and art.

Next time I’d try harder

to get to the heart.

Religious Medley

Kau Cin Sticks copy

Growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the buckle of the Bible Belt, the only religion I knew was Christianity. In the Christian church, there was Catholicism and there were a multitude of Protestant denominations. Each one had their own special set of beliefs and interpretations. Of course, we had a couple of Jewish synogogues, but I always thought that one had to be Jewish to go to synagogue. I knew there were other religions in the world, and I assumed they had denominations as well. What I wasn’t prepared for was the blending of religion, philosophy, ancestor worship, and traditional folk religions which had naturally evolved in both Taiwan and Hong Kong.

One of the things I wanted to study when I went to Taiwan was Daoism (see Chinese Odyssey 2.) One of my teachers at FuJen University found a book for me entitled 老子(Lǎozǐ.) It had the classical text (文言文 wényánwén) and an explanation in the common vernacular (白話 báihuà.) Local friends had pointed out Daoist temples around Taipei and I thought these would be the perfect places to go to learn more about the teachings of Laozi and Zhuangzi. I was taken aback to find what appeared to be a huge disconnect between the Daosim I had been reading and the Daoism that was being practiced as a religion in Taiwan. I learned that in Chinese, what I had read was called 道家 Dào Jiā. What I was seeing in the Taiwan Daoist temples was called 道教 Dào Jiào, the religion of Daoism. What I was told was that although some people in Taiwan adhered strictly to the tenets of Daoism and Buddhism, far more blended one or both of those religions with the various folk religions which had evolved in Taiwan as people from southeastern Fujian came in and joined the aboriginal Taiwanese (原住民 yuánzhùmín) Austronesian people who had arrived in Taiwan some 8,000 years earlier.

Walking around Hong Kong, I found there to be numerous temples which did not call themselves Buddhist or Daoist or Confucianist, but were dedicated to historical or quasi historical figures. General Che Kung aka Chēgōng (車公) helped to suppress a rebellion in the Sung Dynasty. Mo Tai, aka Kwan Tai aka Guān Dì (關帝) is often referred to as the God of War. He was a great warrior during the Period of the Three Kingdoms. My personal favorite has always been Kwun Yum aka Guānyīn (觀音) whose first manifestations were as a male, but who is now most often portrayed as the “Goddess of Mercy.” And since Hong Kong has historically been a home for fisherman, some of the most visited temples are dedicated to Tin Hau, aka Tiān Hòu (天后) who, according to the stories, was a young girl from a fishing village in Fujian.

A popular place of worship in Hong Kong is the Wong Tai Sin Temple (黃大仙祠.) According to legend, Wong Tai Sin (黃大仙) nee Huáng Chū Píng (黃初平) was a poor shepherd who became a Daoist priest in Zhejiang province in the 4^thcentury CE. One of the largest and most visited temples in Hong Kong, it is dedicated to Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism.

The sense of smell may be one of our most powerful connections to the past. That is certainly the case with incense (香 xiāng) burning inside temples throughout China. When walking down side streets in Hong Kong, Taiwan, or mainland China, I smile when I get a waft of incense which burns 24-7 in many temples. Incense is burned to please the gods, immortals, and ancestors. Families often include incense in their praying. They will buy sticks of incense, light several sticks at once, and pray (拜拜 bài bài) by bowing several times in front of an alter holding the burning incense in their hands. I’ve been told that incense also helps to keep away the mosquitoes.

At the Wong Tai Sin temple in Hong Kong, anyone can come in and pray in any of a myriad of spaces. You can also have your fortune read by men and women in Cantonese, Mandarin, and in English. The most popular way of finding your fortune is by using Fortune Sticks (Kau Cim aka 求籤 Qiú Qiān). At Wong Tai Sin, you can have a professional fortune teller help you or you can borrow sticks and do it yourself. There are 100 sticks in a bamboo tube with the #’s 1-100 written on them. There is a way to shake the tube until finally one stick comes out. To make sure that your fortune is correct, you then drop the jiaobei (珓杯 Jiǎo Bēi) blocks. These two wooden blocks are in the shape of crescents with a flat side and a rounded side. The way they land on the floor tells you whether your fortune is suitable or not. Once you’ve determined that your number is correct, you take it to a window and they will give you a poem. It’s up to you and/or your fortune teller to interpret your poem so that it will answer the question you asked. Nowdays if you have your own sticks and blocks, you can do it yourself and go onto a Wongtaisin website for the poems in Chinese and in English.

Chinese Odyssey 19

A stick in a temple

decided my fate.

The mainland of China

would just have to wait.

“You need to go home

to a far distant shore

but we know you’ll come back

to learn even more”

“One Country, Two Systems” – The 1984 Joint Declaration

800px-Deng_Thatcher_2 — By Brücke-Osteuropa [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons

Hong Kong people have never been in control of Hong Kong’s destiny. I don’t believe they felt the British colonial government was repressive. Rather, there was a laissez-faire attitude embraced by Chinese and expatriots alike living in Hong Kong at that time. It wasn’t until the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration announced “One Country, Two Systems,” that local Hong Kong people actually began to consider that they might become active participants in the government and the politics of Hong Kong.

Prior to the the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, Hong Kong was mostly a fishing and farming port. The cession of Hong Kong Island to the British “in perpetuity” was the icing on the cake for the British in what China still refers to as the “Unequal Treaties” after the 1^stOpium War. Unable to keep up with the demands for silver, which was the only “currency” China would accept for the vast amounts of tea the English public was consuming, England, through the British East India Tea company, came up with a scheme for another kind of currency. Opium. Although opium was illegal to import into China at the time, it had definitely found a market among the overworked and impoverished Chinese masses. Since trading opium was against the law in China, the British East India Company used private traders to take their contraband from Bengal in India to China starting in the late 18^thcentury. By 1842, China was hooked. The British didn’t act alone in their opium trade with China. Other European countries, and the USA joined in to get a piece of the opium action.

As a result of the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, Hong Kong Island was ceded to the British “forever”. A portion of Kowloon was added at the 1860 Treaty of Peking. The British were not, however, able to get the same deal for the remainder of Kowloon nor for the New Territories, from the Dowager Empress Cixi in 1898. Their 99 year leases would be up for renewal in 1997. The British had set up a colonial government whose senior ranks were mostly held by the British. Democracy was never a high priority among the British in Hong Kong. The British didn’t believe the Chinese were capable of running Hong Kong. It wasn’t until the British “recovered” Hong Kong from the Japanese after World War II that Governor Mark Young proposed the Young Plan in 1946, in a first attempt to give Hong Kong a representative democracy. This plan was quashed in 1952 by Young’s successor, Alexander Grantham. But the clock was ticking ever closer to 1997 and the fate of Hong Kong after that was very much up in the air. In 1979, Hong Kong Governor Murray Macelhose brought up the future of Hong Kong in an unofficial meeting with Deng Xiaoping. No clear direction could be determined from that meeting. Hong Kong might remain as it had been under British control, or it might revert back to China. In the 1982 meeting between Deng Xiaoping and Margaret Thatcher however, Senior Leader Deng gave a very clear mandate to Prime Minister Thatcher. All of Hong Kong would come back under Chinese control in 1997. The 1842 Treaty of Nanking was the only real bargaining chip that the British held to negotiate a good deal for the British. For the first time in the history of Hong Kong, a new question began to be floated? What would be best for the future of the people of Hong Kong?

The concept of “One Country, Two Systems” was proposed by Deng Xiaoping during negotiations with Margaret Thatcher in 1982. Even though Hong Kong would come back into the Chinese fold as a Special Administrative region, it would be able to keep its current system of capitalism and “a high degree of autonomy” for the next fifty years. Deng saw this to be the future of not only Hong Kong, but also of Macau, and hopefully, Taiwan. Hong Kong would have control of its own domestic affairs, but China would be responsible for diplomatic relations involving other countries and Hong Kong would benefit from China’s national defense.

Like all agreements, however, some things were left up to interpretation. Chief among these was, what was meant by a “high degree of autonomy?”

Chinese Odyssey 18

Great Britain and China

Must find a foundation

so life could go on

with no great alteration

“One Country, Two Systems”

was what they decided.

A plan leaving Hong Kong

a region divided.

The Bamboo Curtain

Mao Ze Dong

There never was a real “bamboo curtain,” just like there wasn’t a real “iron curtain.” Whereas, most people understood the iron curtain to be the metaphorical border that divided Europe after WW2 into the “free world” and the “communist world,” the term “bamboo curtain” was used to describe that same border separating “communist China” from “free Asia”. But “bamboo curtain” never really became a part of the popular venacular during the 1970’s. For Americans wishing to visit China during that era, however, it was every bit as unbreachable a wall. Although Richard Nixon had opened the door to a changing relationship between the two nations, it wasn’t until 1979 that America set up diplomatic relations with China and American students began trickling into mainland China. I have vivid memories of traveling through Hong Kong in 1979 and taking a train with the poet, William Howard Cohen. We rode the train to the end of the line to look at mainland China from a hill near Lowu. I remember feeling sorry for the hard working communist farmers in the fields below.

We were all pretty ignorant of China at that time. Remembering the propoganda magazines and English tracts of Mao’s Little Red Book (毛主席语录 Máo Zhǔxí Yǔlù) and White Haired Girl (白毛女 Bái Máo Nǚ) I picked up in Vancouver in the early 70’s and the passages from the elementary children’s textbooks in Taiwan lambasting mainlanders as Communist Bandits 共匪 gòngfěi , it’s no wonder most foreigners remained ignorant of China. Most of us were totally unaware of the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” (无产阶级文化大革命 wúchǎn jiējí wénhuà dà gémìng) rampaging through China destroying young and old alike. Communism was always more of a vision than a plan. Still the Red Guard believed that by destroying the old, they would enable the new, and that by relegating university professors to working the fields and having uneducated peasants become their teachers, China would emerge glorious and victorious. But it didn’t. It would take years to recover and evolve into China’s current “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.”

Unlike the iron curtain which toppled, the bamboo curtain opened on its own volition. When the US normalized relations with Beijing 30 years after it had established itself as the official government of China, America merely joined the ranks of the majority of countries of the world . The USA and China issue the Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations, in which America agreed that there is only one China and that Taiwan is a part of China; China’s one concession is that America could continue to carry on an unofficial relationship with Taiwan.

Chinese Odyssey 17

At that time ‘round China

was a big bamboo curtain.

No way to go in then

that was for certain.

So we stood by a fence,

at the edge of Hong Kong,

watching communists work.

It all seemed so wrong.

Wandering through Art

A_Hundred_Steeds-1 — This is a faithful photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional, public domain work of art.

When I was in junior high, my parents sent me to Camp Garland, a Boy Scout camp near Locust Grove, Oklahoma. Flowing through the camp was Spring Creek, a pristine watershed, amazingly clear and refreshingly cold. It reminded me of Montana. There was a small feeder spring flowing into Spring Creek that sometimes I would visit. It flowed down the side of a steep cliff and settled onto a natural rock table. I would sit on the table rock and watch the water flow over and around the rocks and algae, through the myriad of plants growing there. Of course, there were lots of bugs, butterflies, and birds and sometimes I’d glimpse minnows darting in and out of the rocks. The longer I sat, the more I became mesmerized by my surroundings, and mini-me would leave my body and wander down by the water (which had become a roiling river), climb up the clefts in the wall and discover paths that would lead from the pools on the table rock up the cliffs all the way to the mysterious source of the crystal clear water below.

When I first began to really look at Chinese landscapes, I was reminded of Spring Creek. I found myself being drawn towards the mountains, disappearing into clouds, and strolling beside rivers. Sometimes in the paintings there were other people walking there as well. Landscapes weren’t limited to natural landforms and water. There were pagodas and temples and markets.

Perhaps the most famous wandering painting of all is “Along the River during Qing Ming” (清明上河圖 Qīngmíng Shànghé Tú) which was painted more than 800 years ago during the Sung Dynasty. In this amazing glance at what we now know as the city of Kaifeng in the province of Henan (then China’s capital), we find ourselves walking through the painting with our eyes. In our walk, we get to experience Sung Dynasty daily life as we stroll past merchants, laborers, sedan chairs carrying scholars, restaurants and taverns, people loading and unloading boats along the Bian River (汴河 Biàn Hé), donkeys bringing in firewood from the outlying areas. And the action isn’t limited to the paths, roads, and bridges. Much of what happens in the painting is on the river itself. Only 10” (25 cm) in width, it stretches over 17 feet (about 5 meters) in length. Starting at the far right, one inches left across the painting savoring the journey; stopping sometimes to shop in the market or grab something to eat on the Rainbow bridge.

“Qingming” is a day to remember one’s ancestors. Some people call it “grave sweeping day”. Families will visit cemetaries on this day. They will tell stories, picnic, and tidy up the plot by sweeping the grounds, repainting the writing on the tombstones with red paint and they will burn incense. Qingming is not a sad day, but a day of thanksgiving and rememberance.

Some Chinese paintings feature a hundred things like children or birds or butterflies. Giuseppe Castiglione (郎世寧, Láng Shì Níng), the Italian Jesuit brother and imperial painter for three Qing Dynasty emperors during the early 18^thcentury, has a famous painting in the Palace Museum in Taipei of 100 horses. Even though he painted in classic Qing style, there are elements in his art that definitely speak to his western origins.

Chinese Odyssey 16

The bowl was her family’s

since she was a child.

The painting inside it

so natural and wild.

There were mountains surrounding

a natural pool

where young kids were playing

decidedly cool.

So Long, Taiwan

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Taiwan was my “ground zero” for learning about China. It was kind of like experiencing snow for the first time or maybe even a first kiss. One has all sorts of notions about what one might feel, but the experience itself is different in a multiplicity of ways. Lots of huge events occurred while I was in Taiwan. Chiang Kai Shek died on my birthday in 1975. The USA recognized the People’s Republic of China as the official government of China on January 1, 1979. A new word was coined for relationships in Taiwan: “denormalization.”

One story I was totally ignorant of when I arrived, was that of the two million mainlanders who descended on the island of Taiwan at the end of the 1940’s. Many of these KMT soldiers, government officials, and others who supported the Nationalist cause set up house in military dependents’ villages called 眷村 juàn cūn. These villages were poorly constructed on public land with building materials scavenged from the neighboring communities. They were built as temporary shelters, since the KMT had every intention of returning to the mainland. Soldiers would reunite with their families and live out their lives in their ancestral villages. But sadly, that never happened. They were mostly men. Most of those who were married had left their wives and children behind. Young men left their mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. Many never saw their mainland families again.

In 1985, my friend, Stan Lai (賴聲川 Lài Shēng chuān) wrote an amazing play called “Peach Blossom Land” (暗戀桃花源 Ànliàntáohuāyuán). It was really two plays within a story. The play starts as the story of young love between two students, one a young man from Manchuria, and the other, a beautiful young lady from Yunnan (1st played by Bridgit Lin (林青霞 Lín Qīng Xiá). As they walk along the Bund in Shanghai, they sadly reminisce on the toll the war has taken and cheerfully plan meeting up again after both paying a final visit to their families. The moment is shattered when the audience becomes painfully aware that they are actually watching a play, “Secret Love”, being rehearsed.

It turns out that the umbrella story which frames the rehearsal of Secret Love, also frames a second play, a slapstick comedy based on the Eastern Jin Dynasty story, Peach Blossom Land. The play rehearsals were double booked to rehearse in a theatre in Taiwan. Secret Love jumped forward 50 years when it resumed. The young man was an old man dying in a hospital in Taiwan. Although he had married a Taiwanese woman once he understood that he would not return to the mainland, he never forgot the love of his life. The bittersweet ending of the story is that of many mainland refugees in Taiwan. Once they were finally allowed back into the mainland, many found that their wives had remarried, their children didn’t know them, and that their parents and siblings were gone. They were happy, of course to meet again, but sad for all they had missed out on.

30 years after “Peach Blossom Land” was first released in Taiwan, it still resonates with people of all generations and remains one of the most popular plays in all of China.

Another play Stan wrote which dealt with this fracture between the “two Chinas” was called “The Village” 寶島一村 (宝岛一村 Bǎodǎo Yīcūn). It took place in one of the military dependents’ villages in Taiwan. The audience was able to watch as the young KMT soldiers scrounged to set up their temporary accomodations. We heard the struggles of people attempting to communicate in Chinese dialects as different from one another as are French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. We saw leaders emerge from the groups, marriages happening between mainlanders and Taiwanese, and strong women who made the most wonderful dumplings ever, step forward. As anyone knows who has ever lived in Taiwan, nothing brings a family or community together better than “bao”-ing jiaozi (making dumplings). Still there was a constant yearning for China by the first inhabitants of the village that succeeding generations never really understood.

Shakespeare said, “Parting is such sweet sorrow.” Li Bai likened saying good-bye to the setting of the sun in his well known poem, “Taking Leave of a Friend” (送友人). Parting from the mainland in 1949 was more like hunkering down in an emergency before a big storm. One always expects to return home.

Chinese Odyssey 15

’til one day while eating

some stinky doufu,

I saw something strange

which was certainly a clue:

In an old woman’s cart

was the same bowl I’d found

as a nine year old kid

digging holes in the ground.