motherboard (daft punk) / interlude (laura marling)

beijing day one

I looked back through my journals about London, the first couple days I landed there, to see if I might have experienced the same kind of waiting sensation there that I experienced for the first couple days in Beijing. I don’t have a record of it anywhere. I remember London—smelled like hot metal and tarmac the first day I was there, and when I surfaced from the underground bits of dust and lint got caught on my greasy face and in my eyelashes and people looked at me like I was a sewer monster as I hauled my luggage first half a mile in the complete wrong direction, and then back after consulting my map for another mile. It felt real. It felt like a whole new world.

Maybe because we hear so much about how the East is different, I expected to feel like I was in outer space or something. So for a while, when there was more greenery around than I had expected, and when the sun was whiter than I’d expected, when the air was cleaner than I’d expected—I kept waiting to feel like I was in China. I was still isolated at this point, like a little Western virus caught up in quarantine, on the tour bus. I couldn’t wait to step out.

The first stop was a restaurant where we climbed up to the second floor and, next to a window display full of dried-out Peking Ducks, ate dim sum. I have no idea what is in that loaf thing but I ate some and then someone at the same table decided that there was fish in it. I thought, great, we’ve only been off the plane for an hour. (I would later eat fried fish/eel thinking that it was fried mushroom…but we didn’t get a lot of help distinguishing what was what. Also, for those of you reading who didn’t know, I’ve been a vegetarian for a while now, since about half-way through high school.) 

dim sum for breakfast: morning 1 :')

After breakfast we took the bus back to the hotel. It wasn’t too hot yet; I’d already fooled myself into thinking that the weather wouldn’t be as bad as they’d warned me, and this delusion persisted for the first few days. 

mysterious mushroom buildings

I don’t know what these little mushroom-looking buildings are, but you can see them from really far away if the air is clear. Beijing is full of high-rise apartments—not as many as Shanghai—but enough so that early views of Beijing reminded me of the first views of London from the surface-level areas of the underground. For some reason I cannot feel as romantically about Beijing as I felt about London.  

Below is the view from our hotel window. We stayed at the Taishan Hotel for the duration of our Beijing stay; my roommate “A” and I were on the fifth floor. Because she attended an optional event that I did not attend on the first morning, I checked in to the room alone and was left to explore all its strange plugs and devices on my own. Unsurprisingly it took me five whole minutes of pressing the light switches to realize that there’s a slot near the door where you have to insert your room key for the power to even come on. After I figured this out I turned the air down as low as it would go which was still too hot, around 28C—I think A came back later and figured out how to get it to go lower than that. 

Our bathroom was really nice, but one whole wall was made of window. I could see there was a blind but I couldn’t reach it. At this point there were two hours left until we left the hotel for lunch and I’d just been on a long international flight and I wanted to shower, so I just undressed and showered with the window open. We were on the fifth floor. Hello, Beijing…

view from hotel window

Later, after lunch (Peking Duck, which I heard was good), we went to the Temple of Heaven. Thinking back about it, this is still one of my favorite stops that we made in Beijing. Flocks of tourists, of course, but there’s also a lower level where a bunch of locals gather to play chess and blast music out of boom-boxes (yes!). Some people’s game stations appeared to be permanent—some chairs were chained to the ground… I liked walking at ground level. I didn’t like being part of a tour. I’ve had the feeling before about other things but I feel kind of …fake? For being interested in these cultures to which I have no real claim other than my own interest…walking around with a tour wearing bright yellow tags did nothing to assuage these feelings. I took mine off after a while and held it in my hand. 

The Temple of Heaven was built in the 15th century, and was the site of heaven worship, the place where Ming and Qing emperors would come to pray for good harvests. There’s the temple, but then there’s also a park around it. I’ve experienced the feeling before in Europe, but more here: how strange that it’s places like these and the things that happened here a long time ago that shaped the culture of the domestic tourists who were coming to visit them… Americans don’t know what it’s like to live in a country where there’s a cultural rule of any kind—our culture is freedom of speech and back-porch barbecues, cheap fast-food and football season’s extravagant chex-mix-filled parties….Southern California is about healthy living, clean seafood, being in the water as much as you can, being bronzed and happy…. But those are all things of right now, we don’t have anything to look back on. And I think it’s why we can feel a little lost sometimes, just as a generation, especially us millennials, for whom the internet has so compressed space and time that we might as well have not been born into anything at all… 

The first person who asked to take a picture with me asked while we were at the Temple of Heaven. I thought I heard him wrong. But I wasn’t wrong. This continued to punctuate my experiences in China…something I’ve been struggling to think of fondly rather than as too strange to enjoy in memory. Just another bit of culture shock…more on this later. 

The sun set on us in Beijing after a long, long day. I kept thinking about “Concerning the Wild Goose Pagoda” by Han Dong on the bus ride back to the hotel. When we reached the hotel A, my roommate, figured out how to use all the things that I had failed to, including how to lower the blind on the bathroom wall…

I discovered the poetry of Han Dong this last Spring, just picked up a book at random in the library and it wouldn’t leave me alone, haunted me… I’m still in the process of writing up a paper about Han Dong’s poems. I sent my dad a few of his poems after we watched a documentary called “Wild China” a few months ago; Han Dong is a contemporary poet, and I started to think a lot about contemporary vs. ancient China. I wrote this:

• This came to mind while we were watching the "Wild China" series last night...I think that a lot of Western understanding of Eastern Asian culture(s) is rooted in an understanding of the "Ancient" Chinese or ancient Korean or ancient Japanese. It's true that a lot of this ancient culture has, because of the culture's age as a whole, managed to dominate even parts of modernized culture, but I like reading these "contemporary" poems as a comment on contemporary Chinese life. I think in a culture as old as the Chinese culture, a perspective on contemporary life probably isn't possible or meaningful without a comparison to the culture's history. I hadn't thought about what you said about the peaceful tone I perceived in the poems before you put it the way you did; that culture and life have just existed in certain ways that have persisted for thousands of years; and now that I'm reading again through them, I'm reading the poems less as a comparison of old and emergent, but as the ways in which an ancient culture reforms itself to fit the current era...it reappears in forms that are familiar and strange, but it's all part of the same, ancient cycle. "Concerning the Wild Goose Pagoda" draws the most noticeable parallels between the past and present; even in a place of so much history, how much can we really know about it just by being alive there today? It's something I experienced in England, when I was amazed by the buildings and how old the streets were, and people just went around living because life changes even if landscape doesn't. SO the poem reframes bravery as the ability to enact vision or to respond to desire and not to disappear into life as though you hadn't climbed to the top of the ancient building at all.

Despite the obvious dark tones (which went over my head the first time I read this poem), I love this piece. It may just be Han Dong’s writing in particular, but reading Chinese poetry often leaves me feeling peaceful, but awakened. It haunts you for a while afterward, too; from the first time I read “Full Moon” by Du Fu last year I haven’t been able to think of the moon without thinking of it (not yet flawed, it drifts...). I can’t go to China, therefore, without thinking of Han Dong… This piece caused quite a stir when it was first published in 1982. 

From Eight Contemporary Chinese Poets by Tao and Prince from Wild Peony Press in 2006:

“Concerning the Wild Goose Pagoda” (Han Dong) 

Concerning the Wild Goose Pagoda

How much can we really know

Many people rush here from far away

To climb to the top

And be a hero for once

Or in some cases twice

Or even more

The frustrated and the disconsolate

The plump and the prosperous

All climb to the top

Play the hero

And then come down

Walk into the street

And immediately vanish

Some work up the courage to jump

And leave a red flower on the steps

That's the way to be a real hero

A hero for the modern age

Of the Wild Goose Pagoda

How much can we really know

We climb to the top

Gaze around at the scenery

And then come down again

writing music: “Icarus Walks” by Epik High

Daedalus made a pair of wax wings for his son, Icarus. After that we remember what happens: Icarus uses his wings to escape captivity and then realizes that he’s curious for the world; over the ocean he flies too close to the sun. When he turns around to see that his wings are melting and realizes what’s happening, he begins to fall; he drowns in the ocean below. 

Pieces, part one is an album that I have really come to love recently. At the end of the school year when I was starting to really wonder about what to do and who I am, I could really only see my love for writing as the thing that grounded me to the world and that would allow me to relate to and interact with others. My world kept getting darker. I feel like I’m still sitting in blackness. Pieces, part one also includes “연필깎이” and “낙화” which are about living through the blindness (연필깎이) and maintaining your dreams despite them being impossible (낙화). The album rewards belief and hard work, but also curiosity and positive attitude. It doesn’t do it in a way I’ve seen before—not a YA anything is possible if you believe kind of message. It’s about being in a time when you feel far away from yourself and imagining what you must look like, wherever you are, and continuing to walk even in the darkness, when there’s no way to tell where your foot will fall.

“Icarus Walks” retells the myth we all know. The greeks were obsessed with hubris, the ways it could kill a person. If you angered the gods you were dead. But Pieces, part one is a different framework. We’re not in ancient Greece anymore; this is a world of cities and shadows and facade and noise that muffles the heart’s own language, where the choice between what mask to wear can consume the face that would support it (re: “nocturne” and many others from Remapping the Human Soul, the last album prior to p.p1). In this kind of landscape, the gods may have forgotten us, or found a better world. It’s now humans with the capacity to inspire and help each other through ugliness and periods of fugue. In Pieces, part one, when Icarus falls to the water, something else happens at the surface, and when we realize it, something else can happen inside us, too. 

beijing airport

Beijing Capital International Airport is bigger and hotter than I would have expected. The ceilings are arched and white, planks of wood criss-crossing over something orange behind them. When we landed at five-something AM the first morning, it was also nearly empty. Beijing Capital is the most highly-trafficked international airport in Asia. ...Maybe because of this, someday, they will decide to invest in air conditioning. 

It took five minutes, maybe a little longer, maybe closer to ten minutes, to walk from the plane to immigration. While I was there the officer helping me talked with the officer at the other booth about something that amused them both. I’d just spent twelve horrible hours not sleeping at all but being the couch cushion for the little boy in the seat next to me; whatever they said didn’t amuse me. I don’t like flying. 

I do like airports. After you pass through immigration you walk through this wide part with a bunch of banners in different languages welcoming you to Beijing, then go down escalators to wait for a train that will take you to customs and baggage claim. I can’t remember exactly what it’s like when you get off the train. I think I may have walked straight to baggage claim and then strait out into whatever the part of the airport is called where people can wait to pick you up. 

I have a few impressions of what happened next: it was too hot in the airport, I needed to shower, and I got accosted by a taxi driver immediately after claiming my baggage. Several others asked me if I needed a ride while I walked the gamut. We’d been told someone from the travel agency would be waiting for us when we go there. There was nobody there. I went and stood with a couple people I recognized as part of the same group. Around us a man got into a loud verbal argument with someone a little passive until a girl maybe my age went up and pushed him around until he quieted down. Couldn’t tell if they were siblings or just star-connected strangers. 

Other than the fact that all signs were in Chinese and that announcements were made in Chinese first and in English second, I kept waiting for it to feel real. I think because when I was in Europe, the weather was so immediately different from what I’ve ever experienced, it really did feel like the other side of the world. It was just hot in Beijing, heat that I’ve felt and hated, too, at home. 

I watched people gather each other, walk aimlessly through the airport’s lower levels. Everything shines in airports. It’s all cleaner than you think it would be. Whiter, too. Feels a little like you’re all passing through some giant animal’s body, just for a time, until you exit into the world full of weather and dirt. 

The view from outside the airport is different. There was this small, shiny, pancake-shaped building across from our bus. It turned out to be a small introduction to a city full of strangely-shaped or strangely-decorated buildings. My first thoughts of Beijing were that I was waiting for it to feel real, but it’s a vigorous city, robustly itself, populated in part by one of the most technologically advanced generations in the world and in part by older men and women with traditional haircuts and who still wear those little black fabric shoes. People ride bikes and electric scooters right into traffic. People walk right into traffic. There’s more greenery—shrubs, trees, parks—than I had imagined. The city is larger than I ever thought. Its people are friendly and interested. Chatty. I wonder how long Beijing will sustain the traditions of its long history; how long it should; how people like me affect what happens there; will we continue to be a pest to the kite-sellers from whom we will not buy…

late July

Some changes: I’ve reverted several posts to drafts while I clean them up. In the meantime, I plan to continue to review music and books (I recently began reading A History of the World in 10 and 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes and recently finished reading Black Aperture by Matt Rasmussen and 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami; recently dug up old writing on Laura Marling’s Once I Was an Eagle and Epik High’s “Icarus Walks” —), and to write a little bit about my recent trip to Beijing and a few cities in Southern China. 

I keep applying for jobs. We’ll see what happens. I recently told some friends that if money was no issue, if getting the jobs I wanted was no issue, the life I envision for myself: I’d like to go to art/fashion school, study textile design or menswear design, work my way into the product acquisition/styling industry; at some point during this time I’d travel to Eastern Asia again to teach English for a year or two. I’d attend foreign language school in Seoul like I wanted. Write that paper on the link between portrayal of women in modern/contemporary South Korean literature and the disappearance of the homeless women during the IMF crisis. Then I’d like to go back to school for an MFA in Creative Writing and enter the literary professional world. 

I spent a long time thinking that writing was the only interest I had, and time with nothing to do has given me the understanding that I’d like to do other things, too. I’m realizing more and more that a single “calling” is another myth that we ingest and promulgate to keep our ideas of our own selves from going out. At a certain point myths don’t convince us anymore. 

From Robert Frost’s “On Looking Up By Chance at the Constellations” —

The sun and moon get crossed, but they never touch,
Nor strike our fire from each other nor crash out loud.
The planets seem to interfere in their curves
But nothing ever happens, no harm is done.
We may as well go patiently on with our life,
And look elsewhere than to stars and moon and sun
For the shocks and changes we need to keep us sane.