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2014: A Howdy-Do Year in Review

Last January, I didn’t get my 2013 lookback, The Great Eighteen, up until the 20th, so if you don’t mind, I’m going to call this prompt. Efficient. Timely — at least for me! Reflection on accomplishments never comes at a bad time. (Does it? Of course, you ninny! Okay, but — Which doesn’t mean it’s always foolish to look backwards, either. Alright then, so maybe — Just get to it!)

I posted to JH.com 93 times last year, which is as productive as I’ve ever been, and that with December nearly ringing up a doughnut. (That’s jock-talk for nada. Zero. Hole in the JZone layer. Nuttin’, honey. I missed that bizarro perfection by one lonely post, so the rest of the year must’ve been excellent.) Starting with my self-conscious blurts in the middle of 2005, JH.com now has an archive of 637 posts. That seems like quite a few.

So, I consulted a panel of experts. What were the most meaningful, artistically satisfying and world-changing posts of 2014 on JamesHowden.com? No. I didn’t. I trawled through 2014 and asked myself, “Okay, self, what do you still like and think others might, too?” Oh, I did take my readers into account, based on what got read most, or what found life elsewhere on the ‘Net, but mainly this is me Me ME. So here is a quick skate through some of the things I wrote here last year. It gives a reasonable portrait of what gave my head a shake in 2014. It’s a quick read, and you can click on anything that appeals. Here, then, are the

Fabulous Fifteen!

1. Sequel: The (Not Quite) Christmas (Late) Show* Must Go On (Jan. 2)                 (with Chinese Characteristics)

For the last three years in China, my wife and I taught in the School of International Business, a small college within our university in Dalian. Every December, there was a spangly student SHOW. Here, I reviewed this incredible, excessive, odd, passionate, obligatory celebration of something-or-other. Warning: this is only the second half of the extravaganza, and you may not be able to resist dipping back into December 2013 for the full jaw-dropping effect. It was amazing. (And only occasionally depressing.)

2. Lost in Cambodia  (February 5)

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Temple of Heaven: Grounds for Optimism, Part 2

 This is Part Two of “Grounds for Optimism”, in which our fearless scribe goes to Chinese gardens, walking and running and thinking about things and then writing about them to dazzling effect. Part the First, on the “Humble Administrator’s Garden” in Suzhou, did its dazzling right here.

The Temple. Little bits of heaven surround it.

The Temple. Little bits of heaven surround it.

A few days later, in Beijing, I loosened my purse-strings again. Though I’d stayed, on a couple of prior visits, in a hotel near the Tiantandongmen station of the capital’s a-maze-ing subway system, I’d balked at the high walls and what had seemed like the rapacious price for a wander around the Temple of Heaven. (Tian Tan. Dongmen means the “eastern door” of this Ming and Qing dynasties-era complex of imperial gardens and temples.) On my second-last day in Beijing, I decided it might be worth running inside those walls, instead of on the chaotic surrounding streets. I had my usual sinking feeling at the entryway crowds, but the lines weren’t actually that long, and I found out that an entrance ticket – no access to the temple interiors, fine by me – was only 15 yuan. (You’re not paying $2.50 to go jogging, goofball. You’re running through Chinese history and culture for the price of a McChicken! Give your head a shake.)

The Tian Tan grounds are enormous, and yes, I got lost. I’d thought to run the perimeter and then see what I’d like to explore further, but after 35 wide-eyed minutes I wasn’t any particular where, as far as I could see. Well, I thought, I must be back near the East Gate by now, but I wasn’t. It didn’t matter. Even without entering The Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests – the “most famous temple in the world”, this under-educated Westerner was surprised to discover – or the Beamless Fasting Palace where Emperors purified themselves for weeks before their invocations of heaven, or viewing the Circular Mound Altar of sacrifice, I knew I’d be back for another tour the next day. Quite apart from the legends and the antiquity, there’s so much China in there, the parts just behind the walls of heavy traffic, the veils of pollution, and the look-how-modern-we-are! forests of shiny skyscrapers.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, but it’s a People Place. (People’s

Rocks to me. Even after I read, I didn't get the significance.

The Seven were just funky-shaped rocks to me. Even after reading, I didn’t get the significance.

Republic. Go figure.) There are tonnes of tourists, absolutely, but what this one liked was the locals who also paid no attention to The Divine Storehouse and the Seven-Star Stones. Folks pay, I found out from a spry old dude with careful and sufficient English, 100 yuan for a year’s pass. They come, singly and in groups, for exercise, community, art, serenity and the most amicable kinds of noise. I walked and ran and watched and listened, and for a time I just lay on a bench looking at the sky through the branches of old cypress trees. Here’s what I saw:

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Running, Pull-Ups and the Oneness of Humanity

I’ve never been able to endure even the idea of running on a treadmill, and only reluctantly do I join the walkers dutifully circling the track at local Chinese schools and universities. (My mind constantly runs in circles, so I don’t need cardiovascular reenactments.) Even plodding along familiar streets gets me restless, which partly explains why I love to run in new places. On a recent day in Suzhou, when my balky body had granted relatively enthusiastic permission for a run, I soured on what might have been a sweet outing, partly because my responsibilities as a friendly tourist nixed my locomotion. Walking (and stewing and brooding) burned a few calories, but I was glad to get out the next day.

We were, however, most favoured tourists. Our more-than-gracious hosts’ apartment  was across the street from Central Park, quiet and leafy in the modern section of Suzhou, so my live-in travel agent and I laced up and lumbered. Ponds and stone avenues, lawns and impromptu dancersize groups of Chinese women gave way to streetcore tourism as my bride signalled she’d had enough. I went straight down Broadway – actually, it was called Xinggang Lu, which means “Denim is my Destination”* — toward the Pants. More respectfully known as the Gate of the Orient, this huge dual tower looks like a pair of low-rise jeans on a hipless Chinese girl. Central Park punctuates, for a few blocks, Xinggang Lu as its traffic flows toward and away from the TrouserGate, and it was only partly for the sake of avoiding getting lost that I went Pants-ward. Impertinence aside, it’s enormous and visually quite compelling, and I didn’t resist its bowlegged charms.

* It most certainly does not mean that.

The boulevard made for pleasant city running.

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07/01/2013: The Longest Canada Day

I’m almost back to normal, though my body remains confused about why I

Missed the big party in the capital, but that was alright with me.

insist on lying down in the dark between 1 and 5 am, which it regards as Afternoon Drive Time. It would be if I was still in China, but I’m sitting in a sunny, leafy backyard behind a loving occasional home that features books, the resumption of sweet old conversations, gustatory temptations that haven’t crooned to me from such close range for nearly a year, and beds in the basement for son and bride and me. We’re back in Canada, almost completely. We flew on Canada Day, which for a long while seemed it would never come; when it did, it went on and on.

It started the way most days have recently, at least for this displaced Canadian trying to figure out Where is HERE? Though worn to a frazzle by an exhausting wrap-up of my working year in Dalian, China, my bladder and the barking of sunrise called me from my bed at about 4:30 a.m. Happy Canada Day! I tried to get back to sleep, but my mind-emptying mechanism was on the fritz. (I couldn’t stop writing parts of this thing, for instance, but I was also mentally packing, packing.)

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Running on Empty, Loving the Game

Because I have connections with cool people in Beijing – well, okay, one – my itinerary on a recent trip to the capital was not the usual middle-aged tourist fare. My weekend in The Big Smoke (literally, if you look at the skyline or scout the pollution figures) was highlighted by a Saturday afternoon not pounding the pavement at Tiananmen Square or fast-breaking into Temple of Heaven Park or (thank heaven!) being full-court pressed by the salesfolk at the pearl or silk markets.

Instead, this lone man loose in the city went hooping. My ace contact had given me a standing invitation to “get in a run if you’re in ever in Beijing”, perhaps not thinking I’d be silly enough to take him up on it. I was, and (heaven help me) I was jazzed about it. Our rendezvous was set for 12:30 on the platform at the Xizhimen station of the number two metro line, the loop that runs a rough underground rectangle of the city centre. I had no idea where I was going, but I had a mobile phone and a tall young American to look for at Xizhimen – that is, until he phoned to say that he was stuck in a police station, doing the obligatory bureaucratic dance of renewing his residence permit for foreigners. (Even my ex-dancer wife didn’t enjoy this process, though our apartment manager — and the 240 yuan that he asked for as a fee — made it relatively easy.) He wouldn’t be able to meet me.

Plan B was going to be “AV”, who texted me, but then when our timing wasn’t going to fit, AV passed me on to Sultan, who was blessedly easy to spot when I got off the subway car. A short taxi ride later, this medical student, raised mainly in Beijing by a Sudanese dad and a Chinese mom, led me through the grounds of the Beijing Youth Political Institute (man, was I in the wrong room!) and a real live gym: a fine old hardwood floor, lots of room on the baseline, glass boards, and what instantly struck me as a scarily high level of player for me to presume to run with.

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“Beijing Spirit”

Here is Beijing Spirit (as codified in a subway display ad):

Patriotism. Innovation. Inclusiveness. Virtue. Quite apart from the questions of who developed this formula, what the public purpose is, and whether anyone in the citizen audience for such encouragement pays even the remotest attention (and indeed, whether there is any reason that they ought to), I found this intriguing. I thought about this on several long walks between subway lines, and sandwiched among my fellow humans who were Going Places on the Beijing Metro.

I am all for sane and non-toxic forms of patriotism. I still love me some Canada as I learn to love the world.

Innovation is a grand thing, the yang to tradition’s yin. (Or vice versa.) Bring on the new; in China, for all its reverence for the 5000 years of civilization, change is a high-speed train. Wisdom is needed to keep it on the rails.

It’s hard to see any dark side to inclusiveness, so long as it’s about more than holding one’s nose in tolerant contempt – say, for the migrant workers who build the luxury highrises and supermalls – or smiling for the foreigners who buy and spend, and then muttering darkly about them in private.

Virtue seems such a quaint idea, and is all the more lovable and necessary for it. Chinese respect for virtue runs deep, and let’s hope it’s a renewable resource in this furiously competitive, deeply wary society.

Think. Ask. When does patriotism collide unkindly with virtue? Can it co-exist with inclusiveness? Must virtue and innovation be at odds, or can there be new and creative expressions of the truly and deeply good? (Pray for ‘yes’.)

These are thoughts from an afternoon on several subway lines.

In the Village

I went to Beijing and all I got was this gorgeous chocolate…

I wrote recently about the extremes of wealth and poverty that may, at a certain level of unremitting seriousness, be the essence of professional sport. Sport is not the reason I came to Beijing, but here I am, in one of the Chinese capital’s many little shrines to conspicuous wealth.

SanlitunVillage. I assume there must have been a village here once, but now it’s something rather other: sexy Adidas megastore with giant photos of a steely-eyed David Beckham; Godiva Chocolates, where I lost

The shopping heart of Sanlitun, from the street. The “bar street” is to the right, Soho luxury highrises are behind and to the left of us, and spending is dead ahead.

my mind and my dietary determination just twenty minutes ago; Starbucks, naturally; McDonald’s, ubiquitous and inevitable, but almost shamefaced in the basement among the more glittering expressions of European, American and Chinese wealth; a Megabox cinema (five posters of a kneeling, battered and helmet-less Robert W. Ironman are leering at me as I write, but I ain’t goin’); and, off to the side, “Sanlitun Bar Street” which I walked towards after leaving Godiva’s in a chocoholic swoon – two quick solicitations for “lady bar, mister? lady massage?” got me back into the den of conspicuous consumption and away from the pits of addictive loneliness. Ah, escape.

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Battling the King of Wealth

For an hour and a half, I’ve been fighting. From just before 7, the outbreaks of man-made thunder began. I fought the adolescent curses that leapt to my mind. I stayed still in my bed, calming my mind with whatever detachment and fatigue could do. Some of the explosions were just rumbliings from a distance, but there have been at least 30 outbreaks of the kind that jolt you. (Vipassana bride has been trying to meditate her way through. I am writing, but I want to hurt people.) Ten or so of these long skeins of firecrackers have been set off right outside our apartment building. My first half hour of relative equanimity, acceptance, and “it is what it is” was bludgeoned into irritation, resentment and rage. Adrenaline. I want to fight, or to run far away.

God of wealth, my sworn enemy.

It is the fifth morning after the big barrage of Chinese New Year’s eve. Something like this has happened every morning,  but not so insistently as this. (Inscrutability: this is no doubt some special kind of day. Oh, it’s special, all right!*) Each new kraa-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka lasts about 15 seconds, though I’ve seen guys set off ribbons of red that bang on for a minute or more, leaving a spreading heap of red paper casings on the ground.

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