BLURT 21: Fear and self-loathing in Hong Kong, Guangdong, Yunnan, over an insignificant promise that terrifies me so that I’m writing THIS instead of THAT.
I’m looking out the 9th floor window of the Salisbury Street (downtown) YMCA in Hong Kong. Actually, I’m in Kowloon, all part of the territory so proudly reclaimed by mainland China in 1997 from the British, but Kowloon is the part attached to the mainland. The black and silver, soaring, hugely titled buildings — Panasonic, Olympus, Epson — across the harbour are on Hong Kong Island, along with Kowloon the densely populated, high-rising part of the “New Territories” of HK. (By the way, in Mandarin the newly returned “Special Administrative Region (SAR)” is known as Qiang Kang, “Fragrant Harbour”. It looks reasonably fragrant on this bright afternoon.)
It’s a city that works, that is remarkably clean, one that genuinely enacts the concept of “mass transit”, moving incredible numbers of people efficiently and, at least in the district where we are, making walking a useful and do-able way of getting around. They’ve maintained, through the decades, a lovely downtown park with massive old trees and lots of water.
Amid the pampered comings and leavings in the lobby of a Chiang Mai hotel, and here on a sunny balcony overlooking the baking tourists by the pool in Krabi, I try to pretend I am not one of them. When I can’t simply enjoy warmth and leisure and good food, I am guiltily soured by this tourist business, and am too (self) conscious of the real “tourist trap”: the detachment from the serving class, the presumption that the too-visible disparity between their fortune and mine is at it should be. At its worst, it becomes a bland but bitter-edged condescension at the quaintness/ignorance/pathos/inconvenience of “these people”. These people. What a simple and toxic phrase – surely better than “these brutes”, “these savages”, but not so much different. These thoughts gain traction in a slippery tourist mind that is still digesting a jet-set reading of The Help.
Now, gentlemen! Don’t turn away, I’m talking to you,
Here’s the Educated, Middle-Aged Concerned Citizen, seeing another country and its troubled, yet pleasant people. What is he thinking as he walks along the crowded streets? How does he correlate what he sees with his experience of the so-called “developed world”, and the perspective gained through his study of education, human psychology, literature and yet more sacred texts? What’s on his mind? Let’s listen in!
Early in the mornin’, come along!
Listen to the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes song!
Catch a bowl of sunshine, here’s how you do it,
Whistle up an appetite and hop right to it!
BLURT 20: First night in Chiangmai, ancient capital of Siam: warm breezes, friendly smiles, mango fruitshakes, drivers using brakes not horns. Thailand 4, China 0.
Sorting myself out on a Monday morning here in Dalian, China, I was surprised to notice how December loomed. Good Canadian lad that I am, ancestral memories rang a High Holy Day alarm: wait, the 28th? That must mean the Grey Cup was yesterday! I hadn’t a clue, though, that my electronic clicks and misses would send me towards a septuagenarian brawl and some old, old questions.
I didn’t know who was in the Grey Cup, the Canadian Football League’s championship game, though I’d read in the Globe and Mail on-line that my (nearly) hometown Hamilton Tiger-Cats had won a playoff game. Since we’re 13 hours ahead of EST, I was able to follow the blurts and textual mutterings of various G&M Sports Guys in the press box as the B.C. Lions clawed the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.
There is a university in my city that offers what I’m coming to think of as a classically “new China” approach to education – at least for the rich.
As you may have heard, China is racing. Athletically, especially as the 2008 Olympics loomed, the sporting cadres sprinted to pressure-treat their selected young warriors to shine, precious-metallically, before the world. Economically, China charges headlong toward international influence and prestige as the world’s largest producer of wealth. (Some say it’s only a matter of time.) Educationally, it seems that the notoriously manic, mobile concentration camp endured by China’s aspiring youth – with their profoundly anxious parents sounding the drumbeats of this single-minded march toward something or other – shows little sign of slowing down to see where it’s going. (To be fair, there is always the mantra: we must work hard so we can have a comfortable life. Even the most English-impaired students know this line, and the majority seem to find it satisfactory.)
A certain school here in Dalian, I’ve come to know, has among its main attractions a series of programs that allow students to travel for study in different disciplines
This is a stale-dated story by now, but it’s a good one. (And what do you care about being chronologically cutting-edge? You wouldn’t be here if you craved punctuality or pragmatism.) I I saw a headline, while sport-snorting in mid-October, something about a 52-year-old guy making his pro boxing debut. I harrumphed and muttered about the latest athletic idiocy and hit Next. The headliner on that card was 46, for crying out loud! Grumble grumble.
I’m no boxing fan, though my limited exposures to the so-called “mixed martial arts” craze have made me a little sad about boxing losing to that sordid circus, and I have irritated sons and nephews with what they consider boxing chauvinism. I revered Muhammad Ali as a kid, and stubbornly and patriotically paid attention to George Chuvalo’s implacable shuffling and incredible chin. I was jazzed by Rocky I.
“Power without love is reckless and abusive and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
Martin Luther King, in Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community.
Read it again. Power and love are positioned as allies, not foes, whose intersections lead toward the justice we all seek. That man had a mighty dream, but not only that.
I am a growing fan of this American author. His Manhood for Amateurs is a smart, humane, and often very funny non-fiction discussion of what makes for modern maleness (and what we can make of it). He’s best known for his fiction, and here’s the last paragraph — no “spoiler alert” necessary, no details are revealed — of his rather amazing debut novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, which tells of one summer in the life of a recent college grad:
“When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another’s skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greater lust and hopefulness — and that I lusted with greater faith, hoped with greater abandon. The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything.”