Adieu

谢安琪的“年度之歌", 表妹形容的最好：“巴适了！”

曾经攀上的天梯 曾经拥抱的身体
曾经在乎一切 被突然摧毁 霎那比沙更细
良夜美景没原因出了轨 来让我知一切皆可放低
还是百载未逢的美丽 得到过又促逝 也有一种智慧

＊ 全年度有几多首歌 给天天的播 给你最愉快的消磨
流行是一首窝心的歌 突然间说过就过
谁曾是你这一首歌 你记不清楚 我看著你离座
真高兴给你爱护过 根本你不欠我甚麼 ＊

曾经拥有的春季 曾经走过的谷底
人生是场轻梯 忽高也忽低 不输气势

Repeat ＊

谁曾是你这一首歌 你记不清楚 我看著你离座
很高兴因你灿烂过 高峰过总会有下坡

回忆装满的抽屉 时光机里的光辉
人生艳如花卉 但限时美丽 一览始终无遗
回望昨天剧场深不见底 还是有几幕曾好好发挥
还愿我懂下台的美丽 鞠躬了就退位 起码得到敬礼

谁又妄想一曲一世 让人忠心到底


A Cantonese song.

My favorite parts:
I have owned the warm springs. I have walked the low valleys.
To have experienced this beauty then to have lost is also wisdom gained.
I'm so happy to have shone brilliant because of you. With highs there are lows.
The year's touching songs go as quickly as they come. You don't remember who gave you this one, but I watched your attention go.
Thinking back to yester-year, I gave it my all.
And am so happy to have given to you. You don't owe me anything.
Yet I understand the grace in exit. As the lights go out, I take a bow.
Who can expect anyone to remain faithful to one song in one lifetime.

It is said a French woman never says 'adieu' to her lover unless she wishes to mark a period of prolong separation.

Adieu Academia.

Remembering June 4

"On that warm June 4 morning, Mr. Liu carried off the corpses of protesters, their blood spattering his shoes. Their sacrifice was too painful to face, much less reconcile.

Thursday marks 20 years since hundreds of students, workers and average citizens died in an army assault on the Tiananmen Square democracy movement in the center of Beijing. Inside China, the day is a nonevent; even oblique references to June 4 are taboo.

For the outside world, Chinese officials this year offer a tenable excuse: the protests, they say, threatened China’s stability. With stability restored, China produced an economic miracle that has lifted scores of millions from destitution.

For veterans of the June 4 movement, however, reconciliation is seldom so tidy or superficial.

...

He suffers nonetheless. He is appalled by the notion that China’s success was erected on the bodies of Tiananmen demonstrators. He struggles with the inability of Tiananmen’s ideals to gain more than a toehold in his homeland. And he despairs at the oft-expressed thought that his fellow Chinese have made a devil’s bargain, trading the freedom that he and his fellow protesters sought for a chance at a car and a bigger apartment.

'You can raise pigs to be very strong and very fat,” he said. “But a pig is still a pig. And a pig has no rights.'"

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/world/asia/04protester.html?hpw

I sit in a tea house in Chengdu watching people go about their busy, prosperous lives, and this article so eerily rings true. Forced and selective amnesia setting in on a nation that is not allowed, does not want, does not care to remember a bloody, failed movement. My dad called to say he was frisked by armed soldiers when he tried to enter the square today, so eerily like 20 years ago when he saw his friends fall, but the atmosphere is more 'stable', more 'harmonious' today. When he walked out, people on the streets asked him why there were so many people in the Square today. It has only been 20 years. It was a day that saw idealism leave my parents, the beginning of many abandoned dreams. I think of the bodies that never walked out of the Square, those wronged spirits that haunt it, all the things that repeat because people forget. But I'm among the few thinking these things today.

Heartbreak in Indo-China

I moved through Indo-China last month with Jon Swain’s River of Time as a heartbreaking companion. Walking along the trash-filled streets of Phenom Penn, the never-ceasing noise of the 4 million motorcycles in Saigon, the eroded banks of the Mekong, I was pained to think these were the places of gentleness and beauty before the war. Now, crassness and penury dominate over any other characteristic.

But greater than my sorrow is my amazement at how quickly people have rebuilt their lives in a mere 35 years. In American efforts to obliterate the Ho Chi Minh trail and the Vietcong, more bombs were dropped on Laos (a country smaller than Texas) than during all of WWII. Today there are no traces of the flattened landscape (but unexploded landmines wouldn't be cleared until 2050 at the current rate). Saigon’s streets after streets of food vendors make it hard to believe it was anything but a city of people eating pho three times a day when it was actually a fashion show for the latest American and Chinese military gadgets not so long ago. An estimated 5 million Vietnamese died during the 16-year conflict, but its population jumped from 55 to 80 million after the war. How resilient people are, to have borne the unbearable and multiplied.

It’s not long (a few minutes) until I am broken out of my reverie as the next tuk-tuk driver or handicraft seller chases me down. I wonder if it embarrasses them as much as it does me that they are begging from me: a Chinese American, whose governments did them such atrocities. Women whose parched skins and hunched backs, making them look 100 years old, hold outstretched skin and bones to each passing tourist. Have we: the West, the East, driven them not only to their graves and destitution, but also robbed them of their dignity and gentleness? Are they as outraged as I am that they now have to beg from their perpetrators?

My sorrows come together in Cambodia as nowhere else. I watch the old, fat, white men with their arms around the local girls. And I wonder if they also mourn their exploitation beneath all the makeup that does not hide their youth. Cambodia has the highest rate of HIV/AIDS in SE Asia and a prostitution ring so cheap it is drawing customers away from Bangkok. This is its happy ending after centuries of occupations by the Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, French, Japanese, Americans. No concrete statistics could be taken, but it’s estimated that of its 5 million population pre-war, under a million were killed or wounded in the Vietnam War. 2 million more were tortured, starved, or worked to death by its own people: the Khmer Rouge. But its population stands at 8 million now with nearly no old people.

Do Cambodians mourn their bloodied past, impoverished present, and bleak future as I do? Do they demand justice and truth about why they suffered? Or are they too tired from just trying to survive the present? Is the war, one generation separated, already too far back to be of concern today? If so, perhaps that is a greater tragedy: to forget not only trivializes the dead but ensures that the blood baths, ideological wars will happen again and again.

Determinism

I was talking with a Tibetan girl in Beijing. She is graduating from the Beijing Forestry University, a first-tier university that many Beijingers cannot get into. She is the only Tibetan in the Computer Sci Dept. and among the dozen in the entire university of 10,000+. I cannot help but profess how impressed I was: she is studying at a top national university as a minority in her second language. Being a well-manned youth, she says she is even more impressed with me as I'm a Chinese studying at an internationally famous university in America. I tell her that it is much, much more difficult for a Tibetan Chinese to move from west to east China than for a Han Chinese to move from China's east coast to America. But she has by no means 'made it'. Of all the Tibetans I know, only a half dozen attended university in Beijing, and they are all back in their home province as racist, discriminatory laws limiting rural-urban mobility are strictly enforced in China.

I used to denounce determinism, arguing that perseverance, opportunities, luck play more important roles in where we end up in life. Just look at me, I live a completely different life in the US than I would have in China; and it all began with an unexpected turn of events in Singapore. How can I even entertain the thought of a life pre-determined!

But now I'm not so sure if I'm the poster child for counter-determinism. My cousins who grew up in Beijing now work in Chinese, British, French investment banks. My childhood friends are paving their way towards bright careers. It may be true that my personality, worldview, ideals would have been drastically different had I remained in China, but I would've continued to be educated, urban, middle-class just as my parents and grandparents were.

Traveling in SE Asia now I contemplate how my life would look as a 24 year old female born elsewhere (based on facts, I'm not this imaginative). In Laos, I married at 16 and am chasing my four children while pregnant with my fifth, but I do have time to chase after them as my husband is working in our small field and I don't have much to look after in the house since we don't even have beds. In Cambodia, I witnessed the massacre of my 4 brothers by the Khmer Rouge. And when the killings finally ended, my remaining 10 siblings starved as a human-induced famine swept over the country. In Vietnam, I lost both my parents to the war. Looking at old propaganda posters showing mothers carrying a rifle in one hand and a baby in the other, I wonder whether my mother was affected by those images while carrying me.

Instead, I am a 24 year old born in Beijing, lived in New York, traveled in Paris. I am free of family obligations, unaffected by social stigma, so independent that it worries my parents. My agonies include whether to study a masters or a PhD, to do it at Columbia or Cambridge.

(It's neither guilt nor blessing-counting that is prompting me to write this, which I never find to be productive emotions. Moreover, the stress and depressions we encounter in the West are very real and terrifying things. Like the others, this post is simply my effort to remember what I see and feel.)

Perhaps our lives are more like Indian ragas: each individual is allowed much innovation and flexibility in how she plays the notes, but the scale is fixed.

A Dwindling Love Affair

When I first arrived in Xining two summers ago, I fell in love.

At 2,300m above sea level, it is referred to as the "Summer Capital" where emperors came to escape from the heat of the east coast. I felt like an empress taking a much needed respite from the heat, noise, lights, glamour of Beijing. Xining is the capital of a poor western province. It has all of life's necessities (reliable electricity, Internet, transportation) and none of its amenities (martinis, coffee, Mac service). It is slow paced where people walk aimlessly on the streets, stop and chat, eat long lunches. I liked walking in the markets, watching old Hui and Tibetan women haggle over vegetables, smelling roasted yams, listening to the Qinghai-accented Mandarin that is as foreign to my ears as Portuguese.

I recently spent another two weeks in the same city. But this time, I saw none of its charm. The streets are dusty and dirty. The hills surrounding the city are bare. Bad music is every present and blaring. Respite is nowhere to be found.

Men walking aimlessly in their polyster suits actually hurt my eyes. I looked in another direction only to see more walking polyster suits. Suits are by definition well-fitted, elegant, making any guy (tall or short, fat or thin, old or young) look sharp. Polyster suits are ill-fitted, displeasing on all the senses, making any guy look...cheap. But it is not just the fashionista in me that is indignant, it's the developmentalist in me too. Why do you try to look Western? Even worse, why do you add in a Chinese touch to Western dress, which adds nothing but cheapness? Why do you disdain traditional, comfortable, or practical clothing for any foreign style that turns out to be ill-fitted and displeasing? I understands it is near impossible to develop your own sense of style and being when every single man wears polyster suits. I lament that the environment in which these men reside does not allow them exposure to other possibilities and suppresses actions deviating from an imposed norm.

This long tangent is meant to show that the polyester suits that grit on my nerves now were completely lost on me before. Hence once I get past the preliminary introductions to a city, how I feel about it is almost entirely based on my moods. I find that I can no longer say I love or despise a city. I can only say that under certain conditions and times where the city (sunny, no construction) and I (lack of stress, desire to have fun) were in sync, I liked being there. It is with sadness that I lost the romantic notion of identifying and feeling myself a part of a place. I realize that I'm not one who can feel a city's energy, feel it in me, make a judgement on whether I like that energy or not, and conclude decisively that I love it or not.

Much as I'm an admirer of Romanticism, I'm not a romantic. Much as I admire carefree spirits, my thoughts are governed by careful rational, calculations, risk-aversion...

Customer Service

We go into a restaurant in Xining, the capital of Qinghai, a Tibetan province in western China. It's the usual loud pop music, musty, smoke-filled atmosphere. I order vegetarian soup and my friend beef stirfry as I'm not a meat-eater and he is.

An hour later, we have yet to see our food. I walk up to the 4 waitresses sitting and chatting. There are few customers. I ask: "Is our food ready?"

Our waitress looks up at me, innocent and no trace of ill-humor: "Yeah, it is ready." There are no signs of movement.

"Hmmm, will you bring us the food then?"

"Oh! Ok, sure!" Goes to the kitchen.

She brings back a plate to put the dish on, but no food. I also wondered why only one plate holder if we ordered two dishes.

Five minutes later, she brings out the one dish: "Here you are: one beef soup."

Fearing we will not eat until morning if we don't eat what's in front of us, we dig in.

So Funny and Sad and True

1. My friend who is a Hui Muslim, an ethnic and religious minority, does development work for an international organization in Xinjiang, the western most province madeup of mostly people who are Central Asian descendents and strict Muslims and speak a Turkish language. It's as contentious a region as Tibet just not as much in the news (for a variety of reasons of course, but perhaps one of them is that the West is more sympathetic to Buddhism than Islam).

A person my friend has worked with is a professor at an Irish university teaching human rights and invited him to do a MA in human rights at her uni, all expenses covered of course.

His response: "You want me to study HUMAN RIGHTS in Ireland?! All my family in China will disappear!"

2. We don't realize how much trust there exists in the States where we trust that someone will do something that she said she will do. In academia especially, grants and awards are given on the basis of a proposed project's merit and the only substantial check is the result at the end of the study; or more accurately, the bad rep you will have by failing to publish a substantial result. In China, where the checks and balances and a tradition of general rule following fostered by a strong legal system (not as much as the Germans and Japanese of course, but still existing) are easily subverted, trust even in academic partnerships is elusive.

At a meeting where a National Science Foundation funded project's principal investigator (PI) is meeting with the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS):

CAS: Show us the documentation that shows you have the NSF grant.

PI: I forwarded you the email that said we received the grant, and I sent you our approved proposal.

CAS: How do we know you didn't just write that email and approve that proposal yourself. I do not believe that the most prestigious research institute in the US just gives you an email to say your proposal is approved. You must have some certification, or your university must have it.

PI: Well, I only have the email, and I also know I've gotten it because the award is in my bank account.

CAS: So you need to either prove to us you have the money in your bank account or give us a certificate from your university.

PI: Would I really come all the way to Qinghai to try to form a research partnership with you if I'm pretending to have the money? Expenditures are in USD, which is 7 times rmb. But I'll try to see if my university has some more formal agreement from NSF. Realize that in the US, we don't stamp things.

The document that the university received from NSF is...?

An email.

Tomb Sweeping

Today is Tomb Sweeping Day, a national holiday, we go to sweep the tomb of my dad's grandmother. It's no easy task. She was buried without a tombstone and nowhere near a cemetery. The only recollection my dad has of her burial ground is that it is next to a railway track outside of Gaoliying, a village under an hour’s drive from central Beijing.

But it may as well have been any village in the country’s undeveloped interior instead of the developed coast. Faces are sun burnt and wind blown. Men kick the dust with their synthetic shoes while twirling grass between their teeth. Youngsters whistle pop tunes while watching passing girls dressed in imitation designer jeans. Young mothers watch their babies play amongst thick dust and exhaust smoke. Matronly shopkeepers count change behind shelves of ramen, candy, and other past expiration date, non-perishable foods. Old men chat and smoke in heavy blue overalls dating to the communist era. Looking down at my T-shirt, I am reminded that heating in their homes is not central; they salvage their own wood or coal.

Like all country sides, Beijing's is all things to all people. Existing alongside are subtle charm and blatant poverty, green fields and brown sewage, four-star resorts and one-roomed huts, open skies and closed roads, where dirt paths rarely lead into city roads.

It takes numerous detours before we find that railroad track. Gaoliying, like the rest of China, has bloated in the last 20 years to beyond recognition.

“There it is: the circle of stones I made as a marker all those years ago. I can’t believe we found it.” My dad says softly.

It is a restful place. The sun makes a warm spot of it, nestled amongst peach blossoms in full bloom this time of the year, broken out of its tranquility by the occasional passing train. My dad pours baijiu on that circle of stones. The sweet fragrance of the 56% alcohol hits my nose and I cry.

My great-grandmother’s image immerges before my eyes. Tolstoy's Anna was born out of a friend, Kundera's Agnes out of a gesture, Laolao was born out of my dad's stories. She was a shy young bride, given as a concubine to a husband with daughters her age. Not coming from a wealthy family, becoming a small landlord’s concubine, i.e. a titled servant, was among the better options. She still had to work day and night, but it was mostly in the house instead in the house and on the farm. When she settled in the routine of serving her husband and children, as all women settled then, the Cultural Revolution came. She was publicly humiliated and chastised as a landlord’s wife though she had little more choice than a chair does in belonging to a man. They were both property. Her grandson watched helplessly as a crowd of people enclosed her, taunted her, and threw things at her. She survived, but parts of her died. In her old age, she moved from east to west China to live with her daughters’ families. In a foreign environment, she raised all her grandchildren. It was a life endured in silence; one spent taking care of others but not oneself. I cry not for her death, but for the life denied her.

I cry for the farmers and migrant workers in Gaolinying, for the lives they will never know. Beijing is an hour away, but it may as well be several life times. I cry for my illiterate grandmother. For her, every outing is composed of indescribable insecurities and fears. All the world’s a stage, and she's never a player. 

“Life is like this.” My dad breaks into my tears. “You never figure out its meaning. Once you do, it’s all over. To live is to seek, to be free to seek.”

I don’t quite comprehend his meaning, but I’m okay with that for now. I’ll seek it out by and by.

The alcohol evaporates, along with my tears. I place another stone in the circle and pray that my great-grandmother knows how loved she is by her children and children's children. The sun sets. I put my arm in my dad’s and we walk away amidst the peach blossoms.