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Two Questions. Two Footnotes. (And a half-sheepish postscript.)

Posted by :James Howden On : February 4, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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 2:58 a.m.

What am I reading from, or whose is the voice I hear, when I wake in the darkness and, in the super-lucid moments before so-called full consciousness (so dim is it, so ponderous after the clarity of leaving-sleep), but still vividly in my racing memory, I hear an over-voice reciting1 – yes, and there was music to it, multimedia aspects, like an ultra-magazine from some attention-deficit future – and the voice and the repeating crescendo of the music2 spoke of things the movies have taught us, such as how we cherish the idea of retraining ourselves, remaking ourselves, perhaps learned from the example of American army training videos, or the joy of (what was it?) making curving paraffin candles dripping with arcing light, yes, like the ones in that Tom Cruise movie where his daughter (Kelly McGillis, in an uncredited role) [waking mind: waitaminute!  Whothehell has heard of Kelly McGillis in alltheseyears? but in the dream this fact is wonder full] is, blue-eyed, something, there was dripping light, SOMETHING, the connection is breaking up, the voice stutters and sparks but I can still (almost) recall it: I ask again, what is this text? Whose is this voice?

Does anyone read to you like this in your half-light moments, words spooling out as if revealed?

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The Howdy TOP 10 (as chosen by, well, me!)

Posted by :James Howden On : January 31, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you…”

That was Walt Whitman, the famous “Song of Myself”, encouraging me from beyond the beyond not to be shy to tell you what I like, even if it’s me. Alrighty, then.

Even by Chinese standards, I’m a little slow to jump on the New Year’s Look-back train. Still, it was a good excuse to browse through some of my 2012 posts, and enjoy them as a reader. Here are ten JH.com posts that might be worthwhile reads for you, too, in reverse chronological order. )Some of them have pictures, my newest baby-step into on-line competence.)

1. February 1. “Not My Brother’s YMCA” starts as a Hong Kong travel piece, and ends in memory of a friend.

2. April 12. “Hessler’s Rivertown“ is a book review, part of a series I call “Better Read Than Never”, about a young American’s first two years in China. Peter Hessler went on to write two more books on this country, and he’s graceful and good. I reviewed four other books under the “Better Read” rubric last year.

3. May 19. “Why Do Men Love Sports So Much?”   is a lengthy answer to a question that is more important than it may sound. I put it in the “On Second Thought” section, ’cause it’s long and I’ve sweated over it. I should sell it. I should develop it into a book. I think it’s pretty good, but be warned: it’s not a tweet.

4. June 16. “NBA Finals: It’s Morning in China” is another long piece, but sits in the “It’s All About Sports” section of the site. It’s a play-by-play, commercial-by-commercial, digression-by-digression log of watching a big NBA game from the other side of the globe. It tells as much about me, and about my views of China, as it does about LeBron. It’s a bit wacky.

5. August 15. “Driving Miss Piggy (Crazy)” is a light-hearted account of my pitched battle with the Chinese language, and some of the collateral damage from it. (Again, apologies to the lovely Ms. Zhu.)

6. September 19. “NINE-EIGHTEEN: Face to (Losing) Face in Asia” is a local glance at a consuming, nervous-making bit of political intrigue in the East.

7. November 17. “Is China Really Upside-Down?” takes a look at childish ideas of geography and global orientation in the light of my lived experience of what makes China deeply the same and profoundly different than my ol’ Canucky home. It got me thinking so much I had to post “Another Thing!” a few days later.

8. November 23. “Afternoon on an Overpass” brought me face to face with injustice and the bitter banalities of every day.

9. November 28. “Old Guy Glory: Still Got It! (One day.)” recounts the stirring and inspiring tale of an old guy showing the youngsters a thing or three. (Well, I had fun.) One of these days there’ll be photo evidence. This giddy piece makes a good counterpoint to my recent court misadventures, and my scarred forehead is a fair argument against further foolishness. (But not a persuasive one!)

10. December 8. “Lightning in My Living Room” is my retelling of a remarkable, head-scratching, where in the world is this going evening in Apartment 902, a close encounter of the sectarian kind.

Are these my best? Heck if I know! as they may still say in the valley of the Grand River, back home in corn country. They’re ten I’ll stand by, anyway, which makes it a little easier to sing along with Walt.

 

Edith Hamilton (Weston) Main

Posted by :James Howden On : January 29, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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The picture I remember best is an old black-and-white that I only saw a couple of times. Her hair is long and loose, her smile carelessly radiant, and her eyes draw one’s gaze again and again. She’s young, and she’s gorgeous, and it surprised a teenaged me to see the middle-aged, slightly doughy housewife – the one who had so lovingly welcomed, guided, and cared for me – looking so confident and free. I had known her as a quiet, self-effacing baker of cherry cheesecake and dispenser of tea, but here she looked like a screen star. This was my future mother-in-law, likely at about the age of her daughter when I married her. She was Edith, “Mother Main” (and not just to me), but I mostly called her Mum. I still do, though it’s been years since I’ve seen her.

The other photo comes 50 years later, I guess. It is more formal, a rather conventional studio shot that can’t hide her silvered, warm-eyed beauty. She is again slender, and her quiet dignity is clear. By this time, she was my ex-mother-in-law, marital fortunes being what they are in these times and in this heart. I was grateful when that same daughter, re-married, as I am, emailed from afar to let me know that Edith was preparing for take-off. She had turned 89 weeks before, and her life had become a smaller and smaller thing. She hung on for another week, and last Wednesday flight confirmation arrived. Friday’s funeral was not a tragic one.

Except that for me, it partly was.

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Another Hit to the Head

Posted by :James Howden On : January 27, 2013
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Category: All About Sports

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McDonald’s is not a place I often go when I’m home in Canada, but in Dalian, it’s a bit of a treat. (All things are relative, my friends.) I began this post, which  begins as an adventure in middle-aged basketball and ends with a journey through Chinese health care, under the golden arches. Last Christmas, I gave you my heart / The very next day, you gave it away / This year, to save me from tears, / I’ll give it to someone special… (Wham!) The Mai dang lao Christmas collection, which I know shockingly well, is still going strong. “Jingle Bells”, a distressingly perky version, just ended. This is a place I sometimes come to avoid the distractions of home! I am the King of Distraction. Speaking of which, here’s the story I wanted to tell.

For the second straight day, I got a call to play some basketball. Normally, that’s not great for the ol’ body, but I hadn’t played very hard Tuesday night. When Yinghua, a former student and a pretty good player, invited me to join him yesterday afternoon, there was no NO there. Projects I was fitfully working at were shelved; even when I was perched at the keyboard, I found myself Mentally Preparing to Play as if this game actually meant something. The King, indeed, but even codgers need something to look forward to. What I hadn’t prepared for was getting decked twice, and staggering away with a pair of more or less serious boo-boos.

Another day, no boo-boos. AND I blocked this shot, I swear!

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Back To You, Mai Di: T-Mac II (Updated)

Posted by :James Howden On : January 22, 2013
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Category: All About Sports

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T-Mac, all smiles with Wang Hai, Eagles owner.

It’s time for an update on Tracy McGrady’s sometimes bizarre, steadily surprising adventures as a basketball nomad in Qingdao, a coastal city in China. When last I wrote of the former NBA scoring champion, his Double Star Eagles were on an epic losing streak to the start the season, which eventually reached 12 painful games. Things are looking better recently, though most of my main questions remain the same. I’m not one to sneer at an athlete on the way down, but his career in China so far makes an interesting story, and perhaps a sad one.

The Eagles look to extend a recent winning streak to six when they visit the second-place Shandong Flaming Bulls tonight, who are led by Pooh Jeter, Jackson Vroman and the Jordanian forward Zaid Abbas. (Any bells ringing? Jeter played at Portland — and his sister is the gold medal sprinter — and Vroman at Iowa State.) The game may even make CCTV 5. When I last reported back in December, McGrady (Mai Di, as he is called in this country) was about to break loose for 41 points, albeit in the last game of the big losing streak. Here’s how it has looked since then.

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Better Read Than Never: FALLING MAN

Posted by :James Howden On : January 9, 2013
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Category: On Second Thought

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Got DeLillo? Here he is, somewhere in New York City.

Not everybody gets Don DeLillo. If you don’t pay attention to the contemporary art of the novel, you may not have even heard of him. Presto! That’s why I’m here today! Mr. D. is in the pantheon of current American fiction writers. Literary fiction, that is – this is not a “page-turner”, and he’s no Dan Brown. (That would be like comparing Vincent Van Gogh to the guy who makes the blue outlines for the old “paint by numbers” craft sets.) And I’m no DeLillo expert: of his major, and often hefty, acclaimed novels – White Noise, Mao II, and the famous Underworld – I have read precisely none. I tiptoed into his work with a comparatively slender novel called The Body Artist. It was clever, admirable stuff, a bit morose, and I don’t remember much about it. It left me cold, or maybe I was there to begin with. I may, however, need to read it again.

My recent second voyage into DeLillo Country was his 2007 novel Falling Man, the post-9-11 book he hadn’t intended to write. I found it on a remainder shelf in a mega-bookstore back home in Canada, next to a non-fiction book by Martin Amis in the same historical vein: The Second Plane. I was trawling for all-things-I-can’t-get-in-China, and not only were these two volumes a few cultural steps higher than the Harvey’s burgers and Baskin-Robbins cones I’d been gorging myself on last July, they also seemed fated together to increase my lugging for the next month’s return trip to China. And here’s why The Body Artist might deserve a second look: Falling Man is a novel I’ll be thinking about for a long time, one that I immediately started re-reading once I’d finished. How did he do that? It’s brilliant, but also an accessible introduction to a challenging writer.

See those towers? On the left, the back jacket, peeking through clouds.

We later find that one of the central characters is Keith Neudecker, a thirty-something lawyer and lover of games. We first meet him, though, as he staggers down a New York street. The novel opens like this:

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Are You Fashion?

Posted by :James Howden On : January 2, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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It was time for a Walmart run. Our local “Friendly Shop” grocery store, so named by our son to distinguish its family ownership from the surliness across the street, doesn’t have everything. Salted peanuts to decorate my corn flakes, plus a large bag of Tide, were on the agenda, but I really wanted one more look at a pink fuzzy pyjama shirt I’d seen the week before. It had been my favourite linguistic delicacy of the winter.

Like most women’s nightdressing in China (well, at least so far as I can tell), the emphasis was on cute, preferably with animals. (Earlier, I’d been looking for a housecoat my wife had casually mentioned, and that’s why I was there, I swear it!) “Love My Bear” had adorned a neighbouring nightie, but I was looking for a stronger, more probing motto: STYLE IS MY GENETIC, the rosy shirt had announced. ARE YOU FASHION? This wasn’t something I could actually buy for my bride’s mid-winter birthday – besides, the pink slippers with the black polka-dots so perfectly matched her black PJs with the fuschia ones! – but I had stood and repeated the sentences. One mysterious statement, and one inscrutable question that I wanted to remember. Tragically, when I’d reported my find back at headquarters, I was convinced that the Chinglish had been even better, even more delightfully flawed. I cursed my mouldy mind.

I shouldn’t have waited a week. Up and down the aisles of women’s clothing I went. I looked in sales bins. No luck. I found Skippy and some pleasantly mediocre jam to spread with it, and everything else I needed for comfort breakfasts and tolerable laundry. Vacuum-packed salted cashews offered crunchable and linguistic solace – TRADITIONAL FOODS WIN ZEN PRESENT – but there was no my genetic, no are you fashion? I left the basement emporium, overheated and slightly claustrophobic as usual, but mainly with that feeling of having missed a chance that won’t come again. Back in the cold air of a December Dalian street, bags in each hand, I trudged on to my next duty, arms heavy but heart heavier at the lost phrase.

(But wait: Chinese neighbours often wear their pyjamas outside! Who knows, maybe come spring I’ll find it on an after-supper stroll! Hope springs.)

Cousin Tracy and the Double Star: McGrady in China

Posted by :James Howden On : December 16, 2012
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Category: All About Sports

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T-Mac flies high in the Rocket days.

The I Love Tracy Show just came into my Saturday morning life, not-quite-live from Qingdao, China (that’s a city in Shandong province, just north of Shanghai). With an NBA game coming on at a routine-for-China 10:30 a.m., there was time for CCTV 5, my inscrutable Asian ESPN, to show a mercifully edited version of last night’s CBA game. The Qingdao Double Star Eagles were trying to keep their perfect record with the great T-Mac on board, and they did it! After losing to the Shandong Flaming Bulls — though apparently no animals were harmed in the naming of this team — they are now 0-9, and it wasn’t even that close a match. “Led” by the lethargic former NBA star – still an icon in China, having played much of his fluid prime in Houston alongside Yao Ming – the Eagles don’t guard much. Down 18 with under 5 minutes to play, they were in a flaccid zone, having been unable to contain a quick little American point guard named Pooh Jeter, and Jordanian forward Zaid Abbas (who pretty much had his way with Mr. McGrady). It was another day in the life of Americans trying to find a basketball refuge (and make a few million yuan, in this case) in the Middling Kingdom of pro basketball. 

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Lightning in My Living Room

Posted by :James Howden On : December 8, 2012
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Category: At First Glance

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This is a metaphor. Isn’t everything?


I was suspicious, right off the hop. My bride is a brightly inviting sort, so it’s not unusual for us to have a houseful. She mentioned that a young woman in our neighbourhood, someone whose good English has made her a go-to person when we can’t figure out how to pick up a parcel or find a decent loaf of bread, wanted to come over and visit. Hmm. Interesting, but we’ve never been exactly chummy before, and she didn’t say why she wanted to come.

“So Cindy wants to come over and won’t say why.”

“Yeah, and she wants to bring a friend, too.”

“Did you ask her? And she won’t tell you? And this doesn’t strike you as weird?”

I instantly smelled vacuum cleaner demonstration, but that’s a memory trace from a long-gone episode of injured pride and free-flowing anger. Chinese apartments are seldom carpeted. Gotta be selling something, though. I was sure of it. I got my back up a little, bluntly reserving my right to disappear into the bedroom at the first sign of a product demonstration. My wife inquired again, and the mystery remained, except that Cindy (an English name, and not her real one) would now have two friends with her. The secrecy irritated me, as did my bride’s apparent lack of curiosity. I even thought, What is this? A swinger’s club?

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Old Guy Glory: Still Got It! (One day.)

Posted by :James Howden On : November 25, 2012
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Category: All About Sports

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“There is a greater hunger for appreciation than for bread,” said Mother Teresa, which may account for the burst of well-being that this middle-aged, decomposing terra-cotta warrior of the hardwood felt last week. Among the new things I learned: my university actually has a basketball team! They play against other universities! I’m a basketball hard case who’s lived in my northeastern Chinese city for over three years, and I hadn’t known this. I also got an email from Han Xinghua, who teaches German at my college – most foreigners call him “Hans”, surprise! – inviting me to join the staff basketball squad. (There’s a teacher team?) I discovered, too, the following Wednesday afternoon, that our university has a sports hall, with glass boards and seating and a pseudo-hardwood floor. Nice!

I launched an early three. Net! Cries of supply and acclaim!

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