Waves Pull at Him

A great friend recommended the book so I threw it in my Amazon list.  Somehow it made it past the winnowing on the last time I prepared an order and hit “send.”  “Barbarian Days” by William Finnegan was remarkable.  I never thought I’d care about waves.  I’ve waded out into the surf and hopped over waves and been occasionally knocked over by curls, spun around so I didn’t know which way was up.  If they’re big they impressive.  If they’re tidal I’ll watch replays of their devastation on Youtube.  But to paraphrase Lenny Bruce: ‘a wave’s a wave.’

William Finnegan oriented his life around waves and by end of his tale you can begin to understand why.  I had just passed through Newport Beach a few weeks back, the place Finnegan was born, and had ate breakfast three days in a row during that trip with surfers down below me at Laguna Niguel.  And though that’s not why I read the book just now, I was glad to have some fresh memories in my mind beyond the earliest Beach Boy lyric points of reference.  Hawaii, where I’ve never been is where he moved to when he was a boy in middle school, or so that is where is starts his tale.  His style is so unassuming, smart and approachable that even after considering the story for the first few pages I knew it would be the next thing I’d read from my pile. 

Waves pull at him and influences choices, to drop out of college, return to Hawaii when he did.  We don’t really learn much about the years he didn’t surf, working on the railroad in the West Coast, but the remarkable journey continues shortly thereafter that involves Guam, and Fiji, and Australia and Indonesia, ultimately to South Africa before returning to his homeland. 

I kept considering the man on the cover of the book jacket, the author and his friend, certainly in the middle of that trip, searching for the perfect waves.   I started out intrigued, because I reckoned, he looked a bit like me, at one time in my life. Irish mugs are like that.  And his realizations after years and years on the road, had resonance with my own.  Later he settles down in places I know well like San Francisco and Manhattan.  Certainly, though I never associated such places with surfing.  And only a dedicated wave-lover would bother with the freezing winter waves of either place when the surf swells sufficiently to make things interesting.

One might assume that repeated descriptions of curls and tubes and spray might become a bit tiresome after a while but that is not the case.  In his hand, they seem to take on the distinction of different lands, or different music, or different cuisine, consistently captivating.  Fourteen years beyond me in age, I could consider what’s up ahead, as he battles-on with waves thought eventually, as his kids grow and his parents retire, he admits the limits of age, himself.   It all mattered a lot, and as they say, I couldn’t put the book down.  In the end I stayed up far later than I should have till three in the morning finishing out his tale, as an act of fraternal camaraderie, disobedience and respect. 

Wednesday, 02/21/18

All the Way Home With You?

It’s Lunar New Year’s holiday.  We’re all sitting around without much to do in a city that has dwindled to half its normal population.  My wife suggested a Temple Fair in the city.  I opined one temple, and she countered with another.  I found a list of ten on line and suggested that she and the kids pick one from there.  “The God of Wealth” she exclaimed.  Let’s go and visit him.  It was over in the west side of the city.  It sounded interesting.  And calling a cab, off we went to pick up my older daughter, who’d had a sleep over in Wang Jing, and then cut across the city to visit the God of Wealth Temple. 

Alas, the God of Wealth needs to invest in an advertising budget.  We got to the location, circled around once and then twice, asked a pedestrian or two, and endured the doubts of our grouchy driver all in vain, searching for the temple of mammon that should have been here somewhere.  Our driver didn’t want to hear this, but I told him to take us over to the White Cloud Temple, some fifteen minutes away, instead.   Look, we’re doing a temple.   

The driver began to complain.  As if.  “It’s awful late in the day. “That place will be so crowded.”  “I don’t think you want to head all the way over there.”  I had been quiet, absorbed in my latest book most of the ride, about a man chasing the world’s best surf from Guam to Polynesia.  But now, something needed to be said.  I raised my voice and asked, at twice the volume anyone else’s heretofore offered up, “What do you want us to do then?  Go all the way home with you?  We came out today.  We’re finding something to do.  Bai Yun Temple then.  If you need directions let me know!”    We we’re on our way.    (I refer you, tender reader, to the title and theme of the entry prior to this one.) 

We pulled up on the street to find barricades and plastic stalls lined along outside in anticipation of many thousands of guests.  But they were vacant at 3:45PM.  Cops and guards and a myriad of officialdom were there to protect everyone against disruption or worse.  I could feel a guy trying to rush behind me in the tight, cattle queue pathway, and once the stall broke free he tried to cut before me with a dash to the ticket gate.  Times like this I always feel like I’m back on the Lexington Ave Line.  Brusque, self-interest?  Nothing wrong with that.  “I’m first.”  I told him, elbowing my way back before him.  

Inside, I tried to remember the place from my memories of seventeen years ago, or was it twenty-one years since the last time I was here.  At the front door, to the side, a line had formed of people waiting to rub the marble knob of the front door.  We passed on this auspicious opportunity and crowded around the masses throwing coins into the well, to ring the bell for luck.  At any one time some fifty people were chucking fake coinage that you could buy at ten kuai for twenty.  In the pit, a hapless man with a hat and a broom was sweeping up the ever-growing piles of phony bronze.  “Girls.  That is why you work hard in school.”  I offered.  You don’t want to wind up with the coin-sweep-up job at the temple.

We trudged through one temple door and further back in, repeating the temple ritual that has slight variations but is otherwise always the same throughout the Chinese world, in much the same way that most churches have pews and a nave and an altar.  At one building, I noticed was from the early Ming period, the monk inside was handing back out the offerings earlier deposited, to the folks who come to pay respects.  He gave my wife an enormous bouquet of lilies, which she was thrilled to receive and carried around for the rest of the day.  Too many people to allow you or the next worshiper to burn incense themselves.  Put it here and the monk will drop it all into the large silver receptacle with the hot coals burning.  My older one coughed on incense smoke and wanted water.  Now.  “I don’t see any darling.  If its that bad, why don’t you ask the kid over there with the plastic bottle if you can have a sip?”  Off to the side a man was selling a ginger tea that we bought and this had to suffice.  

Every temple has its final edifice.  At the rear of the main hall seventy guards or so line up waiting to usher everyone out.  As I walked past someone murmured something and I wished them all a joyous new year loudly, which they eventually replied to.  Later they all filed out, reminding people it was time to leave.  The White Cloud Temple is closing.

Tuesday, 02/20/18

Sing Out As Arrogant

Day off.  Read.  I made a simple decision:  Enjoy the day and put off work on this latter day Lunar New Year holiday and finish my Lin Yutang “The Importance of Living.”  And while some things are dated, like his views on women and his insistence on smoking, he is largely a refreshingly broad Chinese intellect who can speak with gravitas on the Western trajectory as well.  Reading Mr. Lin in New York in 1937, one is introduced to a dozen, new Chinese thinkers that he takes for granted and we get the aching sense of just now much was lost, during the insanity of the revolutionary period, when things were torn up by roots, under the Chairman’s insistence.

Appropriately for the man who coined loan-word you-mo (幽默,) for humor, Lin Yutang had me laughing out loud.  Why, he asks, do foreigners extend their hands to shake?  We Chinese shake hands with ourselves, which I imagined and saw, and concurred.   He refreshed my thinking about authors I’ve read over the years and haven’t considered for ages like: “Six Records of a Floating Life," by Shen Fu.  The wife in the story, Chen Yun, he suggested, was the most adored heroine of all Chinese literature.  (I’d thought that was Lin Dai Yu?).  I pulled it down of the shelf and peppered my wife with questions about their happiness and their deterioration.

When I finished the Lin treatise, I took down another book on China that I’ve eyed for a while now:  “The Chinese Are Like That” by Carl Crow.  As soon as I cracked it open I realized that it too had been written in 1937, from Crow’s office perch in Shanghai.  Hailing from the Show-Me State, Crow is tart, and insightful and with large type cast and plenty of whimsical illustrations I found myself barreling through Mr. Crow’s litany of China-epiphanies, from right before the Japanese invasion, steeping longer in that time, similarly precious and wistful.  

The Chinese aren’t like that anymore.  Street singers, and corner temples these are lost, along with the grinding poverty, the opium addiction and the threat of invasion.  When I typed to a friend who’d recommended to me the book in the first place, we discussed in wechat bursts, what had disappeared and what remained.  I commented that the book might also have been titled “The Shanghainese Are Like That,” when Crow describes the yelling in the street that goes on for hours but never results in a blow and the art of the deal.  Truly, many, many aspects of that pre-revolutionary China, never made it through the meat grinder though, to our contemporary era and in some ways, surely the Chinese, certainly the ones who inhabit the dragon head there in Hua Dong, are indeed, like that.

As 1:00AM turned into 3:00AM and the books mid way point shrank down in the rearview mirror, I decided to finish it off in the one sitting, joining Carl as he negotiates the freedom of some hapless foreigners who’d been kidnapped by a Shandong bandit.  Crow spoke about being numb to the suffering and being sagacious about seeing through “Chinese” treachery and trickery.  And I appreciated his distant, measured, but ultimately presumptuous tone and I wondered just what, within this blog itself, that strives to be objective and thoughtful, might also sing out as arrogant with a few more decades of distance. 

In the morning, I had a call.  There were no demands though, after that and wired, unable to return to sleep I decided upon another “China” book and began something from the same period that has been on my shelf a few months now, “The Age of Irreverence” Christopher Rea, on the history of laughter of in China from that same period at the beginning of the last century.  This had been a must-read, since the time I first came across the title.  It was now, I noticed that in addition to a quote from the respected Sinologist Perry Link there was also a quote from Eric Idle of Monty Python fame on the dust jacket. 

Monday, 02/19/18

An Unregulated Public Commons

Is it a hoax?  Is it a distraction?  Is the Russian, election-meddling story the new McCarthyite phobia cast upon our perennial American foe?  I’m writing this morning, listening to Trane play with Miles, turn into Wayne plays with Miles on a Youtube progression that I’m not controlling, but am enjoying.  My buddy texting me insists that the Muller indictment we read about yesterday is itself a false flag, intended to exonerate the DRC and HRC from having lost to a circus barker.  The impact of Russian meddling, he insists is vastly overblown. 

Blaming foreigners, be they Russians or terrorists or Chinese, is a distraction as old as America itself.  Acknowledged.  I’m particularly sensitive to anything I see that suggests China is molded into a monolithic demon.  So perhaps I am missing it when Russia-phobia blooms again as it is, before my eyes.  Whether or not it was a well-coordinated state plot hatched by the Kremlin, or even whether or not these actions were in fact impactful, it does seem to me that the openness and pervasiveness of platforms like Facebook, Youtbue and Twitter represent profound new opportunities for misinformation, manipulation, by state and non-state actors, domestic and foreign actors.  That some portion of that experimentation is conducted by foreign governments seems clear to me.  It would, in fact, be surprising if foreign governments worth their stripes, did not look to exploit such possibilities.  That U.S. citizens create and promote the majority of the electoral misinformation, also seems certain. 

In China the U.S. organs for social media are banned and the domestic versions, are tightly state controlled.  China was fearful of creating an unregulated public commons, and this was reinforced powerfully as they watched the Arab Spring unfold.  The ideal of a free, public commons is something America likes to hold dear.  But clearly, not much thought went into the implications for a pervasive, viral network like Facebook where spurious, anonymous contributions can be catalyzed and metastasized by foreign and domestic players alike, out of the commons, and into your pockets, into your bedrooms.  Policy plays catch-up to ethics in the disruptive, technological environment of the USA.  And, cautiously, that is still the lesser of two evils: allowing and remediating, rather than never allowing at all.

My wife’s finally up.  I can hear her with the coffee in the kitchen.  She was up late. Cognac and guzheng.  I’m up early.  I’ll step away from the Miles and go and greet the day.  There’s a pile of apples that have been sitting there in the kitchen for some time.  Let me see if we’ve what we need to make them into a pie on this Sunday morning. 

Somewhere, out in Shandong, in a small daub and wattle village with crude genealogy posters up on the wall, the men of the village are setting off fireworks, by the ancestral tombs, tombs that have been moved once or twice on account of road constructions . . . to send all the ancestors safely back to the netherworld.  They used to walk back but now it’s a drive and then they’ll be piling in to the homes where the women folk have the jiaozi bao-ed, ready to slide into a steaming cauldron, the jiaozi skin, made from the wheat, that’s grown in the same soil that covers the tombs . . . But not here in Beijing.  Not for our family this year.  Still, I’m wishing all my ancestors who’ve shared the earth these past few days a safe trip back to the great beyond.  May Miles scare off any unwanted ghosts. 

Sunday, 02/18/18